Manhat’s Reservoir in the Sky

From childhood, Dr Saeed Alhassan Alkhazraji had the makings of an inventor. He’d tinker with the objects that needed fixing in his home – broken lights, pipes, even the car, while also being a star student, adept at both the arts and the sciences.

Like many high-performing students from the UAE, he went on to study engineering, moving to the US for his degrees. “I did my PhD and I had the utmost enjoyment out of the discovery and analysis of new phenomenon and creating new things,” he says.

“I'm curious in nature - which means that I will not be able to be happy if I become only a merchant, just buying and selling stuff.”

Even as he was seeking a curiosity-driven life devoted to innovation, there was also a moment of reckoning. He says, “You ask yourself an existential question - what is the point of accumulating this knowledge?”

The cliché came to mind – if knowledge is power, then with power comes responsibility. Dr Alhassan says, “I evolved slowly towards – if I invent this solution and I know it can help people, it is a responsibility to actually try your best to bring it to the market to change people’s lives.”

For Dr Alhassan, it’s solving one of the world’s most crucial environmental crises -  water scarcity. And in a country like the UAE, where the air is thick with moisture-rich humidity year-round, he had the perfect solution. Enter Manhat, Dr Alhassan’s innovative start-up designed to actually turn humidity into viable water resources.

The Manhat dream was ignited when Dr Alhassan watched a National Geographic documentary in 2012 that explored human survival in challenging conditions. In it, Tibetan tribes were shown to collect and save ice for the winter to use during summers; Algerian nomads dug horizontal wells to access water.

But it was one example that piqued his interest the most; in Chile, people would install fabrics on top of the misty high mountains to collect the fog that would drift in from the Pacific Ocean. “It caught my attention that people have to climb up the mountain to collect that water. And obviously there are a plethora of examples of people walking, running, riding horses, donkeys, and they go to the distances for water sources.”

In fact, women and girls alone spend 200 million hours gathering water every single day.

Not only do over 2.2 billion people globally lack access to safely managed water services, but from 1990 to 2019, women in households without running water spent an average of 22.84 minutes every day collecting water.

As a child of the UAE’s desert climates, he was intimately aware of the water challenges at home. In fact, the Middle East is the most water-stressed region in the world, with almost all countries at critical levels as per the UN - using more than 100% of their naturally available renewable water sources annually. Meanwhile, global groundwater levels are depleting further, leaving many farmers without water for irrigation.

“Despite the availability of rain, it’s still not enough to recharge these aquifers so they can actually have more water,” he says, describing the region’s situation. “Effectively, here, we’re withdrawing from our saving accounts to the point that now there’s no more saving accounts.”

Desalination, a primary source of water, also posed problems - the continuous deposition of salt could salinise and degrade soil quality over the years. “I know that local farms here in the UAE are suffering from that because while they receive good quality water, it still has some salt,” Dr Alhassan explains.

His mind whirring with ideas to help solve the water crisis, Dr Alhassan developed a technology to produce water from humidity, which was patented under Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, where he still works as a professor. A few years later, in 2019, he founded Manhat, a deep technology startup, to sell this product.

“We are developing a technology that places the device on open water surfaces, whether it's the ocean, a river or a pool of useless water or wastewater, and the water will evaporate and give us the purest form of water,” he says.

One investment. A lifetime supply of free water sourced from the atmosphere.

Manhat’s process not only mimics the natural water cycle but can generate water without using electricity, producing salt or emitting CO2. This water can then be utilised to irrigate crops for farming or permanent trees, fighting desertification and biodiversity loss, explains Dr Alhassan.

“I started from the idea of water production. I was in love with the idea and the simplicity of the solution. I liked the engineering, the science was fantastic. I thought that's it. We’ve got a winner.”

“We wanted to be the go-to solution for farming purposes because, for a lot of farmers in areas like the Arab region, water remains the biggest issue.”

Dr Alhassan is undeterred by challenges, however.

“The main reason why I'm doing this is if you know something that will help humanity, then it's important to try as hard as we can to bring it to the market and help the environment and the intricate balance between us and nature. We are not the only occupants of this earth,” he says. While Dr Alhassan forges forward with his dream, he also dedicates his time to teaching and other research, inspired by the joy of discovery.

Once the pilot for floating farms is released shortly, Dr Alhassan hopes to reach the world with this solution. “Our water solution can be adaptable. It can be scalable. It is decentralised. Anyone really can go to the desert and get any type of water and start growing crops using our technology.”

“Because once you have water, the sky is the limit.”