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.
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.
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?
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.
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.