Brine management strategies, technologies, and recovery using adsorption processes

Abstract

The world is experiencing serious shortages, unequal distributions, and contamination of the available freshwater resources. Many factors like geography, climate change, increasing populations, economic and technological development, industrialization, and inadequate water management are considered the main contributors to the issue. Many Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), energy-rich arid and semi-arid countries, have set fossil fuel consumption and desalination of seawater as their main energy and freshwater resources resource. This poses significant economic and environmental risks due to the many challenges associated with non-renewable energy resources and desalination technologies. Some of the challenges of desalination technologies include complex processes, infrastructure, energy requirements, and harmful air emissions as well as environmental discharges. Geothermal energy extraction and CO2 sequestration are recognized as solutions to the global reliance on fossil fuels and global warming. However, these technologies are associated with various impacts. Brine streams are byproducts which contain various pollutants, chemicals, toxins, heavy metals as well as concentrated salts and metal ions. The impacts of brine on the environment through the direct disposal methods have led to the development of many types of brine treatment and recovery processes. These processes aim at removing pollutants and extracting valuable metals from brine, decrease its volume, and produce freshwater. Despite these benefits, the conventional brine treatment processes suffer from numerous implementation challenges, economic, environmental as well as energy constraints. Therefore, the adsorption process through the use of natural adsorbents is presented as a novel, efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly approach to remediate and recover various brine streams. The GCC like Qatar relies heavily on desalination, which produces huge amounts of brine annually. Also, date production is high all year long, which results in the disposal of natural adsorbents such as date pits as wastes. Date pits are demonstrated as highly efficient adsorbents for the higher adsorption capacity of valuable metals, substances, and pollutants from aqueous solutions like brine. Therefore, the urgent need for constant development of the desalination industry as well as brine management strategies is needed. Adsorption could potentially fill the gap of the various mentioned challenges of the current brine management strategies.