Alexander Fuglesang

Alexander Fuglesang did not come to water from water. He grew up in a Norwegian family that has been in the pumping-systems business for five generations, started scuba diving at 15, crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat at 19, flies seaplanes, and then went off to Canada to study finance at the University of British Columbia. So when he talks about the ocean, it is not a pitch, it is the thing he has been around his whole life, and that matters for the company he ended up building.

Alexander Fuglesang spent roughly a decade before Flocean running FSubsea, the company he set up around 2013 to build subsea pumps for the oil and gas industry. The team designed what they describe as the world's first topside-less, sealless subsea pump, which is a meaningful detail because seals cause about 70 percent of pump failures, and they delivered more than 60 pump systems that helped operators pull extra oil out of wells that would otherwise have been abandoned at half full. Then the subsea-systems market consolidated from four players down to two, COVID hit, oil prices briefly went negative, and Fuglesang's board started looking for somewhere else to point a very good pump.

Alexander Fuglesang found that somewhere in desalination, and the route there is the whole story. FSubsea already had a client, SeaBox, doing subsea water treatment, and they had spent more than two years testing pumps together on the seabed, so the engineering fit was already proven. The insight was that the single most important component of a subsea desalination plant is, conveniently, a subsea pump. When the founder of SeaBox offered to do the pivot together, Flocean was demerged out of FSubsea in 2024 to chase water scarcity with what they had learned from oil and gas.

Alexander Fuglesang's pitch for going deep is mostly about energy, and it is worth walking through because it is counter-intuitive. A normal seawater reverse-osmosis desalination plant on land spends its energy upstream of the membrane, pressurising all the incoming seawater to force fresh water out. Flocean flips that: at 400 metres the seawater is already under enormous, free, predictable pressure, so the system only spends energy on the downstream side, pumping the finished fresh water back up to shore. The net effect, across the whole process, is roughly 1.9 to 2.1 kilowatt-hours per cubic metre against an industry benchmark of about 3 (the figure Global Water Intelligence published in January 2024), which is where the 30 to 50 percent energy saving comes from. And because you are below the surface, you get a free bonus, in his words, of no chemicals, no toxic brine, and 95 percent less land, plus immunity to the storms, algae blooms and jellyfish that shut conventional plants down.

Alexander Fuglesang is careful about where this works, and equally careful about not overclaiming. Flocean is not chasing the million-cubic-metre gigaplants of the Middle East. It targets land-scarce remote coastal areas and islands, where its modular 5,000-cubic-metre-a-day pods can stack up to a 50,000-cubic-metre system, and where the ocean is deep enough (400 metres within about 10 kilometres of shore) to make the marine infrastructure pay off. The technology earned Flocean a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2025, the only desalination system on the list, and pulled in Xylem, the Fortune 500 water company, as a strategic investor. His honest read on the bottleneck is the part I found most refreshing, because he is clear that the hard problem now is not the engineering but the financing:

“Subsea reverse osmosis works. It's proven from oil and gas in a much tougher environment. But then there's no premium for having environmentally friendly and resilient system.”

Alexander Fuglesang's plan from here is deliberately modest and very Norwegian about it: a first commercial demonstrator, Flocean One, going in at Mongstad on the country's own water-short west coast, then the Red Sea, and a target of more than five operational subsea desalination systems running by 2030, profitably and sustainably, because he is convinced that is the only way this actually scales.