[philipkglass]

At 35 degrees Celsius (308 K, 95 F), it takes about 44 kilojoules to evaporate 1 mole of water [1]; at 55.6 moles/liter, that's 2.4 megajoules per liter.

Averaged over a year, the energy available to evaporate water over a given area is roughly equal to insolation from the sun. Saudi Arabia has excellent solar resources averaging 2200 kWh/m^2/year [2], e.g. 6 kWh/m^2/day, e.g. 21.7 MJ/m^2/day. With perfect sunlight absorption you could evaporate 9 liters per m^2 of evaporation-pit per day.

They're currently discharging 31.5 billion liters of liquid per day, per the article. That translates to about 3,500,000,000 m^2 (3500 square kilometers) of pit area. So that's probably one reason why nobody deals with desalination brine this way. It would require very large evaporation pits even if you have excellent sun levels to evaporate the waste. It seems like it would be technically possible in SA, as they have a low population density and lots of unused land, but it sounds expensive. Some countries that rely on desalination, like Israel, don't have the spare land area even in theory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#/medi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101836391...

[mrfusion]

Nice analysis! Three things to consider:

I don’t think you can just look at insolation over a given area. Wind and even the cooling itself will cause the air over the area to redistribute with warmer dryer air that can continue picking up water.

Besides that it’s more important to consider how saturated the air in the region is. If it can hold more water it will.

Other things to consider

Some of the water would seep into the ground instead of waiting around to evaporate. Maybe there are ways to speed that up too.

Finally Another option is the spay the water into the air to speed up evaporation a bit.

[philipkglass]

I considered mentioning wind from warmer neighboring regions but at this scale you are basically remaking geography, so I wouldn't count too much on said winds reaching the middle of your evaporation ponds. ("Manmade shallow hypersaline lakes", rather than ponds, at this scale.)

Seepage into the ground -- good point. If there is existing groundwater, seepage would taint it. If there is no existing groundwater, but ground is permeable, that helps.

Spray water into air? That costs more energy. Just waiting for natural evaporation is nice because it doesn't require any more human-added energy.

Of course you'd want to analyze more than the One Big Factor if you were pondering implementing this in practice. But I think that the one-factor approach illustrates why this hasn't been an "obvious" disposal solution for waste brine.