The ocean has often been announced as a sustainable source of important materials for civilization. Application of the same extraction processes to desalination concentrate, rather than to unconcentrated seawater, will necessarily be more energetically favorable, so the expansion of seawater desalination in recent decades brings this dream closer to reality. However, there is relatively little concrete commercial development of ‘concentrate mining’. This review assesses the technical and economic prospects for utilization of commercially viable products from seawater. The most important technologies for economic use of products from desalination plant concentrate are technologies for more economic separation and technologies for more economic concentration. The most promising separation technologies are those, such as nanofiltration, which separate brine into streams enriched/depleted in entire classes of constituents with minimal input of energy and reagents. Concentration is becoming more economic due to rapid advances in Osmotically-Assisted RO technology. Despite very active research on many aspects of desalination concentrate utilization, it is likely that commercial development of the non-NaCl components of desalination brine will depend on the available market for NaCl, as the challenges and costs of extracting the other mineral components from bitterns in which they are highly enriched are so much less than those faced in direct treatment of brines.

海洋经常被宣布为文明重要材料的可持续来源。将相同的提取工艺应用于淡化浓缩物，而不是未浓缩的海水，必然会更有活力，因此近几十年来海水淡化的扩展使这一梦想更接近现实。然而，“精矿开采”的具体商业开发相对较少。本综述评估了利用海水中商业可行产品的技术和经济前景。海水淡化厂浓缩产品的经济使用最重要的技术是更经济的分离技术和更经济的浓缩技术。最有前途的分离技术是那些，如纳滤、它将盐水分离成富含/耗尽整个类别成分的流，而能量和试剂的输入最少。由于渗透辅助反渗透技术的快速发展，浓缩变得更加经济。尽管对海水淡化浓缩物利用的许多方面进行了非常积极的研究，但海水淡化盐水中非 NaCl 组分的商业开发很可能取决于 NaCl 的可用市场，因为从卤水中提取其他矿物组分的挑战和成本它们高度富集的含量远低于直接处理盐水的含量。