Surely the massive open air pools of salt used for sea salt production have figured out how this process works. On the Californian coast, there is already at l

Surely the massive open air pools of salt used for sea salt production have figured out how this process works. On the Californian coast, there is already at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_Salt_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_Salt_Works , a sea salt production facility that uses salt pools. They produce 80k tons annually of salt, which means they process 2666k tons of seawater to get that. If that one salt production facility used brine as their source instead of seawater, they would have allowed the facility to produce 2580k tons of freshwater. The "urban" usage of water in California is 10 million acre-feet (ish), so that's not exactly a significant amount.