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by philipkglass
2721 days ago
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The local sewage systems can't deal with volumes this large. The sewage systems of the entire UK, population 66 million, deal with about 11 billion liters per day: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Saudi Arabia, with a population of only 33 million, isn't going to have sewage systems sized to accommodate 31.5 billion liters of waste brine. |
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As to impact the quality of brine is less important than the amount of surplus salt. Sea water is ~3.5% salt. You need 1:1 fresh water produced to get back to the default at discharge. While a significant fraction of the water produced would be lost as evaporation etc, desalination is not their only source of water.
Edit: Digging into the numbers it looks like Saudi Arabia is not limiting things to cities which have a closer relationship between water and sewage production.