In this episode, we are hunting water unicorns with Dr. Piers Clark. Piers is the founder and chairman of Isle Utilities. They have offices all over the world and what they do is help water utilities identify and adopt new technology and innovation.
Never been a water unicorn in Silicon Valley, there are over a thousand unicorn businesses that exist, but none in water. And so I find myself constantly hunting for what might be a unicorn. I’ve seen two or three actually that I think who’ve got potential.
Dr. Piers Clark
Some of the companies discussed in this episode:
- Mango Materials
- Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc.
- NVP Energy
- Graphene Enhanced Filtration – G2O Water Technologies]
- Biobullets
- Untapped
Learn more about Piers and Isle Utilities here.
Transcript
Dr. Piers Clark:
So a unicorn is a business that could go from an early-stage venture backing, and if someone gives it a $100,000, within a few years, it’s worth a billion dollars and there’s never been a unicorn in the water sector.
Robert Osborne:
A water unicorn.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Never been a water unicorn in Silicon Valley, there are over a thousand unicorn businesses that exist, but none in water. And so I find myself constantly hunting for what might be a unicorn. I’ve seen two or three actually that I think who’ve got potential.
Robert Osborne:
So wonderful. Welcome to The Outfall. I’m Robert and today we talk with Dr. Piers Clark about water trends and companies that can change the world. I know, big stuff, right? Piers is the founder and chairman of Isle utilities. They have offices all over the world and what they do, they help water utilities identify and adopt new technology and innovations.
Dr. Piers Clark:
So we’re trying to help the utility get bankable propositions. It’s a great job, we’ve been doing it for 10 years or so. We’ve seen 6,000 or so technologies. We’ve facilitated over a billion dollars of investment and we worked with 200 plus municipalities and water utilities around the world.
Robert Osborne:
Piers is a perfect person to talk about future water trends and companies that could change the world. Now, a word of warning. This is not for language, this is for some of y’all that listen to your podcasts at a higher speed setting. You may have to slow the speed down for this one. Our talk with Piers is like being strapped in a race car on an open road. Get your sunglasses on, and buckle up.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Though lots of people are very excited about artificial intelligence, and blockchain and things like that, either I’m too old to understand this stuff or well, I don’t know. I think blockchain is a distraction. It’s a bit like 3D printing. A few years ago it was talked about as being, “This is going to revolutionize the water sector,” and I was like, “No, I don’t think so. I don’t see it happening.” I’ve got a sneaky feeling that blockchain might be the same for the water sector. The applications, there are a few, but they’re not obvious. Artificial intelligence, of course, is a huge opportunity for us. But that’s really just about dealing with big sets of data, and coming up with more informed decision choices, and it’s bound to respond quicker, and so whilst I recognize that those are very important, I don’t get that quiver of excitement that I get about other things.
Dr. Piers Clark:
So the ones that I get excited about are things like the generation of biodegradable plastics from organic waste. If someone had said 10 years ago, we’re going to be able to make plastic out of organic waste to shit, you’d laugh at them. And actually, now the technology is so well understood, and of course the plastics agenda is in everyone’s minds. I was in Singapore last week, and you could see that even in Southeast Asia, which is usually the last to embrace these sort of things, this whole idea of not having a plastic bag when you collect your shopping was embedded. So, I love the bioplastics from organic waste, and you could imagine that anaerobic digesters of the future won’t be producing biogas. They will still be generating the volatile fatty acids, which they make nowadays, which is what went through mutagenesis, forms the biogas. But instead, you’ll be harvesting the volatile fatty acids and be turning those into things called PHAs, polyhydroxyalkanoates, which are the base compounds for biodegradable plastic.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Currently the economics are such that, that’s probably 20 times more economically valuable to a water utility to go down that route, than it is to go to biogas, to anyone. Well, I think when you start seeing those sorts of economics, this idea that wastewater treatment plants are going to be a cost sink, you’ll see them rapidly changing. They’ll become something where they’re just moneymaking machines. That’s what I think we should be thinking about waste water treatment as being something that could be moneymaker, which leads neatly on to other technologies I love. Resource recovery, there’s lots around organic nutrient recovery and cellulose recovery. You can recover cellulose, toilet paper basically, have the toilet paper fibers and that could be used in building manufacturing. The bit I particularly am excited there is on phosphorus recovery because I think phosphorus is the environmental problem that we are not talking about.
Dr. Piers Clark:
It is going to be the issue. It’s more important, it’s more scary than climate change, and it’s unavoidable. At the risk of telling you something you already know, phosphorus is a vital nutrient. Every living thing, plant or animal, human being requires phosphorus to live. Your cells only speak to each other because the phosphorus facilitates the synapses working, and we’re going to run out of phosphorus. When mining it out though, in a normal circumstance, what would happen is you’d eat a diet of phosphorous, you’d excrete some of it, you’d keep some of it in your body. And then when you died, the phosphorus would leak out of your system, and be taken up by the environment around you, and be constantly recycled. About, I don’t know, 50 years or so ago we discovered that if we spread phosphorus fertilizers onto crops, they grow much faster.
Dr. Piers Clark:
So we now mine phosphorus out of the earth, and we spread it on the crops, and it rains and most of the phosphorus washes off, and causes eutrophication in lakes. And so phosphorus is thought of as a bad thing, although actually it is very good. There’s usually just enough left on the crops even after the leaching to enable your crops to grow faster. Ultimately all the phosphorus, because you can’t destroy phosphorus, it’s an element, it all accumulates in the oceans, and then precipitates as a dust on the ocean floor, where to all intents and purposes it’s lost from mankind. It’ll come back in 10 billion years when the earth’s crust has recycled it, but it’s lost for all intents and purposes. The doomsday predictors say we’re going to run out of phosphorous in 30 years time. I think that’s probably unrealistic. I think we’ve probably got two or 300 years to go, but that’s nothing.
Dr. Piers Clark:
That’s a blink of an eye in the time that humans have been on the planet. Your great, great, great grandchildren will probably live in a world where the rich will have a phosphorous rich diet, and will live for a long time and the poor will not. And the poor will live a much shorter life, less quality life, much poorer quality life, and we’ve got a chance to correct that problem today. We in the water sector in particular, have a chance to correct that problem because the phosphorus that actually gathers in the sewage works, is what causes struvite. If you hear people talk about struvite, struvite is basically this phosphorus precipitating out in your pipes, and there are technologies which can recover that phosphorous, and it then becomes this slow-release, high-value fertilizer. Brilliant technology. There’s lots of people who do it, but my favorite is Ostara, which is a Canadian business. So there’s that as a technology.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Then you’ve mentioned earlier, you’ve then got low temperature anaerobic digestion. So, 2% of the world’s electrical power is currently used to blow air into wastewater treatment. That’s horrific. 2% of the electrical generation we have is used to blow air into wastewater, so that bugs can do the aerobic degradation process. Anaerobic treatment would be so much more sensible, but it doesn’t work with low-strength, low temperature waste. So the Holy Grail has always been, is there a way of doing a low temperature, low-strength anaerobic treatment, and I think NVP Energy have cracked it. So NVP Energy is an Irish company. They built a number of industrial installations now with Heineken and ABP Foods and [inaudible 00:07:21]. They’ve got their first full-scale domestic wastewater treatment plant being installed at Welsh Water, Dwr Cymru, the only words I know in Welsh, Dwr, which is water and Cymru, which is Welsh. So Dwr Cymru is Welsh Water.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Welsh Water is trialing the first full scale plant, and the eyes of the world should be watching this. Of course, in places like Latin America, they do anaerobic treatment of waste waters, but that’s because it’s warm there. You’ve got the benefit of it being warm. Anaerobic bacteria is what’s working in your stomach now. You’re sitting there at a 100 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius, and the bugs need to work at that temperature. When you’ve got them working at low temperatures, it’s called psychrophilic anaerobic digestion and working at psychrophilic temperatures, you usually got to have this really long solids retention time. You’ve got to trap the solids there for a long time, and NVP energy have done well in cracking that particular nut.
Dr. Piers Clark:
In the investor community, you hunt for the things called unicorns. So a unicorn is a business that is venture backed and then becomes worth a billion. Okay? So a unicorn is a business that could go from an early stage venture backing, and if someone gives it a $100,000, within a few years, it’s worth a billion dollars and there’s never been a unicorn in the water sector.
Robert Osborne:
A water unicorn.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Never been a water unicorn. In Silicon Valley, there’s over a thousand unicorn businesses that exist, but none in water. And so I find myself constantly hunting for what might be a unicorn. I’ve seen two or three actually that I think who’ve got potential. So one of them, just because I’ve talked about a wastewater one, so I’ll pick an example from the clean water, is a company called G2O. They’re based out of Atlanta and Manchester in the UK.
Dr. Piers Clark:
So Atlanta in North America and Manchester in the UK, they’ve got two headquarters. They’re an early stage startup that is incredibly disruptive in the field of desalination. So the G2O is obviously a play on H2O, and the G stands for graphene. And so it’s a graphene based technology, graphene being this new material that was invented about 15 years ago, that has a whole series of magical properties. At one stage people thought that in the water industry you coat graphene on the inside of water pipes, and because it’s almost frictionless, you’d be able to pump water thousands of miles without losing any head on your pipe.
Robert Osborne:
Head loss.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Head loss. But that’s not what these guys do. They can put a coating on a membrane and it makes the flux through the membrane increased by about 10 times. Normally in desalination what you’re looking for is a minute, we found another way of squeezing another half percent out of this, not a 1000 fold increase, which is what these guys can potentially do. So it’s a staggering capability. It’s still early stage. In technology readiness levels, they’re probably still a five or six and nine being fully fledged, zero being sort of an idea you had in the bath last night. So they’re still in that mid-tier range. They want to watch. No one has called BioBullets. Now there’s a bit of a story that has to come with BioBullets. Mussels as in clams, I don’t know what you call them, we call them mussels grow inside water pipes, and they’re a real pain because they cut the flow down the pipe. It means you have to pump harder and they’re a nightmare to clean out.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Normally the way you kill them is you dose chlorine into the pipe, and what happens is the mussel sits there with gaping mouth, and it can smell the chlorine coming, and so it shuts its mouth. The thing about muscles is they are quite good, they can hold their breath as it were, for about three weeks. And after three weeks they finally go, oh, I’ve got to breathe and they die. So you have to dose huge amounts of chemicals into the environment to sweep out these mussels and it’s a pain. And then what happens is you kill everything, and you get this load of dead rotting mussel that you then have to deal. We get a pollution load of rotting mussel meat to deal with. Now BioBullets, and that’s basically taken the salt granules and coated them with a layer of fat, so that you dose these bullets into the pipe and the mussel sits there gaping away and it goes, oh, here comes a piece of fat, gobbles down, eat through them fat layer, hits the salt and dies.
Dr. Piers Clark:
Now the beauty of this, there’s a few things I like about this idea. One is you can control the amount of killing that goes on. You can dose a little amount of BioBullets, and kill just a small proportion or you can kill them all in one go. You can manage your pollution load of the dead mussels. Even better, once you’ve cleaned your pipe, you’re never going to give… It’s like selling drugs. Not that I sell drugs, but I can imagine this is as a commercial model, you’re dosing in a little bit of BioBullets to keep your pipe clean, because that way you’ll never get mussels forming in there. So it’s got this beautiful commercial model. It doesn’t require huge amounts of civil engineering, a nice environmental way of controlling an invasive species, that causes all sorts of health and safety issues, because normally people have to go into confined spaces, to clear out the mussels.
Dr. Piers Clark:
It causes enormous amounts of water quality issues and big issues on energy bills because you’re pumping water harder. So I like BioBullets, it’s one of my favorites. And then just to go to a completely different example, there’s a company called UNTAPPED. Now this is about distributed water in rural areas. I’m going to take you away from the world that we’re probably most familiar with, which is developed water utilities who’ve got water supply pipes, and customer turns on a tap and a faucet and gets a glass of water. In many parts of the world, that doesn’t exist, and what you’ll have is, you’ll have a tanker drive to your local village and they will sell your water at exorbitant prices, probably at 10 times the price you’re paying here in the United States.
Dr. Piers Clark:
It will be poor quality water that you buy from a tanker, and then the tanker drives off taking money out of the local community and it’s terrible. Now UNTAPPED has basically invented the corner shop. What they’ve got is they’ve got a small membrane for plant, which will drill down, it takes local water and cleans it onsite and then people can come to the shop, and they buy their water from the shop. It’s a water kiosk. But the novelty here… And there’s lots of water kiosks all around the world, but they generally don’t work because the commercial model has not been developed properly. And what they’ve done in UNTAPPED, and it’s a dear friend of mine, check with Jim Chu who launched it initially in Haiti, was to build this collection of shops and you got to have a good brand.
Dr. Piers Clark:
People think that poor people in places like Haiti are scrambling a living. They want just what you want. They want safe, secure environment for their children to grow up and they want to drink clean water, they want to buy water from a shop that looks wholesome. And the best bit about this is it keeps money in the local community. It keeps employment in the local community. It also provides a forum now for not just selling water, but now the local farmer can sell milk there or other products can be sold. You can actually start selling family planning, you can sell condoms in the service line there if that’s what the community needs. You’ve suddenly created a corner shop, which I find beautiful in that it’s water back at the heart of the community, and then building things around it which offers also…
Dr. Piers Clark:
We like to think that, in this modern age is the only time that scientists have predicted, making doomsday predictions about what’s coming. In 1856, Joseph Faraday predicted that the river Thames was going to get polluted, and there was going to be a catastrophic situation. Two years later that prediction came true. It’s funny, I love that story because it was a scientist who looked at the evidence and then said, “You know what, if we carry on doing what we’re doing, we’re in shit creek here. Things are going to go incredibly badly wrong.” And he told people, and everyone was like, “No, nah, nah,” and whatever. And it was, that disaster appeared very quickly, and that then led to the Bazalgette sewers and everything happening in London. Scientists today, can see everything that’s coming. So my prediction is that the United Arab Emirates is going to run out of water in the next 15 years.
Dr. Piers Clark:
We’re running out of ground water at a preposterous rate there. Water usage is still not being curtailed. And actually if you just look at the maps of groundwater for the UAE, the red zones are getting bigger and bigger, and the attitude of the general populace isn’t one of there’s a disaster coming. So we’re racing towards the precipice without an awareness that the disaster is coming and people say, “Oh, well that’s okay, we’ll just build another desal plant.” Well, it’s 1500 desal plants around the Persian Gulf and the Persian Gulf is rising in salinity at a faster rate than the flora and fauna can cope with. So we’re going to end up with no groundwater in the UAE, and we’re going to end up with a dead sea in the Persian Gulf. And if you think about the Persian Gulf, if we just go around the edges, you’ve got Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and then Oman. That’s the Gulf.
Dr. Piers Clark:
This is not the most stable of regions in the world, and I think when we run out of water, what will happen is, there will be an exodus. There will be a sort of exodus on biblical scales of literally millions of people needing to move to an area. One could argue, the war in Syria that we don’t tend to talk about because most of us don’t really understand it. The war in Syria is actually driven by water and my view is different now than it was 15 years ago when people used to say, “Oh, there’ll be Wars about water in the future,” I kept that one because you can build a desal plant for cheaper than you can build an Exocet missile, so surely you’d just build a desal plant.
Dr. Piers Clark:
The truth of the matter is, that’s not how it works and there will be more conflict, more mass migrations caused, because water stress is driving people out of areas, and I think we’re going to see it in the UAE. The other area I think we should watch is Mexico, because Mexico City is in very precious, very delicate situation and the water pipes, and you’ve got 25 million people living in a city. And there’ll be water pipes one of the earthquakes are going to break, and you’re going to end up with a big zone of Mexico City that won’t have water and that’s going to result in an exodus of people out of that city. The story I regularly tell is that you have water, you get riots on the street within hours when water breaks down, you don’t get that with energy. If you have a power cut, people relax and they go, “Okay, will the power come back on again?”
Dr. Piers Clark:
If your water breaks down, you get riots on the street pretty quickly and that makes sense. Because if you imagine, when do you find out you haven’t got water? Well, you find out when you are trying to feed your children, when you’re trying to bathe your children, when your grandma has just been to the toilet and find she can’t flush her toilet, that’s when she finds out that her water has been cut off. And that smirk on your face is, it’s sort of amusing, but it’s also horrific when you put yourself into the circumstance of vulnerable people finding out that they don’t have access to water. Find out at a time when you’re vulnerable and therefore all sorts of emotions kick in, of fear and anger, and we’re going to see some of that happening, and it’s going to happen in our lifetime.
Robert Osborne:
A big shout out to Dr. Piers Clark for joining us. Please see the show notes to learn more about Dr. Clark and Isle utilities. We’ve put some links there to some of the companies mentioned in this episode. Please subscribe to the show, leave us some feedback and share this podcast with your friends. David, Amy, and I appreciate all the positive feedback so far. When we were editing and reviewing this show, we’ve read some of the feedback.
David Ladner:
So a big shout out to Ozbek Jack. He wrote a nice review for us. Five stars. “The Outfall is well-written by Academy acclaimed producer Robert Osborne. It’s brilliant, the ways he compares water to life, the guests he brings into The Outfall are amazing, and have great tastes. I know what I’ll be listening to at the South Carolina Environmental Conference.” As you can imagine, that was my 15 year old son, so enough said.
Robert Osborne:
Now that’s a talented individual right there. You got to be proud of that son of yours.
David Ladner:
Yeah. Thank you. Hey, there’s another one. All you all day, wrote us a nice little comment, “Very informative and easy to digest.” I see what he’s doing there or she, I don’t know. Very informative and easy to digest.
Robert Osborne:
Like it.
David Ladner:
Yeah. Hopefully that’s not a dig at our, you know, wastewater sort of thing.
Amy Anderson:
And thank you to TSTORM2000, who says, “Water, water everywhere,” and gave us a five star review. This person says, “Great podcasts from professionals in the water industry. Subjects range from climatology to entomology, but the tie that binds is always water. Anyone interested in these topics will enjoy the material presented. As a water professional myself, the subjects they present are definitely in my personal interest window. Enjoy.” Well, thank you TSTORM2000. We would love to meet you one day, a fellow water professional. Thanks for writing in.
Robert Osborne:
All right, thank you. All right, let’s get on to our real life.
Amy Anderson:
The Outfall Podcast Exploring the hidden edge of our natural water world and our infrastructure.
