Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have just invented a device that could have a huge impact on the worldwide population. It’s capable of extracting water from thin air, and more importantly from dry air.

Researchers from Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that their approach uses less power and works in drier climates than past attempts to extract water from the air. It uses materials made from metals that are mixed with organic compounds. This metal-organic framework results in powders that are porous enough to collect water vapor from the atmosphere.

Once the pores fill up with water, heat is applied to release the water. If this technology could be continually refined and developed, it could help many places around the globe where water is a precious resource.

“This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity,” said Omar Yaghi, one of two senior authors of the paper, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home ‘produces’ very expensive water.”

“One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household,” said Yaghi, who is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, a co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF. “To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalized water.”