Omar Yaghi spent two decades building crystal structures with an internal surface of several football fields per gram. In 2025, he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this work. Now this research is supposed to solve a practical water problem: the startup Atoco, which Yaghi co-founded, plans to deliver devices in 2026 that extract up to 1,000 liters of clean drinking water daily from desert air at only 20 percent humidity.
What Are Metal-Organic Frameworks?
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline materials with an extremely fine pore structure. A few grams of MOF material have an internal surface of several football fields: the pores bind water molecules from surrounding air, similar to how a sponge absorbs water, but at far lower concentrations. The Swedish Nobel Committee awarded Yaghi the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 together with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for developing this material class. MOFs were originally developed for gas storage and catalysis. The application to water extraction is one of several fields where they are deployed today.
How the Atoco Device Works Concretely
The machine operates in two phases. First, it pulls air through MOF layers where water molecules are bound. Once the pores are saturated, the system heats the material, with solar energy providing this heat. The released water condenses and is collected in a tank. In tests, the MOF material delivered 7 to 20 liters of water per kilogram of material per day in arid areas like the Mojave Desert; in more humid regions like Chennai, India, it was up to 90 liters per kilogram. Atoco develops two models: a grid-independent container model for up to 1,000 liters daily and a grid-connected large installation for up to 4,000 liters. The company has not yet published exact production costs per liter.
In Comparison: Why Other Approaches Fail
Extracting water from air is not a new idea. Fog nets, as tested in the Atacama Desert and the highlands of Morocco, collect 20 to 80 liters daily per net, but only where natural fog occurs, so at coasts or in certain mountain areas. Warka Water, an Ethiopian passive structure of bamboo and mesh material, achieves 25 to 100 liters daily but requires air humidity of at least 50 percent. MOF systems work according to Atoco at 10 to 20 percent relative humidity, precisely where conventional methods fail: in arid regions of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Around 2.2 billion people had no safe access to clean drinking water in 2023 according to the UN; a substantial portion live in regions with year-round low precipitation.
The Roadmap to Market Readiness
According to a January 2026 Agri Navigator report, Atoco set as a goal delivering first commercial installations in 2026. The company did not confirm a specific quarter. The crucial question is price: for communities in water-poor regions of the global South, the device must be economically competitive with building new wells or desalination plants. As a comparison point serves the history of solar photovoltaics: in 1976, a watt of solar capacity cost roughly 100 U.S. dollars; by 2024 the price fell according to the energy consulting firm Lazard to under 0.30 dollars, a decline of more than 99 percent in fifty years, driven by scale effects and learning curves in mass production. Whether MOF systems can undergo a similar cost curve depends critically on whether Atoco and other manufacturers move into industrial mass production. For the 2.2 billion people without safe drinking water, this would be one of the most consequential questions of the coming decades.