OriginOil: Biofuels Digest’s 2014 5-Minute Guide

April 14, 2014 |

OriginOil’s signature water cleanup technology, called Electro Water Separation (EWS), is a high-speed, chemical free process that efficiently extracts organic contaminants from very large quantities of water.

For the emerging algae industry, OriginOil is reducing bacterial contamination, and concentrating algae without chemicals, making large-scale harvest possible. For the oil & gas industry, OriginOil is helping clean up produced water and recycle fracking water, to reduce harm to the environment and lower costs. In aquaculture, OriginOil is helping improve yields and making seafood healthier by dramatically reducing the levels of toxic ammonia and bacteria in water. OriginOil is also cleaning up contaminated farm and sewage water quickly and cheaply, without chemicals, for recycling and further purification.

The Situation:

OriginOil continues to develop and promote new technologies; it has been a dizzying ride from algae production systems to the Quantum Fracturing System and now the company’s Electro Water Separation system.

Results have been thin on the sales side, so far. $140K in sales in the first nine months of 2013,m compared to $583K in the first nine months of 2012. And losses have been steady — $6.9M in the first nine months of 2013 vs $6.9M in the first nine months of 2012.

But OriginOil keeps looking for the right combination of market and product — and they certainly win the award for being hungry for opportunity.

Back in 2010, the news from OriginOil tended to focus on projects like “ready to ship its Quantum Fracturing System to MBD Energy’s research and development facility at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Subject to the success of the initial test phase, MBD will purchase significantly larger systems to serve its power station projects in Australia, beginning with a one-hectare pilot plant at Tarong Power Station in South Eastern Queensland, and expanding to full production sites at all three of MBD’s power station projects in Australia.”

By 2012, it was highlighting its “Solids Out of Solution technology”, that would will help the aquaculture industry reduce toxin levels and adopt algae as fish feed on a wide scale. Building on its initial successful lab results, OriginOil has agreed to develop a cooperative partnership with WeFeedUs, a Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based aquaculture company, to test and validate OriginOil’s proprietary water decontamination and algae harvesting technologies for aquaculture systems in the field.

Bottom line: it has correctly judged that, like Levi Strauss making jeans for gold rush miners, that there’s a substantial business opportunity in serving the emerging algae producers with hot technologies for separation and extraction, and has smartly expanded its focus out to existing industries, such as aquaculture, waste remediation and oil & gas, that are already at scale.

Model:

Technology developer and licensor.

Past milestones:

In March 2014, the National Algae Association (NAA) has selected OriginOil’s entry-level algae harvester for its model demonstration site, which features best-of-breed algae production systems in permanent operation.

In January 2014, OriginOil announced that it will collaborate with Israel’s AquaGreen Fish Farms, Ltd to further streamline zero-discharge aquaculture systems for the production of chemical free seafood. The agreement followed a high-profile launch of OriginOil’s Permanent Showcase in December Read More

Also in January 2014, OriginOil announced that it has agreed to supply its water management solutions to a new East Asian hydroponics venture backed by Orix Corp., Japan’s largest financial services and leasing company.

In December 2013, the company inaugurated its Permanent Technology Showcase with a demonstration of its EWS Aqua Q60 and EWS Algae A60 models at Aqua Farming Tech, a sustainable fish farm in Thermal, Calif., located in California’s Coachella Valley.

In November, the company announced that academic testing has verified its new Algae Screen growth optimizer effectively controls bacteria and microscopic predators in commercial algae production, helping to promote high rates of cultivation of the most valuable species. Read More

In October 2013, the company launched its Electro Water Separation Model 12 saying that it had tripled the capacity of its entry-level algae harvester from four to twelve liters per minute at no additional cost, with improved energy efficiency.

Future milestones:

New product introductions

Website.

Category: 5-Minute Guide

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