San Diego-Based Water Farm 1 Aims to Move Freshwater Production Under the Sea

Some four miles off the coast, a company is betting it can solve one of desalination’s biggest problems by moving the technology deep below the ocean’s surface.

OceanWell’s planned Water Farm 1 would use natural ocean pressure to power reverse osmosis — a process that forces seawater through membranes to filter out salt and impurities — and produce up to 60 million gallons of freshwater daily. Desalination is energy intensive, with plants worldwide producing between 500 and 850 million tons of carbon emissions annually — approaching the roughly 880 million tons emitted by the entire global aviation industry.