It's September, and a small group of researchers in a pair of fishing vessels are sailing in some of the highest ice-free waves in the North Atlantic. Here, some 1,600 feet off the coast of Newfoundland, they are anchoring a 10-foot-wide (three-meter) buoy. At the base of the buoy is an integrated cylinder attached to a piston rod. It begins to rise and fall with the waves, collecting and pushing water all the way back to shore through a 10-inch wide pressurized hose—all without an external energy source.

"If you've ever seen two firefighters holding a hose, that's typically a two-and-a-half-inch line running at a pressure of 150 psi," says Christopher White, COO of Atmocean, a company that has been developing the low-tech wave energy system in landlocked Santa Fe, New Mexico. "So imagine, with a complete system of 16 buoy pumps sending water at an even greater pressure of 180 psi through a hose four times the diameter—well, that's a lot of water."

Atmocean engineers set up a wave energy buoy pump in the Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland. Atmocean

Harnessing wave energy isn't a new idea. But most efforts so far have focused on generating electricity from the swells of the ocean. White has another idea, one that would use wave energy to pump water with no need for conversion to electric power.

"With pressurized seawater arriving on shore, we can input it into a desalination facility without the need for grid-tied electricity or costly fossil fuels to run generators," White says. This system could drive down the high costs of desalination, some of which arise simply from pumping water to the plant in the first place.

"Especially in places without reliable power or water, this kind of low-tech machinery and design can be life-changing," adds Michael Graham of the Wave Environment Research Centre at the College of the North Atlantic in Newfoundland. Agriculture, potable water sources, and hygiene all stand to benefit from efficient desalination if it can be brought to remote communities, and the technology can be used as a safeguard against drought all over the world.

Working with Graham and other scientists, White oversaw the latest month-long test of wave-harnessing pumps in Canada, which represented a fifth round of sea trials. He's hopeful the system will be up and running by the end of next year, bringing with it the potential to transform an industry that, so far, has failed to come to shore.

A Hurricane-Borne Idea

Initially, Atmocean hoped to use their mechanical water pump system to combat violent hurricanes.

Two things need to be present for a hurricane to form: a disturbance in the weather, generally a thunderstorm and warm surface waters on the ocean at about 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees C). The storm pulls in warm air from the surrounding atmosphere which combines with the warm surface water of the ocean, and seawater behind to evaporate, filling the lower atmosphere with water vapor. At higher altitudes, the water vapor condenses into clouds and rain, a process that heats the air even more, causing more evaporation and rising warm winds, feeding the storm.

But if you could artificially cool the surface of the ocean as a hurricane is just getting started, the forces of the storm could theoretically be mollified.

Atmocean engineers prepare to deploy a wave energy water pump and hose in Newfoundland. Atmocean

It's an irony that the spectacle of powerful wave surges during Hurricane Katrina convinced White's boss, Atmocean CEO Philip Kithil, to try to find a way to harness that energy and mitigate the conditions that helped create it.

"Those waves near Katrina's eye were huge, and they're saying the Gulf of Mexico is at record warmth year after year," says Kithil. "What if you could capture the vertical wave motion to bring up the deeper cold water and reduce the surface temperature?"

After several incarnations of the original concept, Kithil realized that his wave action pump design could also be used to efficiently transport seawater to shore. Atmocean partnered with Albuquerque engineering firm Reytek in 2010 to manufacture the current pump system. The two companies soon began working with scientists at Sandia National Laboratories who helped assess the feasibility of their near-shore wave energy system.

"We needed to know if we would get a dribble at the end or a gusher of pressurized water," Kithil says. "Sandia helped give us the answer: a gusher."

Stripping Salt From the Sea

On a planet covered by more than 70 percent water, countless coastal communities lack the means to develop agriculture—and more than 660 million people don't have access to clean drinking water. For generations, scientists have been attempting to address this paradox through desalination, primarily through a method of boiling seawater. In fact, the first land-based steam distillation desalination plant began operating in Britain in 1869.

Inside the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, April 30, 2015. Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times Getty Images

By the end of WWII, the industry shifted to the less energy-intensive method of reverse osmosis, which uses semi-permeable membranes to filter salt out of seawater. Improved membranes and energy recovery technologies have helped bring desalination to many countries, and there are now more than 18,000 desalination plants around the world.

Israel's Ashkelon reverse osmosis plant is the largest, supplying about 13 percent of the country's demand for fresh water. More than 72 million gallons are produced per day at a cost of only a penny for every four gallons.

While reduced costs and advances in desalination have been promising, the industry is far from being green.

"The issue is the reliance on gas and diesel to power the plants and pump the seawater," explains White. "As more countries rely on desalination to counter desertification and water scarcity, the industry is quickly becoming a large carbon emitter and contributing to the underlying driver of climate change and the conditions that arise from it."

Diagram of Atmocean's 16 buoy pump system driven by wave energy. Atmocean

To put Atmocean's system into practical perspective, an array of 16 pumps could generate roughly 140,000 cubic meters (nearly 30.8 million gallons) of fresh water per year. "While this is not a massive amount compared to existing large-scale desalination operations, it can produce enough water for 15 to 30 acres of drip-irrigated crops," says White. "And this with just one system, when we can fit as many as 50 along a single mile of coastline."

Using wave energy to pump seawater directly into a desalination plant would also dramatically reduce the carbon footprint left behind when stripping the salt out of the sea.

Harnessing the Ocean

Atmocean's modest, direct application of wave energy is a departure from the multi-million dollar plants that have thus-far made use of the fairly recent newcomer to renewables. Large-scale electricity production has dominated wave energy efforts, with ambitious governments awarding huge grants to develop megawatt-scaled electrical production. Eventually, power production via wave energy may represent viable competition to wind and solar, but White doesn't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, many groups are trying to develop large wave energy converters to compete with energy production costs now. "This assumes the first try is going to work, which is never the case," says White. "So these systems often get one or two shots before their development costs become toxic."

The inherent environmental hazards of harnessing wave energy are not to be overlooked either.

"The ocean is a wild place," says White. "Using vessels that often cost $50,000 per day to deploy a [wave energy] test is like launching new planes from aircraft carriers."

Wave energy buoy pump system off the coast of Newfoundland. Atmocean

Atmocean is trying to find a more immediate application of wave energy in their water delivery systems. Apart from needing no external power, the direct wave-to-water-pump system has the advantage of being completely viable with off-the-shelf parts, allowing local fishermen and mechanics to easily maintain and repair pumps for their communities. "If we can build it in local shops with local materials and deploy using local resources, our costs to develop the technology drop significantly," says White.

Today, Atmocean is negotiating with the Inter-American Development Bank, a group of Peruvian landowners and stakeholders, to develop Atmocean's first commercial desalination system by 2019.

While White will continue overseeing tests in Newfoundland through next year, he believes the system's first foray into the commercial market "will be an important moment that will not only produce water for the people of Peru, but also create jobs and a new sustainable economy."

Given the constant and virtually limitless energy available from the ocean's motion, it's almost irresponsible to not try to harness that ebb and flow of the shifting sea. Beyond its immediate commercial applications, White sees the system as an open-ended means to a more sustainable end, with water that may be used for many purposes.

"True, we are focused on desalination, but pressurized water could also be used for sustainable land-based aquaculture, and even for the cooling of data centers," says White. "And, after extensive development, who knows, pressurized water...generat[ing] renewable electricity could also be on the table."

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