The Water Entrepreneur Podcast的动态

Transcript

Well, we're here at WEFTEC 2024 in New Orleans at the AMS booth. We're finishing up the third day. Lots of very interesting conversations that we've had with with various folks about. Training difficult to treat contaminants and I'm here with Rick Bacon now. And Rick how you doing? Great to see you again. Yeah, it's, it's been a long three days. It's been a long three days where we've worked hard and we played a little, as one does in NOLA. Absolutely, absolutely. So you know, one, first of all, I wanted to, you know, thank you for sponsoring the water entrepreneur here at WEFTEC I I think it's been real successful on both sides. We want to appreciate that. So we've been interviewing a number of companies and presenters about, you know, treating difficult to treat contaminants. What are some of the things you've learned, you know, from listening to some of these conversations with, you know, some of them are your competitors, some of them are engineers. You know that we had a mixed bag of folks. What do you think? And I think obviously PFAS has sort of dominated the conference, whether it's the number, the percentage of papers given on PFAS or the number of exhibitors here where the PFAS something is on their their poster. The other part of that is that I think the broad range of approaches. I'd find it very difficult on the the consumer end to decide between an extraction technology of one sort or another, or an absorption technology or distruction technology. So I think that if I was on the I need to treat the PFAS, I find it very, very confusing. I think the other thing that's left sort of unaddressed is that there's a lot of what we call extraction, so capture technology, which is great, but then what do you do with what you've captured? And I think that's it's an unwritten concern, but it's, it's out there. So if you think about I'm going to spend $1 million on capturing it the capital, 4 million a year on the sort of OPEX. It's like 20 million on the back end. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. Yeah, it's interesting because almost everything is a multi step process. You, you pull it out, you, you know, dry it up, you send it someplace else, you destroy it, you landfill what's left over. I mean it. And that's I think part of. With the customer maybe doesn't understand is just treating for it isn't the end of it. And so some of the solution providers we've talked to are end to end and some of them are just one of those steps. And and so that's like another interesting piece about, you know, maybe what, what do you think is the best way to go about it? You know, entering this or being in this business, do you think it should be a full on service provider? Do you think you should have one piece of the puzzle and then partner with somebody who does say the destruction side? What do you think about that? If you look at all those technologies, they're quite different and I think it's very difficult for one company to have all of that. I think there's some very good players in the, call it, extraction, capture technology, very different and that has different implications for then how you destroy and whether it's even destroyable. And I think that that's going to get uncovered over the next couple of years. Our position is very much on the destruction end of things. And so our focus is very much who's producing. Concentrated PFAS And can we help them solve the problem? Because some people would say, ohh, it's just another can. We've got it out. We're gonna kick. Someone's gonna kick it down the road. Don't worry about it. And my my view is we've got to be able to offer a proper end to end. Sit one quick solution, but system that delivers what's required, which is to eliminate PFAS from the water cycle. If you just put them on the top of the mountain having captured them and they flow down into Leache and then into groundwater, you just move the can around a bit right through through, just dilute it a little bit more. So you talked, we've been talking about PFAS, but you know, there's a number of other chemical compounds and you know, antibiotic resistant bacteria, pharmaceutical compounds, microplastics. Is AMS involved in all of those kinds of recalcitrant contaminants or just are you focused on PFAS? So one of the joys of this technology that we've developed is that it is multi application. So we can generate ferrate on site and it's a chemical. That is the most powerful oxidant around, more powerful than Ozone. So you immediately think, well, what does ozone do? We could replace ozone. Ozone very, very costly capital, very costly to operate and not very nice to operate. So there's sort of replacement there. But there's, and you know this because you wrote the papers, the there are multiple papers done on the applications of ferrate, right? And they all sort of conclude with it would be nice if you could produce this on an industrial scale, then we could do something with it. And what we've been able to do is sort of take it out of the lab and produce ferrate on industrial scale. Its biggest weakness is that it's got a 5 minute lifetime, right. So you can't make it in a factory like ferrate chloride and ship it. So you have to make it on site. And when you make it on site, you can then attack this broad range. I don't know how many papers you covered, but I mean numerous applications, whether it's endocrine disruptors, PFAS, general organic removal, azoles in semiconductors. So we've sort of. And the question is where do which do we go after first? But it's a, it's a nice place to be and we've just got to develop the applications. And Ferrate is an iron based compound, right, right. So it's produced the way we do it electrolytically. So we're dissolving steel plates, electric, it is not electrochemical oxidation which has serious limitations. We're producing ferrate in caustic soda. Those are the two consumables. And producing this very concentrated reagent, which has these amazing oxidising powers. The joy that is when it it gets consumed, it gets converted to ferric hydroxide, which is a coagulant. So you're actually getting two shots for one. It's a fascinating chemical, but I think it is anyway. And it's interesting because most oxidants cause, you know, some byproduct that's bad, you know, this one's interest in their cost is actually a positive byproduct, which is that never happens. That's good, you know. There are so many different technologies out there that purport to be able to treat in some way, shape or form. What do you think of kind of the overall vetting process for these technologies? I, I mean I ran a Research Center and, and we were able to treat or test, you know, say microfiltration systems on the same water. So we had, you know, a side by side comparison apples to apples and we could tell, OK, this one worked this well, this one worked that well. I don't know if there's any place that's available to, to vet these kinds of technologies. It's really. From our position it's really difficult. You can go 1 route, which is. Sort of look for public funding. That takes an age, yeah. Just going through the RFP process, you've got a time with academics. By the time you put all that together, it's four or five years down the road. And you know, people in our position don't have four or five years we wanted out there. So what we've done is sort of agnostic to that. We've found the earlier adopters and we've had to seek them out who are willing to try it and do it. with the proper protocol and all that stuff. But it's really hard unless you've been in the, it's like a catch 22. Unless you've been in industry long enough that people will trust you to let you go and play on their site, you're never going to play. And if you haven't played, how do you, how do you build trust? So I think that there are, there are instances like the water tower in Georgia, which have got a broad set of facilities where people like us can go and play. It's managed rigorously. It can even be assessed independently. We can drop in our technology, have an engineering group or whoever do the validation and then that's published in, it sort of stands the test. But getting that independent validation, which is what we've had to do numerous times, is very costly and it slows down adoption. So another piece of the puzzle is the monitoring side. I mean, whenever you're treating anything, you have to know how much is there to begin with, You know, how much is there at the end, and that tells you one. Your equipments working if you're meeting the you know discharge requirements, whatever and ultimately tells you if you're the technical efficacy and the value proposition of your product. So how do you do the monitoring side? So that's actually how we got into treatment So we we built this portfolio of advanced water quality analyzers and in fact we were being used by engineers for precisely that purpose in California who want to know how effective their Chrome treatment was. And it was through that it was likely became inside insider traders. We could see the limitations of RCF reduction calculation, filtration, reverse osmosis, ion exchange. This is crazy, this data shows. They're falling over every 5 minutes or they have to backwash every two minutes, and that's not sustainable. And in fact, they were so costly that the state withdrew the regulation until later on when we turned up and sort of moved things along. But being able to monitor the influent And it's never stable and then monitor the effluent and know that it is stable and it's well below the limit is absolutely critical. And we designed our treatment systems to incorporate that because you need to know that you don't want to be so efficient that you're driving up your energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. You want to know that you're achieving the goal without overtreating, but not undertreated right at the same time you're influent is all over the place and so real time monitoring, Integrating can help that whole process. Absolutely. So where do you manufacture your systems? So I've managed enough factories in my life, never want to do that again. So we've, there are very good people out there. So we subcontract to US manufacturers and that gives us as a startup you don't want to build a factory that's fixed cost waiting for something to go through it, right. So we've got partners in Massachusetts, partners in Texas who build it to our once we've got past prototype. You don't want to throw a plate of spaghetti over the fence because it comes back with spaghetti. You send it out when you've got a nice recipe and then they produced to order. And that's a very flexible business model that I think most startups should apply anyway. So it's the most talk about PFAS again, is, is the US market kind of driving things to other, you know, other countries have PFAS regulations? So Europe sort of getting ,So yeah, definitely US And I've talked to some people here who think it's sort of gone completely over the top. I mean, I think there are definitely sites where the levels of PFASs are problematic, but it sort of becomes such a widespread issue. Regulation for drinking water. But actually I think the real problem is wastewater, because it's wastewater that's ending up in drinking water. So I really do not understand why there aren't regulations around wastewater. And in Europe, we were there a couple of weeks ago. They talk about Tifa. Have you heard it? No. Well, it's another short, short chain and they're actually more worried about TIFA than they are about PFAS. I mean, it's a subset really, I guess. But so yeah, I think there's there is a general concern, but they haven't gone anywhere near as far as the US. So what's next for AMS What's the next big challenge? Find some money, spend it, investigate, and develop applications. You know, it's a it's a sort of multi. It's like I talk to think about as a chair, right? You've gotta have the clients, the engineers, the product and the money and you've got to keep all of those things sort of moving forward. But we're now winning our first major treatment contracts and that's going to change our profile in terms of growth and presence in this industry. So it's a very, very exciting time for us. Great. Well, thanks so much for for chatting. And you know, this is a perfect end to a very successful conference. And thanks a lot, man. Thanks for making it successful. Run. Alright, cheers.