Article by George Van Hal, published on de Volksrant on April 18th, 2025.
de Volkskrant: ‘Everyone will soon be able to provide their own water’
de Volkskrant features an interview with Professor Omar Yaghi, highlighting his pioneering work on reticular materials that can extract drinking water from extremely dry air, with the goal of enabling everyone to produce their own water supply.
Omar Yaghi with a prototype of his invention in Death Valley in the United States.
Born in 1965 in Amman, Jordan, as the sixth of ten children, his parents gave him an important task in his youth. ‘Fresh water only arrived in our city once every two weeks. That always happened early in the morning. I would be the first to get up, open all the taps and make sure our reservoir was filled. Our family had to last two weeks with that water,’ he says. ‘As a result, I was aware at a young age of the enormous preciousness of every drop.’
Fast forward to now, and Yaghi, who moved to the US at the age of 15, is a professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley and one of the most cited chemists on the planet. The reason for the latter? His development of materials with the promise of making the kind of water scarcity of his childhood a memory worldwide.
And that while the problems with water are only increasing so far. By 2050, three out of four people would have to deal with the consequences of drought, according to experts from the United Nations last year.
Yaghi recently presented his solution at Aquatech in the RAI in Amsterdam, the most important trade fair in the field of drinking water and wastewater in the world. In recent decades, he has developed very porous materials that he abbreviated with the sound of an incantation to appease the water gods: MOFs, COFs and ZIFs.
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