Innovative New Device Uses the Air to Create Drinking Water for 100 People a Day

Clean drinking water is one of the world's most vital resources. Humans can only survive a few days without water (compared to more than a month without food), and yet more than a billion people around the world live with water scarcity, either due to a lack of natural resources or poor water management. And climate change will likely only make the problem worse in the coming years. New technology, however, promises to cheaply create potable water from just air, Fast Company reports.

Two water-centric tech organizations, The Skysource and Skywater Alliance, teamed up to develop a shipping-container-enclosed device that can turn water vapor (i.e., humidity) into drinking water at a significantly cheaper rate than other, similar technology or techniques like desalination. The group's technique recently won the $1.50 million Water Abundance XPRIZE, a two-year competition devoted to coming up with energy-efficient ways to harvest fresh water from the air.

The competition required teams to create a device that could extract at least 2000 liters (528 gallons) a day from the atmosphere using renewable energy, at a cost of no more than 2 cents per liter. That would be enough to provide for about 100 people for $40 a day or less. In response to the challenge, the Skysource/Skywater Alliance team created WEDEW, or "wood-to-energy deployed water."

The system uses technology Skywater had already developed to pull water from the air. The Skywater machine essentially creates a man-made cloud inside it. It pulls in warm air from outside that, when it hits the refrigerated cold air inside the device, turns into condensation. That water can then be stored in connected tanks. The pre-existing technology required a lot of electricity, though, meaning it wasn't cheap.

The prize-winning version is powered by biogas, making it easy to operate almost anywhere. The biofuel gassifier creates renewable energy cheaply from cast-offs like wood chips, coconut shells, and dead plants, vaporizing the material to generate power. The system also generates a lot of heat, which is good for pulling water out of the air—think of how humid it is in the summer versus the winter. In the process of generating energy, the biogassifier also creates biochar, a type of charcoal that can improve soil fertility.

In places where biogas isn't a feasible option (like if there is no available wood or other fuel sources), the device could also be run on solar power or batteries.