Oasys Water Inc., the first company to discover a more energy efficient, low cost method of transforming salt water to potable, fresh water, has found a home in Massachusetts’s Cambridge area.
The breakthrough is especially significant with the world facing a water shortage threat, and the need for new methods of creating drinkable water without the high price and rate of energy consumption.
Considering that only 3 percent of the world’s water comes in a drinkable form, some technology innovators say that methods that can utilize the rest of the 97 percent from the ocean may be the solution.
About three years ago, however, scientists in Europe ruled out the prospects of using ocean water to combat the world’s water shortage problems because of the high amounts of energy and financial means that it required.
But Oasys Water Inc. claims to have developed a desalination method that uses as much as 90 percent less energy to extract salt from ocean water than previous desalination methods, according to Technology Review, an MIT publication.
The process forgoes previous, energy-intensive boiling methods and instead uses the natural osmosis of salt water to separate its salt particles from its fresh H2O.
Salt water is placed on one side of a membrane, while a more concentrated ammonia and carbon dioxide mixture is placed on the other. The more concentrated mixture draws the saltwater toward itself through the membrane, which acts to block out the salt. The result is mixture of H2O, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. This mixture is then heated, at much lower temperatures than boiling requires, evaporating out the carbon dioxide and ammonia. The result is clean, drinkable water.
The heat used to evaporate out the carbon dioxide and ammonia is the waste heat from power plants, which would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere unused.
"The cost will be low enough to make aqueduct and dam projects look expensive in comparison," said Oasys cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Robert McGinnis, who invented the company's core technology, in an interview with Tech Review.
Boston’s Mayor Thomas M. Menino expressed his excitement about having Boston become home to the development of such technological advances during a recent trip to the company.
