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All the Water We Need: How Aquaria Makes Drinking Water From Air (Water you talking about? Pt.1)
The atmosphere holds around 13,000 cubic kilometers of water, roughly seven times more than all the world's rivers combined, and that supply replenishes approximately every week. Aquaria harvests this humidity to produce drinking water that contains no PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals, or agricultural runoff from the outset.
When people first hear about atmospheric water generation, the obvious question is whether there's actually enough water in the air to draw on. The numbers say there is — by a wide margin. At any given moment, the atmosphere holds roughly 13,000 cubic kilometers of water, about seven times the volume of every river on Earth combined. And because the water cycle replenishes through evaporation and rainfall on roughly a weekly basis, that supply continuously renews itself.
In this Part 1 of "Water you talking about?", Aquaria co-founder Eric explains why the air is also a uniquely clean starting point. Contaminants like PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals, and agricultural runoff don't bond to water molecules in vapor form — so water harvested from humidity arrives without them. Aquaria still runs the output through an additional filtration stage to catch anything from local air, but the baseline is already cleaner than groundwater, river water, or desalinated seawater.
The reason this hasn't been a mainstream water source until now isn't physics, it's necessity — and demand for a renewable, consistent supply is finally driving the technology forward.
[00:05] So, we're pulling water out of the air, but how much of it is actually in the air and how much can we pull out of it? It's a great question. So, around the world in the air around us, there's about 13,000 cubic kilometers of water, which is about 5.16 billion Olympic-size swimming pools. If we're still not getting there, that's about seven times more water in the air than there is in all the rivers on this planet combined.
[00:35] The water cycle, which evaporation, condensation into rain, happens about every single week. So, this water supply in the air is constantly replenishing and constantly renewing itself. So, the water we get from the air is clean because we start with a clean source. To the degree of every source of water that we experience today, certain levels of filtration is required depending on where it came from.
[01:01] When you start with seawater, you need to go through many steps of reverse osmosis because uh before it becomes consumable, just like when you pull from a river or you pull from a glacier melting, it there's different levels of filtration. Because we start from humidity, we're starting from a source that does not contain any contaminants that we find in the sources that are traditionally around us.
[01:23] There's no PFAS, there's no microplastics, there's no heavy metal contamination, there's no agricultural runoffs because well, those cannot latch itself onto water molecules in the air. So, we're already starting from a clean source. After we make the water, we yet still put it through a filtration process because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that regardless of what is in the air perhaps, there's smoke around there, we want to eliminate everything.
[01:52] The reason we haven't tapped into this source historically is because well, necessity is the mother of all innovation. We have looked, you know, whether we know it or not, there is other technologies that can harvest moisture in the air. We have fog nets, but fog nets aren't reliable. They can only capture so much water.
[02:12] What we need in today's world is a consistent, renewable, sustainable source of water. Just think, the glass of water you're drinking from could have been a cloud over the Amazon the week prior.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much water is actually in the air around us?
A: There is approximately 13,000 cubic kilometers of water in the atmosphere at any given time. To put that in perspective, that is roughly 5.16 billion Olympic-size swimming pools, or about seven times more water than exists in all of the world's rivers combined. This makes the atmosphere a significant and largely untapped freshwater resource.
Q: Does atmospheric water replenish itself or will it run out?
A: The atmospheric water supply constantly replenishes itself through the water cycle. Evaporation and condensation cycle approximately every single week, meaning the source is continuously renewed. This makes it a sustainable and renewable supply compared to groundwater aquifers, which can take centuries to refill.
Q: Is water made from air actually clean?
A: Yes, water harvested from atmospheric humidity starts from a cleaner source than most traditional water supplies. Contaminants like PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals, and agricultural runoff cannot attach to individual water molecules suspended in the air, so they are absent from the start. Aquaria then runs the collected water through an additional filtration process to remove anything that might be present in local air, such as smoke particles.
Q: How does atmospheric water compare to desalination or river water in terms of filtration needed?
A: Atmospheric water requires less intensive filtration than seawater or river water. Desalination requires multiple reverse osmosis stages before water is safe to drink, and river or glacier-melt water also needs significant treatment. Because atmospheric water starts from humidity with no dissolved contaminants, the filtration burden is substantially lower from the beginning.
Q: Does air-to-water technology contain PFAS or microplastics?
A: No. PFAS chemicals, microplastics, heavy metals, and agricultural runoff cannot bond to water molecules in their vapor state, so they are not present in water harvested directly from humidity. This is one of the core advantages Aquaria highlights over ground, surface, and desalinated water sources.
Q: Why haven't we been using air as a water source before now?
A: Historically, the need was not urgent enough to drive widespread innovation in this area. Existing technologies such as fog nets can capture some moisture from the air, but they are unreliable and limited in yield. The growing global demand for a consistent, renewable, and sustainable water source is what is now accelerating development of atmospheric water generation technology.
Q: Are fog nets a reliable way to collect water from the air?
A: No. Fog nets are an existing technology that can harvest moisture from the air, but they are not reliable and can only capture limited volumes of water. They depend on specific weather and geographic conditions, making them unsuitable as a consistent water supply for most communities or households.
