I missed out on our April update as the end of the month was quite busy, so this will be the first of two updates in May. It’s finally warming up here in Boston — despite the rainy weather this week, we’ve had a couple hot days in the workshop. We’ve also had several late nights and have been rewarded with some stunning views of the Boston skyline.

Follow-ups from our March update

• MIT TLO has agreed to grant us another one-year extension on our option. They have sent us a preliminary agreement, a straightforward renewal. We are awaiting the executable version.

• We submitted our XPRIZE qualifying application. You can read it here. We expect to hear back in June, which will come with some modest funds ($3M split amongst X qualifying teams). The qualified team testing requires a one-week test of a 1 m³/day system. We will use one of our BoR test skids to collect that data in the summer.

• Piloting continues to progress, albeit slowly. We had Kevin Reece, our automation engineer, over to Chelsea for the last several weeks to get Searay up and running. We have now gotten some water into the system and plan to run our first seawater tests later this week. The folks in Golden, CO are also working through commissioning of Chimaera. We may expect them to be ready for us to visit again in June.

  

More April updates

• A couple commercial prospects

  • An old contact from a large multinational reached out again to us re: recovery of cooling tower blowdown. Scaling is a challenge in this application and their ideal solution would require minimal consumables and maintenance.

  • We’ve made new contact with a small engineering firm based in Latin America. Their clients are interested in seawater desal in South America for both residential and agricultural use. We've had two good meetings with them and will keep the momentum going in May.

• Outreach in Texas + Portugal

  • Haig flew down to Texas for several meetings of the Texas Well-Owners Network. These were admittedly not the most productive events -- most of these were residential wells with capacities far smaller than our target.

  • Christine represented Harmony at the European Desalination Society congress in Porto. The very first day was hit by a power outage, so a rather unique conference experience. Power was restored in time for our talk, which was well-attended and received.

    

• Two summer interns: we have hired two interns for the summer, subsidized by the MassCEC Clean Energy Internships program. Rishabh will help us out with business development and Fausto will pitch in with marketing to help market our pilots.

Expect to hear from us again by the end of May.

-quantum