Deep Ocean Desalination with Flocean's Alexander Fuglesang

Alexander Fuglesang is the founder of Flocean, a Norwegian water technology company pioneering subsea desalination to deliver fresh water from the deep ocean.

What led you to found Flocean?

I was born and raised in Norway and have been passionate about the ocean and water since I was a kid. I started scuba diving at 15, crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat at 19 and am a seaplane pilot. My family business dealt with advanced pumping systems, so I grew up in the workshop getting nerdy on subsea systems. We supplied equipment to submarines and to oil and gas companies.

After studying in Canada  and working for a venture capital fund, I came back to the family business with a clear goal. I wanted to work on deep ocean technology, do something good for people and the planet, and build a business around it. We had been supplying clients in oil and gas who needed to inject treated seawater into reservoirs to force more oil and gas up. To do that, you need to remove sulfate from the seawater, which is similar to removing other salts. We developed some of those capabilities with a client of ours called Seabox. We continued to optimize that technology and pivoted toward solving an even bigger problem, which is drinking water supply.

How does conventional desalination work, and where does it fall short?

Current desalination methods have been around commercially since the early 1970s and are fundamentally quite inefficient. You extract seawater, mostly from the ocean surface, and pump it up to a land-based plant. Roughly half your facility is dedicated to pretreating that water so it can be desalinated. You have to remove particles, biology, plankton, and all the things happening in surface water using four different chemicals like flocculants, coagulants, disinfectants, and antiscalants.

Then you pump that water with very high pressure to force it through a reverse osmosis membrane. About 40 percent comes through as fresh water. The remaining 60 percent becomes waste that gets dumped back into the ocean, which is neither cost-effective nor environmentally friendly. You're dumping water that is twice as salinated, often co-mingled with chemicals, back into shallow waters where corals, seagrass, and other organisms live. They are not happy about that. The process is energy intensive, costly, land intensive, and harmful to ocean biodiversity.

How does Flocean's deep ocean approach solve these problems?

Once you go into the deep ocean, your raw material is pristine. You have stable, clean, and already pressurized seawater. We can build standardized modules that see the same conditions 365 days a year. There are no storms, algae blooms, river runoff, or seasonal variations at our depth. You get a boring but clean and reliable set of input conditions.

We take that naturally pressurized water and generate suction pressure through the membrane with a much smaller pump, saving 30 to 50 percent of the energy that would have been used in conventional desalination. We just push the fresh water to shore. We're harvesting fresh water without using any chemicals. The water that comes back is only about 20 percent more salinated and immediately mixes with the surrounding deep water rather than forming a concentrated plume. We don't take up any land area. And because we use so much less energy, we reduce the climate impact, especially in coastal ecosystems and islands that typically run on diesel or other fossil fuels.

At what depth does the desalination process take place?

We prefer a minimum of 400 meters, roughly 1,300 feet, of water depth. From a cost perspective, we like to be within 10 kilometers of shore, though technically we could go much further. That range is the commercial sweet spot.

What are the biggest technical challenges of operating in the deep ocean?

Most of our challenges are related to having a multidisciplinary system that operates autonomously for long periods. It is usually much more expensive to retrieve something from the deep ocean than it is to build it, because you depend on very expensive ships. So the biggest challenge is having a fully functional system that lasts for months and years without any maintenance.

That dictates our design philosophy, our operational approach, and our installation and retrieval procedures. We need to test every single washer, bolt, and pressure sensor rigorously before we put it down there. This is where our oil and gas legacy is invaluable. We come from a culture of subsea reliability and have the tools and expertise to do it. That industry essentially paid for the R&D, and now we can deploy it for another market without having to pay for it again.

Where does Flocean stand commercially today?

Our first commercial unit is being built right now, literally 20 meters behind me. It's being shipped to a municipality on the west coast of Norway in a few weeks, and we'll do testing and installation over the next few months. In parallel, we have about 20 active dialogues with potential customers around the world. We're getting more incoming inquiries than we can handle and are trying to be systematic about prioritizing regions. We have four or five serious negotiations for commercial deployments on the back of this first unit. Europe and the Mediterranean are key target areas, and we'll expand further as time goes on.

Most of our customers are municipalities or governments looking for a source of fresh water. Reverse osmosis produces the purest, highest-quality water available and automatically removes microplastics and PFAS. We're also seeing corporate interest from semiconductor manufacturers and data centers to clusters of resorts with irrigation needs. Agricultural applications are coming in the longer term as well.

We're also excited about our partnership with Xylem, one of the largest water technology companies. They offered our deep ocean desalinated water to their network at an event in Davos a few weeks ago. We've been running water through a prototype since November 2024, so bottling it and letting people taste it is a powerful way to demystify subsea desalination and show that this is real. We’ve also been recognized by TIME as a best invention of 2025 and we are one of the select few winners of the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Water Resiliency Challenge. We know this is still frontier technology, but we think people are starting to take notice!

What is the long-term vision for Flocean?

We believe the future of fresh water is subsea. We can't solve every water problem this way, but for coastal ecosystems and islands with access to depth, the potential is enormous. There are 95 countries in the world with coastlines that have this depth and serious water scarcity. We have examples of our system coming in at one-seventh of the capital cost of a traditional diesel-powered desalination plant for the same volume. This isn't an environmental premium product. It's more cost effective and more environmentally friendly, and those two things together are extremely powerful.

Scaling subsea desalination will be easier than scaling conventional desalination in some respects because we're actually helping biodiversity along the way. When you build out solar or other renewable projects, you sometimes fight biodiversity by consuming land area. We have the added benefit of not releasing brine into shallow waters and not building on any land.

Water is also a market where supply decreases every year. NASA recently published satellite data showing that groundwater is disappearing globally. The UN has released multiple reports highlighting the growing scarcity of freshwater, recently declaring that we have entered an era of global water bankruptcy. Meanwhile, demand keeps growing, driven by population growth, industrial expansion, and the rise of CPU-intensive AI data centers. That supply-demand gap is widening every single year, and in some regions it's growing exponentially.

How do you define deep tech?

Deep tech for us is doing something truly unique that's going to have a huge impact. Obviously we're physically going deep, which is the added element. We're using the deep ocean to be truly nature-based. But deep tech is also about having the guts to see into the future and develop a market that doesn't yet exist. Even though desalination is established, we have to reframe the mindset of our customers because subsea desalination is a fundamentally different proposition. So for us, deep tech is being literally deep, doing something unique, and creating a blue ocean market all at the same time.

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