US lab invents a Fremen-tech water harvester

An American lab has developed “Fremen-like” technology that can extract moisture from the air even in a desert.

Like the technology at the heart of Frank Herbert’s book “Dune,” the machine needs no electricity and utilises the power of the sun to condense pure water literally out of thin air that could become a game-changer as increasing numbers of regions around the world face a growing water crisis thanks to rising temperatures.

Herbert’s book has been made into a major science fiction movie where the fictional Fremen people live on the desert planet Arrakis and have developed technology – wind traps – to condense humidity in the air to huge caches of water, with which they intended to transform the planet into a green paradise.

At a laboratory in a Southern California warehouse, scientist Heng Su unveils what is in essence the same technology, reports Bloomberg.

The technology, called metallic organic frameworks (MOFs), has been developed by Irvine-based startup Atoco. It operates by condensing the humidity in the air, potentially providing a sustainable solution to global water scarcity.

“You can harvest water from air anywhere in the world, at any time of the year regardless of the level of humidity, without a carbon footprint,” Omar Yaghi, who founded Atoco in 2021 told Bloomberg, who is a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The small handheld device has stacked white fins similar to an old-fashioned radiator, and uses the heat of the sun to condense water into a beaker. In the lab in Southern California a prototype was shown to steadily increase in weight as it slowly filled with water.

MOF can only produce only a few millilitres of water, but the company hopes to scale up the technology to an industrial size that can produce thousands of litres of ultrapure water daily. A unit capable of producing enough water to serve a house should be as big as a standard air conditioning unit, Yaghi says.

Currently, half of the world's population are suffering from water scarcity, and a quarter are enduring extremely high levels of water stress, according to a 2024 United Nations study. Even in California, the world's fifth-largest economy if it were a country, nearly a million residents lack enough clean drinking water as temperatures there this year broke the all-time record for highest temperature ever recorded on the planet by man. One of the ironies of the Climate Crisis is that it has produced more rainfall, but to counterbalance the torrential downpours and increasingly violent storms other regions are experiencing pronounced droughts.

MOFs, which are nanoscale crystalline structures filled with porous cavities, offer a unique way to harvest water from even the driest air. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that the atmosphere contains 12,900 cubic kilometres of water, equivalent to about 14% of the water found in the world's lakes. Atoco’s MOFs are engineered to attract specific molecules, such as H₂O, making them highly effective at atmospheric water harvesting.

The scientists are working on refining the technology so that it can be scaled up and it is not ready for commercialisation, but Atoco said that it hopes to reach this stage in the not-too-distant future. Currently, for desert countries such as those in the Middle East, the only other source of water is from expensive desalination plants.