Quench your thirst

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Today, we’re diving into the world of water tech - turns out water’s pretty important for us as humans. With the whole climate change thing going on, people reckon water’s going to get rarer (first casualty, French villas) - turns out, technology could be the solution we’re looking for.

Let’s dive in.

Demands for fresh water

When every single living being on the planet needs one resource to survive more than any other, it makes sense that people start getting nervous when that resource looks like it might be dwindling.

If you take a step back, it all kinda makes sense. The world’s population has exploded over the last few centuries. More people means more water needed for:

• drinking

• growing food

• industry

This quickly adds up. So much so that McKinsey believes by 2030, demand for water will be 40% higher than supply.

Yikes.

Tech to the rescue

Sounds like we got a lot of water to make up for by 2030. The way we make up the gap is essentially through either reducing water need or increasing water supply.

The cheapest thing to do is to reduce how much water we use. Especially when growing crops (70% of global water usage), developing drought-resistant crops that can grow with less water, or improving the efficiency of irrigation systems are solutions that could be cheap to implement, while having an outsized impact on consumption.

Industry in particular is one of the heaviest users of water. The thing is, they usually take in clean water and by the time it comes out of the factory, the water is dirty with chemicals and all sorts of nasty stuff.

The first water-tech startup to hit that holy grail Unicorn (>$1Bn valuation) mark called Gradiant reckons new ways of cleaning this dirty water is a start to solving the problem. One man’s trash is another man’s route to making a tonne of money I guess?

Finally, the holy grail of solving water scarcity. Desalination. Not sure if you realised, but we have a tonne of water sat in our own backyards. Problem is, it’s saltier than the 15 year old kid screaming obscenities at your mother while playing an online game.

The good news is desalination has gotten cheaper and cheaper - falling from $1.50 to $0.50 per cubic meter over the last 15 years. As renewable energy continues to ramp up, and if we see fusion energy do it’s thang, we could end up living in a water-filled future.

A (Straw)man can dream.

See ya tomorrow,

The Strawman