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by pclmulqdq 610 days ago
This idea of extracting water from air keeps coming back, but every time someone tries it, they learn of the same thermodynamic limits. It is extremely energy-intensive to extract water from the air, and it only really works if the climate is humid enough that there is water in the air to extract. This is exactly what a dehumidifier does, and the off-the-shelf version you can buy at home depot is no more than 5-10x worse than the thermodynamic limits - those generate a pitiful amount of water for a lot of energy intake.
2 comments

Do we even need to extract the water? The point is to capture weight, and the only reason to liquefy the water is to store it more efficiently, by volume.

Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient, storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just compressing the hydrogen.

Or you try to capture water that's already condensed... cloud droplets.