OUTER PLANET 54 PETplanet Insider Vol. 24 No. 05/23 www.petpla.net OUTER PLANET Israeli headquartered company Watergen has developed patented technology to extract pure water from fresh air. New machines have recently been deployed in water-stressed areas of India. Water from the air The Earth is 74% covered in water but great areas of land suffer from water stress. Some of these are deserts, like the Sahara Desert in North Africa but some are less obvious and over a billion people worldwide do not have access to secure sources of drinking water. Sometimes rainfalls do not happen as expected, leading to drought conditions. Sometimes the rain falls excessively, leading to floods and attendant damage and loss of life. India has seen a shrinkage in the Himalayan glaciers that feed its great northern rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra. The Godavari, Krishna and other rivers that flow across the Deccan plateau into the Bay of Bengal or into the Arabian Sea are fed by monsoon rains – which do not always arrive. Drought has led to devastating famines although those days are, thankfully, largely in the past. Other years, they are so fierce that estuaries and flood plans are devastated. Most of India’s water abstraction is used for agriculture, with demand expected to rise a further 89 billion cubic metres by 2030, compared with 2005. About 97 per cent of the population experiences severe water shortage for at least one month annually, according to Statista. India is a huge country and it isn’t all covered by piped water. Its economic expansion has led to dramatic and often unplanned urban development, putting further strain on what infrastructure there is. With the increasing incidence of heatwaves and depleted groundwater, an inconvenience is becoming a crisis. In order to address the problem, a company called Watergen, which is headquartered in Petach Tikva, near Tel Aviv, Israel, has partnered with Indian company SMV Jaipuria Group, of New Delhi, to bring Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) technology to India. These are devices that suck in air through a specially-designed condenser, which Watergen has named the GENius. Its patented technology enables air to move quickly into and through the system, for greater efficiency and less energy consumption. Watergen is claimed to be the global leader in the AWG market. Scalable, efficient and low cost The technology is highly scalable. The GEN-M1 machines can serve a single family or village school with 225 litres of pure drinking water a day. The medium-sized GEN-M Pro has production capacity of 900 litres a day. The top of the range GEN-L can supply an industrial facility, schools, entire rural villages, hospitals, mines or construction sites with 6,000 litres a day. They can even be linked together to form a ‘water farm’. The GENius heat exchanger uses condensation to produce fresh water. It is powered by electricity – from any reliable source, including wind or solar. Energy consumption for its smallest models is as little as 0.3 kWh; producing a litre of water costs 7-15 US cents, depending on local electricity costs. It doesn’t need supersaturated air to work; it can produce drinking water from air with humidity as low as 20% and at temperatures from 15 °C up. External storage tanks with attached smart quality systems, including controllers and malfunction alert, keeps condensed water fresh by circulating it round the reservoir and thus provides optimum capacity and a ready supply of safe, clean water. Disasters, emergencies and waste As well as established areas of water distress, where management is an increasingly pressing priority, the fact that Watergen systems do not need a piped supply infrastructure means that it can be deployed in disaster areas, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes or any other even that has disrupted or even destroyed water supplies. As the machines can be located on-site, transportation costs are pretty much eliminated, as is the need for extensive and costly piping networks. It also means that the use of disposable bottles can be minimised. www.watergen.com
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