> The analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it.

But you're doing that with the same water you're trying to make in the first place!

You could just dilute it using fresh seawater, if you used enough and (maybe) spread it over a wider area. The amount of water people need for drinking is a relative drop in the ocean.

Brine doesn't necessarily behave the way you imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool

Blue Planet video of a brinicle, content warning for kind of horrifying death of sea creatures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc

And a Blue Planet II video of a brine pool, stronger content warning for much more horrifying death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY

You can dilute the brine in a facility before disposing.

Go on. With what?

Seems like you could just dilute it with seawater at like 100:1 ratio and it would be negligible done offshore. We already dump our shit 5 miles out.

100:1 is overkill and energetically very wasteful. It's a fairly straightforward chemical engineering problem.

gasoline

...sea water. You take 10 units of sea water for every unit processed and you'll get a slight increase in salinity.

A phase diagram tells you exactly how far you need to go.

You know this makes more thermodynamic sense than carbon capture, right?

With fresh water, we’ll get it from desalinization! Hey wait a second…

Sarcasm aside, your comment actually works: you can use the freshwater from desalination!

Just wait for the saltwater to come back around in the sewer.

Globally about 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture so less than a third of it will come back around, if it's exclusively for residential/commercial use you might do better but overall not a strategy that balances out

70% of desalinated water wont ever go to agriculture because its too expensive to use for corn. Only very high value crops need apply.

But, so what? 30% sewage is still a strong dilluant... especially when mixed with more seawater

Im shocked how many people cannot grasp that you can dilute brine's salinity arbitrarily close to seawater's with energetically cheap pumps.