Fight Canada’s Water Shortage With Fog

After I graduated from the University of Ottawa with my B.A. in business administration in 2015, I went on a backpacking trip around California. It turned out that my holiday coincided with the worst drought in the state’s history. Signs of the crisis were everywhere—lawns browned and burned, lakebeds dried up into cracked mudflats. The governor’s office lowered water usage limits by 25 per cent to protect the state’s supply, infuriating wealthy homeowners and golfers. I saw news reports about financially overleveraged farmers dying by suicide as their crops withered. And yet, when I got to San Francisco, I couldn’t see across the bay for all the fog. That was my eureka moment: the sky was full of water. Why couldn’t we use it to fight what was happening on the ground? 

Signs of Canada’s own draining water supply are all around us: worsening wildfires, prairie-wide droughts, stranded salmon and surging insurance premiums for farmers. Yet, to most Canadians, the liquid coming from our kitchen taps feels like an unlimited resource. Nearly nine million of us rely exclusively on the fresh water stored in underground aquifers, including everyone in P.E.I. The problem is that, globally, we’re now drawing water out of our aquifers much faster than they can be naturally replenished by rainfall. At the same time, we’re ignoring the abundant water hovering above us. Canada’s West Coast has the same fog that caught my attention in San Francisco; out east, clouds bursting with desalinated water roll in off the Atlantic. Man-made desalination plants are energy-intensive and expensive, so it’s cheaper and safer to let the clouds do the desalinating for us. It’s just a matter of getting that water to ground level.

Within a year of my California trip, I founded Permalution, a cleantech company that converts fog into fresh, usable water. Most of my family members are engineers, so they pitched in with the science; meanwhile, I retreated to my garage to cobble together hardware-store supplies into Permalution’s first fog-collecting prototype. Our current models are much more advanced: big polypropylene membranes that vaguely resemble tennis nets strung up on metal frames designed to bio-mimic the way tall conifer trees collect fog. In nature, it condenses into ever-larger water droplets on trees’ needles until gravity pulls them to earth. Unfortunately, since 2000, Canada has lost about 14 per cent of its conifer cover to logging and disease, causing a so-called “firmageddon” along the West Coast. Our collectors fill the gap.

Our team installs the units on islands and mountaintops and along coastlines—places where fog naturally passes through. Like the conifers, the collectors’ mesh condenses the fog into usable water, then gravity pulls the droplets down the membrane into a cistern, filter or irrigation system. A single unit with a 20-square-metre mesh network can gather up to 400 litres of water a day, while our industrial-sized units can get up to 2,000 litres a day. (For reference, the average Canadian uses just under 230 litres a day.) Our collectors can also run totally off-grid, making them ideal for remote applications. And in areas with solar panels and cell service, we can instantly upload collection data via meteorological sensors to the cloud—the digital kind. 

We’ve also created a Fog Atlas that uses mapping algorithms to find fog hotspots across the country, like the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. But even in drier, landlocked areas, like Jasper, fog collection provides an easy water source. (The elevation of the Rockies gives our machines access to cloud water that otherwise wouldn’t rain down.) We place radar sensors in those areas to measure the water quality, the number of litres we can accumulate per day and the ideal positioning for our units. 

Fog collection is a great tool for wildfire prevention in the country’s dry interior. Our off-grid collectors have fireproof membranes that can gather water for irrigation in high-risk areas or that can be stored in man-made reservoirs for later use. We’ve already successfully tested these techniques in Nayarit, Mexico, in an area of forest frequently devastated by fire. In 2019, Permalution partnered with the local government and secretary of sustainable development, first installing sensors to find the fog, then outfitting collectors in remote mountainous areas to gather and disperse water.

Though some progress has been made in the last 10 years, many Indigenous people across Canada are still living under boil-water advisories. Fog collection is one low-cost solution for reserves that don’t have access to fresh drinking water because of drought or contamination. During the pandemic, Permalution consulted with First Nations communities in Canada and Latin America—not only to create more abundant household-water sources, but also as a way to develop new economic opportunities. (For example, First Nations could use fog water sourced from their land to manufacture new food, beverage and cosmetic products.)

In the private sector, fog collection can support plenty of water-reliant industries. Currently, many Canadian mining operations have to truck in water for ore processing and cooling machinery if their dig sites don’t have access to a natural water source nearby. In the long run, fog collection is cheaper than the trucks; after the initial investment of buying the collectors ($40,000 to start), they require minimal maintenance. It’s also safer than drilling for groundwater, which risks contaminating aquifers and causing land subsidence—when the ground around wells begins to sink as they’re drained. 

Fog collection could also reduce the strain on community water reserves. Data centres—which store the computing devices used to power AI tools—are notoriously thirsty, and the artificial intelligence boom is only increasing that demand. In Virginia, the data-centre capital of the world, water usage increased from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons between 2019 and 2023. Our fog collectors could process some of the steam these centres generate, gathering water that could be sent right back into the local supply. As another example, fog collectors could be quite helpful for breweries. We consulted with one company who told us that, depending on the brewing process, a litre of beer sometimes requires a litre of water to make, so reliable access is a key component of their business model. And who wouldn’t want to try a fog lager? 

The number of future applications for fog collection is huge. Right now, our team is working with the University of Toronto on a hybrid collector with solar panels—to catch water when it’s cloudy and rays when it’s sunny. We’re finding ways to pair our machines with cloud-seeding technology, where planes and ground generators encourage precipitation by dropping and shooting silver iodide into the sky. My ultimate dream is for our collectors to provide water to five million people within the next five years—many of them in Canada. We need to take better advantage of the liquid gold trapped in our vast northern sky.

Tatiana Estevez is the founder and CEO of Permalution, a cleantech firm based in Montreal.