CA: 12 Month Pilot Approved for Offshore Floating Desalination System

I bet you thought is was going to be those damn floating wind turbines again, didn’t you?

Honestly, so did I, as soon as I saw ‘offshore’, ‘floating’, and ‘Ft Bragg’, which is up the California coast about 275 north of San Francisco.

And then, this headline was just so wild, sucked me right in:

As the California Coastal Commission Looks for More “Blue Economy” Innovations, They Approve a 12 Month Pilot for a Fort Bragg Off-Shore, Floating, Wave-Powered Desalination System

WAIT, WHUT

It sounds too whacky Left coast to be true, but it’s certainly less intrusive than towers hundreds of feet tall tethered by chains thousands of feet long, all bobbing around like corks in an unforgiving Pacific. 

And it’s a real thing, not some pipe dream that’s going to be developed at gullible green taxpayer-expense.

Ocean waves could soon help solve Fort Bragg’s drought worries. The unit to be deployed off Noyo Harbor is the ninth generation of wave-powered desalination systems developed over seven years of ocean testing by Oneka. #cawater https://t.co/ngWnfjsjET

— Maven (@MavensNotebook) November 18, 2025

Fort Bragg and Mendocino County in general have been in a boom-and-bust cycle, from too much rain to severe drought over the past decade or so. Being California, no one in state government has done a thing to alleviate any of that distress by building the reservoirs they need or implementing the plans they’ve had on the books for decades to capture the runoff they do get in copious amounts when it comes. This system sounded worth pursuing.

…Fort Bragg city officials hope the system will provide a reliable source of freshwater during drought years.

Fort Bragg Public Works Director John Smith told the gathering, “Obviously, we are here for water. It has been a challenge for us in the 1970s. [Then] 2014 was the first wake-up call for us, pretty much we had no water in the river and only one reservoir. 2021 was also a bad year for us, extreme drought, and if you were living in town, you knew what the consequences of that were.”

So it seems locals are thinking outside the box, and a Canadian company called ‘Oneka’ (their site here) has been testing its desalination buoys off the coasts of places like Chile and Nova Scotia for almost 10 years now.

…“The Iceberg-class buoy is expected to produce roughly 13,200 gallons of freshwater per day during a 12-month trial. Freshwater will be piped to shore through a 3-inch line, and officials will monitor water quality and system performance,” [Oneka CEO and Co-Founder Dragan Tutic] he said.

“The project delivers a reliable supply of fresh water using clean, zero-emission energy, protects the environment by avoiding lead and employing a low-concentration, chemical-free design safe for marine life.” He explained that 60 sensors, including cameras, monitor the buoy’s performance and environmental impact.

The system uses a 60-micron mesh to filter out incoming debris. “To put it in perspective, 60 microns — or 0.06 millimeters — is even smaller than the mesh typically used for capturing fish larvae,” he said.

“Oneka’s freshwater technology does not require obtaining land-based operations,” Tutic said. “The unit that you see today is the same as the unit that was installed in Nova Scotia last fall, and it withstood waves converging at 20 feet on average and at extremes of 30 feet.”

I hope they did their homework on how high waves can get at that spot during a good Pacific storm.

The pilot project was awarded a $1.5M grant from the state to secure the go-ahead. The buoy, which will be stationed a half a mile offshore, requires no fuel or power other than wave action. 

…The membrane-based system, also known as reverse osmosis, works by pushing saltwater through a semi-permeable membrane, which catches the salt. This still requires a significant amount of energy, but less so than thermal.

In both cases, the energy supply more often doesn’t come from renewable sources or nuclear, and so contributes to carbon dioxide emissions.

Each technique also produces a waste stream of highly concentrated salt water or brine. If this is not properly diluted before being discharged back into the sea, then it can create “dead zones” – areas where the salt levels are too high to support marine life.

Oneka’s floating desalination machines – buoys anchored to the seabed – use a membrane system that is solely powered by the movement of the waves.

The buoys absorb energy from passing waves, and convert it into mechanical pumping forces that draw in seawater and push around a quarter of it through the desalination system. The fresh, drinking water is then pumped to land through pipelines, again only using the power provided by the waves.

“The tech uses no electricity,” says Ms Hunt. “It is 100% mechanically driven.”

The units require just one metre high waves to work, and the firm hopes that it will start to sell them commercially next year. They come in three sizes, the largest of which is 8m long by 5m wide, and can produce up to 49,000 litres (13,000 US gallons) of drinking water per day.

The brine that is produced is mixed back in with the three quarters of seawater that the buoys pull in but hasn’t gone through the membrane. This is then released back into the sea. “It’s only about 25% saltier than the original sea water,” says Ms Hunt. “It’s a much lower concentration of brine compared to traditional desalination methods.”

That part was pretty cool. If this one works out, plans would move ahead to install more of them.

…Oneka staff gave a walk-through tour of the “Iceberg-class buoy,” explaining how it converts seawater into freshwater. The unit to be deployed off Noyo Harbor is the ninth generation of wave-powered desalination systems developed over 10 years of ocean testing by Oneka. Its half-mile offshore site was carefully chosen to balance pumping efficiency, available wave energy, water depth for brine dispersion, and visual impacts.

The system requires no batteries, grid connections or fossil fuels. And the results of this pilot project will determine whether a larger array of wave-powered units could eventually supplement Fort Bragg’s municipal water supply.

The city and company will be watching the data for the next couple of years to see if it’s up to snuff. The buoy should be deployed by this spring with the system up and running this summer.

…Fort Bragg City Manager Isaac Whippy:  We got  [$1,490,000] from the California State Department of Water Resources to fund this project. Next spring if all the permits go well, we will start to install the buoy moorings. We’re looking at next summer for the entire system to go live and be deployed for a 12-month trial period.  

We will be using that data, and part of our plan for the next five years is to see if this could supplement our current water supply. The trial period is primarily about learning, gathering data, and studying the science. 

Oneka seems to have some cutting-edge thinking going on in the company. Not only with the wave desalination plants, but also utilizing wave energy for electricity generation or even as a source of power for locomotion someday, like sailing vessels. Although I would argue with this enthusiast’s assertion that wave energy is ‘consistent’ and ‘predictable.’

Only when it wants to, and when the conditions are favorable. It can get quite nasty with very little warning.

But yeah, most of the time waves do always roll in, unlike the wind dropping off completely and night coming on.

A Canadian company just cracked the code on harvesting ocean wave energy with a device the size of a shipping container. Here’s why this could revolutionize maritime shipping.

Oneka Technologies has developed floating wave energy converters that generate fresh water and… pic.twitter.com/0Y6ixQX2Si

— Ricky (@TwoBitDaVinci) November 9, 2025

…Oneka Technologies has developed floating wave energy converters that generate fresh water and electricity simultaneously. Their modular buoys use wave motion to power reverse osmosis desalination systems, producing up to 50,000 liters of drinking water daily while generating clean electricity. The genius lies in the simplicity – no complex machinery, just smart engineering that works with nature’s rhythm.

Early deployments off Chile and the Bahamas are already proving the concept works in real ocean conditions. The scalability is incredible – imagine cargo ships powered by the very waves they create, or coastal communities getting both power and fresh water from a single offshore installation.

This breakthrough tackles two massive global challenges at once: clean energy and water scarcity. Wave energy is consistent, predictable, and available 24/7 unlike solar or wind.

This sort of thing is always so interesting, even for a hard-core renewable skeptic, like me. My problem has always been that when renewables flame out, as they invariably do, it was our money they lit on fire.

Oneka has received Biden Department of Energy grants – one in 2023 for $3.4M – but is so far still standing in a far harsher economic climate for green tech companies. 

If they really have a viable product that does what it claims, this is, as I said, quite cool.

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