As many of you have probably experienced, omniscience is too often the barrier that stands squarely in the path of breakthrough innovation.
by Mike Rainone, Co-Founder of PCDworks
If you have been reading these missives, you may recall that PCDworks, our new product development company in Palestine, Texas, has spun off another company; a company that produces a portable wastewater treatment device.
The science behind the “Water Phoenix,” as we call it, was developed at the Texas Research Institute for Environmental Studies (TRIES) at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) almost eight years ago.
Congressional funding, along with support from first the Air Force and then the Army Corps of Engineer’s branch in Vicksburg, Mississippi, allowed the development of an autonomous, portable, anaerobic, purely biologically-based waste digester. Formed in partnership with SHSU, Active Water Sciences has made a miraculous start, with millions in sales in barely a year.
As President and Board Chairman, I actually had very little to do with this success. The real drivers have been Gavin Jones, the microbiologist primarily responsible for finding the bugs that do the work; the mechanical engineering staff at PCDworks, including Phillip Grisham and Dave Carton; our lead electrical engineer, Bert Sackett; and our partners from Sam Houston, Sabin Holland and Dan Davis. All have worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to take us from Alpha to Beta prototype, and finally to top-notch production units.
In spite of my limited involvement, on November 3rd I will be in Redwood, California, to represent AWS and all of the folks involved over the past eight years as this technology is recognized as a runner up in the environmental category of the 2010 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards.
When our great PR lady, Gigi Westerman wrote and submitted the application for the award, she warned that if we were to win, our lives would change. Actually, nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of interest that comes from this sort of recognition from the WSJ. Since the announcement, we’ve been flooded by offers of venture money, possible distributors, and a slew of folk who are just interested in the system.
The irony is that if it had been up to those who “know everything,” it would have never happened. From day one, the technology was challenged by those who know better. A group of civil and mechanical military engineers told the inventors that a purely biologically based system was unfeasible, that it was simply a pet project of a congressman that wasn’t worth pursuing. They indicated that everything about wastewater treatment was already known — and no biological system could possibly meet EPA standards within the military’s time requirements. Obviously, they were wrong. AWS is now selling such systems to the military, and has interest from other markets where a fast-set-up, no sludge, no hassle method of rapidly transforming heavily polluted water into EPA standard water is needed. Chalk one up for the good guy, and add another miss for Luddites.
Now, we are trying to understand how to play in the biggest water producing industry in the world - the oil business. It is pretty well known that the biggest producer of water in the world is big oil. Estimates are that for every barrel of oil produced (42 gallons), one-and–a-half barrels of water (60+ gallons) come as a byproduct. This is known as “produced” water. It may be highly saline, brine water, but water it is. As fate would have it, just as we began to wonder how our system might be used in this business, along came the frack water crisis, or opportunity depending on how you view it.
Today, probably the biggest play in the oil and gas industry is natural gas. All over the U.S., from the Marcellus formation (a unit of marine sedimentary rock, the shale here contains largely untapped natural gas reserves) in Pennsylvania to the Haynesville in Louisiana to the Eagle Ford in South Texas, the oil industry has discovered enough gas to power this country for years to come.
Unfortunately, all of these formations are shale, a sedimentary rock that is laid down in tight, impervious beds that make it hard to produce the gas. The solution is hydraulic fracturing or fracking.
The process is pretty simple: You take about 4,000,000 gallons of clean water from some source like an aquifer, lake, or stream. You adulterate it to make it flow easier, add proppants to help prop up the formation cracks, include a lot of proprietary mystery stuff, necessary or not, and simply pump it into the well between 50,000 to 60,000 psi. After a few days, you get back about 20 to 25 percent of the water you put in, and the gas flows.
Unfortunately, 4,000,000 gallons of water per well is a lot of water. Today, there are hundreds of these wells and they represent only about 5 percent of what will be drilled in the future. Obviously, those folks in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Oklahoma are not about to let billions of gallons of water be siphoned off from their rivers or watershed. So, drilling and fracking can only continue if, and this is a big if, the water problem can be solved.We are drawn to this problem because of our technology, our long association with the oil business, and by some interesting research we discovered within NASA, you know, that poorly funded, much ignored, national crown jewel. It seems bacteria can sequester salts and, potentially, some of the other gook found in frack water. The phenomenon is call binucleation, and it explains the mysterious black sand we always find in the bottom of our biodigester.
With this idea in mind, I put a call into our favorite oil industry customer, who coincidentally was beginning a big effort on water, and was asked for a white paper. After much fussing, we produced a white paper which listed competing technology and made the case for a biologically centered system that would not only clean up wastewater to use for fracking, but clean the flow-back water to reuse for the next job. Well, wouldn’t you know it, déjà vu all over again. Some engineering/chemistry genius decided that biology couldn’t be used in frack flow-back water cleaning. Exeunt stage left.
Next scene: AWS and a group of insightful folk in Louisiana formed a partnership to push this forward. To date, our bugs are thriving in 12 percent salt brine, pulling all of the organics and lots of the nasties out of the flow-back water. So much for letting a group of chemists and engineers decide what microbiology is capable of accomplishing.
It seems a bit presumptuous of them, but perhaps not surprising. For billions of years, the biosphere has been taking care of the planet, long before engineers, chemists, and other self-proclaimed authorities came around to tell it what is possible. This tendency to know everything, defend turf and dismiss things we may not understand is all too common. As many of you have probably experienced, omniscience is too often the barrier that stands squarely in the path of breakthrough innovation.
Someone else noticed this a while back…
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-- Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167
