Yale Environment 360: A ferry plows along San Francisco Bay, trailing a tail of churned up salt, sand, and sludge and further fouling the already murky liquid that John Webley intends to turn into drinking water. But Webley, CEO of a Bay Area start-up working on a new, energy-skimping desalination system, isnt perturbed.
Look at the color of this intake, he says, pointing to a tube feeding brown fluid into a device the size of a home furnace. There, through a process called forward osmosis, a novel solution the...