BRINE CONCENTRATION PROJECT

NEED FOR BRINE CONCENTRATION

Desalination, as an industry, is growing dramatically. Roughly, for every 1,000 gallons of freshwater produced by today’s methods, 1,500 gallons of concentrate, known as “brine” is the resultant by-product which has a high content of salinity. Disposed into the seawater or elsewhere in the environment, creates significant risks to marine life, sea plants, ocean oxygen levels and other negative ecological consequences. Brine, at the levels above, is detrimental but concentrated to much higher levels, benefits can be achieved. Current methods of further concentration involve high pressure membrane based or high temperature thermal based technologies which are inefficient and costly.

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BENEFIT OF BRINE CONCENTRATION

Brine whether from current desalination processes or our new sonics based process, can be concentrated to much higher levels by our new sonics based process. Not only is more freshwater produced during the process but highly concentrated brine now becomes economically viable for saltwater mining of numerous minerals and by-products. Taken further, developments to achieve Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) are now within reach as disclosed in patents now pending.

 

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R&D METHODOLOGY FOR BRINE CONCENTRATION

Current methods rely on either further processing through membranes similar to the original desalination process but as concentration increases, so do the inefficiency of the membrane based procedure. Thermal based methods rely on high heat which requires high energy, area and time. The sonics based extraction method is performed on a flowing stream which separates water from brine in two streams resulting in more water production per volume flow and much higher salinity concentration per volume flow. The R&D to be performed leads to refinement of the process to produce the most concentrated flows based on the makeup of the stream to be processed.

 

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STATUS OF BRINE CONCENTRATION

Development Stages:

• Determine the effect of the SDA stage on the incoming stream prior to brine extraction
• Determine the optimum extraction method(s) to achieve given concentration levels
• Evaluate and compare methods to “transport” brine at different concentrations
• Determine concentration levels to achieve different viable mining results
• Effect of incorporation of brine into ZLD process

Development Status:

• SDA “test mule” is in development of disassociation on the incoming stream
• Some SDA testing has been started
• SSA “test mule” is in development of the brine extraction process stage
• Some SSA testing has been started
• Further progress and rate of development are funds dependent

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