New AltaSea Tenant OceanWell Looks to the Ocean to Solve Fresh Water Scarcity

This summer, OceanWell—an innovative blue technology company that produces fresh water from the ocean—became the newest addition to the AltaSea campus.

Humanity’s water use has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and water scarcity is a year-round problem for one billion people worldwide. As climate change worsens, adequate amounts of fresh water will become increasingly difficult to find. This is because climate change affects the water cycle—in arid areas, rising temperatures lead to increased evaporation and decreased rainfall, exacerbating dryness and extending droughts. 

By 2050, five billion people will be impacted by climate-related water shortages. This means that finding long-term solutions to water scarcity is of paramount importance. Arid nations in the Middle East have long relied on desalination in order to maintain freshwater supplies, but traditional coastal desalination plants are energy intensive and negatively impact coastal ecosystems by discharging highly salty brine. 

With both the water crisis and the environment in mind, OceanWell set out to redesign desalination and avoid these negative impacts. The result is technology that harnesses the pressure of the deep sea to generate fresh water via reverse osmosis. Each of OceanWell’s ‘water pods’ produces up to one million gallons of fresh water a day, and then transfers the water to shore via subsea pipelines. According to OceanWell, a ‘large’ water farm could meet the water needs of an entire city.

Because it uses the hydrostatic pressure of the deep sea to drive the reverse osmosis process, OceanWell says its technology uses 40 percent less energy than coastal desalination plants. The technology also has a built-in mechanism for dispersing extracted salt via deep sea currents. OceanWell claims that this allows the salt to rapidly diffuse back to ‘ambient level’ salinity.

OceanWell has made the AltaSea campus its base as it executes its pilot project—the world’s first water farm. In partnership with Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which provides water to Calabasas and the surrounding communities, OceanWell will anchor 20 to 25 pods to the seabed off the coast of Malibu. The plan is to eventually add enough pods to supply water to 250,000 people.

Several Southern California water utilities are keeping a close eye on this pilot project, with a hope that it will provide a sustainable water solution to the drought-plagued region. Major environmental groups have also taken interest. 

“[OceanWell’s technology] can potentially provide us Californians with a reliable water supply that doesn’t create toxic brine that impacts marine life,” Mark Gold, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of water scarcity said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. 

“If this technology is proven to be viable, scalable and cost-effective, it would greatly enhance our climate resilience.”