Brine Disposal and Management—Planning, Design, and Implementation

Abstract Desalination is the method of removing salts from brackish or saline water in order to produce fresh water. Due to rapid increases in populations and limitations to existing water supplies, this method has become essential source to provide fresh water demands. Thus, many large desalination plants, mostly coastal, have been constructed or are under construction around the world. Capital cost, high energy consumption, and environmental impacts are the main considerations involved in designing and operating of desalination plants. The main environmental concern, however, is the disposal of produced waste water back into the environment. The effects are mostly related to high salinity of brine produces during the process as byproduct. If the salt concentration is very high, making it denser than the ambient water, it is prone to plunge and spreads out over the floor, which increases the risk of negative effects on benthic ecosystems. So proper brine disposal is required to minimize the adverse impacts. The solution is to design marine outfall for rapid dilution to reduce salinity down to safe level. In this chapter, some of the essential issues involved in the management and modeling of brine discharges for coastal desalination plants are discussed.