The world is busy with clean water. This technology promises to fix this.

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal 5 min Read 07 Jun 2025, 06:20 IST exemption plants on the seabed can help solve the world’s clean water crisis. (Image: Pixabay) Summary The deep-sea salining is about to provide a source of clean water from the Caribbean to the Emirates. According to the UN, half of all people on earth experience severe water scarcity at least one month out of the year. A radical new kind of desalination technology is ultimately about to help the world’s thirst. The pitch: Put desalination plants on the sea floor. This deep-sea process, which was only proposed in the early 1960s, would benefit from both the pressure water pressure and relatively pure seawater that is more than 1,000 feet. It has been unworkable until now. Only the recent commercialization of innovations-in-including deep-sea robots from the oil and gas industry, and advanced reverse osmosis filters now standard in earthly desalination, it makes viable. Water scarcity is expected to become much sharper in the coming decades due to more extreme weather patterns, decimating the world’s aquifers, salt water invasion and growing urban populations. It threatens humanity on a fundamental level – not only because we need water to drink, but without it there is no food or manufacturing and precious small electricity. From unworkable to sustainable for decades, desalination was the only reason that many places, from the Caribbean to the Emirates, were habitable. But it has always been a solution to the last resort, for one big reason. Tom Pankratz, who has been in the industry for 45 years, is the most expensive way to make water, and there are no businesses, and have consulted many of the world’s largest desalination projects. On the country, engineers would literally cook the ocean, create steam that would become drinking water and run some powerful turbines to repay some of its costs. It was so energy intensive that some suggested in the 1960s to use nuclear power to do so. The world’s largest desalination plant, in Ras Al-Khair, Saudi Arabia, produces much of its water through evaporation. About 2000, reverse osmosis changed everything, says Pankratz. In this process, water over a plastic membrane is forced with holes so small that only go through water molecules, leaving salt and other impurities. This process needs about half the energy, making it a credible option for Trinidad, which in 2002 received a plant that now produces 40 million liters of water per day, and Israel, which has received one in 2005 that now produces 85 million liters of water daily. Many more plants have followed, and this is now the standard way to desalinate water. That said, it’s still expensive compared to traditional water resources such as reservoirs and aquifers – between about $ 2 and $ 6 per 1000 liters, says Pankratz. Much of the cost depends on the price of electricity, says Eric Hoek, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who advises Oceanwell, an desalizing technical enterprise. There are other costs to keep desalination plants on the edge of the ocean. Intakes can raise the marine life; Outflow -pipes can shower a concentrated brine that falls back in the sea in the sea. These issues led to California rejecting a decades-in-the-work deprivation plant in 2022 for the water-hungry Huntington Beach. It is better where it is a wetter Oslo-based Flocean, the Dutch Aquarius and Bay Area-based Oceanwell, is one of the businesses that seized this idea of ​​desalination-and plunged it to a depth of at least 400 meters. The principle is easy to understand: instead of spending large amounts of energy pumping seawater on the land and then pushing it into a plant, why not utilize the extreme natural pressure of the ocean? At depth, seawater, of course, wants to cross a desalination membrane, as long as the fresh water is pumped to the surface on the other side. The result is a net energy saving of up to 40%. An Oceanwell pod without its shell is in the burden for Genes reservoir underwater as part of a pilot at the burden of Genes Municipal Water District. There are other great benefits: These facilities can be far from the shore and out of sight, so there is no competition for property on the beach. Once in place, the systems can be scaled up without negotiating real estate. Because the process occurs so deeply, the salter brine is spread by the ocean quickly without harming aquatic plants or animals. And at that depth, the ocean is cleaner-free from the microorganisms, fish poup and other debris that can quickly upset an inverted osmosis membrane. There is no fundamental scientific breakthrough that enables these systems, says the CEOs of all three companies, just the greater availability, lower prices and raising the functionality of deep-sea robots, underwater power cables and other technologies. From pilot plants to real customers despite the promise of technology, these three companies have so far built only modest facilities to prove their value to potential customers. The transactions they are all looking for are multi -cade contracts with governments. Although they do not come easily, it is the kind of customers needed to turn these technical demos into real businesses. Both Flocean and waterysis placed their pilot plants on the seabed just abroad of Norway, not far from all the North Sea drilling that produces energy for the region. Flocean already produces ultrapure water for a local company that makes a high cocktail ice. Oceanwell has its demo facility at a reservoir in the burden of Genes Municipal Water District in California, not far in the interior of Malibu. The first Clocean customer is a major foreign industrial facility in Norway named Mongstad, which is expected to initially produce about 264,000 liters of water per day from a single unit of 40 tons. CEO Alex Fuglesang is expected to come online in the second half of 2026. Waterysis has announced an agreement with an industrial customer, Jordan Phosphates Mines, to provide 6.6 million liters of water per day that is desalinated deep in the Gulf of Aqaba. The company plans to start the first plant with the first plant later this year with the first plant that can produce between 7.9 million and 13 million liters per day. That’s at least the purpose. Until some of these work at the bottom of the ocean, for years, if not decades, it will be difficult to know if they can earn their promises, says UCLA’s angle. It is unclear how much maintenance they need, and how fluctuations in salinity and temperature can affect their performance. History is full of ideas that worked in principle, from nuclear-powered cargo ships to solar power generators in the deep desert. Pankratz, the saltiest veterans in the industry, thinks at least one of these companies will be able to go into the depth in stores. “How close it is, and how many of these things are in the end, is another question,” he says. Write to Christopher MIMS on [email protected] Catch all the technological news and updates on live currency. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates and live business news. More Topics #News Read Next Story