Around 2.2 billion people on Earth currently lack access to safely managed drinking water. For many of them, the problem is not that water doesn't exist nearby — it is that the infrastructure to reach it does not. Rivers, aquifers, and rainfall are out of reach, and conventional solutions like desalination only work near coastlines.
Professor Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent three decades working on a different answer. Growing up in a refugee community in Jordan without reliable running water, he understood the problem not as an abstraction but as a daily reality — the neighbourhood whisper that the water truck had arrived, the scramble to fill containers before it left.
Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on Metal-Organic Frameworks — MOFs — crystalline structures whose pores are so fine that a single gram of material has the internal surface area of a football field. At night, these materials capture water vapour from the surrounding air. During the day, ambient sunlight and low-grade heat cause the trapped moisture to release and condense into drinkable water. No grid connection required.
His company, Atoco, has developed units roughly the size of a 20-foot shipping container that can produce up to 1,000 litres of clean water daily off-grid, functioning even in conditions as dry as 20% humidity — the equivalent of Death Valley. Prototypes have already been tested there successfully.
The technology is being considered for deployment in Grenada and other Caribbean islands devastated by hurricanes, where central water infrastructure can be destroyed overnight. Yaghi has described it as a potential lifeline for communities that have always been told there is no solution.