Nobel chemist Omar Yaghi turns desert air into drinking water with solar device

In a field test conducted from August 19 to 23, 2022, Omar Yaghi’s research group installed a thermos-sized cylinder at Furnace Creek inside Death Valley National Park. The device, containing 35 g of the metal-organic framework MOF-303, operated autonomously for three full day-night cycles, extracting liquid water from air that was as hot as 65 °C and as dry as 14% relative humidity at night. Laboratory analysis showed the material could yield up to 210 g of water per kilogram of MOF per day, with a recovery rate of 85-90%, proving the concept works even in the world’s harshest desert.

The findings were detailed in a July 2023 Nature Water article and contributed to Yaghi receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for their work on metal-organic frameworks. Yaghi, now a professor at UC Berkeley and director of several research institutes, later unveiled through his startup Atoco a solar-driven system claimed to generate up to 1,000 L of water per day in air with less than 20% humidity, though independent trials are pending. He emphasizes that the science is ready and scaling the technology is the next critical step.