9320-9054 Québec inc.

Published purpose

UNICEF estimates that two billion people live in countries where water supply is inadequate and that half the world’s population could be facing water scarcity by 2050. The world increasingly needs affordable, sustainable drinking water supplies at large volumes and is turning to conventional desalination, which is expensive, dirty, and unsustainable.  Almost half the cost of traditional desalination pays for fuel, creating a carbon footprint that is on average 2.0 kg CO2e/m3 of water produced. While the desalination industry uses seawater as an input, it does not take advantage of the immense energy in ocean waves proximal to the input resource. Using wave energy instead of fossil fuels to power desalination plants presents tremendous opportunities to reduce GHG emissions.The project, led by Oneka Technologies, aims to scale up its wave-powered desalination buoys to utility-scale units, called “Glaciers”. The project will allow Oneka and its partners to deploy their redesigned hull & structure, design and deploy seabed anchoring approaches adapted to Glacier class buoys and develop operational and maintenance innovations at scale while serving as a platform to gather real-time operational data and market the technology to utility-scale users. The project will also allow the team to cost-engineer Glacier for competitiveness with the conventional desalination industry at any scale, consuming zero fossil fuels, producing zero operational emissions and using no land.