The XPRIZE Foundation, a California-based nonprofit that designs and hosts public competitions aimed at fostering technological development, has announced the launch of a five-year global competition that will provide a total of $119 million in funding for new approaches to address water scarcity through sustainable seawater desalination. .
Although desalination technology has been around for more than 100 years, the market has stagnated in terms of cost-cutting innovations, says Lauren Greenlee, executive vice president of the Food + Water + Waste domain at XPRIZE. Only 1% of the world’s clean water comes from desalination, and “of the thousands of plants that exist, 70% are in rich countries,” he says.
Over the next five years, about 50 selected teams will be narrowed down to two finalists that can most efficiently produce 1 million liters of drinking water per day over the course of a year. One finalist will receive about $40 million to expand its desalination technology, and another will receive $8 million to develop new membrane materials. Finalists will also receive funding.
“With global water demand predicted to exceed supply by 40% by 2030, the timeliness of this competition could not be more crucial,” says Greenlee, although he also acknowledges the negative environmental impacts associated with desalination plants, including powerful intakes that harm marine life, highly. saline brine released directly into the environment and the need for significant energy use.
Greenlee says XPRIZE aims to motivate and support teams, ranging from student groups to established companies, to design and scale new technologies that are not only cost-effective, but also meet specific environmental needs in the US and other global areas. .
In addition to meeting freshwater production criteria, judges will favor submissions that reduce impact on marine environments, eliminate harmful chemicals, promote material longevity, and optimize energy intensity and supply , XPRIZE officials say.
Greenlee says it would likely take five years or more for a full-scale desalination project, based on a competition-winning technology, to be up and running. “To see a team, or even multiple teams, heading in that direction would be great,” he adds.
XPRIZE has successfully incubated innovative designs for a range of challenges related to climate, biodiversity, health and more. In 2020, co-finalist Carbon Upcycling created a technology to sequester carbon dioxide in concrete. A decade earlier, a winning company called Elastic patented an oil spill cleanup technology that recovered oil at three times the previous industry best rate.
These successes leave Greenlee hopeful about the impact of the XPRIZE water scarcity competition. “I think about [how] … we only get 1% of our clean water globally from desalination and I hope that, more than 10 years after the award, that number will be beyond double digits.
