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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

Agree with the skepticism, and furthermore if this were such a killer moneymaker you'd expect multiple commercial efforts in this space already.

But this is California - there may be reasons that are not economic or technical that have prevented anyone from trying to develop or pursue such an idea. The concentrated salt-brine discharge, for example, may be impossible to get environmental approval for at these volumes.

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Israel is, I believe, the place in the world that has the most desal, and is actually already using it for ag. I'm not familiar with domestic/development policy in Israel, but I have trouble believing it's as restrictive as the CA. So not only has CA not already done it, but neither has Israel, who, at the very least must have different roadblocks.

The point is, it's not only California (which I agree is pretty anti-development and where this plausibly might be disallowed even if it did make economic sense) that is leaving this supposed $100 bill on the ground.

Part of it might just be timing. The price of Magnesium and Lithium spiked in 2022; what was not viable prior to 2022 may be viable now.

Are we using that definition of "world" that somehow excludes any other country outside the western alliance? Saudi Arabia and six other countries have more seawater desalination capacity than Israel.

I put "believe" specifically because I knew I didn't know much on the topic and they were a country I knew used a lot. I was very intentionally signalling my lack of certainty about that sentence. A simple correction rather than an assumption of....whatever the hell it is you are vaguely accusing me of would have been much more helpful.

That being said, thanks for the heads up! However, it really just strengthens my point that even more countries are using desal and not mining the brine.

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