Only innovating on price, not on dealing with the toxic brine dumped into the shores (ocean shores are a bio-diverse eco-system in itself, that you can't find in the rest of the ocean).
What if you dump the brine 10 miles into the ocean via pipes?
The desalinated water has to make its way back to the ocean somehow, I would not be worried about us making an impact on the Earths ocean salt levels, and if we dump the brine far enough into the oceam, there must be cubic power laws about salt dissipation.
Or just dump the brine on the ground in a dump site. Let the water seep away underground and the salt pile up to eventually be bulldozed away from the pipe outlet when it gets too high.
I'm picturing something that looks like mine tailings.
Possibly the stuff could be sold as pavement salt for cold climate markets. Depends on how dirty it is I suppose.
I wonder if this is not done because it's expensive (maybe brine corrosion requires expensive pipes), or because governments will simply do nothing until there is public outcry (unlikely to happen in Saudi Arabia, they would need international pressure).
Price is the only barrier to desalination. Environmental impact is a problem to be solved, but we never try to solve it for other things, so why for this?
