Water. Desalination + reuse
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Water. desalination + reuse December 2016 Far Site 37 Q & A A n u r Ag B A j p Ay e e "We become part of our customers' business, interacting with them daily." • Gradiant is a water technology company spun out of MIT. We initially entered the US oil and gas market, because we'd found a way to bring the cost down. In that space, the technology is proven, we have real commercial projects, we've delivered a significant operating history and we have some very large customers on board. So we're gaining a strong reputation for cost and quality, as well as health, safety and the environment. We spun out Gradiant Energy Services in September 2016 to develop the larger global opportunity, includ- ing markets in China, and the Middle East, and new industries including power, particularly in the flue gas desulphurisation wastewater space; and textiles and tanneries, to name a few. • Gradiant has a suite of solutions. We learnt by working closely with our customers that there is no silver bullet to address all the needs and water challenges of the oil and gas industry. We have a carrier gas extraction product technology, which is a desalination solution that produces fresh water quality product. However, you don't always need fresh water in the oil and gas industry. So we developed our second product line, selective chemical extraction, which is a precipitation technique where we take the produced and flow-back water from our customers and make it into a quality that is good enough for recycling. The argument being: "If you don't need fresh water, why pay for it?" The third product addresses free radical disinfection, where we are disinfecting water as it's going down the well; and that's another need of our customers. • These technologies weren't developed in academia without interaction or focus on commercial applications. We worked closely with industry from the beginning. We're a services company. We build, own and operate our plants and our systems. We become very much part of our customers' business, because we're interacting with them on a daily basis if we're operating the plant. The new products team (research and development) is distinct from the field operations and engineering teams, but they have very open lines of communication. The teams are talking on a daily, or at the very least a three-times-a-week basis. • Oil is $50 a barrel, which means that everyone is focused on cost. And because Gradiant lowers the water cost for our customers, we see a fairly healthy period of growth in US oil and gas. Gradiant Energy Services will continue to focus on developing new markets. Anurag Bajpayee is co-founder and chief executive of Gradiant Why did you establish new subsidiary Gradiant Energy Services? Talk us through the products? What's your philosophy for developing new technology? What are your expectations for 2017? Gradiant's philosophy on technology is to take fundamental concepts and develop them into water technologies that speak directly to customers' experiences in the field. two challenges mean that main- tenance must be considered as part of the initial design effort. Wedge wire screens are typi- cally available in stainless steel, duplex, and super-duplex stain- less steel, and copper nickel. Due to the salinity of the Pacific Ocean, the highest grade steel is preferred, but when overlaying the need for retarding biofouling growth on the screen, copper nickel is preferred. "As far as we know, there is no desalination plant of more that about 15 million gallons a day capacity (68,000 m3/d), anywhere in the world that uses this type of intake technology in an open ocean environment," says Maloni. "There might be some power plants that draw water from rivers or lakes that use wedge wire screens that have 1mm, but we're not aware of any open ocean desalination. So this would be state-of-the-art in terms of seawater intake tech- nology for seawater desalination plants, as far as we know." Poseidon, the developer be- hind the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in California, describes the Huntington Beach project as in the "late development phase. The exact design of it won't come until much closer to the end of permitting," says Maloni. The next stage of permitting for the proposed new plant is to get permits from the California State Lands Commission, and based on the strength of its en- vironmental analysis, Poseidon can then obtain further permits from the Regional Board and the Coastal Commission. It expects to have completed the permit- ting process by the end of 2017. "Environmental laws and regulations in California are more stringent than anywhere in the world, as far as we know. The real concern in California with these intakes is not fish and mammals, it is fish eggs and larva," says Maloni. "Carlsbad was the first large-scale de- salination plant permitted in the state. It has now changed its regulations, and we will be the first plant through the new permitting process. We are setting the standard, and we're proud of that. We've got a lot of arrows in our back from it, but we were successful in Carlsbad and we're going to be successful in Huntington Beach. It's just a matter of time."