this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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The mere fact that we can stop scorching the earth for lithium and cobalt is enough.
Now, we'll scorch it for salt.
Well, we have nearly an endless supply of salt here on the Internet, should be an easy transition.
Desalination of water is basically an endless supply of salt, we can't just push it back into the ocean because that increases the salt concentration in the ocean which is actually not great and when done at scale. But we didn't really have anywhere else to put the salt because there's already an abundance of it for use elsewhere but if we start using salt for Batteries it would be a great place for salt from desalination to go
Only locally, it's absolutely not a problem globally. That water will go back into the ocean soon enough. We're not generally putting wastewater in aquifers. The same is true of lithium. Both sodium and lithium form salts that dissolve in water, so over time their biggest concentration is in the water and that's why we refine it from salt flats.
I don't consider the refining of lithium to be a huge problem, other than the fact that it usually just means they're trucking a bunch of water to the desert for concentration and evaporation ponds (or worse, using the local groundwater in the desert instead of trucking in desalinated water like they should be).
To put it into perspective, high lithium brine and ore reserves contain about 14 million tons of lithium. Seawater contains over 2 trillion tons. We currently have a yearly consumption somewhere under 200 thousand tons. We won't be hitting a lithium resource crunch anytime soon, it'll just get more expensive. If we ever get hydrogen fusion running, we'd have to separate a bunch of lithium-6 which makes up under 5 percent of lithium.
You make that sound like it isn't an issue. Massive ocean die-offs in a localized area is still a very bad thing.
There's a reason why oil spills are treated with such seriousness. Globally, an oil spill is also not a problem.
It depends on how local we're talking about. If you build a pipe out of the littoral zone into the ocean with multiple outputs you likely wouldn't kill much of anything but a few plankton. The intake pipe is often worse than the output pipe for wildlife.
For a place like, say, the the Persian Gulf, that uses oil for heat desal and gets their intake and output from a sea so it's all littoral and doesn't as quickly exchange it's water with the ocean, of course it's an environmental nightmare. It's naturally saltier without desal because of the higher evaporation rate and small comparative inlet size of the straight of hormuz, but at this point its 25% saltier than the rest of the ocean thanks to that desal.
Are you trying to spell literal? Not trying to be a dick, just unsure if you have a different word in mind.
"Littoral" is effectively equivalent to "nearshore". Makes sense as written.
I misspelled strait, but I was referring to the shallows that contain the vast majority of ocean life due to ease of photosynthesis with littoral. Much of the Persian Gulf is within these shallows. In a lot of ways it acts like a salty inland sea that exchanges some of it's saltier water with fresher water from the ocean, but that's limited by the size of the strait of Hormuz.
Desalination is also a good way of getting lithium right now, it's just a bit less cost effective than surface mining dried oceans currently. Maybe if sodium demand also goes up, it'll be effective to capture desalination salts for both lithium and sodium.
I dealt with CaSO4 (calcium-sulfur salt) dumping before. It is considered fine (by DNV) as long as it not in brackish waters or too close to the shore or in most of the North Sea. It's just adding salt to salt water, salt is supposed to go there.
I guess if you were doing it at insane scales it would be best to run a pipeline out, run your seapumps harder, or have ships do the dumping. Not sure.