Converting Earth’s abundant saltwater resources into fresh water has become an urgent matter in the face of climate change. But while desalination technologies have existed for decades, these systems, says Adam Uliana, are often too expensive, wasteful, and polluting to be a viable solution to the global water crisis.

Uliana ’17 Eng is CEO and co-founder of ChemFinity Technologies, a startup pioneering a new desalination technology that may hold the key to unlocking Earth’s oceans—97% of the planet’s water is saline—for human consumption. After graduating from Penn State with a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, Uliana earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researched membranes used in desalination systems to filter salt and other toxins found in salt water. In 2022, Uliana co-founded ChemFinity to commercialize the technology with support from the Breakthrough Energy’s Innovator Fellows program, which provides grants to entrepreneurs working on cutting-edge climate technologies. He and his team have been building a commercial prototype of his desalination membrane, which can be chemically “tuned” to selectively remove salt and other pollutants found in ocean and wastewater with a single filter. Moreover, the membrane can capture critical minerals that can be repurposed for electric vehicles and other clean technologies. This reduces the cost and complexity of desalination and eliminates much of its main pollutant, brine.

“Water scarcity is a huge issue everywhere, and we need to move toward sustainable water systems,” says Uliana. “With our membrane, we’re trying to achieve the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time.”

Uliana hopes that the membrane will soon be deployed in a pilot project to demonstrate its effectiveness in a real-world commercial system. Before the end of the decade, ChemFinity hopes to deploy its system around the world to help communities dealing with water crises. —Daniel Oberhaus