The On-Site AOS
Treatment Train
We recently built and installed a sophisticated water
treatment system featuring our Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) at a poultry and
livestock farm near Edmonton, AB (
Sunworks
Farm). This pre-commercial pilot will be the first in-field operating AOS
system. It is hard to overstate how proud we are of our team for this milestone
in the development cycle of the AOS. It’s equally hard to overemphasize how
important this milestone is to the commercialization of this amazing technology.
When we talk about our AOS technology with stakeholders and investors, a common
refrain we hear is, “Sure, but when’s this thing getting out of the research
lab and into the real world?” With the news of this treatment train
installation, we can answer, “Now”.
This AOS treatment train has profound implications on both
the technological progress of the AOS technology as well as our ability to
monetize the AOS. From a technological standpoint, this is a full treatment
train containing everything a client needs to treat their wastewater to
discharge standards set by regulators. It’s also capable of handling the
flowrates required by livestock facilities like this one and is easily scalable
to higher flowrates with additional reactors in the treatment train. And
importantly, the treatment train is robust enough to function over long periods
of time at this poultry farm in any weather. This is a far cry from the lab
prototypes that came before. With this new AOS treatment train we have a
portable, modular water treatment solution that delivers the highest
performance in disinfection and decontamination,
eliminates
hard-to-treat micropollutants, and has lower operational costs, capital
costs, and energy usage rates than other similar water treatment technologies.
From a monetization standpoint, this treatment train can be
described as a “test drive” of our business plan for the AOS – we deliver a
full treatment solution to a customer in a robust, ruggedized trailer for a
free trial period, after which they have the option of keeping the equipment
through either lease, purchase, or pay-per-gallon. This is the reason this
prototype AOS treatment train truly represents a pivotal moment in the
commercialization of the AOS – it’s out of the lab and into the field, where it
will soon be earning real money and helping people save on water costs.
Furthermore, this pilot system and its integrated on-site laboratory will
provide key data and metrics to provide potential customers and is therefore a
linchpin for future sales. This is also just our first pre-commercial pilot.
Another is being installed at a small brewery in Southern California and it’s
also being pulled by industry stakeholders in areas like stormwater, food &
beverage, and petrochemical.
It has been a long journey to bring the AOS to this point.
It’s worth mentioning that even multi-billion-dollar technology development
companies take many years to invent, develop, and commercialize a new water
treatment system, and that’s part of why we’re so proud of getting to where we
are now with the AOS. At this milestone, it’s worth reflecting on the journey
our water technology team has undertaken to bring this technology to bear.
The Early Days of the
AOS
Many of you may remember the beginnings of the AOS. The
technology was invented by BioLargo’s Chief Science Officer Ken Code. Ken
recognized three things: 1) that current water treatment technologies struggled
to contend with certain contaminants and pathogens, leading to public health
incidents, 2) existing systems were usually very costly and very
energy-intensive, and 3) the industry was using the same handful of
technologies to treat water virtually everywhere, with little innovation – UV
systems, ozone, hydrogen peroxide systems, and chlorine-based systems. Ken
conceived of a new technology that exploits electrochemical principles to
deliver novel, highly oxidative iodine chemistry that rapidly kills pathogens
and oxidizes contaminants. The AOS was born.
The very first AOS devices bore little resemblance to
today’s AOS. Its job was to demonstrate the principle that advanced carbon
materials combined with iodine electrochemistry would result in rapid
disinfection and decontamination.
Next, the first real lab-scale AOS prototypes were made. Their
purpose was to show that the AOS process works in flowing water (we call this a
“flow-through reactor”). These were small, fragile, and slow, but they were
shown to exhibit tremendous disinfection and decontamination rates in flowing
water while consuming surprisingly little electricity.
The AOS’ Adolescent
Years
The next AOS prototypes that were made were a bit bigger –
approximate 3” in diameter. These were made to prove that the AOS technology
was scalable with size, and that the performance we saw with the smaller
reactors wasn’t an artefact of their small size. These new AOS prototypes were
capable of processing up to 1L per minute (0.25 gallons). They didn’t win any
beauty contests, but they achieved their goal.
The next step in AOS development was a big one – our first
pre-commercial prototype. The purpose of this was to demonstrate that the AOS could
be scaled to a size relevant to water treatment in a real, albeit small,
commercial setting. It also needed to be equipped with on-board sensor systems
that could measure water quality parameters, flow rate, and pressure. To
accomplish this, we partnered with an incredibly talented team of sensor
developers at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s (NAIT) Centre for
Sensors and System Integration (CSSI) in Edmonton. With NAIT, we built the
first Alpha Prototype, complete with state-of-the-art sensors, which we
showcased at our technical symposium in August of 2016.
Soon after this, the BioLargo Water team began to work on a
new iteration of the AOS – the “Spiral AOS”. This prototype is designed for interior
water treatment applications where space is more of a concern and where a
compact water treatment platform is preferable. We showcased the AOS late last
year on our blog, and
you
can learn more about it there! The conventional “Stacked” AOS is still used
for applications where space is a less important consideration (for example, at
a poultry farm). Thanks in part to the modularity of the Spiral design AOS, the
technology is now scalable to nearly any required flowrate by adding increasing
the number of AOS reactors in a treatment train.
All Grown Up
The next step in the development of the AOS was to convert
this pre-commercial prototype into a packaged device that could actually be
used in a field setting. This meant designing what’s referred to as a
“treatment train” – meaning all the equipment required to pump, filter,
pre-treat, and post-treat the water so that it meets discharge standards and
the client doesn’t have to think about it. This was an arduous step, requiring
significant capital resources to create the full treatment train you see here.
At this stage we also looked to secure agreements with livestock facilities
interested in a pre-commercial pilot project. Our treatment train is now
installed on-site at
Sunworks Farm,
a certified organic chicken farm in Alberta interested in the eco-friendly and
innovative nature of our AOS technology.
All of this work could never have been possible without the
generous support of government funding agencies like NRC-IRAP, NSERC, Alberta
Innovates, and Southern California’s MWD-ICP program. Grants from these
organizations helped pay for salaries, equipment, consumables, lab space,
office space, and important research collaborations. All in, BioLargo Water has
received more than 60 grants to fund its R&D work on the AOS thus far.
Where does the AOS go from here? Another common refrain we
hear from our followers and investors is, “When does this thing start making
money?” The question is fair enough. Now, thanks to this pilot (and those soon
to come), the answer is easier – “Soon.” Pre-commercial pilots like this one
are the last stop on the road before commercial pilots, also known as
commercial trials. In this pilot we are refining our technical offering at the
commercial scale and refining our business model, wherein we offer customers
modular, portable treatment trains that simply solve their water issues. Certainly,
the journey is not yet over for the commercialization of the AOS that Ken Code
invented years ago, but it’s plain to see that the technology has traveled far
to get where it is today, and that the journey is nearly over. We couldn’t be
more excited for the future of the AOS.
