Desalination Device Could Mean Fresh Water for All [VIDEO]

A month after 500 of the world's leading water scientists issued the stark warning that in two generations, the majority of humanity will be facing a shortage of fresh water, researchers have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques.

Capable of running off of a store-bought battery, the process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt and water at a microscale.

The technique is called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination and was described in the journal Angewandte Chemie. It works by applying a small voltage to a plastic chip filled with seawater and a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an "ion depletion zone." This increases the local electric field in comparison to the rest of the channel enough to redirect salts into one branch and the desalinated water through another.

"The neutralization reaction occurring at the electrode is key to removing the salts in seawater," Kyle Knust, a graduate student in Crooks' lab and first author on the paper, said in a press release.

In a way, the ion depletion zone is like a guard focused on preventing salt from passing through.

At this point, the method is able to reduce 25 percent desalination, and while drinking water requires 99 percent desalination, the researchers say they are confident that they can achieve this goal.

"This was a proof of principle," Knust said. "We've made comparable performance improvements while developing other applications based on the formation of an ion depletion zone. That suggests that 99 percent desalination is not beyond our reach."

Going forward, the team is determined to make this happen sooner rather than later.

Approximately one-third of the world's inhabitants currently live in a water-stressed area, according to the researchers, who add that many people have access to abundant seawater but not the energy infrastructure or financial resources to desalinate water using current methods.

As a result, some 3.4 million people die every year due to water-related causes, Water.org reports.

"People are dying because of a lack of freshwater," said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. "And they'll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent."