Nanobubbles provide an effective solution to many of the challenges of climate change. These nanoscopic bubbles are 2500 times smaller than a single grain of salt and can be formed with any gas. Unlike larger bubbles, they remain suspended in liquid longer and remain stable until they interact with surfaces or contaminants. Their size allows them to achieve dissolved oxygen levels many times greater than those achieved using traditional aeration technologies. With applications from industries including agriculture, aquaculture, oil and gas, mining, and municipal and surface water treatment, nanobubbles can improve energy efficiency, save water, and reduce chemical use. In this episode Hilary Langer talks with Moleaer’s CEO Nick Dyner. Moleaer provides nanobubbles-as-a-service, nanobubble equipment, and water quality improvement around the world.
Nanobubbles provide an effective solution to many of the challenges of climate change. These nanoscopic bubbles are 2500 times smaller than a single grain of salt and can be formed with any gas. Unlike larger bubbles, they remain suspended in liquid longer and remain stable until they interact with surfaces or contaminants. Their size allows them to achieve dissolved oxygen levels many times greater than those achieved using traditional aeration technologies. With applications from industries including agriculture, aquaculture, oil and gas, mining, and municipal and surface water treatment, nanobubbles can improve energy efficiency, save water, and reduce chemical use.
In this episode Hilary Langer talks with Moleaer’s CEO Nick Dyner. Moleaer provides nanobubbles-as-a-service, nanobubble equipment, and water quality improvement around the world.
Links:
Article: Capitalism Vs. Climate Change: Moleaer’s Innovative Nanobubbles (forbes.com)
Article: Moleaer Deploys Nanobubble Generators to Eliminate Foul Odour (h2oglobalnews.com)
NOAA: Nanobubble Ozone Technology Shown to Eliminate Invasive Species in Ballast Water
Article: A breath of fresh air: how nanobubbles can make aquaculture more sustainable
Article: Nanobubbles as an Emerging Sanitation Technology
Episode recorded: May 25, 2023
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Nick Dyner: Recycling water, reusing water, treating water is obviously incredibly important. It's a finite resource, but our principal focus is, how do you improve the productivity of where water is being utilized, or how water is being treated? How do we make things better?
Hilary: Nanobubbles are gaining recognition as an underutilized but incredibly effective solution to many of the challenges of climate change. These microscopic bubbles can improve energy efficiency, save water, and reduce chemical use across a whole range of industries — from agriculture and aquaculture to mining and municipal water treatment. In this episode I talk with Moleaer’s CEO, Nick Dyner. Moleaer is at the forefront of bringing the efficiency of nanobubbles to industries that shape our world.
Hilary: Nick, thanks so much for joining us today.
Nick: Thanks, Hilary.
Hilary: Nick, you serve as Moleaer's CEO, and you were brought on after the company was operational. How was the technology first developed?
Nick: Sure. We have to go back to 2016. Our co-founders who are still with the company, Bruce Scholten our CTO, and the inventor of the technology, and Warren Russell our Chief Commercial Officer, were working together to find a way to improve the oxygen transfer rates of aeration systems for wastewater treatment. It's actually a neat backstory. Traditional aeration, which is the function of blowing air into water to make it aerobic, usually in wastewater, actually consumes 2% of the world's energy, is a very inefficient process. It's inefficient because when you put air into water, you form a bubble. The size of the bubble dictates how fast it'll rise. The distance or the depth dictates the distance it's going to travel. It's a race against time. Shallower waters, it's even harder to achieve an aerobic environment, given what I just described.
Warren was seeking a technology that could make smaller bubbles that would stay in the water longer. He was interested in the idea of nanobubbles which were being researched primarily at Japan and Korea, and it was not a lot, but some papers being generated that perked his attention across his screen, so to speak, and he reached out to Bruce to see if there's a way to achieve bubbles that were so small that they would stay in the water for a long period of time.
Bruce developed something, filed some patents, sent it out to Warren's project in the UAE, and sure enough, they saw very high levels of oxygen and sustained levels of oxygen, even though it was a shallow body of water and a high temperature. They ran another project that was similar to that, saw really interesting outcomes again and decided that they wanted to create a company. I was fortunate enough with a few others at the end of 2016 to meet them, and then shortly thereafter invested in the technology and the two of them and joined them to help grow the business. It was built out of necessity, which is a neat place in terms of where technology originates from.
Hilary: Did it work for that case study, for that initial deployment?
Nick: It did, and the next one. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have joined them.
Hilary: What does it actually look like? How do you infuse the oxygen into the water? I'm thinking a giant SodaStream.
Nick: No, it's not that elegant on the desktop of a kitchen. It looks more industrial than that. The first thing you should be picturing is something that looks like a pipe. Something that water or liquid is going to pass through. The technology itself is gas agnostic, liquid agnostic, and we have a number of applications outside of water. Primarily we focus on water, so I'll use that as the surrogate for liquid.
The first thing [unintelligible 00:03:14] as a pipe that water is passing through. Within that pipe, we have some proprietary materials that's going to diffuse or inject the gas, could be air, could be oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, ozone, doesn't matter, into that flowing water. We're going to manipulate the way that water flows, and when that water gas come together, the technology does two distinct things. It dissolves the vast majority of that gas into water. Whereas I've said before, only 1.5% per foot of water, we're dissolving sometimes 30 or more X than that number. We make that gas more affordable because you need less of it to get the amount that you want the water. In doing so, we also form enormous concentrations of these 100 nanometer-sized gas bubbles, which are more like gas particles at that scale. 100 nanometers is about 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt. You do not see it with your eye, you need to put it under microscopes that specialize in detection of nano-sized particles and liquids to know that you have a concentration, or you need to see the outcome that could only be a result of the presence of nanobubbles. What we do is we take that pipe that I just described and we offer it in different flow rates. It's actually scalable to any flow. That's allowed us to commercialize the technology so rapidly in a new class of science and what are considered fairly conservative industries and it's very versatile.
As I said before, water is what I'm talking about today, but we can treat almost any liquid, utilizing almost any gas. Then we package it into a system that might provide you a pump if you need it. It might provide you the gas source, an air compressor, oxygen generator if you need it. It can give you controls and give you sensors and it comes in different sizes based on the amount of water or liquids you need to treat. Ultimately you're picturing an industrial system of various sizes.
Hilary: You've worked in water technology throughout your career, starting with GE. What prompted you to join Moleaer?
Nick: Like you said, I was with GE. I left in 2010 to join a venture-backed startup in reverse osmosis membranes. Desalination was where I went to after GE, and there I still have a lot of passion for. I was there for six years, the first four years with NanoH2O, leading the commercial organization that was acquired by LG. Part of the agreement was that I would stay till the end of 2016 to help them expand the business globally. It was a fantastic experience. It's an amazing company. They've done extraordinary things in the membranes field and with NanoH2O.
At that time, I didn't want to stay any longer. I was looking for another water-related technology to connect with and to help commercialize and bring to market. What was interesting about Moleaer, and perhaps more importantly was nanobubbles, was when I met Bruce and Warren, after they talked about what it is, I went away and like anybody did some Google searches. In 2017, there weren't nearly as many papers being published in the use of nanobubbles, but there was enough that it brings you down a rabbit hole for a very long period of time and you get really excited. Areas from the use of nanobubbles in cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging, using nanobubbles to improve the way different products are cleaned. In fact, predating us, there's a carpet cleaning company that had nanobubble technology to enhance the efficacy of dirt and grit removal from carpets. There were activities around different chemicals like paints and how paints dry, scale inhibition on heat exchanges. You start to look at this thing as a really interesting platform technology that not only Bruce and Warren proved created value in wastewater, but could go in a lot of different places and could start to create big impacts around lots of different industries, in particular, water as a medium.
Hilary: As you've touched on, Moleaer has applications for their nanobubbles across all sorts of industries. You've got agriculture, aquaculture, oil and gas, wastewater treatment. Could you talk to us about agriculture and what that looks like and how Moleaer starts engaging with farmers? Are they coming to you for a solution or are you presenting this and selling it to them as a way to reduce chemicals and other additives?
Nick: It's actually a neat story how we got into ag or into irrigation. We weren't specifically targeting it. I'll tell you the story, but before I get to that story, just to frame the way water is used. About 70% of the world's water goes to irrigation. People often forget that. We always associate water and the availability of water as how’s it going to impact me at home, which is relevant. That's what we ultimately care about more than anything else until we think about how it's utilized. 70% of the world's water goes to irrigation, 20% goes to industry, there's roughly 10% between water and wastewater in the home. When you can play in irrigation and create value in that space, it can become a really large opportunity. It's one of the reasons why we're obviously very focused on it, combined with the value proposition and the effects or the benefits it's having and the solutions it's offering, particularly around input costs, chemicals, nutrients and whatnot.
In 2018, beginning of 2018, end of 2017, we were approached by a well-known crop consultant who also has their own business in horticulture, hydroponics, which means you're growing crops in water, in this particular case, leafy greens, only in about six inches of water. Think of a plastic platform. You've got the plant sitting on top, and underneath the platform, the roots are touching a little bit of water. Although we all know that the plants need CO2, it's actually the leaves need CO2, the roots need oxygen. Without oxygen, plant's going to die. It's going to asphyxiate. It can't eat. You need to make that water aerobic.
When they'd heard about the gas transfer or oxygen transfer advantages of nanobubble technology and what we were-- We were starting the marketing ourselves. We got connected, and he was curious to know, "Could I use your technology to put pure oxygen into my hydroponic water and see if I can elevate the dissolved oxygen levels and get more production, particularly in the summertime where it's too hot to be able to get any oxygen in that water and therefore it can't grow?" We said, "Let's try it."
We took oxygen, which naturally with air has a maximum of about 9 or 10 parts per million. With pure oxygen, you can go about 5x that, and we took it up to about 30 parts per million cost-effectively without really increasing costs at all. From what before he couldn't sell any of the produce in the summer, he was able to sell all the produce. The yield improvements were over 50% on all of these different leafy greens. Although science suggested that's exactly what should have happened, it was still pretty exciting and certainly said, "Hey, there's something here. Let's try this again."
We did it in another greenhouse. Both of these were in Dallas, Texas area. Saw similar results and we decided, "You know what? There's a value proposition here we should go after." Sale cycles are shorter.
We're clearly addressing a critical need, which is, how do I make water more oxygenated or more aerobic, which is well understood in growing as being important for the root development, root health of the crop. I don't think anyone anticipated how much value that would create in both increasing yield and increasing the caliber of the quality of the fruit and vegetable, but also improving or lowering so many other input costs associated with the need to disinfect irrigation water. The need to disinfect the equipment or clean the equipment that occurs from things like biofilm growth, to eliminate disease, and ultimately to be able to utilize nutrients more efficiently because you'll get better nutrient absorption to that crop.
That's how we got into that space. It's our biggest market today. I'd say it's not a coincidence, but it should go hand in hand. 70% of the world's water is going to irrigation, and you have a play in irrigation, it probably will become your biggest market. About half our business is in that field today.
Hilary: Were they not growing any crops in the summer because of the heat and because of the fact that water holds a lot less oxygen as it warms up?
Nick: That's right. That's exactly the challenge. As water gets warmer, just like your soda gets warmer, it's more flat. As water gets warmer, it's also going to hold less oxygen. In that particular environment, the temperature was 99 degrees Fahrenheit, and at that level was not able to get oxygen in there cost-effectively, and therefore couldn't grow crops cost-effectively to be able to sell them. You can use chillers. Chillers are more expensive.
Hilary: They took that whole season off?
Nick: Took the whole season off. Yes.
Hilary: Wow. Until you came in?
Nick: Till we came in.
Hilary: Now they're growing in the summers?
Nick: Now they're growing in the summers. Yes.
Hilary: Has the competition noticed?
Nick: Yes. We actually have competition in two directions. One of them, other nanobubble companies that are merging because this new class of science, which is not really new anymore, is starting to become more well known and well understood. The other is folks trying to figure out other ways to oxygenate water. The clear critical difference is it's more than just the oxygen. It's also the benefits of nanobubbles that create all the added value around yield, crop quality, reduction of input cost. Oxygen alone can't do that.
Hilary: With aquaculture, I understand you can really reduce the amount of feed and potential for disease in some of these installations.
Nick: Yes. In principle, we focus on salmon farming today and a little bit in shrimp farming. Salmon because that is the one area of aquaculture where growers are investing heavily in technology. One of the areas that they are focused on is how to improve the oxygenation of all the different grow-out facilities from the hatchery when they start out on land and then eventually go out to the sea cage. Some of the treatment that the fish have to go through before they go to market, and then ultimately restoring the sea floor, which is becoming a bigger and bigger issue in a good way, regulated as a requirement for growers as a problem they have to go address and solve. Our technology plays a critical role across that entire spectrum of applications within how you bring a salmon from the start to the market.
We focus really in two areas. One of them, as I mentioned before, our technology's going to resolve the gas more efficiently than anybody else's. We lower the cost of oxygen, or we allow them to get more oxygen to that water so they can increase the stock and density, meaning more fish at any given point in time that they can grow out and then grow and then bring to market.
Secondly, we improve water quality. That really comes down to the nanobubble, and improve the fish welfare, they call it, or the fish health, and ultimately how that translates to feed conversion rates, the biomass, meaning the weight of the fish, how fast it grows, and being able to utilize that feed more efficiently, meaning lower those costs. That's where the nanobubble aspect comes into play as well.
I think the most exciting area from a climate sustainability aspect is that last piece I mentioned, which is the seabed remediation. Unfortunately, when you're growing salmon offshore, you have quite a bit of waste, both the fish waste and food waste that reaches the sea floor below the cage. That ultimately converts it into an anaerobic or anoxic environment where the natural wildlife can't flourish, can't live, and dies out. Particularly in Chile, but we expect this to expand globally over time. There are mandates now that growers need to also invest in restoring the sea floor. It's called seabed remediation. You've damaged it, now fix it. That's where nanobubble technology comes in. It has been the only solution that so far has proven to be able to basically restore, rehabilitate the sea floor below these sea cages. Not only do you meet the environmental requirements from a regulatory perspective, but you're actually doing good. You're bringing back what you've potentially destroyed and also now in the future, preventing that destruction of the sea bed as a result.
Hilary: In these photos that you have on your website, the Moleaer unit is actually floating on these different sea cages. Is the oxygen going in at the surface level and then also down at the sea floor level?
Nick: That's right. Picture piping going down and then it gets diffused onto the sea floor. The nanobubble oxygenated water starts at the surface and gets pumped down.
Hilary: Okay. Then you bring more oxygen to the sea floor so that aquatic life does better.
Nick: Yes. You bring oxygen nanobubbles to the sea floor. One of the other properties of nanobubbles I didn't touch on earlier when I was mentioning surface tension and viscosity is that they also have a naturally producing oxidant or disinfection capability to it. Oxidants are things like bleach, chlorine, hydrogen peroxide. Those are very strong oxidants and obviously they play important role in different aspects of water treatment, to put it simply. On the sea floor, the bubbles themselves provide a mild oxidant, and that mild oxidant helps also eliminate some of the contaminants that accumulate there due to fish waste, feed waste, et cetera.
Hilary: Do you anticipate applications for restoration efforts on other open water areas?
Nick: Yes. About a quarter of our business historically is what we call surface water. Surface water can be anything from your traditional golf course community pond to a storm water channel. The largest project Moleaer did to date was a storm water channel actually in Los Angeles County where it appears that there was some sort of chemical spill. We don't know the full origin of what happened.
Very rapidly, that storm water channel went from an aerobic to a completely anoxic, anaerobic state. When it's anaerobic, things like sulfate-reducing bacteria forms. That sulfate-reducing bacteria forms hydrogen sulfide, which forms that rotten egg smell. The rotten egg smell and the amount of hydrogen sulfide gas that was emitted from the channel was strong enough that everybody in the community could smell it. About 1,200 homes or families were relocated temporarily to get out of that environment. It ended up being one of the largest cleanups or remediation or restoration projects that any storm water division in any county in the United States has ever done.
LA County reached out to Moleaer, and in about two weeks, we started to deploy, eventually, 60,000,000 gallons per day of nanobubble treatment to restore that storm water channel. Within a few weeks after we were fully deployed, we eliminated the anoxic or anaerobic condition. The odors went away. The air became safe, families came back home. That's about four months in total, or three and a half to four months to do the full restoration, but it's an example of the value of the technology. To LA County's credit, they could have used harmful chemicals to eliminate that smell. They didn't want to do that. They could have used aeration to create an aerobic environment, but it would've shipped out even more hydrogen sulfide, which would've been even more dangerous temporarily for the area.
To LA County's credit, they sought a sustainable solution that would do two things. It would treat the problem under the surface, so you wouldn't emit more, and they weren't going to use harmful chemicals like peroxides or chlorine or bleaches to try to oxidize the contaminants that had built up into that storm water channel. It's a project everyone here is really proud of. It's a good example of the sheer size and scale of the capability of the technology and the company and the types of problems we solve. We do hundreds of different types of surface waters every day. We're permanent installations. Lakes, ponds, storm water channels, rivers, canals, et cetera.
Hilary: In LA County, the understanding is that it was a one-time event where some chemical entered and so you don't need ongoing remediation.
Nick: Correct. The storm water channel naturally by itself is fine. It doesn't encounter these issues. It was a one-time event, but those one-time events happen pretty often. Think about the train derailment that happened in Ohio.
Hilary: Right.
Nick: Something we were not involved in because the bodies of water there that were affected was less localized. That's an area where nanobubble technology could absolutely play a role.
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Hilary: You do have a number of municipal engagements for some of these surface water treatments, is that right?
Nick: We do. Most of the municipal work we do is on wastewater. On surface water, a little bit in the municipal space, but a lot of it more in terms of homeowners like community ponds, golf course ponds, power plants, those types of end users.
Hilary: How energy intensive is it to deploy the technology?
Nick: It depends on how it's being deployed. When you utilize an existing pump, so if you're an aquaculture facility where everyone's already pumping, or you're a wastewater treatment plant where you're often already pump in the wastewater we can integrate in, our technology can utilize that existing pumping. The only energy penalty you face is a little bit of the back pressure, meaning some of that added pressure that's necessary or lost to move water through our core tech, and whatever pressure is necessary to bring in compressed gas. A lot of times these facilities already have compressed air, so the energy penalty is negligible.
If we have to provide a pump, then of course we are adding energy to the process. We also might be saving energy in return. Let me give a good example of that. Take a wastewater treatment plan. If you go back to the very beginning of our conversation and mentioning the origin of Moleaer, it was about the inefficiency of traditional aeration systems which are most commonly used to increase oxygen levels in wastewater biological treatment processes. The reason why it's so inefficient is, in wastewater, you have the presence of things like surfactants which are cleaning chemicals, industrial cleaners, hand soap, sanitizers, et cetra. Fat soils and grease that come out of different types of food processing facilities or our homes. The combination of those actually prevent bubbles from dissolving oxygen as easily as it would if it was clean water. In clean water, you can dissolve about 3% of oxygen per foot of water. In wastewater, it's 1.5%, as I mentioned before. It drops by a factor of two. It's a pretty significant reduction in efficiency.
Customers will add air nanobubbles using Moleaer's technology to the front end of a wastewater treatment process that start to react with those contaminants I mentioned before, fat soils and grease, or fat and those types of cleaners. We're separating them out, oxidizing. We're basically removing them from the rest of the wastewater treatment process. Not all of them, but enough whereby when that wastewater finally gets to the aeration basin, where conventional aeration is putting an enormous amount of air into the wastewater to create an aerobic environment, we've made those bubbles dissolve oxygen more efficiently as they rise up the water column before they reach the surface and pop. As a result, those wastewater treatment plants don't need the same amount of energy because they don't need to get the same amount of air in there anymore. The air that is going in is dissolving more efficiently. The biomass health improves. The kinetics of the treatment process gets better as well and end up increasing the throughput. Whereas we might be adding a pump upstream, we're saving all that energy on the back end by improving the oxygen transfer efficiency of the existing aeration systems.
Hilary: That's fantastic.
Nick: Yes. It's actually a neat thing that we started to really understand in terms of the sheer power and potential of the bubbles about two years ago to really help us understand the mode of action and why it was creating the value it was creating in wastewater.
Hilary: What's the payback period for something like that?
Nick: We often offer our technology as a service in wastewater specifically, which means we come in there, we install it for the wastewater treatment plant, particularly in the municipal space more than industrial space, and we get paid a monthly rate for that product. Obviously, they're only going to pay us per month if they save more money per month. They're immediately saving money within the first 30 days of running our system. To give you a good example, many of our customers don't let us talk about the data, don't let us talk about, especially in wastewater, what we've done for them. One that we often highlight is the City of Goleta up here in California, because they've been very good about sharing lots of data, really allowing us to learn a lot about the value proposition of our technology, how it works, how best to optimize, et cetera. In that particular installation, we saved the rate players of the City of Goleta at their sanitation district over $120,000 a year in savings and operating costs. That came through a 40% reduction in energy, 40% reduction in chemicals. That's a good example of the benefit of adding Moleaer and nanobubble technology to the front end of that treatment process and then letting it provide its value downstream in terms of optimizing the different process units before the wastewater ultimately is discharged to wherever it's going.
Hilary: That's incredible to be able to save 40% of both the energy and the chemicals. There are not a lot of technologies where you can see that kind of result.
Nick: I agree. That's how I think about nanobubble technology in terms of its future value, which is, ultimately, we focus more than anything else on, how do you improve productivity? Recycling water, reusing water, treating water is obviously incredibly important. It's a finite resource, but our principal focus is, how do you improve the productivity of where water is being utilized, or how water is being treated? How do we make things better? If you're using water to grow a tomato, how do we help you grow a bigger tomato or use less water to grow tomatoes you want? If you're treating wastewater, how do we help you treat that wastewater more cost-effectively, energy consumption, chemical consumption, or otherwise?
Hilary: You're calling in from California which, despite the floods this year, has faced chronic droughts. Does that motivate you as you think about the applications in agriculture?
Nick: It does in a huge way. I'll explain twofold to it. One of them is, I remember when California mandated that homeowners reduce their sprinkler usage at home because it's like 70% of the home usage is going to irrigating your lawn. I don't have real grass in my house, so it didn't really affect me. When you do the math, that's like 1% of California's water. It's like, who cares, right? 80% of California's water is going to irrigation. That's over 30 trillion gallons of water irrigating over 9 million acres of land. That has to be the focus, not what we are doing on our landscapes at home, even though we can all be smarter about that.
That was one area where you're like, "Come on, let's wake up and look at where the real problem is," and look at technologies, not just ours, but there are others that can help growers utilize water more efficiently.
Then the second is actually the pain and suffering. I went to a conference about 18 months ago, where mostly in a conference people are talking about the future, what it means, and here's the direction of the industry. It's usually upbeat. This conference was people hurting and literally asking politicians like, "What are you doing right now for me?" and like, "I can't grow right now. I shut down. I've laid off these people. I'm pulling up perfectly healthy vines because I can't irrigate." You start to realize, that's a big deal. It's not just a big deal for a Californian grower, it's a big deal for food across the United States, so it definitely motivates.
Of course, this year the pendulum swung the other way and now they're hurting because they're flooded. It's actually maybe worse from an economic perspective for them. The state can't catch a break when it comes to water and growing right now.
Hilary: Do you expect that nanobubbles will be applied to some of these smaller-scale farms or farms overseas and in developing countries?
Nick: Both. We already do both. We started smaller. It's always easier to go after smaller than bigger.
Hilary: Sure.
Nick: We start in very small greenhouses, vertical farms, and we started moving into the traditional Dutch greenhouses. Then we started moving into more of the Spanish low-end farms where they don't need a high-tech greenhouse. They have beautiful weather, but they need a greenhouse. There's too much heat, too much radiation, so you have to protect it. Now we're moving more into those outdoor farms and we're launching more and more products that offer the right solution with the right price point for that particular grower. Ultimately, the market for us is, everywhere that water is being applied for irrigation is potentially a customer, and we want to find a way to create the right product portfolio that helps them.
Hilary: Wonderful. Anything else you want to address before we switch over?
Nick: No. I think for me it's just the overarching message of why I think it's so valuable to be able to have this opportunity, again, thank you, is be able to educate and create awareness around this category. A category that, yes, I live it every day, but most people are not familiar with, and the rate of growth in the scientific community around nanobubbles. When I joined Moleaer six years ago, there were maybe 500 papers in total. Last year, 2,000 papers alone were published from the use of nanobubbles across a wide range of applications, and almost all of them-- well, not almost, the majority of them are focused on water. This is a critical ingredient to helping reduce the amount of water that's being used as opposed to focusing just on how you reuse and recycle. I think it's an important mission to focus on.
Hilary: Now that the technology is developed, what are the constraints to growth?
Nick: I'd say the constraints to growth for us right now are really identifying where to focus in terms of the critical needs are and making sure that we're giving all the right energy to helping those customers understand how to optimize and apply the technology, especially with more and more competitors coming in, and how to maximize the value as a result of it. What we're really focused on right now is really understanding, "Where are those problems biggest and how do we align ourselves with the right people, the right partners?" and entering those spaces into it.
For example, if you take Southern Spain, for example, they grow very differently than they do in a Dutch greenhouse. If you take a municipal wastewater treatment plant, they have very different issues than an industrial food and beverage wastewater treatment plant. To make sure that we really are positioning Moleaer for those needs of those particular customers, putting the right people into place with the right solution, the right value proposition, and making sure we really work for the customer and work our way backwards and offer that solution to them.
Hilary: Fantastic. Good luck with that.
Nick: Thanks.
Hilary: You got your work cut out.
Nick: That's a big challenge.
Hilary: We're going to switch over to the hot seat.A book or an event that changed my perspective.
Nick: An event was 9/11. I was in New York. I was actually in New Jersey going to a meeting stuck across the Hudson River for many, many hours watching everything unfold that day. That definitively has shaped who I am.
Hilary: Is that why you're in such a mission-oriented company now?
Nick: I don't know for sure, but I do recognize that it makes you realize that everything's-- Life is finite. You got to take advantage of it.
Hilary: Yes. Then finally, to me, climate positive means--
Nick: I think right now, climate positive means helping people, industries do more with less. How do you utilize resources more efficiently and respect them?
Hilary: Wonderful. Nick, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Climate Positive. It was great to have you and I'm excited to see more and more applications for nanobubbles.
Nick: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity.
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I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.