Solugen bringing cleaner water through chemistry

The treatment of waste water from petrochemical production is an ecological vicious circle.

The chemicals used to treat the wastewater prevent toxic substances from entering the environment, but they also contain phosphates, which cause algal blooms that can block sunlight from underwater plants, lower the oxygen levels in the water and further damage aquatic life. However, with few alternatives, these chemicals are widespread, especially in petrochemical centers like the Gulf Coast.

Solugen, a Houston-based company founded in 2016, aims to break this cycle by replacing the chemicals commonly used in wastewater treatment with renewable substitutes. Solugen’s technology starts with corn syrup, which is converted into a hydrogen peroxide product that can be used not only for wastewater treatment but also for products like fertilizers and even hand sanitizers.

As a side benefit, Solugen says the acid that is created as a by-product of the treatment process can break down minerals, clogging and corroding the pipes.

“In petrochemical manufacturing, the temperatures are so high that hazardous chemicals are used and the chemicals break down,” said Sean Hunt, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Solugen. “The challenge with the by-products is that there are unpleasant chemicals and emissions that end up in the wastewater.”

Investors are open to Solugen’s treatment technology, which the company calls BioForge. Solugen said last month it closed a $ 350 million financing round that valued the privately held company at approximately $ 1.8 billion. Investors included the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, British investment company Baillie Gifford and New York asset manager BlackRock.

“These investors are very credible, and that’s a good sign,” said Glen Daigger, professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan, whose expertise is in water infrastructure and water management. “It suggests that the company is moving towards a commercially viable approach.”

These investors are banking on an industrial wastewater treatment industry that is expected to grow with global energy consumption. According to a 2019 estimate by the Environmental Defense Fund, the U.S. oil and gas industry generates approximately 900 billion gallons of gallons of wastewater annually. Meanwhile, U.S. hydraulic fracking, or fracking, generated approximately 21 billion gallons of wastewater annually between 2005 and 2014, according to a 2015 report from Duke University.

By comparison, US homes and businesses produce approximately 12.4 trillion gallons of wastewater per year, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Worldwide, annual sales of industrial wastewater treatment products will increase by around 17 percent or around 4.66 billion US dollars between 2020 and 2024, the London-based market research group Technavio forecast in February. About 60 percent of this growth is expected to come from the Asia-Pacific region, while Dow, Ecolab and Hitachi are among the world’s largest manufacturers of industrial wastewater treatment products.

“The demand for energy is increasing all over the world, especially in emerging countries like China and India. This has led to a significant increase in consumption and demand for oil and gas reserves, ”wrote Technavio. “As a result, waste water generation in the oil and gas E&P has increased [exploration and production] Activities.”

Enzymes meet chemical production

Solugen’s genesis dates back to 2010 when Solugen’s co-founder and CEO Gaurab Chakrabarti – then a student at the University of Texas’ s Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas – was introduced to Hunt, who received a PhD. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through Hunt’s then girlfriend and now wife.

After years of correspondence about Chakrabarti’s research on enzymes and Hunt’s research on chemical production, the two founded Solugen in 2016. ) and that the company would make a peroxide product (for the “gene”). He added that “S” and “G” in Solugen represent the first names of the co-founders Sean and Gaurab.

The company wanted to use Chakrabarti’s work on enzymes to make a hydrogen peroxide-type product to treat contaminated water by oxidizing it and removing many of the contaminants. But the peroxide in Solugen is not made with environmentally harmful phosphates, but with corn syrup, the by-products of which are organic acids.

The company’s first round of funding came in May 2016 when Solugen won $ 10,000 in an MIT business competition. The company was soon accepted into the Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley Accelerator program in which Chakrabarti and Hunt spent the first three months of 2017. The company received $ 5 million in seed capital from Y Combinator.

Today Solugen employs around 120 people and is growing rapidly. Solugen produces approximately 10,000 tons of its corn syrup-based chemicals annually at a facility located on five acres in southwest Houston.

Solugen said his facility will be the first Houston factory to produce zero emissions or wastewater discharges because it is powered by wind energy. The company declined to elaborate on how the facility eliminates wastewater discharge or supplies itself without wind. The company also operates a facility in West Texas.

Solugen declined to disclose its earnings, profits or losses. However, in a Forbes article for 2020, the company predicts sales in 2020 will increase from $ 12 million in 2019 to more than $ 30 million.

Chakrabarti estimated the company’s production could triple this year and increase tenfold from 2021 to 2022.

Chakrabarti declined to identify any of the company’s customers, merely stating that Solugen’s water treatment customers were “service providers” while the agricultural customers were fertilizer mixers and traders.

Side appearance

In the early stages of the pandemic, when medical supplies were in short supply, Solugen also produced hand disinfectants when the product was in short supply. According to last year’s Forbes article, the company mixed its hydrogen peroxide, which is an antiseptic, with alcohol from a nearby ethanol factory. Chakrabarti said the company donated “many truckloads” to various communities in need last year.

Granted, the growing demand for corn syrup as a raw material for non-food processes can create additional problems for corn-dependent companies like Solugen, according to Daigger. Droughts and forest fires have made the prices of plant-based commodities more volatile, while some analysts say that greater use of plants as fuel increases the likelihood of food shortages. While Solugen raised no concerns about corn prices, some oil refineries planning to open biofuel plants are delaying projects due to high prices for corn, a raw material for ethanol, and soybean, a raw material for biodiesel.

The use of food crops to make fuels and chemicals is controversial, in part because it increases competition for staple foods like corn and increases food prices. In addition, the CO2 reduction benefits of these plant-based products can be offset by emissions from the energy used to make them.

“It takes energy to harvest corn and turn it into corn syrup, but it’s also done on a fairly large scale,” said Daigger, a professor at the University of Michigan. “But it competes with the production of food, so it’s not that easy.”

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