Ocean Oasis

Using wave power to make sustainable and affordable water for coastal communities and businesses

What is the Challenge?

There are nearly 1.5 billion people – including 450 million children – living in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability. With population growth and climate change, water scarcity will affect over half the world’s population by 2050. Climate change and extreme weather events are compounding water stress and with less than 3 percent of the world’s water resources being freshwater, this is growing increasingly scarce. Over 300 million people rely on desalination for their water supply and this number is expected to triple by 2050. How do we find a sustainable and affordable solution to benefit people and industry in water stressed areas?

What is the Solution?

To meet the global demand for fresh water, extensive desalination is necessary. Desalination is the process of making fresh water from sea water, normally a carbon intensive process with over 90% of the energy currently supplied by fossil sources. Ocean Oasis offers a sustainable offshore desalination solution, with zero emission. With a mobile floating desalination plant, using wave energy to provide a stable flow of pressurized seawater to run the desalination process offshore, Ocean Oasis’s patent-pending solution enables freshwater production in deep ocean waters. The desalination buoy will deliver fresh water to shore through pipes along the seabed. A fleet of units could provide fresh water to an entire city.

Furthermore, Ocean Oasis’s solution mitigates local environmental challenges, typically associated with desalination water intake and brine discharge, as the solution is placed in relatively deep offshore waters. Water intake will not be affected by algae or sewage in the same way as close to shore intake, and the brine will be more easily dispersed. As offshore conditions can be harsh the technology needs to be robust, and Ocean Oasis' technology is developed building on expertise from the Norwegian offshore industry. The company just launched the prototype of its offshore floating desalination plant in Las Palmas, Gran Canarias.

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