New Device Extracts 1,000 Liters of Clean Water Per Day from Desert Air
1d 11h ago by slrpnk.net/u/reallykindasorta in climate@slrpnk.net from greekreporter.com
A new device extracts up to 1,000 liters of clean water a day from desert air, offering a potential backup supply when storms or drought disrupt central systems. The machine, developed by 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Omar Yaghi, is designed to operate in arid conditions with humidity as low as 20%. His company, Atoco, says the unit can function without connection to the power grid.
The system uses a branch of science known as reticular chemistry. Inside the container-sized unit are Metal-Organic Frameworks, synthetic porous materials engineered at the molecular level.
These materials have an extremely large internal surface area. Even a few grams can match the area of a football arena. That structure allows the material to capture moisture from the air and release it as liquid water.
If that 1000 liters of water doesn’t stay in the desert, will that make the desert even more arid?
it could affect plants and wildlife that survive on small amounts of water vapor.
But this would be more practical in regions surrounded by salt water.
Not an ecologist: my assumption is the only ecosystem intensely vulnerable to harm from moisture extraction would be fog deserts. Since they’re wanting to set these up on islands, it sounds like it shouldn’t immediately cause an ecological collapse or anything like that.
It must to some extent, could potentially be minimal though. Plus we should keep in mind that taking water out of the ground or waterways isn’t ecologically inert either. Hopefully some desert experts can assess.
This scam again? This is like the self filling water bottle.
this one's the size of a shipping container so it seems more believable. improvised solar stills give you 2L per square meter per day iirc
No, just trading energy for water via a standard dehumidifier
Maybe read the article?
I'm a bit confused, they talk about extracting from desert air and then talk about emergencies on Carribean islands, which are moist and tropical.
I'm not sure if the engineering makes sense on bringing an entire shipping container full of expensively produced metamaterials to provide 1 m3 of water per day in emergencies. That same shipping container could instead contain 33 m3 of cheap tap water from a humid region (which means more water per day in most emergencies), or it could contain the materials to build a water tower that contains 1000 m^3 (for if there are times when there is plenty of clean water, like in the Caribbean where it falls from the sky).
Depending on how polluting it was to make the device and what the ecological consequences are of removing usable amounts of moisture from desert air every day, I could see it making sense for people that have to live in a desert for one reason or another, but it's still an entire shipping container of advanced materials for a dozen people that import their food, when pumping an aquifer can provide water for far more people with far less tech.
So this looks like yet another "fuck you got mine" technology, allowing people than can afford a shipping container of advanced materials to have their own private water supply even if the public aquifer runs dry due to capitalist exploitation or wasteful posturing. And unlike a private water tower, it doesn't make much sense for the public to seize it because it only puts out such a small amount of water each day that only a handful of people can benefit.
If this was done intentionally - and it seems hard not to, given it's a for-profit company - then it's some very impressive hyperindividualist prefiguration. It's the part of lifeboat environmentalism where they expertly design the lifeboat to only fit the rich.
You don’t think there’s a use case for small, rural communities that don’t have reliable tap water supply lines?
I think testing in the desert was mainly to develop and test the technology.
I definitely don’t know anything about the company but it doesn’t seem targeted towards survivalists in the article
1000L/day is not enough for a community, you're going to need multiple shipping containers worth of expensive material. Then you've got to put them far enough apart that they don't interfere with each other's operation, and lay a kilometer of pipes from each of them into a central water supply. Maintain the pipes, clean the devices when dust gets on them. Maybe the organic part of the material decays after a while so you need new ones.
It seems implausible that all of this would cost less than a pump, pipeline, well, or even rain water catchment system.
And I'm not thinking of survivalists, I'm thinking of rich people trying to be respectable while preparing for climate change in a selfish way, or coopting 'preparation' for selfishness. Glass Onion types.