A recently concluded financing effort is funding five customer trials of a water purification technology. One trial will be located in the Houston area while a second trial will be located around Orla near the Texas-New Mexico border.
Components for the pilot have started arriving at Aquafortus’ Houston facility and beginning in mid-March, Aquafortus engineers will deploy to Houston to assemble the pilot, with completion expected in June. Following testing and commissioning, the five customer trials, including in the Permian, will begin.
Daryl Briggs, chief executive officer of Aquafortus, expressed confidence his company’s technology can handle the various chemistries in Permian Basin produced water, be it from the Texas side of the Permian or the New Mexico side.
“They’re very different and I think we can handle all of them,” he told the Reporter-Telegram in a telephone interview.
He added, “all we’re doing is moving water away from salt.”
Aquafortus’ approach turns 98% of high salinity brine into fresh water while extracting lithium, copper, magnesium salts and other metals and minerals.
Because the technology uses a non-thermal, zero-liquid discharge recovery and crystallization approach, it also uses 90% less energy than the traditional thermal-based evaporation brine desalination technology. Other technologies also can’t reach the levels of salinity Aquafortus’ can, he added.
“We will be working with our oil and gas neighbors,” said Briggs of its Permian pilot program.
He added, “what is getting us excited is beneficial reuse. Our technology produces very clean water that can be used for aquifer recharge or in agricultural applications.” The salt left when the water is removed can be sold for use on roads or in chemical processes, among other uses.
Briggs finds a touch of irony in the possibility the Texas oil and gas industry could be the source of domestic supplies of lithium needed for the batteries that power electric vehicles and other sources of renewable energy.
By taking an alternative source like produced water and turning it into a commodity, he said it reduces demand for freshwater.
“At a minimum, we can reduce disposal volumes to a quarter of what they are,” he said.
The New Zealand-based company raised $17 million in financing, led by DCVC and Novo Holdings, joined by Universal Materials Incubator, Intrepid Financial Partners, Envisioning Partners, Burnt Island Partners, K1W1 and NZGCP to fund construction and deployment of a relocatable demonstration unit and commercial pilot across US producing basins.
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