Thirst Trap: The Future of Water

The Original Trap

In 2024, the Oxford English Dictionary added “thirst trap” to its lexicon. Definition: a deliberately provocative image, posted online to elicit reaction. The phrase had loitered in internet slang for over a decade before that, but it was never really about water. It was about wanting something you couldn’t quite have.

The original thirst trap, in fairness, predates social media by about four and a half billion years. From space, our planet looks like a blue marble drowning in itself: seventy-one per cent water, more water than anywhere else we have so far found in the solar system. The trick, the trap, is that 97.5 per cent of it is salt. Of the remaining sliver that is fresh, two-thirds is locked into glaciers and polar ice. What is left must serve eight billion people. By 2050, it will need to serve nearly ten billion. The world is wet. We are thirsty.

On 25 May 1961, John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and committed the United States to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The speech became one of the defining moments of the twentieth century. One month later, on 21 June, Kennedy gave a second address. This time he sat in the White House and broadcast by telephone to a crowd gathered at Freeport, Texas, where Vice President Lyndon Johnson was unveiling America’s first industrial-scale desalination plant. Kennedy used very nearly the same register. Converting seawater into fresh water, he said, was “a work that in many ways is more important than any other scientific enterprise in which this country is now engaged.”1 Earlier that spring he had gone further. “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from salt water,” he had said, “that would be in the long-range interests of humanity which would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.”2

Boil It or Squeeze It

The Freeport facility was a strange-looking machine. A dozen chrome canisters eight storeys high, lashed together with tubes and scaffolding, powered by a coal furnace borrowed from a Dow plant next door.3 It produced about a million gallons of drinking water a day for the citizens of Freeport. It also burned through coal at a fearsome rate. The technology was thermal distillation: heat seawater, capture the vapour, condense it back into fresh water, throw the salt away. Aristotle had described the principle around 340 BCE. The Americans had merely scaled it.

While Johnson was beaming for the cameras in Texas, a quieter revolution was already underway in Los Angeles. A team of researchers at UCLA had spent a decade developing a different approach. Rather than boil seawater, they would squeeze it. Pump salt water at very high pressure against a thin polymer membrane whose pores were just large enough to let water molecules through and just small enough to reject the ions of dissolved salt. They called it reverse osmosis. By the mid-1960s the UCLA team had working tubular membrane modules producing fresh water from both seawater and brackish groundwater.4 No one quite appreciated what they had built. Within three decades, it would render almost every thermal plant of Kennedy’s era obsolete.

Thermal and membrane remain the two foundations of desalination today. Thermal systems come in two main flavours. Multi-stage flash distillation, MSF, heats seawater under pressure and then flashes it into steam across a chain of progressively lower-pressure chambers, sometimes as many as thirty in a row.5 Multiple-effect distillation, MED, is a slightly different choreography of the same trick, reusing the heat from each stage to drive the next, which makes it more efficient. Both produce extraordinarily pure water. Both demand a lot of heat, typically between five and fifteen kilowatt-hours per cubic metre of product.6 They survive today mainly in places where energy is cheap and conveniently on hand, the Gulf states above all, where desalination plants are routinely bolted onto power stations and run on their waste steam.

Reverse osmosis dominates everywhere else. Pressurised seawater, typically at sixty to eighty bar, is forced against a spiral-wound polymer membrane. Pure water passes through. A concentrated salty brine, around twice the salinity of the source, comes out the other side. Modern plants now recover much of that brine’s pressure on the way out using devices called pressure exchangers, which recycle the kinetic energy back into the incoming seawater. Combine that with better membranes and careful pre-treatment, and the energy required has fallen by an order of magnitude. In February 2025, a small demonstration plant on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, named DESALRO 2.0, achieved a verified specific energy consumption of 1.794 kilowatt-hours per cubic metre. That is roughly a tenth of what the same job took in the 1970s. It is also a Guinness World Record.7

There are subspecies worth naming. Electrodialysis uses electric fields to pull salt ions out through ion-exchange membranes; it shines on brackish water and struggles on full-strength seawater. Forward osmosis uses a high-salinity draw solution to pull water across a membrane without applied pressure, then separately recovers the fresh water from the draw. Membrane distillation uses a hydrophobic membrane and a small temperature gradient to drive water vapour across. Each has its champions. None has yet displaced reverse osmosis at industrial scale.

Cold War, Hot Sand

America cared about desalination in 1961 because, in part, Texas was thirsty. The state had endured the worst drought in its recorded history through the 1950s, with reservoirs reduced to cracked mud and farms folding under. By the time the Freeport plant opened, Lyndon Johnson was Vice President of the United States, but he had spent the 1950s as the senior senator from Texas. He had lived through the drought and the earlier Dust Bowl. Water security was not abstract to him.3

It was also a Cold War story. The early 1960s were a moment of almost vertiginous American techno-optimism, when no engineering problem looked too big and the prestige of solving one before the Soviets did was its own reward. Kennedy made the parallel explicit at Freeport. The breakthrough, he said, would “end bitter struggles between neighbours, states and nations.”2 The Soviets had Sputnik and Gagarin. America would have the Moon, and it would have the sea.

That second promise turned out to be the harder one. Costs proved stubborn. By the early 1980s, desalinated seawater still cost two to three dollars per cubic metre, more than ten times the price of conventional fresh water in most American cities.4 The plants were energy hogs. The Freeport facility was decommissioned in 1969 after only eight years. The federal programme that Kennedy and Johnson had championed quietly wound down. Desalination became a thing other countries did because they had to, not a thing America did because it could.

The underlying problem, of course, did not go away.

The Desalination Era

There are now over 21,000 desalination plants in operation worldwide, across roughly 150 countries, with a combined installed capacity of around 115 million cubic metres of fresh water a day. That is enough to supply more than 300 million people.8 Capacity has roughly tripled since 2000, and the trade press now expects it to keep growing at five to six per cent a year through 2030.9 The Middle East and North Africa together account for over half of the global total. Saudi Arabia alone operates a fleet producing more than eleven million cubic metres a day, with the UAE not far behind. The cheapest contracted water in the world, in recent Saudi and Emirati tenders, has slipped under fifty cents per cubic metre.9

Israel is the most instructive case. A country of nine million people on the edge of an arid eastern Mediterranean, it now draws between 60 and 80 per cent of its drinking water from the sea.10 Its first major reverse osmosis plant opened at Ashkelon in 2005. Four more followed along the Mediterranean coast over the next fifteen years. The Sorek plant, fifteen kilometres south of Tel Aviv, was for a decade the largest reverse osmosis facility in the world. Its successor, Sorek 2 (also called Be’er Miriam), came online in 2023 with an annual output of 200 million cubic metres. It is the world’s first steam-driven seawater reverse osmosis plant, using waste heat from a neighbouring power station to drive its high-pressure pumps, and it set a record-low contracted water price of $0.41 per cubic metre.11 A small bottle of mineral water at a London corner shop, by comparison, costs roughly thirty times more. Israel now produces more water than it consumes, and exports the surplus to Jordan and the West Bank.10

The industry behind all this is more concentrated than most people realise. Three companies dominate engineering and construction at the high end: Veolia of France, IDE Technologies of Israel, and Acciona of Spain. Doosan Enerbility of South Korea has built much of the Saudi thermal fleet. Membrane manufacturing is led by DuPont, Toray of Japan, Hydranautics, and LG Chem. Pumps and energy-recovery devices, the often-overlooked beating heart of any RO plant, come largely from Danfoss of Denmark, Flowserve of Texas, and Energy Recovery Inc. of California.12 Veolia, the biggest integrator, announced in 2025 that it intends to double its global desalination capacity by 2030, and signed a partnership with TotalEnergies to power its plants increasingly with solar. It has already built the world’s largest dedicated solar desalination facility in Oman.13

The cost-collapse is the headline story. From around twenty kilowatt-hours per cubic metre in the 1970s, reverse osmosis is now routinely run at 2.5 to 3.5 kWh/m³, and the best plants are well under two.14 Solar-powered modular systems, deployed for islands and isolated communities, run at three kilowatt-hours per cubic metre using nothing but the sun. In the Gulf, contracted water prices are now comparable to or cheaper than the long-distance pipeline water some American cities still import. The price gap between water you find and water you manufacture is closing.

“The world is wet. We are thirsty. The gap between those two facts is what desalination has spent sixty-five years trying to close.”

The dramatic question is no longer whether desalination works. It is whether it works well enough to matter at planetary scale. The UN counts 720 million people now living in countries with high or critical water stress. About four billion experience severe water scarcity for at least one month a year.15 By 2030, on current trends, water demand will exceed supply by roughly 40 per cent. Desalination presently supplies less than one per cent of the world’s drinking water. The next decade will decide whether that fraction climbs into double digits, or remains a coastal curiosity.

Three problems still bound the answer. The first is energy. Even at two kilowatt-hours per cubic metre, supplying the world’s drinking water entirely from the sea would consume about three per cent of global electricity generation, on top of everything else electricity is being asked to do this century. The Gulf states get away with desalination partly because they have an inexpensive surplus of energy to burn. Coupling new desalination capacity to renewables and, in time, to advanced reactors looks essential rather than optional. A Canadian firm, Thorium Power Canada, has already proposed a 10 MW thorium reactor in Chile to drive a 20-million-litre-a-day plant.16 Loonshot readers will recognise the marriage from our recent piece on thorium energy. Here is one of its better use cases.

The second problem is brine. Every cubic metre of fresh water produced by reverse osmosis leaves behind roughly one cubic metre of concentrated brine at around twice the salinity of the feedwater. In current practice, that brine is mostly discharged straight back into the sea. Done well, with diffusers placed in well-mixed waters, the local impact is modest. Done poorly, the brine sinks, creeps along the seabed for kilometres, and asphyxiates seagrasses, corals, and the benthic life that depends on them.17 As capacity grows, brine management is moving from afterthought to design parameter. Zero-liquid-discharge plants extract everything from the brine and leave a solid salt. Brine-mining systems recover commercially valuable minerals (sodium, magnesium, potassium, bromine, and even lithium) from what used to be a waste stream.9 MENA pilot projects have shown that a desalination plant can become, in effect, a mineral mine that happens to produce drinking water as a by-product.

The third problem is geography. Most of the world’s largest cities are coastal, which is the convenience that desalination depends on. Lagos, Mumbai, Karachi, Jakarta, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Cape Town: all eligible. Inland populations, particularly in the dry interiors of Africa and central Asia, are not, and the energy cost of pumping water from the coast often dwarfs the cost of making it in the first place. Subsea systems, the most futuristic recent development, are starting to push past some of those constraints. A California company called OceanWell is preparing to anchor a fleet of cylindrical pods on the seabed about seven kilometres off the Malibu coast, at a depth of around 400 metres. At that depth, the natural pressure of the ocean is enough to drive reverse osmosis without high-pressure pumps.18 Each pod will produce up to a million gallons of fresh water a day, piped to shore through a marine umbilical. The company claims its system uses around 40 per cent less energy than conventional onshore plants and produces almost no concentrated brine, since the modest excess salt simply disperses in deep currents. The first commercial deployment, Water Farm 1, is targeted at 60 million gallons a day by 2030.19 Whether it works at scale will say a great deal about the next decade of the industry.

The Next Trap

Which brings us to the planets.

Kennedy’s two great speeches of 1961 framed water and space as parallel breakthroughs. Six decades on, they are turning out to be the same problem.

Long-duration human spaceflight is, at root, a water problem. Carrying water from Earth is impossibly expensive. Even with reusable rockets, every litre lifted to orbit costs hundreds of dollars, and the figure for the lunar surface runs into the thousands. The International Space Station already operates at a 98 per cent water recovery rate, recycling sweat, exhaled humidity, and urine through a sequence called the Environmental Control and Life Support System, with a Urine Processor Assembly that distils urine and a Brine Processor Assembly that wrings the last two per cent out of whatever the UPA cannot reach.20 NASA calculates that 98 per cent is the threshold below which a Mars mission becomes infeasible. The astronauts, by their own admission, are drinking water cleaner than what most people on Earth manage.21

But recycled water is not new water. For permanent settlement, off-world humans will need to extract water from local materials, and those materials are salty. The Moon’s permanently shadowed regions at the south pole hold an estimated billions of tonnes of water ice, mixed into the regolith with a stew of contaminants.22 Mars’s subsurface ice deposits are widespread, but they are pickled with perchlorate salts, oxidising compounds that are corrosive to equipment and toxic to humans even at low concentrations. The European Space Agency’s Mars Express has identified underground briny ponds that remain liquid only because their salt content is so high, which is, from a desalination engineer’s perspective, much the same problem as the brackish groundwater of the American Southwest, only located rather further from the nearest pipefitter.23

NASA is actively prototyping the answers. Lynn Rothschild’s team at Ames Research Center is developing a biocatalytic reactor that uses genetically engineered Bacillus subtilis bacteria to break down Martian perchlorates into harmless chloride and oxygen, the latter conveniently routed straight back into breathable air.24 At Washington University in St Louis, electrolytic systems have been demonstrated that turn Martian briny water directly into hydrogen, oxygen, and drinking water in a single integrated process, exploiting the very perchlorates that complicate the chemistry.25 Lunar surface missions, including the IM-2 PRIME-1 payload in early 2025, have already drilled into south polar regolith to characterise the ice.26 India’s Chandrayaan-4, the joint JAXA-ISRO LUPEX mission, NASA’s VIPER rover, and the broader Artemis programme are all aimed in much the same direction.27

The line from Freeport to Pozo Izquierdo to Malibu to Mars is the one Kennedy gestured at on that June evening in 1961. Civilisation runs on fresh water. The act of making fresh water from water that does not start fresh, whether by heat, by pressure, by membrane, or by some clever microbe yet to be designed, is the foundational technology of any future in which humans live in arid places. The Arabian peninsula is one such place. The American Southwest is another. The lunar south pole is a third. Mars is a fourth.

“Pozo Izquierdo and Shackleton Crater are, in some deep sense, the same project.”

And here is the curious thing. The country that built the world’s first industrial desalination plant on a windy stretch of the Texas coast in 1961 now operates only a small share of global capacity. Its largest single facility, the Carlsbad plant north of San Diego, is dwarfed by half a dozen Saudi installations. The technology has spread, matured, and globalised. The cost has fallen by an order of magnitude. The membranes are better, the pumps quieter, the energy-recovery devices more elegant. Kennedy’s other moon shot has, on its own quiet schedule, more or less landed.

What it has not yet done, in the way Kennedy hoped, is dwarf the visible scientific accomplishments of our age. Most of humanity still drinks water that has not been within a hundred miles of the sea. The biggest plants are clustered in the richest arid countries, not the poorest. The engineering to pull drinking water from a Martian glacier is being prototyped in NASA laboratories before the engineering to pull it from inland Mauritania at affordable cost has been deployed at scale. Whether that ordering is a strategic mistake, or a sensible division of labour in which each programme accelerates the other, is the unanswered question.

Kennedy gave two speeches one month apart in the spring of 1961, both of them about turning impossible things into routine ones. The first put boots on the Moon by 1969. The second is still in progress. Six decades on, the two are converging in unexpected places. A Spanish demonstration plant. A Saudi mega-project. A Malibu seabed pod. A NASA bioreactor designed to drink Martian ice.

The world is wet. We are thirsty. Kennedy’s other moon shot has been on a longer trajectory than he realised. After sixty-five years, it is finally coming back down.

Sources

1. JFK Library, Remarks Upon Activating by Remote Control the Saline Water Conversion Plant at Freeport, Texas, 21 June 1961 — https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961/JFKWHA-040-003/JFKWHA-040-003

2. Issues in Science and Technology, “Time for Another Giant Leap For Mankind” (Kennedy quote in context) — https://issues.org/realnumbers-30/

3. Science History Institute, “Nor Any Drop to Drink” (Freeport plant history) — https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/nor-any-drop-to-drink

4. UCLA Technology Development Group, “QuantumFlux Reverse Osmosis” (history of RO at UCLA) — https://tdg.ucla.edu/quantumflux-reverse-osmosis

5. Wikipedia, Multi-stage flash distillation — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-stage_flash_distillation

6. TRENDS Research & Advisory, “The Future of Desalination: Between Financing and Climate Challenges” — https://trendsresearch.org/insight/the-future-of-desalination-between-financing-and-climate-challenges/

7. Pumps & Systems, “Energy Efficiency in Seawater Reverse Osmosis” (Pozo Izquierdo Guinness record) — https://www.pumpsandsystems.com/energy-efficiency-seawater-reverse-osmosis

8. University of Florida EDIS, “Desalination Systems and Their Environmental Impacts” (global capacity figures) — https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/SS746

9. Oliver Wyman, “8 Trends That Could Transform Global Water Accessibility” (2025 industry overview) — https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2025/dec/mena-global-water-sector-8-transformations.html

10. Scientific American, “Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here” — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/

11. International Desalination and Reuse Association, “IDE Water Technologies Pioneers Sustainable Desalination with Sorek 2 – Be’er Miriam” — https://idrawater.org/news/ide-water-technologies-pioneers-sustainable-desalination-with-sorek-2-beer-miriam/

12. Blackridge Research, “Top 10 Desalination Companies in the World [2026]” — https://www.blackridgeresearch.com/blog/latest-list-of-top-leading-water-desalination-treatment-plant-companies-firms-in-the-world

13. TotalEnergies / Veolia partnership announcement, SEC Form 6-K — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000879764/000110465925105118/tm2529941d1_ex99-4.htm

14. Hannah Ritchie, “How much energy does desalinisation use?” Sustainability by Numbers — https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation

15. UN-Water, Water Scarcity facts — https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/water-scarcity

16. Wikipedia, Desalination by country (Thorium Power Canada – Chile project) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination_by_country

17. Environmental Science & Technology, “Impacts of Desalination Brine Discharge on Benthic Ecosystems” (2024) — https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.3c07748

18. ASCE Civil Engineering Magazine, “New desalination tech could bring freshwater to California residents” (OceanWell) — https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2025/09/new-desalination-tech-could-bring-freshwater-to-california-residents

19. OceanWell / LVMWD, “Launch of California Water Farm 1” (PR Newswire, August 2025) — https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oceanwell-and-las-virgenes-municipal-water-district-launch-california-water-farm-1-with-capacity-of-60-million-gallons-per-day-as-six-agencies-join-project-302531079.html

20. Space.com, “NASA just recycled 98% of all astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS” — https://www.space.com/astronaut-pee-iss-water-recycling-98-percent-milestone

21. Florida International University News, “Water recycling is paramount for space stations and long-duration missions” — https://news.fiu.edu/2025/water-recycling-is-paramount-for-space-stations-and-long-duration-missions-an-environmental-engineer-explains-how-the-iss-does-it

22. NASA Science, “NASA’s LRO: Lunar Ice Deposits are Widespread” — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-lro-lunar-ice-deposits-are-widespread/

23. NASA JPL, “NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars” (perchlorates) — https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-todays-mars/

24. NASA, “Detoxifying Mars: the biocatalytic elimination of omnipresent perchlorates” — https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/

25. WashU McKelvey School of Engineering, “New tech can get oxygen, fuel from Mars’ salty water” — https://engineering.washu.edu/news/2020/New-tech-can-get-oxygen-fuel-from-Mars-salty-water.html

26. New Space Tracker, “Water on the Moon: Ice, ISRU, and Why It Changes Everything” (PRIME-1) — https://newspacetracker.com/articles/water-ice-on-the-moon/

27. NASA, “NASA’s Water-Hunting Tool Will Help Scout Moon’s South Pole” (LUPEX, VIPER) — https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-water-hunting-tool-will-help-scout-moons-south-pole/

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