The Climate Community – A glass of ocean water: Quebec firm wins award for desalination expertise

Simply 0.5 per cent of the planet’s freshwater is on the market in lakes and different our bodies of water and specialists are warning {that a} water shortage disaster is at the moment underway. Local weather change is amplifying geopolitical tensions as lands flip to deserts, leading to humanitarian crises amid the tough situations.

Oceans are probably the most plentiful water useful resource however salt water can’t be consumed by people, which leads many specialists to 1 resolution: desalination.

Desalination applied sciences take away the salt from ocean water so it may be used as ingesting water or for irrigation. Oneka Applied sciences, an organization based in Quebec, says that their expertise supplies protected ingesting water with their all-in-one desalination system.

An aerial view of the desalination system. (Oneka Applied sciences)

The corporate is shortly gaining worldwide recognition for his or her applied sciences that purify ocean water solely powered by the movement of ocean waves. The desalination techniques are positioned on buoys which might be anchored 200 metres to 3 kilometres from the shoreline, a distance that was chosen based mostly on wave top and sightline away from the coast.

A ‘pumping’ motion happens when the buoys rise and fall with the waves, which compresses the seawater and squeezes it via a reverse osmosis membrane. This leads to concentrated saltwater being launched again into the ocean and clear ingesting water being despatched to the shoreline via an underwater pipeline that’s related to the buoy.

The smallest desalination system consisting of 5 buoys can produce 50,000 litres per day and bigger techniques of 100 buoys can produce a million litres per day.

There are completely different sizes of desalination techniques that produce numerous volumes of water. (An aerial view of the desalination system. (Oneka Applied sciences)

One level of rivalry with desalination is the priority about hypersaline water being launched again into the ocean.

“Once you take a look at the massive image, there’s loads of freshwater that’s flowing into the ocean, specifically [from] the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland — it is all melting. There’s extra freshwater from ice flowing again within the ocean than there may be [hypersaline water] from desalination. And sadly, it isn’t slowing down,” Dragan Tutic, CEO and founding father of Oneka Applied sciences, mentioned to The Climate Community.

“We did a allowing course of in Florida for a mission on the market and native companies deemed that the impression we’re having [on the environment] was minimal,” Tutic added.

Oneka Applied sciences was based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. (Oneka Applied sciences)

Though ocean water looks like an clearly untapped useful resource for ingesting water, desalination processes might be costly and power intensive. Many desalination applied sciences are nonetheless of their infancy and governments are actively funding analysis and competitions to stimulate progress on this subject.

This 12 months, Oneka Applied sciences received a grand prize and general a complete of $1 million USD through the U.S. Division of Power’s Waves to Water Prize — a contest for modern desalination applied sciences.

A number of the standards that helped Oneka Applied sciences safe the grand prize included: the excessive quantity of freshwater produced, the pace and ease of their gadget meeting, and the pace and ease of their buoy deployment.

Along with testing in Florida and North Carolina, a desalination system was shipped to Chile and an upcoming Canadian mission is within the works. Each the Canadian authorities and the U.S. Division of Protection are at the moment exploring alternatives with Oneka Applied sciences, for numerous makes use of together with emergency and catastrophe reduction.

“We wish to assist these in want, so hopefully this may be put into nice use,” mentioned Tutic.

Thumbnail credit score: Oneka Applied sciences