A Startup Confronts Water Shortages by Pulling It Out of the Air

The large metallic white box sits in a Southern California parking lot, looking unremarkable until water starts flowing from a hose attached to it. Peer inside, though, and it’s nearly empty but for some wires, tubes and a container of light-colored material.

The water isn’t being conjured out of thin air by magic but by MOFs— metallic organic frameworks. MOFs are nanocrystalline structures engineered at an atomic level to attract specific molecules. In this case that’s H2O and the machine made by startup Atoco is silently harvesting molecules from the surrounding air and storing them in the material’s porous cavities that serve ...