A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought, could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says.
The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions.
Atoco, a technology company that Yaghi founded, said their units, comparable in size to a 20-foot shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources are interrupted by drought or storm damage.
Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize award in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean, which are prone to drought. He added that it could be a solution for countries needing to get water to marooned communities after hurricanes such as Beryl and Melissa, which left thousands without water.
Any place you can bring a shipping container to can also be served by a water tanker truck capable of delivering 40,000 liters per trip.
If this was something you could fit on an offroad pickup truck, I might see some application in very remote drought stuck regions, but most of the time such regions have people with livelihoods depending on lifestock that also needs water, so 1000 liters a day is never going to cut it for them.