Recovery of Valuable Products from Reject Brine of Seawater

Desalination Plants
Oswald Eppers, K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies

Summary
Desalination plants do not only produce potable water, but also for every liter of
freshwater output an average of 1.5 liters of hypersaline reject brine containing
additionally potentially hazardous chemicals added in the desalination process.
Ecotoxicological studies have proven negative environmental impacts on marine
ecosystems caused by the dumping of such residues in the sea. This fact sometimes
leads to a rejection of desalination projects by the local population because of concerns
about possible negative impacts on the fishing industry and tourism. Therefore,
improved brine management strategies are required to mitigate the negative
environmental and economic impacts on waste management and drinking water
production. This paper presents a strategy that uses reject brine to produce valuable
products such as potassium, magnesium, and calcium salts, as well as additional
byproducts with a high demand by the chemical industry, agriculture or other industries
such as caustic soda, bromine, green hydrogen, ammonia or methanol. The production
of valuable products from waste streams generates additional revenue sources leading
to an overall reduction in desalination costs, while at the same time mitigating negative
environmental impacts. Depending on local settings and project characteristics, in an
ideal case, a cero liquid discharge seawater desalination can be implemented with the
use of solar evaporation ponds, if necessary, in combination with technical evaporation
systems for reject brine processing. However, the general drawback of such a cero liquid
discharge strategy is the very high energy demand for water evaporation, required for
fractional salt crystallization. This shortcoming can be at least partially compensated by
producing in areas with high evaporation and low precipitation where solar evaporation
can be ideally used, such as those found on the Pacific coast of northern Chile and Peru.

1. Introduction
According to an UN-backed paper (Edward Jones et al., 2019), about 142 million m3 of
reject brine is generated worldwide per day, most of it in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and
Qatar, where currently 55% of the total global share in seawater desalination capacity
is installed.

The most applied technologies for desalination are multistage is reverse osmosis and
flash distillation. Particularly in areas without the accesso to very cheap fossil energy
resources, reverse osmosis, which consists of using a semi-permeable membrane that
allows water but not the dissolved salts to pass through, is becoming increasingly
important. In the case of reverse osmosis, the remaining hypersaline reject brine has a
salt concentration approximately 1.6 - 2.5 times higher than the salinity of seawater,
and additionally containing traces of potentially hazardous anti-scalants and anti-fouling
agents used in the process mainly for membrane protection. It has been found that the
discharge of reject brine into the sea, particularly without prior dilution, can cause
severe environmental damages to the marine ecosystem. To mitigate these
environmental impacts, the brine should be retained in a tank or pond where it is diluted
with fresh seawater (usually at a ratio of 1:4) before its discharge into the sea. However,
since this practice is energy intense, the most applied method is the direct discharge
through a submarine outfall, which has the function of achieving the fastest possible
brine dispersion to minimize environmental impacts. Ideally the discharge point should
consider an area of low ecological sensitivity and catch a strong current to optimize
plume dispersion and minimize the area of the impacted zone. Therefore, the brine
discharge point typically should be located as far offshore as possible and discharge flow
rate should not be too high. Typical brine discharge velocities in engineering designs are
in the range from 2 to 8 m/s (José Vargas, 2018). Other alternatives avoiding a direct
discharge to the ocean, such as discharge to surface water or sewers, deep-well injection
and brine evaporation ponds, are rather the exceptions.

2. Environmental Impacts of reject brine disposal

Almost 80% of brine is produced within 10 km distance to the coastline and the
discharge of reject brine into the marine environment cause localized environmental
impacts such as a gradually increasing salinity of the seawater, an increase in turbidity
due to suspended solids, a contamination with hazardous chemicals and finally a
significant depletion of dissolved oxygen.

Ecotoxicological studies conducted in several countries show that brine discharge causes
real damage to the marine ecosystem in the discharge area, which can negatively affect
local fish industry (Nurit Kress and Bella Galil, 2015; Jill Woodworth, 2008; Anton
Purnama, 2014). The composition of brines is more complex than it appears at first
glance due to the presence of chemicals to prevent membrane blockage with potentially
negative ecotoxicological effects, including coagulants in the pretreatment phase (iron
or aluminum salts, polymers), biocides added as algaecides (including chlorine),
antifoulants (including copper compounds) and membrane preservatives (like sodium
bisulfite), antiscalants (polyphosphates, polyphosphonates, polyacrylic acid, polymaleic
acid), etc. In addition, there are other reagents used for cleaning reverse osmosis
membranes (acid and alkaline solutions, as well as detergents) and pH and water
hardness regulators. These chemicals are added at various stages of the process in
generally low concentrations and are subsequently eliminated with the reject brine
without pretreatment. To mitigate the negative impacts, it would be necessary to
decontaminate the reject brine or waste from membrane cleaning in a water treatment
plant prior to its discharged – a process that for cost reasons is not viable. Apart from
the concentration of salts and the presence of potentially ecotoxic chemical compounds,
adverse effects on the ecosystem were also observed due to differences in the
temperature of the reject brine and seawater. Rather unexpectedly, partially irreversible
damage to polychaetes, crustaceans, plants, fish and phytoplankton was detected even
in dilutions of less than 10 to 20 times with seawater (Nurit Kress and Bella Galil, 2015).
It should be noted that the dilution zone of the reject brine with seawater can extend to
distances of more than 500 meters, depending on the concentration gradient and
current conditions (Anton Purnama, 2014). There are sensitive species such as kingfish
in Australia (Seriola Ialandi), where a 70-fold dilution of the brine with seawater is
required to avoid damage to the fish population (Jill Woodworth, 2008). These findings
lead us to question the validity of some results of numerical dispersion models applied
in programs such as CORMIX or VISUAL PLUMES (José Alonso Vargas Torres, 2018; ANA,
2017). Such type of simulation programs is frequently applied in environmental impact
studies to justify a direct discharge of reject brine by using submerged outfalls, without
counting on results of site-specific ecotoxicological studies. High costs and time
requirements are the main reason that ecotoxicological studies are the exception, rather
than standard practice. In most projects, reject brines are discharged without any
pretreatment into the sea, relying on a rapid dilution of the effluent (Nurit Kress and
Bella Galil, 2015).

In conclusion, the high concentration of salts in the reject brine is only one factor among
many in explaining the environmental impacts on the marine ecosystem. A cocktail that
includes high local salinity, the presence of potentially ecotoxic chemicals, oxygen
depletion and other stressors such as elevated temperature can have a profound impact
on benthic organisms, which can subsequently translate into observable ecological
effects throughout the food chain.

3. Reject brine as a valuable raw material

Seawater contains about 3.5% dissolved salts, i.e. in each liter of water there are 35
grams of dissolved salts on average. Sodium chloride, which is known as table salt,
accounts for about 80 percent of the salts present in seawater. Many other salts also
can be isolated from seawater, such as magnesium and calcium sulfate and chloride,
magnesium bromide, potassium sulfate and chloride, as well as minor salts of boron,
strontium, lithium, silicon, rubidium, cesium, uranium or molybdenum. Taking
advantage of the different (temperature dependent) solubilities of salts formed during
the crystallization process, as shown in Table 1, pure or mixed salts can be separated
during water evaporation combined with cooling. Mixed salts subsequently can be
processed to separate pure salts which can be marketed.

Compound Solubility in g/100 ml H2O at RT

CaCO3 0.0015
MgCO3 0.0139
CaSO4 • 2H2O 0.26
K2SO4 11.1
KMg(SO4)Cl• 3H2O, Kainite 20.0
K2Mg(SO4)2• 6H2O, Schoenite 25.0
KCl, Silvinite 35.5
NaCl 35.7
Na2SO4 44.0
MgCl2 56.0
KMgCl3•6H2O, Carnalite 64.5
CaCl2 81.3
LiCl 84.5
SrCl2 •6H2O (0⁰C) 106.0
Table 1 – Solubilities of selected salts present in reject brine
By exploiting the high commercial value of various salts that can be recovered in
significant quantities from recovered brine, there is an opportunity to use this resource
to reduce the cost of the desalination process while reducing the environmental impact
of brine discharge.

For the separation of valuable salts in high quality and with a reasonable production
yield, the reject brine must be processed appropriately. The biggest challenge in this
process is the concentration of enormous quantities of reject brine, required for the
subsequent fractional crystallization of salts. A reverse osmosis plant with a daily
freshwater production capacity of 10,000 m3 has a reject brine production of
approximately 14,000 m3 per day (assuming a typical recovery ratio of 0.42 for reverse
osmosis processes). To start crystallizing lower solubility salts and sodium chloride, it is
necessary to concentrate the reject brine by a factor of more than 7. This means that
the 14,000 m3 brine will need to be condensed to approximately 2000 m3, which under
economic considerations is only viable using solar evaporation ponds with the sun as
free energy source. However, this free energy comes with long evaporation times and
construction costs of hectar-sized evaporation ponds, which in general must be lined
with geomembranes for impermeability. At project sites where such evaporation ponds
cannot be constructed due to space or other geographic constraints, brines need to be
concentrated by replacing some or in a worst-case scenario all of the ponds by technical
evaporation technologies, preferably supplied with solar energy sources. In most cases,
however, a combination of solar and technical evaporation can be applied to find a
compromise between economics and such logistical constraints.

Technical concentration technologies can roughly be separated in membrane and

evaporation technologies. Membrane methods use thin sheets of semipermeable
plastic or ceramic membranes that act as selective barriers, allowing pure water to be
separated from the salt. For the application with hypersaline brines, membrane
methods like reverse osmosis are proving to be very energy intensive and prone to
membrane clogging. The other option, thermal based desalination methods, where the
saline water is evaporated and condensed to obtain freshwater, are also energy
intensive and often not useful for a rapid evaporation of large quantities of water.
Conventional evaporation techniques require temperatures in excess of 100°C, which
are usually achieved by boiling water or steam. In general, the high energy costs for a
technical evaporation are the deciding factor about the feasibility of such a project. A
lot of research is ongoing to find viable solutions for this challenge with acceptable
energy requirements, including the application of solar energy supported vapor
compression distillation (K-UTEC, 2022, Abdel-Mohsen et al., 2021), multistage flash
distillation, multiple effect distillation, membrane distillation (Youngkwon Choi et al.,
2019) or other low-temperature flash evaporations with energy recovery (K-UTEC 2022,
J. Robert Paden et al., 2007, Nayar et al. 2019). In general, low-temperature evaporation
technologies are most promising because of their energy-efficiency to relatively fast
remove large quantities of water from brines (K-UTEC, 2022). Consequently, multistage
flash distillation plants account for currently more than half of the world production of
desalinated water, particularly applied in Arabic countries where cheap energy sources
are available.
Combining systems to form a multi-stage evaporator allows larger volumes of water to
be removed with the same initial heat input. Since the boiling temperature of water
decreases with decreasing pressure, the steam evaporated in one vessel can be used to
heat the next vessel if each evaporator is maintained at a lower pressure than the
previous one. Only the first evaporator requires an external heat source, which can be
taken from another process or generated specifically for this purpose, ideally from
sustainable energies. The systematic integration of heat exchangers recover heat from
condensation and salt crystallization process, thus reducing even more the overall
energy demand.

4. Fractional crystallization of valuable salts

The major components of reject brine determining their solubility properties are Na+,
K+, Mg2+, Cl- and SO42-. Using current available technology, it is economically feasible to
separate salts of magnesium, potassium, calcium, bromine, boron, iodine, strontium,
lithium, and rubidium (see Figure 1; Paripurnanda Loganathan et al., 2017). Among
these, rubidium, iodine and lithium salts have the highest market price, but at the same
time they are amongst the salts with the lowest concentrations in seawater. Lithium has
an average concentration of 0.17 mg/l, rubidium of 0.12 mg/l and iodine of only 0.005
mg/l. For this reason, very large quantities of concentrated brine are required for an
economically profitable production of these trace elements.

Figure 1: Selection of minerals that can be economically extracted from seawater

based on market prices and mineral concentrations in 2017 (Paripurnanda
Loganathan et al., 2017).

The K-UTEC Approach

Limiting factors for a successful implementation of reject brine processing are high
capital investment and operational costs. Among the most important factors are energy
expenditures, acquisition costs, maintenance costs and operation of the applied
technology.

A way out of this dilemma is the application of the same process elements already
successfully applied at industrial scale in the potash and lithium industry. Key for the
economic and technical feasibility in most of these projects is the application of sun
energy for water evaporation and proven cost-effective technologies for fractional salt
crystallization and processing. Recently, direct extraction methods for lithium and other
cations have been introduced in the industry, but definitive breakthroughs for mass
application have not yet been achieved due to the lack of long-term experience on an
industrial scale (K-UTEC 2021, William Stringfellow and Patrick Dobson, 2021).

In the following, a brief description of the process applied by K-UTEC is presented

(Heiner Marx et al., 2019; Markus Pfänder et al., 2018). A simplified schematic of the
process is presented in Figure 2.

In the first step, solar energy is used in a series of open-air evaporation ponds to increase
the concentration of the salts until saturation is reached. Depending on the space
available for setting up evaporation ponds, direct extraction techniques and/or technical
evaporation can also be included in the process scheme as already explained before. At
the beginning, low solubility salts like calcium and magnesium carbonate and gypsum
precipitate. After reaching a critical concentration with a brine density of about 1.21,
the major ions sodium and chloride start to precipitate as table salt, NaCl.

Figure 2: Simplified block flow diagram of the K-UTEC Process for maximum recovery
of valuable products from brine resulting from seawater desalination.

In the first step, the precipitated NaCl is collected and processed to produce table salt
and other salt qualities, as well as for the possible production of other downstream
products such as sodium hydroxide solution (NaOH), hydrochloric acid (HCl) or sodium
carbonate (Na2CO3). Calcium chloride (CaCl2) can also be crystallized from this solution
as a by-product. A second evaporation step is necessary for the recovery of a salt mixture
that is widely known as kainite-type mixed salt (KTMS), containing potassium chloride
(KCl), magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) and NaCl.

This salt mixture is the feedstock to produce potassium sulfate (SOP) in the desired
quality, applying a series of chemical, mechanical and thermal processes. As an
intermediate step, after the first evaporation stage and before the production of KTMS,
NaCl is precipitated with some impurities like calcium sulfate and iron hydroxide. This
saline fraction can be dissolved and recirculated to be reused in the process to increase
recovery efficiency. Subsequently, a liquid fraction rich in magnesium, chloride and
sulfate ions is obtained from these processes and is called bittern solution (bittern). This
solution can be used for the extraction of hydrated magnesium sulfate or epsomite
(MgSO4 *7H2O) by cooling crystallization under controlled conditions. In addition,
bromine is also found in the residual fraction of bitters in sufficient concentrations for
recovery. Apart from the above, the production of magnesium compounds such as
magnesium hydroxide (Mg[OH]2) and magnesium oxide (MgO) from the remaining brine
can be achieved.

Ongoing research is happening by utilizing any remaining fraction of bittern after

debittering by applying new innovative technologies, including pilot trials assessing their
potential for upscaling. An example of such a technology is Salinity Gradient Energy, also
known as Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO), which involves energy recovery using the
salinity difference of two solutions (e.g., seawater and bittern) separated by a semi-
permeable membrane (K-UTEC, 2022).

As an example of a proposed process scheme, Figure 3 shows a block flow diagram for
SOP production from harvested KTMS, which is produced from the reject brine of
seawater desalination plants (Heiner Marx et al., 2019). The KTMS from the reject brine
evaporation process is reacted under certain conditions that allow the formation of the
intermediate product Schoenite, a double hydrated salt, consisting of magnesium
sulfate, potassium sulfate and water (K2Mg(SO4)2• 6H2O). Subsequently, K2SO4 (SOP) is
separated by controlled crystallization and MgSO4 remains in solution. At the end of the
process, the separated Schoenite is decomposed into SOP, a fertilizer in great demand
on the international market. The SOP produced is then further processed to separate
adherent brine by centrifugation and to dry the product. The main aqueous streams of
hot and cold mother liquor are circulated in-process to increase the overall production
yield.

The bitter solution remaining from these processes is sent for further processing to
obtain other products such as epsomite, elemental bromine and magnesium oxide. As
an additional option to improve the cost-benefit ratio of the process, the production of
additional products such as boron as boric acid and lithium as chloride, carbonate or
hydroxide can be considered. For the selective recovery of boron, the electrodialysis
method with monovalent anion exchange membranes can be applied to improve the
concentration factors. The separation of lithium from brine is an economic challenge
due to the generally low lithium concentrations, but it is technically feasible using state-
of-the-art selective extraction techniques (K-UTEC, 2021). In this context, it is worth
mentioning that a new process allows the direct production of lithium hydroxide from
lithium chloride without the use of toxic reagents and with a minimum of additional
water expenditure (Oswald Eppers, 2020).

The recovering rubidium, iodine and strontium is technically also feasible, but in general
not considered in the process, mainly for reasons of high investment costs and low
concentrations of these elements in the brine.

Figure 3 - Potassium sulfate production (SOP) from kainite-type mixed salt (KTSM)
obtained from brine concentration.

Green Hydrogen and Ammonia Production

The world is facing enormous challenges due to the climate crisis, and green hydrogen
is seen as an integral part of the clean energy mix to secure a sustainable future. As a
result of increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the hydrogen market
is currently facing unprecedented political and economic development, driven in part by
the gradually decreasing cost of producing and storing hydrogen using new
technologies.

The concentration of reject brine with technical evaporation technologies is an

opportunity to recover the required amount of high-quality water that can be used for
water electrolysis to generate hydrogen. The use of renewable energies to degrade the
water molecules generates so-called “green hydrogen” and oxygen that is released to
the atmosphere or can be marketed as well. For each ton of hydrogen formed, about 9
m3 (9,000 liters) of purified water are electrolytically decomposed. Typical commercial
electrolyzer system efficiencies are 56–73%, which corresponds to 70.1–53.4 kWh/kg of
hydrogen produced. A 100 MW solar or wind energy farm can produce about 19 tons of
green hydrogen per hour by electrolyzing about 170 m3 of high-purity water (456 tons
H2 per day, using 4080 m3 of water) (B. Kroposki et al., 2006).
The biggest technical challenge for global trade in hydrogen is arguably its huge volume
at normal temperatures and pressures, which poses high logistical, technical, and
ultimately economic challenges. Technically, hydrogen can be transported by
compressing the gas (usually to over 200 bar) and moving it through pipelines or in tanks
by ship. Vessels for compressed hydrogen, on the other hand, are not yet on the market,
although small quantities of compressed hydrogen are transported via trailer cylinders.
Alternatively, hydrogen can be liquefied by lowering its temperature to -253 °C, which
shrinks it to 1/800 of its volume under normal conditions. Chemical conversion to
hydrides or physical adsorption to carrier substances are other possibilities that are not
yet mature on industrial scale. In general, all options are expensive and have an
unfavorable carbon and ecological footprint. For this reason, over 80% of export-
oriented low-carbon hydrogen projects envision transporting the hydrogen carrier
ammonia instead of hydrogen. Green ammonia is produced commercially by the
catalytic reaction of nitrogen and hydrogen at high temperature and pressure using the
proven Haber-Bosch process and renewable energy sources. The synthesis, storage, and
shipping of ammonia is well understood on an industrial scale, and the market for
ammonia is approximately 180 million tons per year, mainly used in the fertilizer
industry.
Figure 4 shows a general scheme of an integral desalination process, where reject brine
is used for salt as well as for green hydrogen and green ammonia production. In an ideal
case, such a production can be performed as cero liquid emission process. In practice,
however, it is a challenge to process the entire reject brine economically and logistically,
especially in projects with a very high daily production of reject brine. Therefore, in
practice, it is arguably often unavoidable to discharge a portion of the reject brine into
the sea, if other more environmentally friendly alternatives are not available.

Figure 4: General scheme of desalination process with use of reject brine for salt,
green hydrogen and derivatives production.

Apart from ammonia, a series of other “green” chemicals are available from green
hydrogen, including green methanol. Methanol is both an important industrial chemical
and a useful multipurpose fuel that could play an increasingly important role in a carbon-
neutral energy mix. Pure methanol is easily transportable, is readily flammable, and
burns without visible flame to form carbon dioxide and water. It has high knock
resistance, which allows a higher compression ratio compared to traditional gasoline or
diesel engines. Currently, most methanol is obtained by catalytic conversion of syngas,
which is usually produced by steam reforming of natural gas [J. Ott et al., 2012]. As an
alternative to syngas, green methanol can also be produced by direct hydrogenation of
pure CO2 (preferably from a sustainable CO2 capture) with H2 with high selectivity on
commercially available Cu/ZnO-based catalysts. The economic feasibility of this CO2
hydrogenation to methanol has been investigated in several studies (Harri Nieminen et
al., 2019). It was found that the total cost is generally dominated by the hydrogen
production cost, which consists of the capital cost for the electrolyzer and the electricity
cost.

5. Conclusion
In seawater desalination, a large volume of hypersaline reject brine containing low
concentrations of potentially ecological hazardous chemicals is generated, whose
discharge to the ocean can result in environmental problems in the marine ecosystem.
A way out of this problem is the conversion of this problematic waste material into a
resource to produce commercially valuable salts and other products like green hydrogen
and ammonia. The approach has not only the advantage of avoiding ecological damages,
but also can generate additional income streams which lead to an overall reduction of
freshwater production costs. As each project has its own characteristics, individual
feasibility assessments are required in order to determine the profitability of a designed
reject brine processing. The most feasible process route for valuable salt production is
the use of solar energy for brine concentration in open evaporation ponds, combined
with high energy-efficient technical evaporation technologies, a minimum chemical
reagent requirement and an overall optimization of waste management with waste
minimization and recycling strategies. Particularly in arid areas, such as the pacific coasts
of Peru and Chile, characterized for high evaporation rates and extremely low rainfall,
the use of solar energy for the concentration of reject brine is a preferred strategy where
logistically feasible.

As an example of salt production capacity, a facility with a generation of 2000 kt/year of

bittern solution (bittern) has the potential of producing per year 385.000 tons of sodium
chloride, 38.000 tons of potassium chloride, 110.000 magnesium sulfate, 172.000 tons
of magnesium chloride and 3500 tons of elemental brome (Heiner Marx et al., 2019). It
is important to clarify that market prices of salts highly dependent on the quality and
quantity of the offered products. Therefore, it is important to select a process route
which results in high-quality products to obtain high market prices. In general, the
profitability of the process depends on the specific characteristics of each project.
However, experience suggests that the investment in salt recovery from brine will pay
for itself within five years (Heiner Marx, 2021). After this time, the revenues will fully
support the freshwater production and reduce overall water production costs. The
generation of green hydrogen and other downstream products like green ammonia
open the door for the production of nitrogen fertilizer which are also in high demand in
South Americas agricultural business.
For green hydrogen production, a key element is the availability of sufficient and
adequate renewable energy sources. A 100 MW solar or wind energy farm can produce
about 19 tons of green hydrogen per hour by electrolyzing about 170 m3 of desalinated
water. Preferably, due to the high transport costs, green hydrogen can be used in local
and regional industries and transport in order to reduce overall national CO2 emissions.

In summary, capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operation costs (OPEX) of the

implementation of a reject brine processing strategy dependent on the characteristics
of each individual project, including amounts of reject brine produced, land availability,
climatic and geographical conditions for evaporation pond installation, off-taker
markets for produced salts and other potential products and last but not least project
financing capabilities. In cases where optimal conditions are provided, the processing of
reject brines for the production of valuable byproducts is a viable opportunity to
generate additional income streams and at the same time to mitigate environmental
impacts to the marine ecosystem.

Literature:
1. Edward Jones, Manzoor Qadir, Michelle T.H. van Vliet, Vladimir Smakhtin and
Seong-mu Kang (2019), The state of desalination and brine production: A global
outlook,Science of The Total Environment,Volume 657, 2019, Pages 1343-1356,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.076
2. José Alonso Vargas Torres (2018), Evaluación del Impacto Ambiental del
efluente submarino del proyecto PROVISUR empleando el modelo CORMIX,
Tesis para optar el Título de Ingeniero Civil, Pontifica Universidad Católica del
Perú, Facultad de Ciencias e Ingeniería, Lima, September 2018.
3. Nurit Kress and Bella Galil (2015), Impact of seawater desalination by reverse
osmosis on the marine environment, In: Efficient Desalination by Reverse
Osmosis - A guide to RO practice, Chapter 8, IWA Publishing, Volume 14, ISBN
9781780405049; and publications mentioned in the book.
4. Jill Woodworth (2008), The Provision of Reverse Osmosis Brine Toxicity Testing
on Larval Kingfish (Seriola Ialandi), Marine Toxicity Tests, Report ECX08-1809
and ECX08-1810, GeoTech.
5. Anton Purnama (2014), Environmental Quality Standards for Brine Discharge
from Desalination Plants, Chapter 18 of the book: Recent Progress in
Desalination, Environmental and Marine Outfall Systems, Springer Verlag, ISBN
978-3-319-19123-2.
6. Autoridad Naciona del Agua, ANA (2017). Guía para la determinación de la zona
de mezcla y le evaluación del impacto de un vertimiento de aguas residuales
tratadas a un cuerpo natural de agua. Lima.
(https://repositorio.ana.gob.pe/handle/20.500.12543/900)
7. a) K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies (2022), private communication, unpublished
results, b) Abdel-Mohsen O., Mohamed, Evan K., Paleologos and Fares M.
Howari (2021), Pollution Assessment for Sustainable Practices in Applied
Sciences and Engineering, Editor: Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN 978-0-12-
809582-9
8. Youngkwon Choi, Gayathri Naidu, Long D. Nghiem, Sangho Leeb and
Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran (2019), Membrane distillation crystallization for
brine mining and zero liquid discharge: opportunities, challenges, and recent
progress, Environmental Science: Water Resource and Technology, Issue 7,
2019.
9. J. Justin Robert Paden, P.K. Tewari, P.K. Tewari, D. Venkatram and D. Barnabas
(2007), Spray flash evaporator for low-temperature saline water desalination
application, International Journal of Nuclear Desalination 2(4), 2007.
10. Nayar, Kishor G., Jenifer Fernandes, Ronan K. McGovern, Bader S. Al-Anzi, and
John H. Lienhard V, (2019), Cost and Energy Needs of RO-ED Crystallizer
Systems for Zero Brine Discharge Seawater Desalination, Desalination 457 (May
2019): 115-132, 2019 Elsevier B.V.
11. Paripurnanda Loganathan, Gayathri Naidu and Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran
(2017), Mining valuable minerals from seawater: a critical review, Environ. Sci.:
Water Res. Technol.,2017,3,37-53.
12. a) K-UTEC (2021), Lithium Mining, From Resource Exploration to Battery
Grade Lithium
(https://www.academia.edu/59055549/Lithium_Mining_From_Resource_Explo
ration_to_Battery_Grade_Lithium); b) William T. Stringfellow and Patrick F.
Dobson (2021), Technology for the Recovery of Lithium from Geothermal
Brines, Energies 2021, 14(20), 6805 (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-
1073/14/20/6805)
13. Heiner Marx, Stephan Kaps, Bernd Schultheis and Markus Pfänder (2019),
Potassium sulfate - a precious by-product for solar salt works, World Salt
Symposium Report, Bull. Soc. Sea Water Sci., Jpn., 73, 89 - 93
(shorturl.at/abnMU).
14. Markus Pfänder, Stephan Kaps and Bernd Schultheis (2018), SOP Production
from Sea Bittern, Presentation at the International Conference "Salt Asia 2018",
29-30 November 2018, Inter Continental Grand Stanford, Hong Kong.
15. Oswald Eppers (2020), New Eco-efficient Process for the Production of High
Purity Lithium Hydroxide, Researchgate (https://bit.ly/3pKyO8v).
16. Heiner Marx, CEO of K-UTEC Salt Technologies (2021), unpublished
information.
17. B. Kroposki, J. Levene, K. Harrison, P.K. Sen, F. Novachek (2006), Electrolysis:
Information and Opportunities for Electric Power Utilities, Technical Report
NREL/TP-581-40605 September 2006
(https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/40605.pdf)
18. Ott, J.; Gronemann, V.; Pontzen, F.; Fiedler, E.; Grossmann, G.; Kersebohm,
D.B.; Weiss, G.; Witte, C. (2012), Methanol. In Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of
Industrial Chemistry; Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA: Weinheim,
Germany, 2012; pp. 1–27.
19. Harri Nieminen, Arto Laari and Tuomas Koiranen (2019), CO2 Hydrogenation
to Methanol by a Liquid-Phase Process with Alcoholic Solvents: A Techno-
Economic Analysis, Processes 2019, 7, 405.
About the Author: Oswald Eppers is a PhD Chemist and business development
representative of K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies in South America. K-UTEC is an engineering
and consulting company specialized in salt mining and salt processing, with emphasis on
lithium and potassium salt production projects; oswald.eppers@k-utec.es; www.k-utec.de