Arab–Israeli peace projects regional problems of acute shortage of clean fresh water in Jordan, and the rapid contraction of the Dead Sea. A new desalination plant to be built near the Jordanian tourist resort of Aqaba would convert salt water from the Red Sea into fresh water for use in southern Israel and southern Jordan; each region would get eight billion to 13 billion gallons a year. This process would produces about as much brine as a waste product; the brine would be piped more than 100 miles to help replenish the Dead Sea, already known for its high salt content. This would
Brine mining salt precipitated in solar evaporation at the Dead Sea plants is tens of millions of tons annually, but very little of the salt is marketed. Today, salt from groundwater brines is generally a byproduct of the process of extracting other dissolved substances from brines and constitutes only a small part of world salt production. In the United States, salt is recovered from surface brine at the Great Salt Lake, Utah, and from a shallow subsurface brine at Searles Lake, California. In 1997 about two-thirds of world sodium sulfate production was recovered from brine. Two plants in the US, at Searles