X, the “moonshot factory” for Google parent company Alphabet, in 2020 began its first tests on a design to harvest drinking water from the atmosphere using solar power.

Now, in a paper published in Nature, the team has calculated the number of people such a device can potentially help around the world.

Study author Jackson Lord notes that larger infrastructure projects such as desalination plants can take years to build. “This (model) can (potentially) leapfrog a lot of that and go directly to the source with a small device that’s solar-powered,” says Lord, who previously worked at X on the project.

“Net-zero water production is possible if such AWG systems are coupled to renewable-energy sources, such as hydrogen or solar power,” says Khalifa University’s Ludovic Dumee, who was not involved in the study. “In that context the footprint of the technologies, which may be decentralized, may become competitive with reverse osmosis. However the kWh requirements are still much higher for AWG than for RO.”

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, senior director of Masdar Institute at Khalifa University. “The 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.”