At the end of July, we were delighted to hear that the Texas Water Development Board had decided to fund a project we had put together with Plum Creek Conservation District. Unfortunately on September 16th, the PCCD board voted 3-2 against executing a contract with TWDB and that project will not move forward. This was discouraging, to say the least.

However, I’m proud of our team for marching on and submitting a similar proposal to the State of New Mexico just 10 days later, an effort spearheaded by Haig. If we are awarded that project, it would essentially replace the TWDB project as the scope and timeline are similar.

Christine has also secured a critical partnership and cost-share for our Ventura pilot (more on that below). Meanwhile, I am spending less and less time in Chelsea with lots of travel planned this fall (full schedule at the bottom of this newsletter). Our Boston-based crew (Jenny, Quinton, Martin) is stepping up beautifully and leading the charge on assembling and testing our BoR pilots this fall before they ship out to California and (hopefully) Texas.

What we’ve done this month

• Party to four grant submissions.

  • Led a proposal to New Mexico’s Brackish Water Supply. This proposal was supported by a local groundwater conservation district.

  • Two proposals to an Army STTR for high-recovery desalination for expeditionary water production. We joined Tactical Edge on one and led another with Purdue and Horizon Modeling.

  • Joined a proposal to Wasser-Energie-Nexus (Germany) led by Boreal Light, a supplier of solar-powered desalination units.

• Visited our pilot site in Ventura, CA. This site is located close to our pilot partner, Active Membranes. It is a small oil field with no available on-site water disposal. Their oil production is currently capped by their (in)ability to dispose of produced water. They were very excited at the prospect of us operating a six-month pilot and reducing their brine volumes. One interesting thing about this site is that they are artificially heating up the water to reduce the amount of gas they need of flare. This has implications on our membranes.

  

• Critically, Christine has helped to secure ~$70k in cost-share for our Ventura pilot through a project partner, who will be providing the much-needed pretreatment, ceramic pre-filters to take out the oil & gas content before it hits our RO membranes. We must provide 50% cost share on this project, so any cost-share coming in from external partners is less cash that has to eventually come from Harmony’s bank account.

• Otherwise, I attended the opening session of a MassChallenge accelerator, Sciens Water’s Rethinking Water event @ Climate Week NYC. Regarding our IP, Christine and I shepherded a response to the EU patent office and will prepare another to the Saudi office.

What’s coming up in October

• Next week I will fly to Midland, TX for three reasons:

  • Attending the City of Socorro’s Planning & Zoning meeting. On October 7 the committee will vote on a recommended action regarding agricultural re-zoning of our pilot site. I will be there to address concerns from any residents.

  

  • Hold an outreach event in Socorro (10/8). Quinton has put together a nice little RO demonstration unit. We will bring this over so that residents can see reverse osmosis in action. There are some concerns regarding noise and odor. We feel the best way to address some of these concerns is to let them see a unit in action.

  • Speak at the Waters of West Texas Symposium (10/9). I will highlight our pilots in Socorro and Ventura.

• Shortly after, Christine and I will fly to Iceland for the IDRA Summit on Water & Climate Change. We are one of three teams selected to pitch at the NextWave Start-up competition and we will also be giving technical talks. This conference is a prime opportunity for us to connect with potential customers, partners, and investors.

  

• As we wrap up in Iceland, the team in Chelsea will be hard at work getting us ready to commence our XPRIZE testing. We are gearing up for a full two weeks of 24/7 operation and have an internal goal to exceed 95% uptime. A successful performance here is critical as only twenty teams will advance to the semifinals. We feel good about advancing — we feel the numbers will speak for themselves. We cannot imagine anyone can match our energy performance at this scale (5 m³/day, assuming 50% recovery).

  • We launched a website and LinkedIn for our XPRIZE Consortium team.

Look out for an invitation to see “Danny” in action as we commence our XPRIZE testing in October.

-quantum