UAE start-up Manhat is making the most of Cop28 to promote its vision of food and water security with products that generate fresh water without electricity.
“This is an opportunity to meet and network with potential investors, technology providers or NGOs to bring our product to the market,” said Emirati founder Saeed Alhassan, who is also a chemical and petroleum engineering professor at Khalifa University.
The technology Mr Alhassan refers to is an ambitious one.
The device launched by Mr Alhassan last year uses proprietary technology to generate fresh water from the ocean without using electricity, addressing a major hurdle as the Arabian Gulf seeks ways to ensure water and food security, which has historically been problematic given the climate in the region.
“Water basically evaporates from the bottom side,” he said, pointing to one of the company’s devices.
“And then it goes up and it fills this sphere, and when the night comes and the temperature drops, then the water condenses inside and gets collected in this reservoir here.”
“There’re a lot of problems with the current desalination method,” Mr Alhassan said, referring to the energy-intensive desalination process.
“The brine [in the current process] also collects a lot of contaminants from the water processing because it’s in contact with a lot of metal equipment … and it eventually goes back to the ocean and has an effect on aquatic life,” he added, noting that the common reverse osmosis method also has the potential to create pollution.
Manhat is in the process of finding a better price point for its proprietary devices to bring them to the masses, Mr Alhassan said.
“We want to be among the first to break this,” he said, referring to the current economic landscape of building, manufacturing and delivering the devices.
“We want to bring this technology to market as soon as we can.”
In a lot of the advertising and marketing materials for Manhat, a floating farm is part of the company’s vision.
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