Healthy Marine Environment

Desalination creates brine. Brine is hypersaline waste water twice as salty as the sea.

A challenge for desalination plants is disposing of this waste. The most common solution has been to dump it back in the sea in the hope the ocean will disperse it.

While most marine flora and fauna are accustomed to fluctuating salinity, the question is how much fluctuation is acceptable and over what period. In terrestrial terms, smoke offers a good analogy.

Too much smoke suffocates everything. Short-lived, intense smoke, or long-lived, medium smoke levels may kill some organisms but spare others. And individual organisms may have varying sensitivities over time (for example, pregnant mothers or propagating plants may be more sensitive than at other times in their lifecyle). In the marine environment it's a safe bet things are pretty much the same, but with one big difference: we know alot less about what goes on in the ocean than we do about the land.

Long-term brine dumping into a marine environment has impacts no one can confidently quantify. Given makind's fragmentary knowledge of the marine environment, it's unlikely there will be a definitive answer anytime in the next 20-30 years. That's the average life of a desalination plant built today.

In choosing a location in the Upper Spencer Gulf, Acquasol used the precautionary principle ("first, do no harm" ). Acquasol precluded sites close to economically-valuable marine environments like fisheries or popular recreational sites. These activities contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to the South Australian state economy. No one wants to put them at risk.

Acquasol's Point Paterson location is a brownfield area formerly used for solar salt harvesting. By resuming solar salt harvesting at Point Paterson with brine used as feedstock, Acquasol will create an additional revenue stream for its business while protecting the marine environment.