like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine.

But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine.

And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants.

You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs.

A desalination technique that can yield potable water within seconds.

And the desalination process is one where we take out salts.

But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine.

A company called Aquaporin is starting to make desalination membranes mimicking this technology.

Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine.

So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine.

And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea.

We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera.

Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes. Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine

Here's the first battery a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine.

So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology.

What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture?

And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico.

It is He who made two bodies of water flow side by side, one fresh (and) sweet, the other brine (and) bitter, and has placed an interstice, a barrier between them.

So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings.

When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants.