Water Made From Air Can Help People In Poor Regions Or Hit By Disasters

David Hertz works in Studio of Environmental Architecture, a company near Venice Beach specializing in making green building. After learning that water can be made from thin air under certain conditions, Hertz put a small contraption on his office’s roof and started making free water bottles for anyone in need. Soon enough, he and his wife – Laura Doss-Hertz, thought bigger, which led them to the $1.5 million XPrize for Water Abundance.

The couple developed a system using wood chips, shipping containers and other waste materials to generate up to 2,000 water liters a day, costing only 2 cents for 1 liter.

The XPrize is a competition that honors daring futuristic ideas, aiming at preserving and improving the Earth. It was created by a group of businesses, philanthropists and others, who have awarded $140 million in total.

In 2004, $10 million XPrize prize was awarded to Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, and Burt Rutan, aviation pioneer for SpaceShipOne, the first private manned space flight.

A few years ago, when Hertz knew about the prize and what it honors, he decided to go for it.

At that time, he was making about 568 liters of water and gave most of it to the homeless who lived in an alley behind his firm.

Hertz, along with his wife work with Richard Groden, assembled The Skysource/Skywater Alliance.

They decided to create a little rainstorm inside the shipping containers by bringing the wood chips to a certain temperature and humidity where the water is drawn from the wood and the air.

Hertz pointed out one great thing about shipping containers is that more are imported than exported, hence a surplus. And the containers are cheap as well as moved easily.

Moreover, in case you don’t have wood chips for heating, you can use any other kind of natural waste, including grass clippings, rice, coconut husks and walnut shells.

Matthew Stuber, an expert on water systems and a panel’s judge, said that this is such a simple technology to implement in certain areas where there are a lot of biomass.

He considers the system a “really cool” combination of simple technologies in delivering waters to regions that are attacked by natural disasters or rural areas suffering from water shortage.

Hertz and his wife are thinking about how to make those words come true.

Among 98 teams from 27 countries, including bigger teams with better funded, the couple had to mortgage their own house to stay in the competition. They made it to the final round of five.

Hertz said that he and his wife would spend all the money awarded on developing and deploying these water-making machine to bring water to those in need.