“More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by ‘atmospheric water harvesters.’ The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical.

Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls ‘an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.’ …

In 2023 [University of California, Berkeley chemist Omar Yaghi] and his colleagues reported an aluminum-based MOF that was cheap to make in bulk and that could wring water from desert air. In preliminary, unpublished tests, Yaghi says, prototype devices using a tweaked version of his team’s MOF can produce 200 liters of water per kilogram per day with only small amounts of added heat.

Yaghi has licensed the technology to Atoco, which is exploring using it to generate water to cool data centers, harnessing their waste heat to speed the cycling. Atoco plans to open pilot scale facilities in Texas and Arizona next year to test scaled-up versions.”

From Science.

“Reporting to the country’s top legislature on Sunday, Li highlighted key achievements under the Yellow River Protection Law, which took effect on April 1, 2023, following its adoption in October 2022.

For the second consecutive year, the quality of the Yellow River’s main course has met Grade II standards, the vice-chairman said. China uses a five-tier quality system for surface water, with Grade I being the highest.

Li also pointed to a significant increase in vegetation coverage in the basin, with 84.9 percent of the area showing positive trends. Over the past two decades, the basin’s ‘green line’ has shifted westward by about 300 kilometers.

In 2023, nine provincial-level regions along the Yellow River completed afforestation efforts covering 1.7 million hectares. Additionally, around 16,000 square kilometers of areas affected by water loss and soil erosion were treated.

Progress has also been made in pollution control, water conservation and energy transition. For example, in a campaign to address violations involving solid waste, nearly 118 million metric tons of trash were cleared from 4,084 locations.

Li noted that water consumption per unit of GDP and unit of industrial value added in the nine provincial regions of the basin decreased by 22.8 percent and 40.9 percent, respectively, from 2018 to 2023.”

From China Daily.

“Equatic’s process works like this: first, it pumps sea water into an electrolyser, a machine that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which in Equatic’s case is run on clean electricity such as wind, solar or hydro. This converts the seawater to hydrogen gas, oxygen gas, an acid stream and an alkaline slurry of calcium and magnesium-based materials. The alkaline slurry is exposed to air, pulling out CO2 and trapping it, then discharged into the sea. A last step is to neutralise the acid waste stream using rocks (in order to avoid ocean acidification) before this is discharged into the sea too.

The CO2 captured by Equatic ends up in the ocean as dissolved bicarbonate ions and solid mineral carbonates, forms in which the CO2 is immobilised for 10,000 years and billions of years respectively, the company says. ‘In electrochemical methods that convert CO2 into a stable carbon like solid carbonates, the CO2 is locked away permanently,’ agrees Chen. ‘Unless that carbonate is heated to a high temperature of around 900C (1,200K), that CO2 will not be re-released.'”

From BBC.

“Algeria plans to spend $5.4 billion boosting what are already Africa’s largest desalination facilities, as climate change piles pressure on the OPEC member’s water supplies.

Five new plants due to start operating this year will hike the amount of drinking water the nation will have the capacity to produce from the Mediterranean to 3.7 million cubic meters per day from 2.2 million, according to Lotfi Zennadi, chief executive officer of state-owned Algerian Energy Co. Six more installations are planned by 2030, he said.”

From Bloomberg.