Link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/21/nobel-laureate-omar-yaghi-invents-machine-that-harvests-water-from-dry-air

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.

the economics dont work out very well, I assume.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Moisture_vaporator

So we gonna die from asphyxiation?

1000 liters per day is very little...

They have a big AI section too, claiming how it shortens R&D from years to weeks... So probably bullshit.

Now see if he can get someone that understands their binary language and also speaks Bocci.

So basically they've used fancy chemistry to make a better dehumidifier. "Dry air" is still around 20% humidity according to their website.

Overall, there's just not a lot of moisture in the air for these types of systems to squeeze out. I'd be interested to see a cost/benefit analysis compared to just delivering water from somewhere else in an emergency.

And it is not clear what exactly is new

There's a long list of technologies that do the same thing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator

So my first thought is... This man made a dehumidifier... And yeah. He did.

Then it says it's powered by ambient thermal energy. Sounds cool.

A sloped tarp and a collection bottle in the early morning can do that.

I mean. I'll give him credit. 1000 liters from something the size of a shipping container isn't an insubstantial amount, but even the lowest tech can manage significant results at the right scale.

Give me some solar panels and a long line of consumer grade dehumidifiers.

Sufficient space was never the issue with extracting moisture from air.

Nope. I havent. Never put any effort into it. But I do know a fluff piece when I see one. My point was, this isn't revolutionary tech. And it's not being rolled out all over the place either. They built it and rolled it out onto a Caribbean island. Is it actually scalable? Is it practical? We don't know. What I see is that it's part of a campaign piece to solicit funding. Fairly obviously too.

This is just building a better mousetrap. Sure, some good can come from it. I hope it does. But I'm not going to prop up every article that doesn't pass the sniff test. Cancer already would have been cured a thousand times over if you were to believe every article promising that "this is the fix we've been waiting for"

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.

I just thought that this was interesting. I'm not so hyped about it like the author of the article.