Inside TII’s Push to Rethink Desalination and Water Waste
At the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the most important work on water right now was not presented as a moonshot. There were no sweeping claims about “solving scarcity” or reinventing nature. Instead, the focus stayed on pressure points — places where the global water system looked efficient on paper but quietly wasted money, materials, and resilience at scale.
That distinction mattered because desalination was already one of the most optimised industrial processes on earth. As Prof. Phil Hart, Chief Researcher at TII’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Research Centre, said, the baseline reality had shifted:
“Producing water is, in real terms, incredibly cheap. What else can you produce a 1m³ amount of for less than 3kW of power?”
That reality changed the problem. Energy efficiency still mattered, but it was no longer the only constraint. Cost, waste, and adoption increasingly shaped what was possible.
Over the last year, Hart and his team had been working on two parallel fronts: making desalination hardware materially better, and reducing the amount of water that needed to be produced in the first place. Both efforts started from the same assumption — water and energy were tightly linked, and marginal gains only mattered if they survived real infrastructure conditions.
The membrane problem that refused to go away
Desalination has spent decades pushing energy consumption down. Today’s systems were already close to physical limits. Hart was clear about what that implied:
“We’re already incredibly efficient, and squeezing additional energy reductions out is very challenging.”
That was why TII focused on changing the materials rather than fine-tuning existing designs. Over the past twelve months, the team validated a new class of membranes, fundamentally different from conventional approaches, first at the nanofiltration level and then at full reverse osmosis proof-of-concept.
The milestones were concrete. The nanofiltration product was set to enter full-scale trials over the summer, with a commercial launch targeted for late this year. Reverse osmosis versions were expected to follow shortly after. Hart said the gains were not theoretical:
“These offer the ability to retrofit into existing plant, increasing water production quite dramatically for the same energy input, whilst decreasing membrane replacement to almost zero over 20 years.”
That detail mattered. Membrane replacement and chemical sensitivity were quiet but significant cost drivers. A membrane that tolerated harsh chemical cleaning without degradation altered maintenance economics across an entire plant lifecycle. If the technology held up at scale, the real impact would not just be higher efficiency, but lower operational risk — the variable infrastructure operators optimised for most.
The cheapest water is the water you never make
The second strand of work was less visible but potentially more important in the Gulf. Agriculture remained the largest water consumer in the UAE, largely because sandy soils retained almost nothing. Irrigation compensated for geology.
TII’s soil enhancement material was designed to change that balance. In greenhouse trials, adding limited amounts of the material to untreated UAE sand reduced irrigation frequency from daily watering to once every four days — a 75% reduction in water use. Hart said the results went beyond expectations:
“These greenhouse tests exceeded our initial targets by an impressive amount.”
The additive also released fertiliser gradually, removing the need for additional soil enhancements during the crop cycle. Larger greenhouse and open-field trials were planned later this year, with the aim of showing that the results could be replicated across farms in Abu Dhabi.
The significance went beyond efficiency. Every cubic metre not demanded by agriculture was a cubic metre the desalination system did not need to produce, transport, or subsidise.
The waste stream nobody priced correctly
When desalination bottlenecks were discussed, energy usually dominated. Hart pointed to a different issue hiding in plain sight: brine.
Traditionally, concentrated brine was diluted and discharged back into the sea. As desalination scaled globally, this approach became both environmentally risky and economically wasteful.
“That waste brine stream is loaded with minerals and metals that are currently classed as waste products,” Hart said.
TII had been developing technology that selectively captured these materials, effectively turning desalination plants into resource recovery systems. Full-scale demonstrations were planned by the end of the year, installed on the back end of a working plant.
In some cases, Hart said the economics could flip entirely:
“We expect the value of these materials to exceed the cash value of the water produced in the original plant.”
That turned a damaging waste stream into a revenue generator and repositioned desalination as part of a broader resource system, not just a utility.
Why deployment, not science, is the real risk
Technically, all of these technologies were close to market. They were not blocked by materials supply, regulation, or cost curves. The constraint was slower and more human: risk appetite.
Infrastructure operators existed to deliver reliability, which made them cautious by design. Hart acknowledged that tension:
“We need to demonstrate any of our new tech at large enough scale and for long enough that they can judge the risk acceptable for introduction into their plant.”
That concern fed directly into his biggest uncertainty about the roadmap. If something went wrong, it was unlikely to be the science.
“Adoption rates,” Hart said. “We can provide technology that is significantly better than the current. But time to market is constrained by the risk appetite of our clients.”
Without shared testbeds and faster qualification pathways, even strong technology could stall. The risk was not failure, but delay — innovation sitting idle while the problems it could address continued to grow.
What this tells us about the future of water
What emerged from TII was not a single breakthrough, but a shift in priorities. There was less obsession with marginal energy gains, and more attention to lifecycle cost, waste recovery, and demand reduction.
Desalination would continue to expand, particularly in arid regions. The real question was whether it would remain a system that produced water and discarded everything else, or evolve into one that treated water, minerals, and energy as part of the same loop.
That outcome would depend less on membranes or materials, and more on whether institutions were willing to share risk — and move faster — with the engineers building the next generation of infrastructure.