Abstract As desalination develops, the impacts of brine ocean disposal rise increasing concerns. Here we present a screening of the hurdles to brine disposal through pressurized submerged outfalls in the broader Mediterranean region. Using first-tier dilution models, we analyze how different environmental quality standards reflect in terms of initial outfall velocity. We show that achieving moderate dilution is usually not problematic, while higher environmental quality standards would often require excessively high initial velocities. Although this may not be so overwhelming a problem as to undermine the feasibility of brine discharge, it indicates possible hurdles to arise in the permitting of a project. We also show that increasing water recovery (i.e. having more concentrated brine) reduces jet extents, hence allows disposal in shallower waters, with smaller pipelines, causing an appreciable reduction of costs, while also slightly reducing pumping energy demand (which is rather small anyway in comparison with the overall energy demand of the desalination process). This makes recovery of water from the brine a potentially interesting management option, to be appraised against the costs of increasing recovery, and the difficulties arising from the higher dilution required at the outfall.

中文翻译：

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筛选地中海周围海水淡化盐水的海上处置障碍

摘要 随着海水淡化的发展，盐水海洋处理的影响越来越受到关注。在这里，我们介绍了在更广泛的地中海地区通过加压淹没排放口处理盐水的障碍。使用一级稀释模型，我们分析了不同的环境质量标准如何反映初始排污口速度。我们表明，实现适度稀释通常没有问题，而更高的环境质量标准通常需要过高的初始速度。虽然这可能不会成为破坏盐水排放可行性的压倒性问题，但它表明项目许可可能会出现障碍。我们还表明，增加水回收率（即具有更浓的盐水）会减少喷射范围，因此允许在较浅的水域中进行处理，使用更小的管道，从而显着降低成本，同时也略微减少泵送能源需求（与海水淡化过程的整体能源需求相比，无论如何都相当小）。这使得从盐水中回收水成为一种潜在的有趣管理选择，可以根据增加回收率的成本以及排放口所需的更高稀释度带来的困难进行评估。