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One Quebec company’s desalination platforms are aiming to boost water supplies in drought- and wildfire-prone communities.
Two of the biggest wildfires in recent history — in Los Angeles and Maui, Hawaii — burned through areas a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. Firefighting efforts couldn’t make use of that ocean adjacency, though; saltwater isn’t ideal for fighting fires because it corrodes metal firefighting equipment and absorbs moisture from soil, hindering plant regeneration.
But what if water from the ocean could be used to help solve water shortages in times of drought and wildfires? Oneka Technologies, a small Quebec company that specializes in desalination plants, thinks it can — and it’s currently testing its biggest desalination platform in Barrington, Nova Scotia.
The Barrington Lake fire of May and June 2023, which destroyed some 60 structures and over 23,000 hectares of forest, was the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia’s history. As in Los Angeles and Hawaii, the fire was fueled by extremely dry weather due in part to climate change.
“We had three drought seasons in six years,” says Chris Frotten, chief administrative officer at the municipality of the district of Barrington, the southern-most point in Canada east of Ontario. “It was becoming more frequent, and we were trying Band-Aid approaches — helping people drill or dig new wells, and we had a water distribution system — but it just wasn't sustainable.”
Dry weather has been much more common over the past 10 years in this historically foggy, rainy rural area, Frotten says. “It's not something we had ever dealt with before—less snow in winter, less precipitation in summer. Water levels and water tables are much lower than they used to be.”
Enter Oneka, which was looking for an East Coast location to add to operations in Florida and Chile. The company was also searching for a place to test their largest unit, a desalination platform they call the Glacier class. Oneka refers to it as a buoy because it floats in one place, anchored to the ocean floor. It can produce 500 cubic metres, or about 500,000 litres, of fresh water per day.
The Glacier is still in the development stage, so when company researchers learned that the massively destructive wildfire added to the problem of chronically dry wells in Barrington, they offered the local government a chance to partner for a short trial run of the Glacier three kilometres off the coast.
The Glacier’s technology uses an onboard reverse osmosis process to produce freshwater. When seas are one metre (3 feet) or higher, the bobbing action draws in seawater. Then, seawater is strained through a special membrane that blocks salt from passing through. Freshwater is pumped to a holding reservoir on land through pipes on the seafloor; wave action powers the pumps. The unit requires no other power source and needs very little space on land; typical land-based desalination plants have a large footprint for the several steps required to complete the process.
The Glacier buoy is Oneka’s utility-scale desalination platform. The company also manufactures two other models: the small Ice Cube, which produces one cubic metre, or about 1,000 litres, a day, as well as the mid-sized Iceberg unit, designed for resorts that need to fill swimming pools and small coastal communities dealing with water shortages. It produces up to 50 cubic metres, or 50,000 litres, daily. Oneka's unit disposes of a byproduct of the process — the brine — offshore from multiple drainage points, unlike a typical plant, which discharges brine from one point, often in a shallow coastal area. Its brine is also considerably less salty than a conventional system — 30 to 50 per cent saltier than sea water, compared to up to 150 per cent saltier.
[The Glacier] can produce 500 cubic metres, or about 500,000 litres, of fresh water per day.
The Oneka Glacier Project in Barrington will take place in the summer of 2025. As part of the $14.1 million project, a local boat-building company, AF Theriault & Sons, is manufacturing the hull and structure of the buoy, while H2O Innovation is building the onboard desalination plant. Canada’s Ocean Super Cluster, an industry-led partnership of startups and mature organizations with a mission to develop ocean-based solutions to global problems, is providing half the funding. Project partners provide the other half.
Frotten knows that the near-shore location, the pipe route, and the onshore storage location will all be of interest to the community, particularly because commercial fishing is the primary economic activity in what is considered the lobster capital of Canada. Frotten and the municipality have supported two public consultation sessions and many more informal discussions in the community and on the wharves. To date, concerns are minimal. Frotten says of local fishers who provided feedback, “They wanted to avoid areas that were solid fishing grounds or in certain navigational lines or channels.”
If the Glacier proves itself in Barrington and elsewhere, these units could be life savers for billions of people and relieve pressure caused or intensified by climate change the world over. Some 2.4 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, live within 100 kilometres of the ocean. Over one billion people, or about 15 percent, live within 10 kilometres. Cities, tourism facilities, industry, and firefighters could all benefit from plentiful supplies of inexpensive freshwater.
As Frotten sees it, Barrington doesn’t have a choice. “Climate change has become something that we've had to address.”
Edited 3/20/25: A previous version of this story made an inaccurate claim regarding the amount of fresh water New Yorkers consume.
