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What’s the ETA on EVs?

In July 2022, Bloomberg analysts reported that the U.S. has now reached the “tipping point” for mass adoption of electric vehicles. According to the report, the nation has reached the magic number that signals a period when “technological preferences rapidly flip.” That magic number is just 5 percent — and 5 percent of new car sales in 2022 were electric vehicles.

IMAGE: Shutterstock
The Middle East brings its own challenges to EV adoption

Although consumer interest is high in the region — local company M Glory Holding Group in the UAE opened its electric vehicle manufacturing plant in 2022 with plans to produce 55,000 electric cars annually to meet a rising demand for green mobility — there are still numerous obstacles hindering the widespread adoption of EVs. The limited availability of EV charging stations is one concern, but more pressing is the new demand placed on power grids by at-home charging stations. Traditional power-distribution grids are not designed to handle a significant number of EVs charging in the evenings when their owners return home from work. Utilities providers will need to predict and account for this surge in demand. Read more›››

EV manufacturers also face the challenge of keeping up with demand, not just for EVs themselves but for their constituent parts. Replacement parts are expensive relative to components needed for internal combustion vehicles, especially when supply chains are not fully developed and hampered by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic on logistics around the world. Localized procurement is the answer for the future, but companies and suppliers need time and investment to set up and serve the local market. In a relatively nascent industry, this is not a short-term solution.

Included in those replacement parts are batteries and tires. Saudi Arabia announced a U.S.$6 billion investment in a steel plate mill complex and electric vehicle battery plant in 2022 to take advantage of its geographical location at the crossroads of the producers of the necessary minerals: lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and graphite. But this investment also foresees the need for more batteries in the Middle Eastern EV market than anywhere else. Put simply: The sun and car batteries don’t mix well. Hot weather means higher temperatures under the hood, which accelerates corrosion inside the battery. In an electric vehicle, full of batteries, this is naturally an exponentially larger concern.

Beyond damaging them, heat also drains batteries, meaning less range available for drivers. A 2019 study by the American Automobile Association found the driving range of an EV could reduce by up to 17 percent if the temperature is constantly above 35C — which it is for almost half the year in the Gulf.

Charging the EV only adds to the heat experienced by the battery. Charging in the evening makes it easier on the cooling systems but that puts a strain on the power grids.

It’s all connected!‹‹‹ Read less

Sales for electric vehicles, commonly called EVs, are on track to double every couple of years, says Loren McDonald of EVAdoption. The industry analysis group predicts 40 million EVs on U.S. roads by 2030. In 2020, some 276 million vehicles were registered.

The industry certainly seems to believe in the proliferation of electric vehicles: Vojay Chandler, investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, says EV’s share of global auto sales is likely to grow from about 7 percent today to nearly 90 percent by 2050.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Climate change and its consequences are forcing people to consider their environmental impact. Governments across the globe are developing policies to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increasing energy efficiency wherever possible. Fuel prices are at the mercy of political instability, particularly in Europe, and governments are hesitant to introduce e-fuels.

As Nasir Salari, marketing expert at Bath Spa University, points out, despite the sluggish growth rate of electric cars, the latest report by the International Energy Agency in 2020 illustrates promising figures in major markets. The global electric car stock hit the 10 million mark, a 43 percent increase over 2019. And while China has the largest fleet with 4.5 million, Europe had the largest annual increase to reach 3.2 million. In the United Kingdom, 67,100 passenger electric cars were registered in 2020. This is promising, Salari says, but the adoption curve is still at the early stage.

IMAGE: Abjad

Salari conducted research in the U.K. looking at the factors contributing to the “sluggish growth rate.” He interviewed 336 individuals in the U.K. to assess their willingness to buy an EV. Like most analysts, he predicts a boom in the coming years, particularly with the U.K. government reaffirming its commitment to ban new petrol and diesel cars in 2030. With pressures like these, new cars will be electric, but people currently seem reluctant to dive into the electric future.

Credit: Abjad

“There are various reasons for this,” Salari tells KUST Review. “This has always been the case for new revolutionary products: the first color TV, smartphone, cameras, for example.

There have always been early adopters and then majority adopters and the people open to embracing technology in general will also be more willing to adopt an electric car. The TRI is a good indicator of this.”

Developed in 2000, the TRI (Technology Readiness Index) is a widely used scale in understanding technology adoption behavior and a powerful tool to predict the adoption of incremental and revolutionary technologies.

“Our data shows no difference between men and women in their willingness to purchase an EV or pay a higher price for the product,” Salari says. “However, the overall TRI is higher amongst men than women, and this difference is statistically significant. This shows that overall, men are more willing to embrace new technology and possess new and unique items in general. There was also no significance between age groups for their willingness to purchase, but I was surprised to see a significant difference in how much environmentalism played a part: The 50-plus age group expressed higher levels of green values than the 20-29 group.”

IMAGE: Unsplash
Bringing down charging times

One of the issues with electric vehicles is the charging time. But a team at Khalifa University is working on cutting that time down. Read more›››

On-board EV charging is generally done through two stages, says Vinod Khadkikar, who leads the project funded by Abu Dhabi’s ASPIRE. In the first stage, AC voltage is converted into DC voltage. But this DC voltage is generally higher than the EV battery voltage, so an additional DC-DC converter is needed to charge the battery. Most current commercial on-board chargers use a full-power processing converter at the DC-DC stage, which requires higher voltage and current rating of switches and diodes. This restricts the charging speed. The size, cost and efficiency of any EV charger also largely depends on the device rating and number of power processing stages.

The KU team proposes partial power processing-based topographies at the DC-DC stage that use a fraction of the power.

“Therefore, the DC-DC converter size is reduced and the charger efficiency is high (97-99 percent with hard switching). The semiconductor device rating is reduced significantly, which helps to achieve higher power density (smaller footprint/compact size). This lets the user use the same footprint size to design the charger for higher power,” Khadkikar says.‹‹‹ Read less

Interestingly, Salari found that most consumers were more concerned by the economic impact of their purchase, rather than the environmentalism aspect: They cared more about their investment than how green they were being.

“Electric vehicles are advertised as environmentally friendly and they are! And people know this, but this isn’t necessarily encouraging people to purchase them,” Salari says. “Environmentalism does not have an impact on purchasing an electric car; its functionality is more important.”

Like Salari, experts believe that demand for electric vehicles will increase as they become more affordable. Morgan Stanley predicts that continued performance improvements and reductions in the cost of batteries (which account for about 35 percent of an EV’s total cost) could lower the average EV price to $18,000 by 2025.

Salari says it also depends on consumer incentives: “People aren’t running out to buy electric vehicles because they’re good for the environment. They’re hesitating because they’re expensive but they’re in favor because their running costs are much cheaper. Regular drivers are more open to adopting EVs because of fuel costs, so it all depends on how you market your product. Enviro isn’t doing it: Shift your marketing to the economic benefits.

Prices will be lower in the future — that’s how innovation works. The first time a product launches, it’s not a cheap product, but as it becomes a mainstream offering, it will become more affordable. The market is still in its infancy. To grow it, we need more early adopters and government incentives are one way to drive adoption.

– Nasir Salari, Marketing Expert at Bath Spa University

Tax credits and improved infrastructure are the way forward then. The U.K. is certainly investing in its electric vehicle readiness: Lampposts across London are being fitted with sensors and EV charging points to reduce emissions and cut congestion, and parking is even free in the capital for EV drivers. New-build houses come with electric vehicle charging stations as standard and many are fitted with solar panels to power this.

As charging infrastructure gets more support, subsidies and incentives become more robust, and governments enforce more petrol-banning policies, electric car sales will continue to rise.

“It’s happening,” Salari tells KUST Review. “It may not be where we expected it to be by now, but it’s happening.”

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Ask the experts: What’s the future of hydrocarbons in an increasingly green world?

Behaviors must start changing now

Michael Jefferson

From the supply side there are a few problems facing us as we (or some of us) endeavor to move to “an increasingly green world.” For example, the UK is Europe’s windiest country, yet in the first 11  months of 2021 there were at least 85 days when wind energy failed to provide even 10 percent of the country’s electricity grid load, leaving gas (and sometimes even coal) to come to the rescue.

Things are not helped by the fact that this sector has only just begun to invest in significant volumes of back-up storage, and wind energy producers who look as if they may produce electricity when not required are paid to shut down temporarily.

Michael Jefferson

Michael Jefferson is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School (London campus). Read more›››

Formerly Group Chief Economist, Shell International (1974-1979), and other planning and oil supply and trading posts (1979-1990); deputy secretary general, World Energy Council (1990-1999); lead author, contributing author, IPCC reports; recipient of the IPCC’s certificate for contributing to their award of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2007.

Chairman, Policies Committee, World Renewable Energy Network, 1991-2007; senior editor Energy Policy journal 2013-2019.‹‹‹ Read less

On the demand side there are serious issues arising about how societies will be able to cope as demand for electricity rises concurrently with pressure to reduce reliance on hydrocarbons. The demands of re-charging electric vehicles is but one of these. There is also the rising opposition to plastics. We should all abhor plastic waste. But there are estimated to be up to 9,000 plastics products, all reliant on hydrocarbons (petro-chemicals is perhaps a more relevant term here).

You may gather that I believe we are still only in the early stages of realizing how great the challenges are of seeking to move forward along an increasingly green path.

Hopefully a greater effort will be taken in using solar power, wind towers, learning from traditional architectural layouts to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons. But we all need to be aware of the many basic needs provided for by petro-chemicals, realistic time horizons for moving off petroleum in the transportation sector, and the key contribution which gas will make to the needed energy transition. In many countries, the general population remains concerned about the safety of nuclear power, and perhaps insufficiently aware of the current constraints or challenges to wind and wave power, and modern biomass.

Readers of this may find me unduly pessimistic, so I had better point out that I believe human activities have raised near surface global temperature by just over 1 degree Celsius over the past 140 years, and I fear they could raise it by nearer 3 degrees (rather than 1.5 or 2.0) over the remainder of this century.

I have worked with climate research scientists for over 40 years, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) between 1991 and 2015 in various roles, and believe strongly in the need for sound precautionary policies and investments — as well as behavioral changes — now to counter climate change, even if the start of a new global solar minimum happened to be just round the corner.

 

Hydrocarbons will continue to have a significant role

Mai Bui

Hydrocarbons have provided the majority of the world’s energy needs for centuries. Employed in many areas of society, hydrocarbons have played an important role in the power, industry, transport, commercial and residential sectors, with 84 percent of the global primary energy consumption currently coming from fossil fuels. At a global scale, total anthropogenic CO2 emissions reached 36.4 Gt/year in 2019, which reduced to 34.07 Gt/year in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Subsequently, a growing number of countries and companies have recognized the need to commit to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 (or 2060 as in China’s case).

Mai Bui

Mai Bui is a research associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

Even at a national scale, reaching net-zero will be a major challenge, requiring unprecedented levels of greenhouse gas emissions reduction and removal from the atmosphere. The net-zero transition will employ a portfolio of different technology options, including renewable energy, hydrogen and energy-efficiency improvements.

Carbon-capture and -storage (CCS) technologies will also play an important role in reducing emissions associated with hydrocarbons in the power and industrial sectors, as well as generating low-carbon hydrogen (e.g. from natural gas or biomass) to use for transport or residential heating. CCS can also be used for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, which can be used to offset any residual CO2 emissions that are not captured.

It is highly likely that hydrocarbons will continue to have a significant role for the upcoming decades, particularly in countries and sectors that currently rely on carbon-based fuels. Although 2050 seems far into the future, reducing emissions at a gigaton scale will require major infrastructure changes and large-scale deployment of low-carbon technologies.

Carbon capture and storage could be key to helping tackle global warming. CREDIT: Shutterstock

Furthermore, governments will have an essential role in developing policy that will support and facilitate the transition to net-zero. Although urgent action is needed immediately, it is crucial that the transition to a green-oriented future is affordable and socially equitable.

We need to strike the right balance between cost, energy security, meeting emissions-reduction targets, while also avoiding unintended negative impacts to society and the environment.

 

3 pathways to a net-zero future

Martin Haigh

In the long run, we need to get to net-zero CO2 emissions to stop the world’s temperature rising.

That means that we need to be on a pathway to reduce our use of fossil hydrocarbons. In turn, that boils down to three options:

  • fossil hydrocarbons are not burned but used to make products like plastics (in which case those need to be either recycled or disposed of responsibly);
  • fossil hydrocarbons are burned and the emissions are captured;
  • or fossil hydrocarbons are burned and the emissions are balanced by negative emissions elsewhere.

Then the debates start about how we achieve this. Because of the pervasive use of hydrocarbons across our economies and lives, the implications are profound: justice and equity. Which uses are seen as more legitimate? How much more time should developing countries have to decarbonize? Indeed, should developing countries’ emissions rise for a period in order to continue meeting human-development goals?

  • demand or supply of fossil hydrocarbons? Can you effect change by stifling production of fossil hydrocarbons, or do you need to address demand for any change to be lasting?
  • economics and practicalities. How much change is realistic by 2030? What are the knock-on consequences of changes? Which policies are most effective in driving change?
Martin Haigh

Martin Haigh looks after the long-term energy modelling behind the Shell scenarios.

These are just a few examples, but the “how” touches almost all areas of politics, economics, technology and society. We explored a range of alternatives in our scenarios: Waves, Islands and Sky 1.5, available here. These look at wider drivers of change and the implications for the whole energy system, hydrocarbon and non-hydrocarbon.

In the Sky 1.5 scenario, a stretching and rapid world of change across the energy system, we look at the most practical means of keeping the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. All available options come into play, including negative emissions, and both technological (bioenergy with CCS) and natural (nature-based solutions).

In Waves, stronger demand combines with a widespread desire to drive the energy transition by focusing on elimination of fossil hydrocarbons as the root cause of climate change. In common with Sky 1.5 is strong growth in renewables and hydrogen, but in this scenario, CSS does not play a material role.

Going green means more than just reducing our energy consumption. IMAGE: Shutterstock

The result in Waves is that emissions take longer to peak and fall. In Islands, near-term energy (and hydrocarbon) demand grows more slowly than the other scenarios, as countries focus on trying to stimulate sluggish economies and address local concerns.

The flip side to factors leading to the slower growth in demand is that the pace of transition is slower and similar to historical norms. Here are our outlooks for the future of oil demand and supply.

In the long-term, demand moves away from oil. The timing of the peak of demand for oil is quite different, possibly even this decade (Sky 1.5). But there are very different trends underneath this, both regionally and across sectors. Some uses, notably the “non-energy use” sector (material products like plastics), continue to be robust throughout the century, while it moves away more rapidly in sectors like car travel. Our data set provides the figures behind this graph, together with outlooks for other hydrocarbons (natural gas, coal and bioenergy, the non-fossil hydrocarbon), alongside other energy sources, and then how the uses of these different energy forms evolve.

 

Gulf countries need to take the lead

Adnan Shihab-Eldin

With increasing momentum in favor of switching to global clean-energy sources (net-zero emissions) by around 2050, the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in November adopted a series of decisions embodied in the Glasgow Climate Act (GCA), which aims to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate-change goal of keeping the projected rise in global average temperature below 1.5 degrees C.

Renewable technologies, solar and wind in particular, are at the forefront of the clean-energy mix. Nuclear energy and clean, carbon-neutral fossil-energy fuels could competitively be part of the mix, but their roles and shares are uncertain due to multiple, and sometimes contradictory, views about the optimal path of the transition, its component technologies and who will bear investment costs estimated at about $5 trillion annually by 2030, according to the NZE2050 scenario from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

There remain significant differences among industrial countries over how to proceed with emissions reductions: Some vehemently oppose expanding nuclear energy and clean fossil-energy technologies and some European countries are against including such technologies in the list of clean-energy sources and products eligible for global trade, raising obstacles to plans to export and import fossil-based clean (blue) hydrogen and ammonia.

Adnan Shihab-Eldin

Dr. Adnan Shihab-Eldin is a senior visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and a board member of both the Kearney Energy Transition Institute, Amsterdam, and Gulf Bank of Kuwait.

Those countries, and most environmental activists, are betting that renewable energy could provide most if not all of the clean-energy supply, despite technical and economic obstacles that prevent their share in electrical grids from exceeding, on average, about 30 percent. A number of extreme energy-transition scenarios predict a sharp decline in the contribution of fossil energy to total demand, from the current 80 percent to about 20 percent by 2050 (e.g. IEA’s NZE2050). However, such scenarios are idealistic, costly and difficult to realize.

Among a wide range of other scenarios, OPEC’s latest annual World Oil Outlook report projects oil and gas demand to grow, albeit at a slower pace, until at least 2045, with the share of fossil sources falling to about 70 percent.

Regardless of the degree of optimism or pessimism of these scenarios, the goal and trajectory of all energy-transition pathways are unequivocal: a rapid transition to a clean-energy mix, with a wide range of component technologies. The growing enthusiasm for protecting the environment is sometimes shrouded in an increasingly negative outlook toward fossil sources, irrespective of how clean some can be.

This will no doubt drive an accelerating shift in policies, unless countries with large reserves of fossil sources, combined with low production costs, such as the Gulf states, start immediately making strategic investments to develop CO2 capture, use and storage technologies (CCUS, or CCS), including direct capture of CO2 from air (DAC). The investments are huge but worth it, for they will help to maintain a robust role for fossil-energy sources. Although many CCS projects are being implemented by oil- and gas-producing countries, most of them are still of small capacity and their number is growing slowly due to their high cost.

In line with the GCA call to member states to make more ambitious and concrete pledges to reduce carbon emissions, the Gulf states should embrace an ambitious initiative: pledging to equip all fossil-based power plants with (CCS) systems by 2035. Such an initiative would be welcomed worldwide. Furthermore, it will reduce Gulf countries’ CO2 emissions by approximately 25 percent, or about 1 percent of total global emissions — a significant decrease given the size of their economies is about 1.8 percent of the global economy.

Individual countries have their own views on how to go green in a post-carbon future. CREDIT: Shutterstock

Most importantly, implementing this initiative will significantly reduce the cost of CCS technologies, increase their reliability and global acceptance and ensure a continued robust role for oil and gas well into the second half of this century, while providing clean energy sources (electricity and fuel) to the world’s poor. Recently, the Gulf countries have taken encouraging steps in this direction. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have adopted clear and well-considered energy-transition strategies.

As part of its Vision 2030, the KSA implemented major environmental initiatives and emission-reduction programs such as the “Green Saudi Arabia” and announced its commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2060 and producing 50 percent of its electricity from renewable-energy sources by 2030.

On a similar path, the UAE nearly 15 years ago launched pioneering initiatives and implemented the construction of Masdar Clean Energy City, four nuclear power plants and several large solar power plants with total capacities of more than 2 GW. But more investments and innovations are needed to make CCS and clean fossil fuel an important component of the future global clean-energy mix.

The GCC countries and other low-cost oil producers have the most to gain if they do and the most to lose if they don’t.

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A river runs over it

Think the Amazon River is the largest river on Earth? Technically, you’d be right but the river with twice the amount of water than the Amazon can be found in the sky.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of concentrated water vapor that produce major amounts of rainfall. They exist on a global scale, transporting moisture from the tropics to the higher latitudes.

And they can have a huge effect on the way you live. “Atmospheric rivers are responsible for important impacts throughout the Earth’s middle and polar latitudes, such as flooding, influence on water resources, and melting of polar ice sheets,” explains Kyle Mattingly of the University of Wisconsin.

IMAGE: Unsplash
Like a hurricane
but not

Atmospheric rivers are not big hurricanes. Read more›››

Although they share many features (high winds and lots of rain originating from the tropics), atmospheric rivers are sustained, moving bands of moisture with wide-spread impact. Think a jet stream, but wet, and closer to the ground.

Hurricanes, on the other hand, are rapidly rotating storm systems that concentrate their water content into precipitation over a much smaller area. Hurricanes take heat from the tropics to the poles, which plays an important role in regulating global climate; atmospheric rivers take moisture out of the tropics and spread it around the world.‹‹‹ Read less

A 1998 paper from Yong Zhu and Reginald Newell, the researchers who coined the term, says on any given day, atmospheric rivers account for over 90 percent of the global north-south water-vapor transport.

There are typically three to five rivers present within a hemisphere at any given time, and any single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Amazon River. For context, that’s about 6,592 cubic kilometers of water every year, or more water than the next seven largest independent rivers combined. It’s just water vapor instead of liquid water.

These rivers in the sky help replenish reservoirs and redistribute water in the Earth system, but they can also be detrimental to the places they deposit water.

Extreme weather events such as severe flooding and high winds are now found to be associated with atmospheric rivers. These elongated tendrils of moisture stretching from the tropics poleward act as conveyor belts, feeding huge amounts of tropical moisture into existing weather systems, intensifying the rainfall. Record-breaking rainfall is often associated with an atmospheric river making landfall.

However, this water content doesn’t just fall out of the sky on a whim. The rivers pass through various atmospheric conditions on their journey, and where conditions are right for precipitation, water is released as rain or snow. Mountainous regions are particularly effective at squeezing moisture out of these sky rivers as wind travels up their sides.

A NEW ANCIENT PHENOMENON

Despite earning a name only in 1998, atmospheric rivers have been meandering through the skies for millions of years — they’re not new. So why are atmospheric rivers making a splash in the current zeitgeist?

Climate change, of course.

Plus, it’s a useful and versatile term, says Mattingly. “The ‘rivers in the sky’ metaphor helps to vividly communicate these scientific ideas to the public. In places such as California, where they have major impact, the concept helps people connect weather they experience personally with processes operating at much larger scales in the climate system.”

Understanding atmospheric rivers is key to improving weather forecasts for better managing water resources and predicting flood risk. However, atmospheric rivers are also influenced by climate change.

Previous work has examined the relationship between weather patterns and atmospheric-river development, but with climate change, these features may become more variable — and therefore harder to predict. This could mean a less reliable source of precipitation for those areas depending on the water redistribution, but could also mean extreme flooding in other places.

To those living in the Middle East, huge amounts of rainfall are pretty rare and would likely be welcomed to recharge oases, water crops and wash away the dust that accumulates in cities. The reality can be much more detrimental than beneficial, unfortunately.

A global phenomenon, atmospheric rivers have far-reaching influences on weather patterns and natural disasters. IMAGES: Unsplash and Pexels

Although a large body of research has shown the impacts of atmospheric rivers on weather-related natural disasters over the western United States and Europe, little is known about their mechanisms and contribution to flooding in the Middle East.

However, a rare atmospheric river was found responsible for the record floods of March 2019 in Iran that damaged one-third of the country’s infrastructure and saw the death of 76 people. This river started its 9,000-kilometer journey in the Atlantic Ocean before making landfall over the Zagros Mountains. It needed special conditions to make this trek across North Africa, including anomalously warm sea-surface temperatures.

What do we know is a symptom of global warming? Rising sea temperatures. The moisture transported by this rare atmospheric river was equivalent to more than 150 times the accumulated flow of the four major rivers in the region: the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Karkheh. Even now, people are still wrestling with the aftermath.

It was a rare atmospheric river for 2019. But like hurricanes, atmospheric rivers are projected to grow longer, wider and wetter in a warming climate. Several recent studies have modelled how atmospheric rivers will change in the coming decades: The planet warms, more water evaporates and a wetter atmosphere makes for stronger storms.

BLOWING HOT AND COLD

Challenging our understanding of atmospheric-river genesis is the increasing activity in the polar regions. Atmospheric rivers developing near the poles transport large amounts of moisture and heat and have been playing a significant role in short-duration but high-volume melt events over the Arctic and Antarctic in recent years.

There are several reasons for this, explains Mattingly. “Research to date has shown that atmospheric rivers can increase ice melt by enhancing the water-vapor greenhouse effect, releasing condensational latent heat into the air over the ice, forming bands of cloud that reflect heat back to the surface, and providing more water to the cyclones ahead of which they develop. In addition, atmospheric rivers are closely related to the atmospheric fronts over the Southern Ocean, which, in turn, reinforce subantarctic cyclone dynamics.”

The number and intensity of cyclones around Antarctica over the past few decades have increased as the storm tracks shift toward the pole under enhanced greenhouse-gas concentrations.

In the largest calving event from the Amery Ice Shelf since 1963, an iceberg 1,636 square kilometers with an estimated weight of 315 billion tons broke away from its glacier in September 2019.

Melting polar ice is concerning enough, but global warming and atmospheric changes could lead to more such calving events.

Atmospheric rivers can increase ice melt by enhancing the water-vapor greenhouse effect.

– Kyle Mattingly, University of Wisconsin

Cyclogenesis, the formation of cyclones, is a major factor in this, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers in the region will only exacerbate the problem. It’s not just calving events we need to be worried about.

Despite their distance, the sand dunes of the Sahara and the ice caps of the Antarctic are linked by global atmospheric phenomena. CREDIT: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

“Our analysis of the polynya event in September 2017, where a body of unfrozen ocean appeared within a thick body of ice during Antarctica’s winter, shows that the atmospheric rivers that initiated this were the most intense on record,” Mattingly says. “Surprisingly, these atmospheric rivers resulted in the highest amount of snowfall on record over the study area, but because of the warm temperatures, it was this warm snow that enhanced the ice melt and inhibited refreezing.”

It may be rare now, but under a warmer climate, atmospheric-river activity is expected to intensify considerably: a scary thought when we now know it can melt the sea ice in the middle of the Antarctic winter.

It’s not all bad, though. Within the sea-ice zones of both hemispheres these polynyas act as oases, enabling marine mammals such as walruses, narwhals and belugas to overwinter.

Some polynyas, such as the North Water Polynya between Canada and Greenland, occur at the same time and place each year. Animals can adapt their life strategies to this regularity, with polynyas in McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic providing a vital winter feeding place for the Cape Royds penguin colony.

IMAGE: Unsplash
A bad year for oysters

Aside from crazy weather, atmospheric rivers can have unexpected secondary consequences. Read more›››

In 2011, there was a massive wild Olympia oyster die-off in Northern California. These oysters were sensitive to the low salinity levels caused by excess freshwater dropped into the ocean from the sky by the 20 atmospheric rivers that passed through the region between October 2010 and September 2011.

It is yet to be seen what other marine life may be affected by an increased frequency in atmospheric rivers. ‹‹‹ Read less

The problem arises in the intensification of the atmospheric rivers affecting a larger area than that of the natural polynya, which may prevent sea-ice growth around the polynya and contribute to keeping it open even after the river moves on.

Jonathon Wille, postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes, is also investigating the impacts of atmospheric rivers on Antarctica.

“The Antarctic continent, like many deserts in the world, receives a large percentage of its yearly precipitation from just a few intense events,” Wille explains. “They may be rarer here, but they still have a major influence on the surface-mass balance of the ice sheet and are responsible for 10 to 20 percent of the total snowfall across East Antarctica.

“This may seem a modest percentage, but this contribution to the snowfall budget has been driving parts of the positive annual snowfall trends in some areas and the negative trends in others. Atmospheric rivers also control the year-to-year variability of precipitation across most of the ice sheet.”

Given this link, increased future atmospheric river activity would result in higher snowfall accumulation on the Antarctic continent. Combine this with Mattingly’s results showing it was snow that melted the sea ice, and we have a problem.

CLOSER TO HOME

If Antarctica feels too far flung to worry about, you can always turn your attention to the European Alps.

Over the past four decades, there has been a pronounced reduction in the snow depth in the Alps, says Diana Francis, senior research scientist at Khalifa University, and, for once, it’s not a warming planet that is directly to blame. A new atmospheric river route has appeared, originating in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and drifting over the Sahara Desert on its way to Europe, bringing desert dust with it.

“Dust may actually play a bigger role in melting snow than ambient air temperature,” Francis explains. “It’s estimated that a single dust event in March 2018, where Saharan sand blew in over the Caucasus Mountains, may have shortened the snow-cover duration by up to 30 days, with this effect even more pronounced at higher elevations.”

Cryoconite is dust made up of microscopic mineral and organic particles that are carried by the winds and fall on the ice. IMAGE: Shutterstock

The dust magnifies the snowmelt in a number of ways.

Dust may actually play a bigger role in melting snow than ambient air temperature.

– Diana Francis, senior research scientist at Khalifa University

For starters, airborne dust enhances the radiative effects of the water vapor in the atmospheric river, meaning the air can hold higher amounts of moisture, and the dust particles can act as cloud-condensation nuclei, promoting the development of clouds that then rain on the mountain snow.

Then, there’s the dust that is deposited on the snow. Dust on the snow impedes the albedo effect, where the white snow reflects the UV radiation back, reducing the heat and keeping things cool.

Dust-covered snow can’t do this, with the darker surface absorbing a larger fraction of the incoming solar radiation, causing it to melt. Drastically, in fact, as Francis confirms the snow-albedo feedback in response to Saharan dust can lead to the snow melting up to 38 days earlier than normal.

That’s not all.

Mineral dust on snow and ice can provide nutrients to the microalgae that grow there. That might not sound so bad, but when microbes grow in abundance they can cause holes in the ice and snow cover, called cryoconite holes.

Among the 21 countries in the MENA region, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have benefited the most from this phenomenon.

– Mehry Akbary, assistant professor at the University of Tehran

The microalgae tend to concentrate at the bottom of these holes, creating a dark mass, which further reduces the albedo effect. As the snow melts, more of the darker material is exposed on the surface, creating a vicious circle.

The jet streams that zoom over the Earth often bring dust to northern latitudes, but with new atmospheric rivers lending a hand, alpine skiers won’t get much opportunity to enjoy the slopes.

But again, it’s not all bad. In a world without atmospheric rivers, drought would reign supreme. Atmospheric rivers are crucial to rebalancing water distribution around the planet, and while an increase in rain may be devastating, no rain at all would be just as bad. A better understanding of the future of rivers in the sky may also help water-resource managers on the ground.

THE GOOD NEWS

Mehry Akbary, assistant professor at the University of Tehran, thinks her findings on the development of atmospheric rivers in the Middle East and North Africa could be used to compensate for the shortage of water resources in this desert region.

The MENA region lies at the interface of the subtropics and mid-latitudes, and its geographical location means there is significant uncertainty about the magnitude of future changes to precipitation in much of the region.

However, because atmospheric water vapor will increase with increasing temperatures, researchers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Balamand Dubai, University of California and California State University say in their 2020 paper, confidence is high that precipitation extremes will increase in frequency and intensity throughout the MENA region.

Akbary thinks this could be more beneficial than detrimental, though. “As the most arid deserts of the world are located in the MENA region, atmospheric rivers can be counted as good sources of precipitation. Among the 21 countries in the MENA region, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have benefited the most from this phenomenon.”

Atmospheric rivers account for more than 30 percent of the total rainfall across the MENA region, with some areas seeing almost half their precipitation from rivers in the sky. “I believe if water storage systems are suitable, this huge amount of rainfall could be stored for coming droughts,” Akbary says.

Desertification may be kept at bay by the live-giving moisture in atmospheric rivers. CREDIT: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

In models simulating the year 2100, calibrated to represent a high-emissions future, we can see increases in atmospheric-river frequency in the North African coast, Turkey and Iran. This doesn’t mean the rest of the region will dry up: on the contrary, there is an expected increase in precipitation for the Arabian Peninsula.

From the Horn of Africa to the United Arab Emirates, more rain is coming. More water for a parched land can only be welcomed, but locals need to prepare for the accompanying high winds and flooding potential.

Mattingly thinks the largest impact from more frequent atmospheric rivers will be their effects on flooding and water resources. “More intense atmospheric rivers will lead directly to more intense floods in the future, and we are already seeing examples of extreme floods in recent years that were likely exacerbated by the fact a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor.

Although more rainfall might help replenish water resources in some areas, wetter and warmer atmospheric rivers will also present challenges to water managers in the future. For example, in areas such as the western U.S. that are heavily dependent on snow pack for their water resources, atmospheric rivers are expected to bring more rain to the region, rather than snow, which will likely result in depleted snow packs and stressed water resources during the dry summer months.”

In general, water managers are working to be more flexible in their approach to managing resources in the future.

– Kyle Mattingly, University of Wisconsin

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, Mattingly is keen to point out. “I do think that in general, water managers are working to be more flexible in their approach to managing resources in the future. California is, again, a good example, because in the past few years they have had to deal with a few wet seasons against the backdrop of a long-term drought and overall warming that has depleted reservoirs and snow packs. The challenge seems to be to develop approaches that conserve the water delivered quickly during more intense rain events to help ride out drought years.”

Models from around the world agree: Atmospheric rivers will become more frequent and intense as the planet warms. The researchers behind these models also agree: Knowing how atmospheric rivers develop and move – and what they may pick up along the way – is an important step toward accurately predicting them and their associated rainfall.

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Making it rain

Linda Zou is a UAE researcher who uses nanotechnology to develop new materials for cloud seeding, a weather-modification technology that improves the chances a cloud will produce rain. She talked to the KUST Review about her work and the future of cloud-seeding technology.

CREDIT: Khalifa University
Linda Zou

Linda Zou is a professor in the Khalifa University Department of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering and the head of the Nano and Water Laboratory. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

QUESTION: Walk us through the basics of cloud-seeding technology and what should people who aren’t familiar with cloud seeding know.

ANSWER: The sun shines and water vapor rises up from the Earth’s surface, and these tiny water vapors will keep on rising and finally condense to become either rain or snow.

In the presence of small particles as nuclei, water vapor condenses, turning into small liquid droplets. And that droplet will hit another small droplet during the falling process, and then they form a larger droplet. The size grows and grows. When the drops reach the lower part of the atmosphere, they’re too big, too heavy, and they fall as rainfall. And unfortunately the availability of this sort of small seeding nuclei in the atmosphere is unpredictable. It could be naturally occurring particles such as volcano ashes, dust particles or pollens. But when you need it you can’t guarantee you’ll get it.

Cloud seeding is to spread artificial seeding materials by using aircraft, flying over the bottom of suitable clouds and releasing the seeding materials, and an updraft will carry them into the cloud, to start the condensation and turn the water vapor into water droplets artificially. And this is the cloud-seeding process.

Q: How important is it to the world to tap that atmospheric moisture?

A: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) did a survey and reported more than 45 countries are practicing some sort of weather modification. Cloud seeding is one of the major (weather-modification) technologies. This implied the advancement in the cloud-seeding materials could have a wider impact to combat the water-shortage problem globally.

Q: Is cloud seeding used primarily in desert countries or are a broad range of countries practicing it?

A: (Cloud-seeding) is technology-driven; commonly you need aircraft fleets. Countries like the US, South Africa and some European countries are very active, particularly in agricultural protection, as well. (Countries may have) a different purpose: Russia is more interested in hail-suppression. China has dry regions. For many decades, the science behind this water-related process hasn’t had much innovation, UAE is driving innovation through its UAE Rain Enhancement Science Program.

CREDIT: Anas Albounni, KUST Review
AI and nowcasting

Cloud seeding can increase a region’s rainfall, but knowing when the conditions for cloud seeding are optimal can be difficult. Read more›››

Now, researchers who recently won a U.S.$1.5 million grant from the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology think they can help by tapping into artificial intelligence.

Luca Delle Monache, deputy director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in March received the three-year grant of the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science (UAEREP) for the project using a hybrid machine-learning framework for enhanced precipitation nowcasting.

Nowcasting in meteorology is describing the present or predicting the very near-future weather conditions. Khalifa University’s Ernesto Damiani, Linda Zou and Hussam Al Hamadi will gather data and create a prototype artificial intelligence system for data fusion and weather nowcasting for the project.

Alya Al Mazroui, UAEREP director, says the work will continue the organization’s role in advancing rain-enhancement technology, as well as “promoting the UAE’s status as a prominent hub for rain-enhancement research and helping the world tackle the challenges posed by the scarcity of potable water.” ‹‹‹ Read less

Q: That leads into the next question: What are some of the problems and limitations that your work is looking to solve?

A: The kind of seeding material adopted around the world heavily depends on atmospheric relative humidity. That means the seeding material released is only activated or useful at very high relative humidity. So a lot of cases you release (the seeds), and if it isn’t very humid conditions, it’s not useful. So because I’m thinking on the science of the interactions between materials and atmospheric relative humidity, I can see that there’s room to improve.

Q: And your proposal is to change the seeding material?

A: Yes. I proposed three ideas: Each has been investigated and concept is realized. The first is to change the surface of the material to make it more reactive (so it can work) at a lower relative humidity. Instead of 75 percent or higher, now we can use it at 65 percent.

To achieve this, we used nanotechnology to engineer a material that is activated in much broader relative-humidity conditions. Because the structure is so porous, water will melt easily, forming larger droplets, increasing the probability that it will work.

Secondly, a bioinspired hydrophilic/hydrophobic pattern was created on the seeding material to enhance the interaction with water vapor; thirdly, a porous 3D nanocomposite was developed to promote ice nucleation and growth for cloud-seeding in cold clouds.

Q: Old-technology cloud-seeding materials might be harmful to the environment. That’s another problem you’re looking to solve?

A: There are different types of seeding material used. Various salt particles are used for warm clouds; their environmental effect is less of concern. But the one you hear about is mostly silver iodide, which is mostly for cold clouds – for ice- and snow-making. Over longer periods of application, silver iodide may pose some toxic effects. It is not used in my research project, as the design of novel seeding material is to steer away from potential harmful materials.

RELATED: Climate change promises uncharted waters for scientists studying atmospheric rivers

Q: Some of your materials are inspired by natural adaptations in biological organisms. What would you say is the value of looking to nature to solve problems?

A: Nature has evolved over millions of years. Every biological system that thrives today is the positive result of evolution. Modern analytical tools enable scientists to look at the details of biology at the biochemistry level and have more understanding on how they work. This newly gained knowledge helped us to mimic the biological mechanism in designing nanomaterials. Although we’re not able to replicate biological mechanisms, I can be inspired and learn from their principles.

Cloud-seeding materials are spread by airplanes but can also be released by balloons and drones. CREDIT: UAE Program for Rain Enhancement Science
Cloud seeding
and beyond

The United Arab Emirates’ rain-enhancement operations began in the 1990s and were developed in cooperation with such international organizations as the United States’ NASA and National Center for Atmospheric Research. Read more›››

According to the UAE Program for Rain Enhancement Science, the Emirates now have more than 60 networked weather stations, five specialized aircraft used for seeding and an integrated radar network.

Other benefits from cloud-seeding research include increased understanding of cloud microphysics; cloud dynamics and thermodynamics; the physical chain of events that lead to cloud formation and rainfall; and how cloud-condensation nuclei and ice nuclei interact with clouds.

Research impacts include improved cloud-seeding materials and delivery methods and helping meteorologists better nowcast and forecast the weather. ‹‹‹ Read less

Q: What would you say are the biggest challenges to seeding clouds?

A: One of the major problems is all cloud-seeding operations are carried out in the open atmosphere. All the conditions cannot be controlled as in a closed system.

Secondly, all clouds are different at a time and they’re also varied and unpredictable. These make the evaluation of cloud-seeding effects difficult. But we accept this unpredictability. And if the seeding materials become more and more efficient, the probability (of success) is higher for any given cloud conditions.

Q: Some of your work focuses on ice and snow instead of rain. How are these approaches different?

A: It’s different and it’s the same in some regions. Clouds that form at a few thousand meters above us are in sub-zero temperatures. Precipitation at that altitude will be ice. But when ice falls down to the earth, if it falls down in cold regions it will be snow. If it falls down to the warm regions such as UAE it will melt into rain.

So for clouds with sub-zero temperatures, different techniques have to be used. The sub-zero clouds’ conditions are different. The water vapors are oversaturated in some cold clouds, so their relative humidity is like more than 100 percent but they stay as supercooled water vapor. So at this stage if (the supercooled vapor meets) a suitable ice nuclei it will form ice crystals and grow rapidly as an ice explosion, as an avalanche of ice crystals.

So I also investigate to develop this type of ice nuclei. The ice nucleus is often silver iodide. Why? the possible theory behind is that its crystal structure is similar to the ice. So crystal grows on the other crystal due to their crystal framework lattice matching. So it’s very different from the droplets, a different mechanism.

And as we said with the silver iodide there are some problems but there aren’t many alternatives. So I designed an alternative material. This material can also help create artificial snow at ski resorts. It works well in cloud-chamber experiments.

Q: Can you describe that material?

A: The novel cloud-seeding material has a shell/core structure, it has a sodium chloride core, which is covered by a nanometer thickness of titania particles. This structure offers a synergistic effect on condensation at lower relative humidity and forms larger water droplets: Both are important to increase the probability of rainfall.

Q: Is this the sort of technology that would be used to control undesirable weather, like preventing hail?

A: Yes. That’s the case in some European countries, to protect agriculture industry from extreme weather attack, such as hail and frost.

Whether the precipitation falls as rain or snow depends on the air temperature. CREDIT: Shutterstock

Q: What impact would you say cloud-seeding will have on climate change?

A: I think this is a very important question. It is in the broader spectrum of climate-change strategies. If we got more water as rainfall through cloud-seeding, it would be cooling the weather and replenish the ground-water aquifer. There would be less demand for air-conditioning, less demand for desalinization. It has very positive effects.

Q: So what’s the next frontier? What’s the next exciting development?

A: The next frontier will be scaling up the production, making the seeding materials more available. Apart from airplane, the seeding materials can be released by other methods such as balloons, or drones. In addition, it can also migrate into surface-water-harvesting applications, like catching fog.

Q: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you want people to know?

A: The UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science is appreciated because they provide us funding on my research project. I really wish that this will have a ripple effect. We need to transform the novel seeding materials into commercial-scale production and wider application. We have started working on that. I need government and industry support on this direction. If this becomes commercially technology, more countries and regions will benefit.

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Out of thin air

On a desert planet in a galaxy far, far away, the land is hot, dry and devoid of any large bodies of surface water. It is a parched world, desolate in that way only a planet illuminated by a pair of binary stars can be. Fantastical, yes; a pop-culture icon, also yes.

Listen to the Deep Dive

But there are two reasons to start with a description of Tatooine, the desert planet that appears in the Star Wars franchise: The technology seen here has become a reality, and we can test it in the real-world places that inspired the fictional landscape.

We’re talking moisture farming.

The moisture vaporators, also known as vapor spires in the Star Wars lingo, are devices used on Tatooine moisture farms to capture water from the atmosphere. Tall and slender, they were stationed at ground level and used refrigerated condensers to pull water from the air around them. Captured water was then pumped or gravity-directed into a storage cistern. These devices could collect 1.5 liters of water every day, even when the relative humidity of the air was only 1.5 percent. An amazing idea, and now becoming real as new technologies and materials emerge to harvest previously untappable water from the atmosphere.

The basic concept is simple. If you take an ice-cold glass of water outside on a hot day, you’ll quickly notice water droplets forming on the outside of the glass. If you cool warm, humid air, it loses its capacity to maintain its water content and you can produce and collect condensation, whether it’s on the outside of your glass or in a moisture vaporator straight out of science-fiction.

Rather than waiting for the rain, bring the rain to you

When clean drinking water comes out of the tap at home, it’s easy to think that it will always be plentiful, but fresh water is actually incredibly rare. Only 3 percent of the world’s water is potable, and two-thirds of that is stored away, frozen in glaciers, or otherwise unavailable for our use.

IMAGE: AI; KUST Review
Do not eat this packet

Almost everyone has bought something and found a packet of silica gel beads placed inside to absorb moisture while items are waiting to make their way to the customer. Read more›››

Silica is commercially available, inexpensive and a highly effective desiccant.

Silica can also be also used in water production via the conventional condensation approach.

Silica gel is one of the most commonly used materials in moisture harvesting, and Lisa Klein, professor of materials science and engineering at Rutgers University, has investigated using patterns on silica gel to facilitate water-droplet formation.

She conducted a series of experiments to condense water vapor on the hydrophilic pattern of silica gels. Although the pattern was hydrophilic, the gel itself was hydrophobic so the water droplets slide down the surface and collect in a container rather than absorb into the gel. This represents another potential area of investigation for harvesting water from the atmosphere. ‹‹‹ Read less

As a result, more than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water year-round. Global warming may be melting those glaciers, but as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, weather and water patterns will change, combining to make less water available for people around the world. By 2025, predicts the World Wildlife Fund, two-thirds of the world’s population may be facing water shortages.

Technologies such as filtration, desalination and solar purification have been developed to use seawater or wastewater. However, because they depend on terrestrial water sources, these technologies are feasible only in coastal areas. Atmospheric water, however, is present everywhere, and the global water cycle enables a sustainable supply of water to the air, providing a resource equivalent to about 10 percent of all the fresh waterin lakes on Earth.

At 100 percent humidity, the air at 40 degrees Celsius contains about 51 milliliters of water per cubic meter of air. For the same humidity at 10 degrees Celsius, the air contains only 9.3 milliliters. Bring that 40-degree air down to 10 degrees and you should be able to extract that water difference. Scale that up and you could produce an awful lot of water on one of those sticky, hot Arabian Peninsula days.

Technologies already exist to catch fog or collect dew that condenses overnight, but pulling water directly from the air, without consuming lots of electricity, is still under development. Still, Ruzhu Wang, professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says atmospheric water harvesting is accessible everywhere and can be easily co-operated with a renewable energy source for local needs.

The problem, Wang writes in Joule, is that there are few commercial water-harvesting systems available.

But when those systems do become available?

“In general, any viable atmospheric water-harvesting technology must satisfy five primary criteria: It should be efficient, cheap, scalable, wide-band and stable enough to operate for a whole year or at least a monsoon season,” Wang writes.

None of the existing commercial atmospheric-water generators meets all five criteria. Wang says this is mainly due to the energy inefficiency of the process.

So, the ideal moisture harvester has a high water uptake, low-energy demand for water release, fast water capture/release cycling, high cycling stability and a low cost — a tall order but one that could be achieved with advances in material science.

Large-scale moisture farming is science-fiction today. But it may someday bring clean water to desert cities. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

Living in a material world

Atmospheric water harvesting based on moisture harvesters captures vapor from the air via adsorption, where water molecules adhere to the surface of a material through chemical or physical interactions.

Researchers are looking at materials such as hydrogels and zeolites, as well as porous materials similar to this AI-generated image. IMAGE: AI; KUST Review

For chemical adsorption, the surface needs to adsorb water through strong chemical bonding; releasing the water requires a large energy supply.

Physical adsorption needs pores in the surface, where water molecules can pool and collect. Energy is still required to release the water, but at a significantly lower rate than chemical adsorption.

Porous materials capture the water from the atmosphere, but said pores need to be perfect; you can’t just place a sponge in the desert and expect water to collect.

Enter the metal-organic framework (MOF): a network of metal and organic materials that can easily trap water vapor, which is then released using energy captured from the sun.

Water load of options

But MOFs aren’t the only material vying for a slice of the water-harvesting pie: hydrogels and zeolites have also entered the ring.MOFs work great in areas with lower humidity, but they have a finite number of pores. Fill those, and your harvesting device stalls until they can be emptied.

CREDIT: AI; KUST Review
Combining the two: Fog and moisture farming

The United Arab Emirates has all the necessary ingredients for fog as dry desert conditions exist next to the warm seas of the Arabian Gulf, with moist air carried inland by the afternoon sea breeze cooled by the night desert surface. Read more›››

Tendrils of fog snake their way through the dunes in the early morning and could be captured by the fog-farming technologies already available. At the same time, the humidity that plagues the region during the hot months makes atmospheric-water generation viable.

Combining both approaches could reduce dependency on desalination and provide clean water for the many farms found far out in the desert.‹‹‹ Read less

Hydrogels, on the other hand, can expand to hold more water. The soft, pliable and thin material that makes up more than 90 percent of contact lenses prescribed in the United States is a hydrogel: a water-swollen polymeric material that maintains a 3D structure.

The 3D network of hydrophilic polymers can swell in water while maintaining its structure and is tunable, dynamic, biodegradable and, most importantly, capable of encapsulating huge amounts of water.

Let’s just use hydrogels, then. Well, they’re not the best in low-humidity areas — they like it muggy outside.

Although they may not be suited to the deserts of the Middle East, there are plenty of places with high humidity that are also water-stressed. Lima, Peru, is one such place.

Just south of Lima is the village of Bujama. Despite being in an area where air humidity reaches 98 percent, Bujama is almost a desert, and its people live in tough conditions with little access to clean water.

Researchers from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lima installed panels in advertising billboards that trap the humidity and transform it into drinking water for the people on the ground. These panels comprise filters and condensers and produced 96 liters of water a day in 2013.

People here may already have one solution to water scarcity, but that doesn’t mean hydrogels couldn’t also work in Bujama.

Zeolites are often considered “molecular sieves” as they can selectively sort molecules based primarily on a size-exclusive process. They are easy to manufacture and have a large internal surface area full of pores to adsorb the tiny quantities of water held in desert air — another contender for the low-humidity application.

Water is running out and we know that desalination is not the solution. It’s not just drinking water, it’s all the water used in industry, in agriculture.

– Michael Rutman, co-CEO of Watergen

Desert countries especially would benefit from atmospheric water harvesting. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

The zeolite can collect water vapor overnight, and heat from the sun can then be used to extract the water for use. However, compared to MOFs and hydrogels, the water capacity of zeolites is relatively low, and releasing the water requires a high energy consumption that, even when supplied by solar power, make zeolites a less efficient option.

In areas where water scarcity is a problem — and climate change is putting more areas at risk — it’s important to consider different technologies and approaches.

Condensing the problem

The billboard in Bujama is just one example of the condenser approach. Michael Rutman is co-CEO of Watergen, a company creating drinking water from air. Based in Israel, “which has a very similar climate to the UAE,” Watergen uses a system involving food-grade polymer condensers and filters to draw water out of the air around us.

“Adsorption can only generate so much water,” Rutman explains. “It also requires a much larger resource footprint than condensation, and much more energy. Metal-organic frameworks that don’t need quite so much energy input to draw the water out are under development, but the metal part of a MOF should also be a concern.”

Atmospheric water is everywhere. The trick is finding energy- and cost-efficient ways to tap it. IMAGE: AI; KUST Review

Rutman points out that an air conditioning unit does much the same thing as a Watergen condensing system: pull warm air out of the environment and cool it, producing water as a by-product. However, the heat exchanger material in an AC unit is usually made of metal, and that metal leeches into the resulting water.

“That’s why you don’t drink from your AC,” Rutman says, laughing. “An AC unit produces tons of water, but that water is contaminated with heavy metals. The Watergen systems use food-grade polymers in the heat-exchanger technology, so the water produced is immediately potable, but we also add minerals to further improve the quality.”

Watergen didn’t set out to save the world from its water problem; the company started by trying to make dehumidifiers more efficient and less power-hungry.

It was Michael Mirilashvili, an Israeli-Georgian businessman, who declared they were wasting this technology. Now president of Watergen, Mirilashvili realized these highly efficient polymers could be used to solve the world’s biggest problem and spent the past five years pivoting the company to producing water from the air for everyone.

Their system works, too. It works in areas of high humidity, such as Colombia and South Africa, but it also works in the driest of places, like Arizona in the U.S., where the average relative humidity is 38.5 percent.

Rutman says he believes mass use of atmospheric water generation is the future.

RELATED: Solar-powered plants could help achieve global water security 

“Water is running out and we know that desalination is not the solution. It’s not just drinking water, it’s all the water used in industry, in agriculture. It can take 160 liters of water to make a pair of jeans, and 60 liters for a loaf of bread. All this water can be replaced by water produced from the air. I believe we’re less than ten years away from this point. Our pilot technology works, and it’ll work everywhere.”

Perhaps a tabletop box like this will some day supply drinking water for an average home. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

Speaking of everywhere, we should also start thinking about portability.

Conventional water supply starts with a large centralized plant that distributes water to the population, but if a device were small enough to incorporate into a home, gaps in water supply could be plugged.

Make them even smaller and they could travel to all sorts of now-uninhabitable regions: the middle of the desert, the polar extremes, Mars?

Back down to Earth

Understandably, research institutes in the Middle East are particularly invested in this new type of technology. Many of the projects showing promise in the U.S. were funded by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, including projects designed by Omar Yaghi, pioneer in the MOF space, and his teams.

Similar technology is behind an industry-funded project at Masdar City, a hub for sustainability research and innovation in the MENA, with whom Khalifa University does research.

“As freshwater scarcity is becoming a global challenge, a promising route to overcoming water shortage is to extract water from air with innovative atmospheric water production (AWG) technologies,” says Samuel Mao, director of Masdar Institute at Khalifa University. “KU’s research team at Masdar Institute is performing comprehensive assessment of different AWG approaches, and developing advanced technologies to enable water extraction from air with better energy efficiency and lower cost.”

Almost half of all people on Earth live in water-threatened conditions, with demand growing drastically, while supply remains constant, according to the World Health Organization.

The United Nations recognizes that access to clean water and sanitation is at the core of sustainable development, and ensuring access requires innovation. Atmospheric water generation could be the solution, and it’s already here.