Ocean Oasis starts off-shore desalination trial
Norwegian company Ocean Oasis has unveiled a prototype of its offshore floating desalination plant at Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. The prototype, named Gaia, is powered by wave energy and will be tested at the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN). The company says this technology will allow the production of fresh water from ocean waters by harnessing the energy of the waves to carry out a desalination process and pump potable water to coastal users.
Traditional desalination requires large amounts of energy, leading to a large carbon footprint and high cost. Ocean Oasis says that desalination that uses wave energy brings a new dimension and additional opportunities to supply desalinated water without emissions, at a competitive cost, and without the use of valuable land. The use of offshore wave energy in deep waters also allows a clean capture of water and the discharge of brine in a sustainable way, minimising the environmental impact.
The prototype, assembled in the port of Las Palmas, has a seven-metre diameter, is ten-metres high and weighs about 100 tons. The device extracts the energy of the waves through the relative movement of two bodies and takes advantage of this energy directly to carry out a desalination process by reverse osmosis without the need to produce electrical energy, thus increasing the efficiency of the process.
The company’s COO, Sebastián Feimblatt, says the Canary Islands: “provide us with the ideal environment to test our technology both due to PLOCAN’s infrastructure, experience and location, as well as the possibility of developing its solution in a market as relevant as the Canary Islands in matters of desalination and offshore activities.”
Ocean Oasis has established an R&D office and workshop in Las Palmas and says the company will continue developing activities in the Islands.
Eventually a second installation will be built with the prototype scaled to produce water for consumption. It will be connected to the water distribution system to help tackle water stress in a sustainable way. This phase is supported by the EU European Innovation Council Accelerator.
Ocean Oasis was awarded 2.5 million euros from the EIC in January 2022 for the two-year project. The jury believed that Ocean Oasis’ innovation could technologically disrupt the desalination market worldwide.
In August 2020, researchers announced they’d purified salt water into drinkable water using a combination of metal compounds and sunlight, a breakthrough that could hold significant implications for the provision of safe water for millions of people globally.
