Specially designed materials called metal-organic frameworks can pull water from the air like a sponge\u2014and then give it back.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But at 10 years old, Yaghi learned of a different occupation. Hoping to avoid a rambunctious crowd at recess, he found the library doors in his school unbolted and sneaked in. Thumbing through a chemistry textbook, he saw an image he didn\u2019t understand: little balls connected by sticks in fascinating shapes. Molecules. The building blocks of everything.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know what they were, but it captivated my attention,\u201d Yaghi says. \u201cI kept trying to figure out what they might be.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s how he discovered chemistry\u2014or maybe how chemistry discovered him. After coming to the United States and, eventually, a postdoctoral program at Harvard University, Yaghi devoted his career to finding ways to make entirely new and fascinating shapes for those little sticks and balls. In October 2025, he was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-\u00adorganic frameworks, or MOFs<\/a>\u2014metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air.<\/p>\n When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide\u2014or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi\u2019s team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge\u2014and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. Just one gram of a water-absorbing MOF has an internal surface area of roughly 7,000 square meters.<\/p>\n Yaghi wasn\u2019t the first to try to pull potable water from the atmosphere. But his method could do it at lower levels of humidity than rivals\u2014potentially shaking up a tiny, nascent industry that could be critical to humanity in the thirsty decades to come. Now the company he founded, called Atoco, is racing to demonstrate a pair of machines that Yaghi believes could produce clean, fresh, drinkable water virtually anywhere on Earth, without even hooking up to an energy supply.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the goal Yaghi has been working toward for more than a decade now, with the rigid determination that he learned while doing chores in his father\u2019s butcher shop.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was in that shop where I learned how to perfect things, how to have a work ethic,\u201d he says. \u201cI learned that a job is not done until it is well done. Don\u2019t start a job unless you can finish it.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of Earth is covered in water, but just 3% of it is fresh, with no salt\u2014the kind of water all terrestrial living things need. Today, desalination plants that take the salt out of seawater provide the bulk of potable water in technologically advanced desert nations like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but at a high cost. Desalination facilities<\/a> either heat water to distill out the drinkable stuff or filter it with membranes the salt doesn\u2019t pass through; both methods require a lot of energy and leave behind concentrated brine. Typically desal pumps send that brine back into the ocean, with devastating ecological effects.<\/p>\n I was talking to Atoco executives about carbon dioxide capture earlier this year when they mentioned the possibility of harvesting water from the atmosphere. Of course my mind immediately jumped to Star Wars, and Luke Skywalker working on his family\u2019s moisture farm, using \u201cvaporators\u201d to pull water from the atmosphere of the arid planet Tatooine. (Other sci-fi fans\u2019 minds might go to Dune, and the water-gathering technology of the Fremen.) Could this possibly be real?<\/p>\n It turns out people have been doing it for millennia. Archaeological evidence<\/a> of water harvesting from fog dates back<\/a> as far as 5000 BCE. The ancient Greeks harvested dew<\/a>, and 500 years ago so did the Inca, using mesh nets and buckets under trees.<\/p>\n Today, harvesting water from the air is a business already worth billions of dollars, say industry analysts<\/a>\u2014and it\u2019s on track to be worth billions more in the next five years. In part that\u2019s because typical sources of fresh water are in crisis. Less snowfall in mountains during hotter winters means less meltwater in the spring, which means less water downstream. Droughts regularly break records. Rising seas seep into underground aquifers, already drained by farming and sprawling cities. Aging septic tanks leach bacteria<\/a> into water, and cancer-causing \u201cforever chemicals\u201d are creating what the US Government Accountability Office last year said<\/a> \u201cmay be the biggest water problem since lead.\u201d That doesn\u2019t even get to the emerging catastrophe from microplastics.<\/p>\n So lots of places are turning to atmospheric water harvesting. Watergen, an Israel-based company working on the tech, initially planned on deploying in the arid, poorer parts of the world. Instead, buyers in Europe and the United States have approached the company as a way to ensure a clean supply of water. And one of Watergen\u2019s biggest markets is the wealthy United Arab Emirates. \u201cWhen you say \u2018water crisis,\u2019 it\u2019s not just the lack of water\u2014it\u2019s access to good-quality water,\u201d says Anna Chernyavsky, Watergen\u2019s vice president of marketing.<\/p>\n In other words, the technology \u201chas evolved from lab prototypes to robust, field-deployable systems,\u201d says Guihua Yu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. \u201cThere is still room to improve productivity and energy efficiency in the whole-system level, but so much progress has been steady and encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n MOFs are just the latest approach to the idea. The first generation of commercial tech depended on compressors and refrigerant chemicals\u2014large-scale versions of the machine that keeps food cold and fresh in your kitchen. Both use electricity and a clot of pipes and exchangers to make cold by phase-shifting a chemical from gas to liquid and back; refrigerators try to limit condensation, and water generators basically try to enhance it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how Watergen\u2019s tech works: using a compressor and a heat exchanger to wring water from air at humidity levels as low as 20%\u2014Death Valley in the spring. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about deserts,\u201d Chernyavsky says. \u201cBelow 20%, you get nosebleeds.\u201d<\/p>\n That still might not be good enough. \u201cRefrigeration works pretty well when you are above a certain relative humidity,\u201d says Sameer Rao, a mechanical engineer at the University of Utah who researches atmospheric water harvesting. \u201cAs the environment dries out, you go to lower relative humidities, and it becomes harder and harder. In some cases, it\u2019s impossible for refrigeration-based systems to really work.\u201d<\/p>\n So a second wave of technology has found a market. Companies like Source Global use desiccants\u2014substances that absorb moisture from the air, like the silica packets found in vitamin bottles\u2014to pull in moisture and then release it when heated. In theory, the benefit of desiccant-\u00adbased tech is that it could absorb water at lower humidity levels, and it uses less energy on the front end since it isn\u2019t running a condenser system. Source Global claims its off-grid, solar-powered system is deployed in dozens of countries.<\/p>\n But both technologies still require a lot of energy, either to run the heat exchangers or to generate sufficient heat to release water from the desiccants. MOFs, Yaghi hopes, do not. Now Atoco is trying to prove it. Instead of using heat exchangers to bring the air temperature to dew point or desiccants to attract water from the atmosphere, a system can rely on specially designed MOFs to attract water molecules. Atoco\u2019s prototype version uses an MOF that looks like baby powder, stuck to a surface like glass. The pores in the MOF naturally draw in water molecules but remain open, making it theoretically easy to discharge the water with no more heat than what comes from direct sunlight. Atoco\u2019s industrial-scale design uses electricity to speed up the process, but the company is working on a second design that can operate completely off grid, without any energy input.<\/p>\n Yaghi\u2019s Atoco isn\u2019t the only contender seeking to use MOFs for water harvesting. A competitor, AirJoule, has introduced MOF-based atmospheric water generators in Texas and the UAE and is working with researchers at Arizona State University, planning to deploy more units in the coming months. The company started out trying to build more efficient air-\u00adconditioning for electric buses operating on hot, humid city streets. But then founder Matt Jore heard about US government efforts to harvest water from air\u2014and pivoted. The startup\u2019s stock price has been a bit of a roller-\u00adcoaster, but Jore says the sheer size of the market should keep him in business. Take Maricopa County, encompassing Phoenix and its environs\u2014it uses 1.2 billion gallons of water from its shrinking aquifer every day, and another 874 million gallons from surface sources like rivers.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, a couple of billion gallons a day, right?\u201d Jore tells me. \u201cYou know how much influx is in the atmosphere every day? Twenty-five billion gallons.\u201d<\/p>\n My eyebrows go up. \u201cGlobally?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJust the greater Phoenix area gets influx of about 25 billion gallons of water in the air,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you can tap into it, that\u2019s your source. And it\u2019s not going away. It\u2019s all around the world. We view the atmosphere as the world\u2019s free pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n Besides AirJoule\u2019s head start on Atoco, the companies also differ on where they get their MOFs. AirJoule\u2019s system relies on an off-the-shelf version the company buys from the chemical giant BASF; Atoco aims to use Yaghi\u2019s skill with designing the novel material to create bespoke MOFs for different applications and locations.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the fact that we have the inventor of the whole class of materials, and we leverage the stuff that comes out of his lab at Berkeley\u2014everything else equal, we have a good starting point to engineer maybe the best materials in the world,\u201d says Magnus Bach, Atoco\u2019s VP of business development.<\/p>\n Yaghi envisions a two-pronged product line. Industrial-scale water generators that run on electricity would be capable of producing thousands of liters per day on one end, while units that run on passive systems could operate in remote locations without power, just harnessing energy from the sun and ambient temperatures. In theory, these units could someday replace desalination and even entire municipal water supplies. The next round of field tests is scheduled for early 2026, in the Mojave Desert\u2014one of the hottest, driest places on Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s my dream,\u201d Yaghi says. \u201cTo give people water independence, so they\u2019re not reliant on another party for their lives.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Both Yaghi and Watergen\u2019s Chernyavsky say they\u2019re looking at more decentralized versions that could operate outside municipal utility systems. Home appliances, similar to rooftop solar panels and batteries, could allow households to generate their own water off grid.<\/p>\n That could be tricky, though, without economies of scale to bring down prices. \u201cYou have to produce, you have to cool, you have to filter\u2014all in one place,\u201d Chernyavsky says. \u201cSo to make it small is very, very challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n Difficult as that may be, Yaghi\u2019s childhood gave him a particular appreciation for the freedom to go off grid, to liberate the basic necessity of water from the whims of systems that dictate when and how people can access it.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s really my dream,\u201d he says. \u201cTo give people independence, water independence, so that they\u2019re not reliant on another party for their livelihood or lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Toward the end of one of our conversations, I asked Yaghi what he would tell the younger version of himself if he could. \u201cJordan is one of the worst countries in terms of the impact of water stress,\u201d he said. \u201cI would say, \u2018Continue to be diligent and observant. It doesn\u2019t really matter what you\u2019re pursuing, as long as you\u2019re passionate.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n I pressed him for something more specific: \u201cWhat do you think he\u2019d say when you described this technology to him?\u201d<\/p>\n Yaghi smiled: \u201cI think young Omar would think you\u2019re putting him on, that this is all fictitious and you\u2019re trying to take something from him.\u201d This reality, in other words, would be beyond young Omar\u2019s wildest dreams.<\/p>\n Alexander C. Kaufman is a reporter who has covered energy, climate change, pollution, business, and geopolitics for more than a decade.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family\u2019s most vital chores: fetching water. Like most homes in his Palestinian neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, the Yaghis\u2019 had no electricity or running water. At least once every two weeks, the city switched on local taps for a few hours so residents could fill their tanks. Young Omar helped top up the family supply. Decades later, he says he can\u2019t remember once showing up late. The fear of leaving his parents, seven brothers, and two sisters parched kept him punctual. Yaghi proved so dependable that his father put him in charge of monitoring how much the cattle destined for the family butcher shop ate and drank. The best-\u00adquality cuts came from well-fed, hydrated animals\u2014a challenge given that they were raised in arid desert. Specially designed materials called metal-organic frameworks can pull water from the air like a sponge\u2014and then give it back. But at 10 years old, Yaghi learned of a different occupation. Hoping to avoid a rambunctious crowd at recess, he found the library doors in his school unbolted and sneaked in. Thumbing through a chemistry textbook, he saw an image he didn\u2019t understand: little balls connected by sticks in fascinating shapes. Molecules. The building blocks of everything. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what they were, but it captivated my attention,\u201d Yaghi says. \u201cI kept trying to figure out what they might be.\u201d That\u2019s how he discovered chemistry\u2014or maybe how chemistry discovered him. After coming to the United States and, eventually, a postdoctoral program at Harvard University, Yaghi devoted his career to finding ways to make entirely new and fascinating shapes for those little sticks and balls. In October 2025, he was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-\u00adorganic frameworks, or MOFs\u2014metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air. When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide\u2014or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi\u2019s team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge\u2014and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. Just one gram of a water-absorbing MOF has an internal surface area of roughly 7,000 square meters. Yaghi wasn\u2019t the first to try to pull potable water from the atmosphere. But his method could do it at lower levels of humidity than rivals\u2014potentially shaking up a tiny, nascent industry that could be critical to humanity in the thirsty decades to come. Now the company he founded, called Atoco, is racing to demonstrate a pair of machines that Yaghi believes could produce clean, fresh, drinkable water virtually anywhere on Earth, without even hooking up to an energy supply. That\u2019s the goal Yaghi has been working toward for more than a decade now, with the rigid determination that he learned while doing chores in his father\u2019s butcher shop. \u201cIt was in that shop where I learned how to perfect things, how to have a work ethic,\u201d he says. \u201cI learned that a job is not done until it is well done. Don\u2019t start a job unless you can finish it.\u201d Most of Earth is covered in water, but just 3% of it is fresh, with no salt\u2014the kind of water all terrestrial living things need. Today, desalination plants that take the salt out of seawater provide the bulk of potable water in technologically advanced desert nations like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but at a high cost. Desalination facilities either heat water to distill out the drinkable stuff or filter it with membranes the salt doesn\u2019t pass through; both methods require a lot of energy and leave behind concentrated brine. Typically desal pumps send that brine back into the ocean, with devastating ecological effects. Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, uses a model to explain how metalorganic frameworks (MOFs) can trap smaller molecules inside. In October 2025, Yaghi and two other scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying MOFs.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND\/GETTY IMAGES I was talking to Atoco executives about carbon dioxide capture earlier this year when they mentioned the possibility of harvesting water from the atmosphere. Of course my mind immediately jumped to Star Wars, and Luke Skywalker working on his family\u2019s moisture farm, using \u201cvaporators\u201d to pull water from the atmosphere of the arid planet Tatooine. (Other sci-fi fans\u2019 minds might go to Dune, and the water-gathering technology of the Fremen.) Could this possibly be real? It turns out people have been doing it for millennia. Archaeological evidence of water harvesting from fog dates back as far as 5000 BCE. The ancient Greeks harvested dew, and 500 years ago so did the Inca, using mesh nets and buckets under trees. Today, harvesting water from the air is a business already worth billions of dollars, say industry analysts\u2014and it\u2019s on track to be worth billions more in the next five years. In part that\u2019s because typical sources of fresh water are in crisis. Less snowfall in mountains during hotter winters means less meltwater in the spring, which means less water downstream. Droughts regularly break records. Rising seas seep into underground aquifers, already drained by farming and sprawling cities. Aging septic tanks leach bacteria into water, and cancer-causing \u201cforever chemicals\u201d are creating what the US Government Accountability Office last year said \u201cmay be the biggest water problem since lead.\u201d That doesn\u2019t even get to the emerging catastrophe from microplastics. So lots of places are turning to atmospheric water harvesting. Watergen, an Israel-based company<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,5,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-club","category-committee","category-news","category-uncategorized","pmpro-has-access"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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