BioLargo, Inc. is a company whose technology platforms are all involved in the harnessing and delivery of iodine as a broad spectrum disinfectant, oxidizer, and nutrient. The company has structured itself as a science-oriented business with three primary market segments, a water filtration through its BioLargo Water business, medical technology through its Clyra Technology division, and consumer products marketed under the brand names Odor-No-More, Nature’s Best Solution, Deodorall, and NBS.
The company expects to tap a huge market with its patented AOS (Advanced Oxidation System) Filter, which is a new invention that was recently validated in proof-of-concept testing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. The validation showed the technology of the AOS Filter was highly effective at dismantling and removing hard to manage contaminants from water.
What they have done is taken an oxidizer and then combined it with well understood technologies like carbon filter media, ceramics, and membrane technologies to extract contaminants from the water flow. Carbon filtering uses activated carbon, which is a form of carbon processed to have small, low-volume pores that increase the surface area available for adsorption. In other words, the pollutant molecules become trapped inside the pore structure of the carbon substrates. Ceramic filters also use small pore size of ceramic material to filter dirt, debris, and bacteria out of water. Membrane technology based filtering has water pressured through semi-permeable membranes that trap the polluting molecules on one side of the membrane while allowing the water to pass through. This traditional filter media is used simultaneously with an oxidizing technology and electricity, which then allows the device to provide an oxidation potential across the surface area of the filter media.
In oxidation, a chemical reaction occurs in which electrons are effectively removed from the molecules of a substance and that substance is effectively dismantled. For example, when iron in moist air oxidizes, electrons are being removed from the iron which degrades and rust. Likewise, advanced oxidation processes (AOP) can be used to dismantle and clean biologically toxic or non-degradable materials such as hydrocarbons like benzene, pesticides, petroleum constituents, and volatile organic compounds in waste water.
So essentially, the AOS Filter is a filter converted to a chemical reactor, which operates at very high rates of oxidation, low-power, high-speed and a continuous flow. BioLargo’s proof-of-claim work showed that their AOS Fitler performed at greater than 10 times faster and at about one twentieth the power consumption of the closest competitor to dismantle and remove very hard to get contaminants in a continuous flow of water.
The size of the global water market is massive and estimated to be a $375 billion industry. Environmentalist have become more concerned with the contamination of water from a huge range of industries, such as agricultural, chemical manufacturers, power plant, fracking, and so forth. With the growth of industrial pollution and increasing droughts due to climate change/global warming, a number of economist from Wall Street even have argued for having water supplies controlled primarily by private corporations, which is certainly not an idea that that has a universal acceptance. With the concerns over water contamination, BioLargo’s technology has a tremendous sized market to tap into.
CEO Dennis Calvert certainly has decided to move in a highly ambitious direction. The company is working on a pilot project with the University of Alberta to decontaminate the waste water that results from the tar sands industry. Tar sands consists of a mixture of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, which is a very thick viscous high weight oil. The tar sands extraction being done in the northwest-central part of Alberta, Canada involves very heavy open strip mining as it requires about two tons of tar sands to produce one barrel of oil. To extract the bitumen oil requires heavy usage of water through steam injection as well as various solvents, and ultimately it takes about 3.5 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil.
Currently the waste water already produced from tar sands oil extraction sits in vast open lakes called tailing ponds with contaminants including naphthenic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenolic compounds, ammonia, mercury and other trace metals. These open lakes cover an area that is 50% larger than the city of Vancouver which is about 176 square kilometers (67.95 square miles), and contains about 830 million cubic meters (219.26 billion gallons) of waste water. It is estimated that these tailing ponds contain: 305,905 kilograms of Arsenic, 178,200 kilograms of benzene, 756,793 kilograms of lead, 824 kilograms of mercury, 1,169,000 kilograms of toluene, and the list of toxins just continues. The water is so deadly that flocks of geese that land in the water simply die, and it has been estimated by environmentalist that thousands to tens of thousands of ducks among other animals have died on these tailing ponds.
Currently tar sands oil accounts for 40% of Canada’s oil production, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government’s goal is to double that over the next 15 years. Setting aside the fact that tar sands oil is four times more carbon intensive than other common crude oils, they lack the water resources to achieve that goal. Hence there are a number of stakeholders who would certainly like to see BioLargo’s AOS Filter technology succeed.
The water treatment industry is a massive commercial opportunity, and the AOS Filter is a significant advancement in the way water can be treated.
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