8 ms·

Saudi Thirst for Water Is Creating a Toxic Brine Problem

57 points by systemfreund 8y ago

sp332 8y ago
Why would they chlorinate the water before desalination? And where does the copper come from?
- systemfreund 8y ago
  Apparently it's for prevention of fouling: > Combined low concentrations of copper (5 μg/l and chlorine (50,μg/l have been effective in preventing both micro and macro-fouling in over 120 seawater installations since 1987. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242186534_FOULING_PREVENTION_IN_DESALINATION_PLANTS1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242186534_FOULING_P...
  - TheBill 8y ago
    It's also done in freshwater (great lakes) to prevent zebra mussels from clogging the intake pipes. Things like to grow where other things bring food by for free, and are sheltered from predators.
ricardobeat 8y ago
Unless they are adding chemicals to the water before desalination (which I don't see mentioned anywhere), that sounds like the 'brine' is just ~1.5x concentrated seawater, which will get diluted back again? What am I missing?
- blunte 8y ago
  The article said the brine has chlorine and copper (added, and remaining).
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    It says 'about 1.5 liters of liquid polluted with chlorine and copper are created', but doesn't explain if these are additives or some kind of byproduct.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Even if it's just extra salty it's still a local problem. You can't just dump it all in the ocean because it would still kill everything. You'd need to dump it out slowly or over a much wider area for the concentration not to be harmful. It's like a polluted river killing everything where it dumps out even if the amount of pollution is inconsequential overall.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    Someone correct me if I'm wrong (not the best at math), but the ocean is massive. The entire amount of brine they mention (31.5 million cubic meters) fits in one 300m square cube. Even if you drop it in an enclosed 1km-wide area of seawater, it will barely increase concentration by 0.01%. It would take millenia for us to increase sea salinity by this method, and all that treated water is eventually coming back. Even if you took the total daily water consumption of the entire human race - 150l per person * 7 billion, or 1^12 liters, and made it extra salty, it is dwarfed by the total of 1.26^21 [mostly sea]water on earth. This would be harmless assuming we are not adding anything to the byproduct, which unfortunately seems to be the case according to the other comments.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      The concern is not ocean-level damage through the salt directly but in localized ecological system destruction. The mangrove forest encompases a tiny portion of the ocean overall but removing this forest affects a large portion of sealife. The creation of 'deadzones' through salinity will have knockoff effects elsewhere that cannot necessarily be predicted.
      - Retric 8y ago
        At worst these dead zones would be tiny. They could dilute the waste stream by dumping it into the local sewage system, but I don’t think that’s going to change much. It’s on the order of building a mall parking lot. Sure bad for the local ecosystem, but we have vastly larger issues.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  It's from anti-fouling and general corrosion. Not sure what makes these plants special though since a population's regular water supply infrastructure would end up producing the same type of waste from pumps and what not.
- cronix 8y ago
  > which will get diluted back again Also raising the concentration of salts in the oceans, especially in the immediate area where they're dumping it back into the ocean in the gulf that has weak ocean currents (due to being a gulf). I can't imagine the wildlife will enjoy that much. It also makes it harder for future desalination, as it's having to desalinate an ever increasing percentage of salt since they just dump it back into the ocean. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-breakthrough-saving-the-sea-from-salt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-brea...
blunte 8y ago
Imagine what the extraterrestrial anthropologists will say about humans someday...
- lstodd 8y ago
  Like, what a nice overlords they ended up to be?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Less about that we graduated from savagery, but more how long it took.
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  "They took a garden and turned it into a parking lot."
  - orangeeater 8y ago
    "If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower"
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  "It appears plastic-based life forms co-evolved alongside carbon-based life on this body, how interesting, we thought only carbon-based life was possible but there is just so much microplastic with large concentrations in these ancient civilization centers! It also appears they dug up, refined, and relocated the bulk of the uranium and plutonium to this cave system, they must have worshiped it. How bizarre, they could have used this in Snarlsfarogogogog reactors with almost 100% efficiency and only had transmuted metals left as a byproduct. And what is with all of these 'AOL' squares and circles?! This must have been their servant class but there's no discernible means of locomotion"
apo 8y ago
The article isn't clear where the metals are coming from. It could be that the desalination process simply concentrates what's already in the seawater.
- tfha 8y ago
  They add copper as part of the purification process
  - apo 8y ago
    What's the source? The article says nothing about it, and seawater contains copper and other metal ions all by itself: https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html
hughdbrown 8y ago
> Saudi Arabia’s desalination plants produce about 31.5 million cubic meters of contaminated water each day. That volume of liquid, most of which is pumped back into the ocean, is equivalent to about 20 million barrels of oil a day, or, double the amount of crude it currently produces I don't understand the math. 31.5e6 cubic meters * 1e3 liters/cubic meter = 31.5e9 liters 31.5e9 liters / 3.78 liters/gallon = 8333333333 gallons 8333333333 gallons / 42 gallons/barrel = 198412698 barrels So it looks like this calculation is off by a factor of 10. Did I miss something?
- Johnny555 8y ago
  I don't understand the equivalence to oil at all -- are they saying that one barrel of this contaminated water has the same environmental impact of dumping a barrel of oil in the water? I don't really understand the relevance of equating water waste to exports, if it were a nation known for pork exports, would they put the water volume in terms of hogs?
  - paulcole 8y ago
    It's an analogy. The average person knows Saudi Arabia exports a LOT of oil. This is 2x a LOT. So a WHOLE LOT.
    - Johnny555 8y ago
      I dunno if that's a good analogy if the desire is to make it sound huge. If it's a small enough quantity that it can be shipped by tankers (even huge super tankers), that doesn't sound like a lot compared to the size of the ocean.
      - paulcole 8y ago
        The average person doesn't know how much a tanker holds. They know Saudi Arabia = Oil.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  bash$ units You have: m^3 You want: barrels * 6.2898108 / 0.15898729 It seems you're right, yes, should be 200. (Gee, so a cubic metre is ~6 barrels? A 'barrel' is tiny, if that's right, 160 litres or so, much smaller than I imagined.)
TheBill 8y ago
IMO the right direction is not conventional treatment, but as Swebs said, either create new salt flats, or use it as feedstock for algae or other single cell organisms that can be converted to feed, or biofuel.
unchocked 8y ago
I'm under the impression that this is just concentrated seawater?
- tfha 8y ago
  With added copper
- jmanderley 8y ago
  That impression is wrong.
AmericanOP 8y ago
Saudi Arabia had water before their stint as a wheat exporter. You can literally see them drain their country's aquifier into agribusiness: https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=sa&commodity=wheat&graph=production https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=sa&commodity...
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  Man that ground water took thousands of years to build up and they are draining it in decades. Kinda like oil lol.
  - anitil 8y ago
    From what I understand the the same could be said of the Californian aquifers

57 points by systemfreund 8y ago

sp332 8y ago

Why would they chlorinate the water before desalination? And where does the copper come from?

systemfreund 8y ago
Apparently it's for prevention of fouling: > Combined low concentrations of copper (5 μg/l and chlorine (50,μg/l have been effective in preventing both micro and macro-fouling in over 120 seawater installations since 1987. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242186534_FOULING_PREVENTION_IN_DESALINATION_PLANTS1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242186534_FOULING_P...
- TheBill 8y ago
  It's also done in freshwater (great lakes) to prevent zebra mussels from clogging the intake pipes. Things like to grow where other things bring food by for free, and are sheltered from predators.

ricardobeat 8y ago

Unless they are adding chemicals to the water before desalination (which I don't see mentioned anywhere), that sounds like the 'brine' is just ~1.5x concentrated seawater, which will get diluted back again? What am I missing?

blunte 8y ago
The article said the brine has chlorine and copper (added, and remaining).
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  It says 'about 1.5 liters of liquid polluted with chlorine and copper are created', but doesn't explain if these are additives or some kind of byproduct.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Even if it's just extra salty it's still a local problem. You can't just dump it all in the ocean because it would still kill everything. You'd need to dump it out slowly or over a much wider area for the concentration not to be harmful. It's like a polluted river killing everything where it dumps out even if the amount of pollution is inconsequential overall.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  Someone correct me if I'm wrong (not the best at math), but the ocean is massive. The entire amount of brine they mention (31.5 million cubic meters) fits in one 300m square cube. Even if you drop it in an enclosed 1km-wide area of seawater, it will barely increase concentration by 0.01%. It would take millenia for us to increase sea salinity by this method, and all that treated water is eventually coming back. Even if you took the total daily water consumption of the entire human race - 150l per person * 7 billion, or 1^12 liters, and made it extra salty, it is dwarfed by the total of 1.26^21 [mostly sea]water on earth. This would be harmless assuming we are not adding anything to the byproduct, which unfortunately seems to be the case according to the other comments.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    The concern is not ocean-level damage through the salt directly but in localized ecological system destruction. The mangrove forest encompases a tiny portion of the ocean overall but removing this forest affects a large portion of sealife. The creation of 'deadzones' through salinity will have knockoff effects elsewhere that cannot necessarily be predicted.
    - Retric 8y ago
      At worst these dead zones would be tiny. They could dilute the waste stream by dumping it into the local sewage system, but I don’t think that’s going to change much. It’s on the order of building a mall parking lot. Sure bad for the local ecosystem, but we have vastly larger issues.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
It's from anti-fouling and general corrosion. Not sure what makes these plants special though since a population's regular water supply infrastructure would end up producing the same type of waste from pumps and what not.
cronix 8y ago
> which will get diluted back again Also raising the concentration of salts in the oceans, especially in the immediate area where they're dumping it back into the ocean in the gulf that has weak ocean currents (due to being a gulf). I can't imagine the wildlife will enjoy that much. It also makes it harder for future desalination, as it's having to desalinate an ever increasing percentage of salt since they just dump it back into the ocean. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-breakthrough-saving-the-sea-from-salt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-brea...

blunte 8y ago

Imagine what the extraterrestrial anthropologists will say about humans someday...

lstodd 8y ago
Like, what a nice overlords they ended up to be?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Less about that we graduated from savagery, but more how long it took.
hyperbovine 8y ago
"They took a garden and turned it into a parking lot."
- orangeeater 8y ago
  "If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower"
ryanmercer 8y ago
"It appears plastic-based life forms co-evolved alongside carbon-based life on this body, how interesting, we thought only carbon-based life was possible but there is just so much microplastic with large concentrations in these ancient civilization centers! It also appears they dug up, refined, and relocated the bulk of the uranium and plutonium to this cave system, they must have worshiped it. How bizarre, they could have used this in Snarlsfarogogogog reactors with almost 100% efficiency and only had transmuted metals left as a byproduct. And what is with all of these 'AOL' squares and circles?! This must have been their servant class but there's no discernible means of locomotion"

apo 8y ago

The article isn't clear where the metals are coming from. It could be that the desalination process simply concentrates what's already in the seawater.

tfha 8y ago
They add copper as part of the purification process
- apo 8y ago
  What's the source? The article says nothing about it, and seawater contains copper and other metal ions all by itself: https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html

hughdbrown 8y ago

> Saudi Arabia’s desalination plants produce about 31.5 million cubic meters of contaminated water each day. That volume of liquid, most of which is pumped back into the ocean, is equivalent to about 20 million barrels of oil a day, or, double the amount of crude it currently produces I don't understand the math. 31.5e6 cubic meters * 1e3 liters/cubic meter = 31.5e9 liters 31.5e9 liters / 3.78 liters/gallon = 8333333333 gallons 8333333333 gallons / 42 gallons/barrel = 198412698 barrels So it looks like this calculation is off by a factor of 10. Did I miss something?

Johnny555 8y ago
I don't understand the equivalence to oil at all -- are they saying that one barrel of this contaminated water has the same environmental impact of dumping a barrel of oil in the water? I don't really understand the relevance of equating water waste to exports, if it were a nation known for pork exports, would they put the water volume in terms of hogs?
- paulcole 8y ago
  It's an analogy. The average person knows Saudi Arabia exports a LOT of oil. This is 2x a LOT. So a WHOLE LOT.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    I dunno if that's a good analogy if the desire is to make it sound huge. If it's a small enough quantity that it can be shipped by tankers (even huge super tankers), that doesn't sound like a lot compared to the size of the ocean.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      The average person doesn't know how much a tanker holds. They know Saudi Arabia = Oil.
yesenadam 8y ago
bash$ units You have: m^3 You want: barrels * 6.2898108 / 0.15898729 It seems you're right, yes, should be 200. (Gee, so a cubic metre is ~6 barrels? A 'barrel' is tiny, if that's right, 160 litres or so, much smaller than I imagined.)

TheBill 8y ago

IMO the right direction is not conventional treatment, but as Swebs said, either create new salt flats, or use it as feedstock for algae or other single cell organisms that can be converted to feed, or biofuel.

unchocked 8y ago

I'm under the impression that this is just concentrated seawater?

tfha 8y ago
With added copper
jmanderley 8y ago
That impression is wrong.

AmericanOP 8y ago

Saudi Arabia had water before their stint as a wheat exporter. You can literally see them drain their country's aquifier into agribusiness: https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=sa&commodity=wheat&graph=production https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=sa&commodity...

Tsubasachan 8y ago
Man that ground water took thousands of years to build up and they are draining it in decades. Kinda like oil lol.
- anitil 8y ago
  From what I understand the the same could be said of the Californian aquifers