The World

Low Salt Water with Low Energy Technology

A chemical engineering team from Yale has devised a creative way to remove salt from seawater. This new desalination technology uses little electricity and could provide fresh drinking water at a fraction of the cost of current methods.

Desalination provides fresh drinking water for millions of people a day, but current technology to remove salt from seawater is extremely energy intensive. Now, a team at Yale has developed a low-energy method of desalination that could produce fresh water at half the price of existing methods, and use just one-tenth as much electricity. IEEE Spectrum and the National Science Foundation’s Lisa Raffensperger has our story.