Map showing the largely artificial salinity of the Persian Gulf.

Desalination is clearly going to be a very important technology for the future, as our drinking water supply dwindles. Carbon capture/storage is also an imperative process to be working on in an effort to slow down global warming in any way possible. So the fact that a scientist at Qatar University is working on a process that takes pure CO2 waste from natural gas plants, waste brine from desalination plants, and ammonia, which all react chemically to create sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), calcium chloride (used as a preservative or tanning chemical), and ammonia (which can be recycled to continue the process). Erica Gies reports for Scientific American:

Farid Benyahia wants to solve two environmental problems at once: excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and excess salt in the Persian Gulf (aka the Arabian Gulf). Oil and natural gas drive the region’s booming economies—hence the excess CO2—and desalination supplies the vast majority of drinking water, a process that creates concentrated brine waste that is usually dumped back into the gulf.

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