{"id":512659,"date":"2026-07-06T16:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T16:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/512659\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T16:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T16:44:13","slug":"a-nobel-winning-chemist-is-trying-to-pull-drinking-water-from-desert-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/512659\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nobel Winning Chemist Is Trying to Pull Drinking Water from Desert Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Omar Yaghi at the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 29\/06\/2026, Lindau, Germany<\/p>\n

Omar Yaghi has spent much of his life thinking about empty space.<\/p>\n

The Jordanian-born chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. These are crystalline materials built from metal-containing nodes and organic linkers. But their real magic lies in what they leave out: microscopic pores, arranged with atomic precision.<\/p>\n

Those pores can be tuned to trap gases, capture carbon dioxide, separate chemicals, or even pull drinking water from the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one gram of this material, which is no larger than a sugar cube, you encompass almost the space of an entire football field,\u201d Yaghi told the audience<\/a> at the 2026 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting<\/a>. \u201cThink about it. It\u2019s like taking a football field and keep folding it on itself until it\u2019s the size of a sugar cube.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strictly speaking, he was talking about surface area. MOFs can pack an extraordinary amount of internal surface into a tiny crystal. And by changing the walls of those pores, chemists can decide what gets trapped inside.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will show you how molecules can lead to hope,\u201d he said at the start of the lecture.<\/p>\n

The Water is Coming<\/p>\n

More than 2.1 billion people still lack safe drinking water<\/a>, according to WHO and UNICEF estimates, and it\u2019s not just in desert areas. The problem appears wherever pipes break, rivers get polluted, storms knock out infrastructure, or water simply lies too far from the people who need it.<\/p>\n

For Yaghi, the problem is personal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe water is coming,\u201d he remembered hearing as a child in Jordan, where water arrived from the government only once every week or two, he said in his Nobel banquet speech. Decades later, while studying how a porous material absorbed and released water, he saw something that reminded him of that childhood scarcity.<\/p>\n

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The material was a MOF.<\/p>\n

MOFs look less like solid blocks and more like molecular scaffolds. They are mostly empty space, and that emptiness is exactly what makes them useful. Yaghi calls the broader design strategy reticular chemistry. At Lindau, he described it more simply as \u201cLego chemistry\u201d, linking molecular building blocks into structures nature never supplied.<\/p>\n

Some of those structures can hold gases. Others can attract water.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw how this MOF could pull water from desert air and turn it into clean drinking water,\u201d he told<\/a> the audience in Lindau.<\/p>\n

A Crystal Collector<\/p>\n

\"Researcher<\/a>Omar Yaghi testing a prototype in California\u2019s Death Valley. Photograph: Atoco<\/p>\n

The trick is that MOFs do not collect water like a sponge soaking up a spill. They adsorb it. Water molecules cling to the huge internal surfaces of the crystal. In a good water-harvesting MOF, the first water molecules attach to strong binding sites inside the pores. More molecules then gather around them, forming clusters, chains, and eventually a network of water inside the crystal.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a grid folding on itself, where a molecule of water will experience attraction from the hydrophilic centers and repulsion from the hydrophobic centers,\u201d Yaghi said. \u201cThis whole push allows you to control how tightly water is bound.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists at Berkeley tracked<\/a> that step-by-step process, finding that the first water molecules attach to the strongest adsorption sites, followed by isolated clusters, then chains of clusters, and finally a water network. That molecular map helped researchers change the linkers in the framework so that the material could release water more efficiently. This was back in 2022. Now, Yaghi says, the product is ready to hit the market.<\/p>\n

How To Run a Water Harvester<\/p>\n

A water harvester built around MOFs runs on a daily rhythm. <\/p>\n

At night, when the air cools and relative humidity rises, the device opens its MOF cartridge to the atmosphere. Water molecules enter the pores and stick. During the day, sunlight warms the material. The water leaves as vapor, moves to a condenser, and becomes liquid water.<\/p>\n

The potential is great, the Nobel Laureate emphasizes. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of water in the air,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have more water in the air than in our rivers on our planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first major<\/a> proof of concept came in 2017, when researchers at MIT and Berkeley<\/a> reported a solar-powered device using MOF-801. The prototype captured water at relative humidity as low as 20 percent and produced 2.8 liters of water per kilogram of MOF per day, with no added energy beyond sunlight.<\/p>\n

The technology has since moved through several generations<\/a>. MOF-303, an aluminum-based framework, became one of the key water-harvesting materials. In 2023, Yaghi and colleagues reported a passive MOF-303 harvester tested in Berkeley and Death Valley. The device produced 285 grams of water per kilogram of MOF-303 per day in Berkeley and 210 grams per kilogram of material per day in Death Valley, using no power or energy input except ambient sunlight.<\/p>\n

From Concept to Company<\/p>\n

The Death Valley test was especially promising, because the environment is extremely challenging. Yaghi and colleagues reported that the device collected water under temperatures swinging from 21.9 to 60.7 degrees Celsius, while relative humidity ranged from 9.4% to 36%<\/a>. They wrote that no other water harvesting system had been reported to operate under those extreme conditions without energy input other than sunlight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis material takes up water at 10% relative to humidity,\u201d he said. \u201cNo other material can do that and release it at 45 degrees Celsius.\u201d Yaghi credits a student, Nikita Hanikel, with discovering key processes for this technology.<\/p>\n

Yaghi has now founded a company, Atoco, to commercialize the technology. The company says its atmospheric water harvesters use reticular materials to collect clean water from air, including in low-humidity regions where conventional water infrastructure is unavailable or unreliable.<\/p>\n

The smaller units can extract 150 liters of water per day. The company has also promoted larger units, comparable in size to a 20-foot shipping container, that Yaghi says could generate up to 1,000 liters of clean water per day using ultra-low-grade thermal energy. <\/p>\n

A Clean Water Future<\/p>\n

Yaghi emphasized that the water that comes out from these machines is \u201cthe most ultra pure water\u201d you can find, because the MOF itself acts like a filter. To prove his point, he showed a video of his colleagues drinking the resulting water. He also emphasized MOFs are by no means delicate materials you can only use in a lab, and mentioned that they managed to overcome many engineering challenges to get them to operate in rugged, realistic scenarios.<\/p>\n

This could lead to a future where, if the economics work out, communities could have a reliable way to generate substantial quantities of water.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith these independent devices that don\u2019t use electricity,\u201d he said, \u201cwe\u2019re looking at perhaps creating water independence for the world when these are fully commercialized and fully deployed, everyone will have a device where they can control their own water and its location.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that if is doing a lot of work.<\/p>\n

The Challenge of Scale<\/p>\n

The best peer-reviewed field data from Yaghi\u2019s group are from a 2023 Nature Water paper<\/a>, which reports the Death Valley humidity data. It\u2019s perfectly plausible that they expanded the capability since, but the results haven\u2019t yet been demonstrated in a scientific journal.<\/p>\n

Also, a passive field prototype and a commercial device are two very different things, conceptually. Larger systems could become more efficient, as they can move more air, cycle faster, use better heat management, pack more material and use waste heat or other energy sources. But they come with their own economic and physical challenges.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the question of money and engineering. MOFs must be made cheaply, consistently and cleanly. They must survive thousands of wetting and drying cycles, dust, heat, contaminants and handling. Again, a small kilogram-sized machine and an industrial-sized one are not the same.<\/p>\n

But Yaghi\u2019s most striking promise was that of water independence. \u201cWith these independent devices that don\u2019t use electricity,\u201d he said, \u201cwe\u2019re looking at perhaps creating water independence for the world when these are fully commercialized and fully deployed, everyone will have a device where they can control their own water and its location.\u201d<\/p>\n

The skeptical question is no longer whether MOFs can harvest water from dry air; we know they can. The question is whether they can do it cheaply, durably, and at a scale large enough to matter for people who still wait for water to arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Omar Yaghi at the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 29\/06\/2026, Lindau, Germany Omar Yaghi has spent much of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[171610,254994,254995,23436,134,2293,97794,254996,111,139,69,254997,254998],"class_list":["post-512659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-atmospheric-water-harvesting","tag-atoco","tag-clean-drinking-water","tag-drought","tag-health","tag-materials-science","tag-metal-organic-frameworks","tag-mofs","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-omar-yaghi","tag-reticular-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}