FIGARO DEMAIN – The company, which has three university research centers and twelve doctors of science, has filed forty-two patents.
In Tel Aviv
Would you like a glass of air? No, it’s not magic. The Israeli company Watergen transforms air into water by capturing ambient humidity.
“And the result is closer to mineral water than tap water, because we remineralize the water: you can make Evian in California, without a plastic bottle,” launches Steve Elbaz, vice-president of the company, in perfect French. And this regardless of whether the ambient humidity is 20% or 99%, and the temperature is 15°C or 50°C.
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The company’s history dates back to 2009, when a billionaire bought their air dehumidifier technology from three Israeli university professors by asking them to produce water. After years of research and development, Watergen launched its first system in 2016. The principle is simple: the air is sucked in and purified before being sent to a condensation chamber where the steam is transformed into drinking water. Today, the company, which has three university research centers and twelve doctors of science, has filed forty-two patents. Different models, of varying size, can produce from 20 liters to 6,000 liters per day.
“We reinvented the air exchanger to generate a lot of water with little energy,” launches Steve Elbaz. This earned Watergen an award for its innovation at the CES (Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas in 2019 and 2020. This is a real improvement compared to existing processes, which consume a lot of energy for the same result. And all the more so as its use can be coupled with solar panels. Not to mention the size, the smallest unit that can fit in a car trunk. This allows it to equip vehicles such as vans, caravans, buses, trains and even boats with water. Several partnerships were sealed with car manufacturers such as Skoda, which got the ball rolling.
Helping affected populations
Enough to allow the wildest dreams to water the desert areas of the planet. Widely deployed in Africa, but also in Colombia, Vietnam or Panama, the process comes to the aid of affected populations during natural disasters such as Hurricane Irma, in 2017, in Saint-Martin, the vast floods of 2017 in India or the 2018 summer fires in California. Prince Albert of Monaco even offered to offer in October 2020 to the disaster areas of Vésubie the unit which had been offered to him in 2019, but this was not possible, for lack of approval by the French services.
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Watergen, which serves Syrian refugee camps through the All-Faith Alliance for Syrian Refugees, is also one of the few Israeli companies operating in the Gaza Strip. Via NGOs like Damour, it makes agreements with municipalities in this Palestinian enclave to equip them with water generators.
With 135 employees and eight production lines on four continents, the company, which has equipped Microsoft offices since May 2022, is experiencing exponential growth in more than eighty countries. “The United States and Europe are asking us more, with the drought. Moreover, it is a way to address European concerns about plastic bottles.believes the leader of Watergen, who is considering opening a new factory in Europe.