One of the more quietly ambitious ideas in clean technology comes from an Israeli firm in Rishon Lezion: pull the water you drink out of the atmosphere itself. Watergen’s machines draw in ambient air, condense its humidity and hand back chilled, mineralized drinking water — no pipes, no wells, no plastic bottles. The concept got a very public stage in early 2022, when the company’s generators kept hydration flowing across Abu Dhabi’s National Exhibition Centre during the World Future Energy Summit, billed as the first exhibition of its size to go plastic-free.
The engineering runs in five stages. Incoming air is first filtered to capture dust, pollen and PM2.5 particles; it is then chilled to its dew point in a module made of food-grade polymer, so that pure water condenses. Carbon filtration strips residues, magnesium and calcium are reintroduced for taste, and ultraviolet light in germicidal form neutralises any microorganisms held in the stored water, with no chemicals involved. A built-in blower keeps air moving through the patented GENius heat-exchange core, and finished water circulates in a reservoir to stay fresh.
The efficiency figures are the encouraging part. Watergen rates its heat-exchange technology at up to 6.2 liters of water per kilowatt-hour — roughly 1.6 US gallons — and says the machines produce from 15 degrees Celsius upward, across relative humidity of 20% to 95%, still yielding water even at 20% humidity, just at reduced output. Filter cartridges are plug-and-drink items on a six-month replacement cycle, and the units carry round-the-clock monitoring with IoT alerts and remote diagnostics.
What separates the claim sheet from the marketing is a published paper trail. Company-backed studies include months of urban sampling published in the journal Water in 2020, a 2021 study in Science of the Total Environment on the imprint that meteorology and air quality leave on the chemistry of water drawn from the atmosphere, and a 2023 paper in Environmental Pollution covering 83 samples and 99 quality parameters from a heavily polluted industrial zone. The company also points to a three-month EPA evaluation in the United States covering microbes in the GEN-350’s water. The mineral profile it publishes reads well against premium bottled brands: zero sodium, trace nitrates at 0.03 mg/L, pH 7.5, magnesium 30 mg/L.
The Abu Dhabi deployment shows the scale. In a deal with the exhibition centre estimated at several million shekels, Watergen installed fifteen industrial devices, including GEN-M PRO generators rated for about 13.5 thousand liters a day, serving some 34,000 daily visitors across a 133,000-square-meter facility. The company was among the first Israeli firms operating in the UAE after the Abraham Accords, signing a partnership with Al Dahra in November 2020 and forming the Watergen Baynunah venture to build and distribute the generators in Abu Dhabi, the wider UAE, the Gulf States and Africa. “The Abraham Accords has given countries in the Middle East the opportunity to improve and advance relations in various fields,” said Dr. Michael Mirilashvili, the company’s president and CEO, who added: “Throughout history, people have fought each other over water sources. Today we are doing the opposite, building peace and a common future around a groundbreaking Israeli technology that will provide water to all residents of the UAE and the world.”
The careful caveat is climate: output bends to humidity and temperature, so the same machine performs differently in a Gulf summer and a European winter, and the published studies are the evidence base to weigh rather than a verdict on every deployment. Still, the largest unit, the Gen-L, is rated at as much as 5,000 liters of clean water daily and needs no infrastructure beyond a standard electricity supply — which the company describes as “perfect for villages, off-grid settlements and factories.” For dry regions that import water by truck and bottle, that is a hopeful sentence to be able to write.
Sources
- Technology – Watergen
- Watergen creates water from air at massive Abu Dhabi energy summit | The Jerusalem Post
Sources
- Israeli firm provides Gaza with drinking water from the air
- Watergen creates water from air at massive Abu Dhabi energy summit
