The Trump administration is hoping to reinvigorate a technology long dismissed as too expensive or energy-intensive to help solve a water crisis that has seen drought grip swaths of the American West, sparking deadly wildfires and legal battles over supply.

The Energy Department last month declared that it's spending $100 million over the next five years to create a research and development hub on desalination, a process that converts seawater and brackish inland water into freshwater.

Announced roughly five years after Congress appropriated the funds under the Obama administration, the planned hub comes as once-periodic water shortages have become perennial, if not ever-present, in American communities, forcing policymakers to rethink how residents get freshwater – and reconsider technologies they'd once shelved.

The investment is widely seen in the research field as a moonshot effort, the best attempt yet to jump-start the kind of advancements that would make the elusive process energy-efficient and cost-effective and make a resource out of vast unusable deposits like the saltwater that covers two-thirds of the earth's surface.

"The significance can't be understated. Something like this has been a long time coming," says Jonathan Brant, associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Wyoming.

"We're faced with a real water crisis, and the main solution to that is going to be able to tap – in an environmentally sustainable and economically sustainable way – saline water sources."

Desalination is costly and enormously energy intensive: Israel and Australia – two of the driest nations on Earth – are by far the world leaders in desalination, largely by necessity. While Israel draws more than half of its water from desalination plants – and more than 85 percent of its municipal water overall is reused – desalination plants in the U.S. provide less than 0.002 percent of the water consumed in the country each year.

That doesn't mean there are no desalination plants in the U.S.: One study from 2016 pegged the tally at over 1,330 plants. The largest, in Carlsbad, California, supplies 50 million gallons a day to some 400,000 residents in San Diego County. The process, in fact, was pioneered in the U.S.: The Bureau of Reclamation funded an office on saline research as early as the 1950s.

In the past half-century, however, while there have been some innovations, the techniques for separating salt and other molecules from H2O haven't greatly changed.

A worker passes rows of tubes used in the reverse osmosis process at the Carlsbad Desalination Project in California on Sept. 22, 2015. (Gregory Bull/AP)

One method largely involves simply heating water until it evaporates, leaving behind the salt and other deposits that made it undrinkable. The other process – the one most in use today – is known as membrane separation, which involves pressing huge amounts of brackish water against a net filled with microscopic holes, each small enough to allow H2O molecules to pass through while filtering everything else.

Both methods are expensive: Salt forms strong bonds with water, and the molecules are not easily separated. While freshwater has traditionally cost about 50 cents per cubic meter in an average U.S. market – and sometimes as little as 10 cents per cubic meter – desalinated water costs as much as $2 per cubic meter, and sometimes even more.

Such costs can be spread out: In parts of California and Texas, for example, desalination plants provide a fraction of the local water supply – only a quarter or a third of the water may come from a treatment plant and the rest from traditional, cheaper sources. The plants also demand huge amounts of energy: In Texas, for example, less than 3 percent of the state's water through 2022 will come from desalination, according to a state report, but its treatment will account for 9 percent of the water sector's electricity demand.

"For the last 15-20 years we've been up against this thermodynamic barrier," Brant says. "What we need is a paradigm shift from traditional methods to alternative technologies."

Already the Energy Department announcement has sparked phone calls and flurries of emails between scientific silos that wouldn't otherwise cross paths: biologists talking with materials scientists talking with engineers. The hope is that such cooperation – greased by the infusion of government cash – could yield the kind of critical breakthrough that would change how the U.S. and perhaps the world gets its water.

"They have created this movement among scientists and engineers nationwide to get to know each other and build alliances to apply for the grant, and that means that all these people who are working on their piece of the puzzle are getting to know each other," says Brent Haddad, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California – Santa Cruz who specializes in urban water management and who plans to apply for funding from the hub. "That's a benefit to this project already, and they haven't funded a dollar."

"It's a very American thing to do: When supplies are tight, we say, 'Let's increase supply.' When supply is tight in Israel, they say, 'Let's conserve.'"

Growing water scarcity across the U.S. is also providing new business cases for desalination: While desalination is most commonly associated with converting seawater to freshwater, its biggest market might be inland: Finding freshwater – whether by drilling deeper into sinking aquifers or treating brackish water – has grown more expensive, narrowing the gap between the traditional costs for freshwater and the pricetag for desalination. The cost of desalinating inland water also tends to be cheaper: The water is typically less salty than seawater, making it easier to treat.

Moreover, the boom in shale oil and gas development has produced oceans of brackish water from underground, with few ideal ways to dispose of it: Injecting the wastewater underground has caused earthquakes in places such as Oklahoma and Alaska. Meanwhile, simply allowing it to evaporate from open-air pools risks leaks and concerns from neighbors about health impacts. By contrast, treating the water offers not only a potential new market for oil and gas companies to sell the treated water, but an opportunity for such companies to present themselves as environmentally friendly.

"If you can improve your desalination technology, you're opening up a wide range of water sources for additional use," Haddad says.

Some environmental groups and advocates warn that the technology is hardly a silver bullet – especially given its current energy demands. Under the Obama administration, for example, the Energy Department brought together an Energy-Water Nexus group, which in 2014 produced a report calling not only for desalination but steps to reduce demand overall. The group has since been disbanded, and the desalination hub's proposed focus on innovation, some experts warn, risks losing sight of steps such as conservation – decidedly less exciting but often easier to accomplish.

"You want to get the most conservation you can before you do something big and flashy," says Kate Zerrenner, senior manager of energy-water initiatives at the Environmental Defense Fund. "There's definitely a role for desal. And as climate change advances and we have more water stress in more places, it's definitely an option that should be on the table. But it's one option, it shouldn't be the only option."

The average American, for example, consumes about 100 gallons of water per day – and in certain regions such as Texas or Utah, as much as 150 or 200 gallons. In Australia, by contrast, residents use about 65 gallons per day. In Israel, the tally is as low as 40 gallons per day.

"It's a very American thing to do: When supplies are tight, we say, 'Let's increase supply.' When supply is tight in Israel, they say, 'Let's conserve,'" says Michael Webber, acting director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas. He also plans to apply for funding from the hub. "I can see the appeal of desal: It's a cool technology, and I'm excited about it as a researcher. But it's just one of the tools in our toolbox, and it might be one of the most expensive tools in our toolbox."

Experts hope that with the infusion of cash, a major breakthrough could come in as soon as a decade and a full roll-out in perhaps 20 years. Whether such a timeline comes to resemble the development of nuclear fusion – where it seems as if a breakthrough is always said to be 25 years away – remains to be seen. But proponents hope that widespread adoption, if it does occur, happens faster than we expect.