On the day of the drought we highlight Chileans Enzo García and Tomás Acuña, creators of Bloom Alert, a technology that seeks to maximize water desalination processes in the world and which has just been awarded the prestigious 'MIT Water Innovation Prize' for its innovative solution.
With global warming, more and more areas are becoming water-stressed and scientists are predicting longer and longer periods of drought. This will not only affect nature, but is already affecting millions of people: more than 40% of the world's population does not have access to safe drinking water for drinking, sanitation and hygiene.
That is why more and more people are betting that the solution to water scarcity lies in the sea: desalination. Every day, some 300 million people around the world depend on desalinated water for their survival. This supply is provided by more than 18,000 desalination plants around the world, with a production capacity of approximately 95.4 million cubic meters (m3) of fresh water per day.
In this context, Chileans Enzo García and Tomás Acuña, convinced that Chile must position itself as a leader in desalination in the Americas, created in 2018 "Bloom Alert", an innovative software that they make available to desalination plants to predict coastal pollution events - oil spills, wastewater discharge, the irruption of red tide, among others - that threaten and seriously affect desalinated water production.
This innovation is attracting the world's attention after winning the MIT Water Innovation Prize in May, a prestigious international innovation contest organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which annually awards up to US$35,000 to emerging entrepreneurs who develop innovative solutions for the water industry. With this award, they became the first Latin American team to reach the final and be crowned champion of the renowned competition.
How does it work?
The computer program analyzes oceanographic information provided by NASA and European Space Agency satellite missions and complements this data with satellite observations from the last 20 years. This process allows Bloom Alert to predict threatening events for the operation of desalination plants up to 14 days in advance.
What "Bloom Alert" could have prevented
To exemplify the usefulness of this system, its creators refer to their home city: Antofagasta, which in March 2011 faced one of the most serious sanitary crises in its history after a failure in one of the city's desalination plants caused the supply of drinking water to 200,000 people to be cut off for several days. It was later determined that the episode had been caused by an explosive outcrop of microalgae on the Antofagasta coast, in the context of a red tide episode. Today, Enzo García, assures that the service interruption could have been avoided if the operators of the desalination plant had had Bloom Alert technology to foresee the occurrence of the natural phenomenon and take the contingency measures indicated by the platform.
Bloom Alert has already completed its first pilot project with the largest desalination plant in Latin America, located in the Antofagasta Region, securing 20% of Chile's desalinated water production. Today they are looking to extend their business model throughout the Americas and the Middle East, where approximately half of the world's desalination plants are located.
To learn more about this innovative solution for the water industry visit their website.