Totally. But what if we left it where we found it?
I get the economics of the situation (capitalism, etc) , I’m just saying…if there is salt already safely and naturally found underground or on a salt flat, why not leave it there and use this byproduct salt that we don’t know what to do with?
There are plenty of mining processes where salt is a by-product. That goes for desalination as well, of course. Salt for batteries will always be a tiny percentage of overall usage so this is not really a significant use case.
There are salt flats and salt mines, which are potentially cheaper than desalination (they’re literally just digging up the ground and putting it into a truck), but desalination also has a huge excess of salt that ends up being dumped into the ocean; more sodium demand would be good for the environment.
Iirc, the problem with desalination is that it doesn’t actually produce salt, just a very salty water slurry. So for them to produce usable salt they’d have to dry it out or something. Not that that sounds like it would be particularly difficult, but it’s an extra step.
As far as I know (which is not a lot in this case), salt isn’t really harvested from desalination, and instead the concentrated salt solution (brine) gets deposited back into the ocean, where it can be damaging to marine life in the vicinity of the plant.
Is the ratio of salt produced as a byproduct of desalination of ocean water out of whack compared to the amount used in battery production?
Sodium is a resource of which there is absolutely no shortage. The stuff is pretty much everywhere.
It sounds like the perfect match with solar panels
If only we could get photons to knock electrons off it.
Totally. But what if we left it where we found it?
I get the economics of the situation (capitalism, etc) , I’m just saying…if there is salt already safely and naturally found underground or on a salt flat, why not leave it there and use this byproduct salt that we don’t know what to do with?
There are plenty of mining processes where salt is a by-product. That goes for desalination as well, of course. Salt for batteries will always be a tiny percentage of overall usage so this is not really a significant use case.
There are salt flats and salt mines, which are potentially cheaper than desalination (they’re literally just digging up the ground and putting it into a truck), but desalination also has a huge excess of salt that ends up being dumped into the ocean; more sodium demand would be good for the environment.
Iirc, the problem with desalination is that it doesn’t actually produce salt, just a very salty water slurry. So for them to produce usable salt they’d have to dry it out or something. Not that that sounds like it would be particularly difficult, but it’s an extra step.
As far as I know (which is not a lot in this case), salt isn’t really harvested from desalination, and instead the concentrated salt solution (brine) gets deposited back into the ocean, where it can be damaging to marine life in the vicinity of the plant.