Hypersaline brine

Chloride minerals are rarely found in coal in the form of solid species because of high solubility of sodium, calcium and trace metal chlorides in coal strata waters. The "inherent" water content of coal is related to its porosity and thus the moisture content of lignite deposits can exceed 40 per cent decreasing to below 5 per cent in fully bituminous coals (11). Chlorides, chiefly associated with sodium and calcium constitute the bulk of water-soluble matter in British bituminous coals (12). Skipsey (13) has found that the distribution of chlorine coals was closely related to the salinity of mine waters. Hypersaline brines with concentrations of dissolved solids up to 200 kg m occur in several of the British Coalfields. 

The mode of formation of hypersaline brines has been discussed by the osmotic filtration through clay and shale deposits. The salinity of the brine ground waters increases with depth and when they are in contact with fuel bearing strata, correspondingly more chloride is taken up by the fuel. However, according to Skipsey (13) the high rank bituminous coals because of their low porosity are unable to take up large amounts of the chloride and associated cations, and the chlorine content rarely exceeds 0.2 per cent. The... 

The presence of hypersaline brines in stratigraphic levels as young as Paleocene appears to be limited to those areas where the evaporitic rocks are present in the earliest Tertiary i.e. Echols County, Georgia, and eastward. 

More concentrated hypersaline brines (>100g/kg) are limited to Lower Cretaceous ( ) strata on land. A lens of such fluids appears to extend from Calhoun County to Lowndes County, Georgia, in transect 13—B (Fig. 3, CAL-f to LOW-5) below the lens is less saline water. However, at these depths, the SP-values yield only semiquantitative salinity values, because the greasy (high-clay-content) nature of the varicolored micaceous sands reported in this zone affects the well logs. 

Eugster, H. P., 1980. Lake Magadi, Kenya, and its precursors. In Nissenbaum, A. (ed.) Hypersaline Brines and Evaporitic Environments (Developments in Sedimentology 28). Elsevier, Amsterdam 195-232. 

Levy, Y. 1980. Evaporitic sediments in northern Sinai. In Hypersaline Brines and Evaporitic Environments. 

The irony of the water shortage in McMurdo is that Antarctica contains 90% of the ice that exists on the Earth and 70% of the fresh water. However, mining of ice and snow on Ross Island for use in McMurdo Station is prohibitively expensive and may violate the Antarctic Treaty because of potential environmental issues. For these reasons, the demand for fresh water in the station continues to be met by desalination of seawater, although this process is also expensive and does impact the environment in McMurdo Sound because of the discharge of hypersaline brine by the desalination plant and of wastewater by the wastewater treatment plant. 

Muramatsu, Y., and Komatsu, R. (1999). Ca-Rich Hypersaline Brine and C02-Rich Fluid in the Mori Geothermal Reservoir, Japan. Resour. Geol. 49(1), 27-37. 

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