For those new to the newsletter: Harmony is making water desalination more affordable and accessible by modernizing the reverse osmosis process. For more, see our newsletter archive.

What we’ve been up to in April.

• We learned that our XPRIZE Track B (Novel Materials & Methods) submission has advanced to the semifinals (top 30 globally). This puts our team in the semifinals for both Tracks A & B.

• We submitted a Letter of Intent to the Department of Energy’s Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator for Cost-competitive direct lithium extraction, separation, and processing. We will submit a full proposal in July in collaboration with Purdue, UConn, and KeyLogic.

• We have been working through some hiccups in our produced water pilot in Southern California. While not related to our RO skids, it reflects on our ability to execute and reliably treat wastewater. After some meetings and assistance from our partners, most outstanding issues are either resolved or have an action plan in place.

• We attended a kick-off meeting for a brackish desalination pilot with the New Mexico Environment Department.

• We closed out our two outstanding commercial proposals and have established a process to turn these around faster in the future.

What’s coming up in May.

• We are preparing to run our scale-up first tests on a 16” bladder at our Chelsea workshop tomorrow. Martin will then fly to Singapore to assist with the commissioning of Big Searay (more details below).

• XPRIZE will make the public announcement of the Track A and B semifinalists on May 12. We have sent out teaming agreements to five industry partners and plan to announce our consortium on May 19.

• We will start discussions with the MIT Technology Licensing Office regarding a commercial license. Our priority is to gain clarity on our commercial license as this uncertainty is preventing us from moving forward with an industrial client.

• We are kicking off our Spring road show with five events in May. See the full schedule below.

How can you help?
With several big announcements upcoming this summer (XPRIZE and New Mexico in May, Big Searay in June) — we are preparing to make a big fundraising push.

Reach out to reserve a spot in our first priced equity round.

Deep dive:

Our primary focus has been to get two projects over the line:

• Big Searay, our 1,000 tons/day seawater desalination demonstration, is nearly ready to operate. This is a large scale-up step for us. 1,000 tons/day is the basic building block of a large-scale seawater desalination plant (10,000-500,000 tons/day capacity).

We have had some challenges with the manufacture of our 16” bladders. Our manufacturer had originally promised delivery in early January. They only finished the first sample in late April. Together we have come up with an alternate plan for making bladders to test in Singapore in May.

• Mesquite - our first solar-powered desalter for agriculture, is moving right along. This is an important demonstration for us as it will demonstrate our ability to operate off-grid with minimal batteries. We’ll also be demonstrating for the first time a two-stage process with L-RO (leaky RO) brine concentration.

We have had some technical challenges on Mesquite regarding the output voltage from our inverter. On the other hand, our control and power panel construction is moving along nicely. We’ve handed our control scheme over to Kevin for programming. Thanks to Jenny for putting that together.

This pilot is particularly relevant given our recent discussions with SW Ingenieria, a regional partner who is reporting demand for RO in Peru from large blueberry and grape farms.

As always, please reach out if you have any questions, suggestions, or connections.

-quantum