With the demand for water increasing every year, a lot of people don’t have access to clean and safe drinking water. At our estimate, over one billion people have this issue.
Easy access to water is one of the most basic rights we should have. The lack of accessibility to this need moved experts to find alternative sources of water. While the option of obtaining seawater is there, the costs of removing the salt from them are expensive and energy-intensive. It will require specially-made desalination plants for people to constantly access drinkable seawater.
A recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports has proposed a potential water source: the air above our oceans. This is because oceanic water vapor is usually there as long as the sun shines above the oceans. University of Illinois’ civil and environmental engineering professor Praveen Kumar and his colleagues proposed capturing the moisture via towering structures offshore. Once these buildings have successfully obtained the vapor, it will then be sent onshore where it can be condensed to become freshwater.
As a proof of concept, the researchers analyzed the amount of oceanic water vapor available at 14 different locations around the globe from the year 1990 to 2019. Their calculations showed that their proposed towering structures could extract enough to meet the daily needs of around 500,000 people.
Image credit: Kumar et.al via Scientific Reports
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