Each week, at BlueTech, we scan, curate and screen what we see happening in the World of Water to separate truth from noise, fact from fiction and identify what is meaningful.
I noted this week:
374Water Announces 5-Year Agreement with the City of Orlando, Approval to Launch Licensed Waste Destruction Services Hub
at the Iron Bridge Wastewater Treatment Plant to destroy PFAS in Biosolids using Supercritical Water Oxidation.
They say Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.
Let’s hope so.
The last time they tried this, with SuperWater LLC, the SCWO reactor blew up. That was in 2014. Or at least a hole blew out of the side of one of the reactor vessels.
It was also treating biosolids.
We covered the first announcements on this new project in 2024, noting: “We remain cautiously optimistic that this innovative approach could effectively treat biosolids and PFAS, reducing waste volume and greenhouse gas emissions. However, success will depend on learning from past failures to avoid repeating them. This project could be a significant step forward, but it requires careful consideration of historical lessons”.
Glen Daigger commented at the time: “This represents an important step forward to assess the future potential for Supercritical Water Oxidation as a biosolids processing technology. This technology has been implemented in other applications for many years, but extension to biosolids has proven difficult in the past.
The leadership at City of Orlando, knowing the history, must have some super-dedicated early adopters, super-keen on super-critical.
If Elon Musk did water, he would most definitely do supercritical water oxidation.
It’s an elegant solution, it’s a discontinuous innovation (market taking) like a Tesla. And Elon Musk is OK with blowing things up to work out the advanced material engineering issues.
This could be it, the final breakthrough…though it does feel a little like dejavous.
Orlando: we have may have lift-off.
Fingers crossed!
The team is strong and, as Ali Ling noted, a big benefit here is the ability to become auto-thermal at 15% dry solids, which is the benefit of staying in the aqueous phase. Also, the eocnomics may finally make sense now, as it was difficult historically for SCWO to compete economically at prices in the range of $50-$80 per wet tonne. This changes the economics and it is becoming a crisis driven innovation. Which moves at twice the speed of a value-driven innovation, higher risk but more rapid velocity.
For more insights on PFAS, Biosolids and emerging water technology market opportunities, please reach out.
