World News

Flocean to Launch the First Commercial Subsea Desalination Plant in Mongstad, Norway

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Flocean has finalised plans to launch the world’s first commercial subsea desalination plant at Mongstad, Norway’s largest offshore supply base and a key industrial hub on the country’s west coast. The project is located in the Fensfjorden area—one of the most important marine corridors in the region.

With permits approved by the Norwegian Coastal Authorities, the project is moving full speed ahead. First water is scheduled for the first half of 2026. This is no longer a concept or a prototype. This is real infrastructure – underwater.

Built for Real-World Performance
This next step builds directly on the success of the Flocean Zero installation, which has been delivering clean, drinkable water from ~500 metres below the surface at Mongstad since November 2024. That system showed, for the first time, that subsea desalination is not just technically feasible—it can be operated reliably at scale.

Subsea desalination demands a fundamentally different engineering approach than traditional land-based desalination plants – integrating high-pressure fluid dynamics, advanced subsea robotics, marine-grade materials and systems designed to operate autonomously for long durations in extreme environments.

Flocean is one of the few teams in the world qualified to do this work. Its engineering foundation comes from deep experience in offshore energy, subsea robotics and modular marine systems – skills traditionally reserved for oil and gas but now redirected toward planetary water resilience.

By operating at depth, the systems use the ocean’s natural pressure as a free energy source, eliminating the need for massive surface infrastructure or high-pressure pumps. That means:

  • 40% less energy consumption
  • 95% less land footprint
  • No toxic brine discharge 
  • Unaffected by storms, hurricanes, flooding and algal blooms
  • Improved physical protection 

Flocean’s philosophy is simple: use the ocean’s natural conditions as an advantage, not an obstacle. The result is a scalable, environmentally friendly path to global freshwater.

Backed by bold partners
This wouldn’t be possible without an incredible coalition of partners and supporters helping bring subsea desalination into the commercial era:

Asset Buyout Partners, Alver Kommune, Siemens Energy, NLI AS, Reach Subsea, SAS Airaro, Burnt Island Ventures, Freebird Partners LP, Nysnø Climate Investments, Katapult Ocean, Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.