Fresh Drinking Water From The Ocean Floor

If a desalination plant is placed in deep ocean water, it can halve energy consumption.

Credit: Flocean

Companies are developing technology that places desalination plants on the seabed to solve water shortages, writes the Wall Street Journal.

The method utilizes the extreme water pressure in deep water instead of consuming large amounts of energy to pump seawater up on land. At depths of at least 400 meters, seawater naturally wants to pass through the desalination membrane, as long as the fresh water on the other side is pumped up to the surface. The result is an energy saving of 30 to 50 percent compared to traditional land-based facilities.

Oslo-based Flocean, already has a pilot facility off Norway that produces ultra-pure water for a local company that manufactures cocktail ice. The company's first major customer will be the Mongstad industrial facility in Norway, which will produce approximately 1 million liters of water per day from a 40-ton unit.

Flocean's facility at Mongstad is expected to come online during the second half of 2026 and will be the world's first large-scale deep-sea desalination plant. The technology is not based on new scientific discoveries but on deep-sea robots and underwater cables (originally developed by the oil industry), plus other technology becoming more available and cheaper.

Dutch Waterise and American OceanWell are also developing systems for deep-sea desalination.

According to the UN, half of all people on Earth experience severe water scarcity at least one month out of a year, so cheaper clean water for those in need would be very good news.