Oxymem waves treating wastewater

It's been an eventful 12 months for last year's overall winner of The Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation Awards.

Oxymem, which took the top honours for its highly innovative water-treatment technology, has completed a significant funding round, formed partnerships with some of the world's leading water companies, made its first foray into China, and picked up a few more awards along the way.

Founded in 2013, the UCD spinout company has developed a revolutionary new system which can bring down the operating costs of wastewater treatment plants by up to 75 per cent as well as offering other advantages such as a lower overall environmental impact and far easier deployment.

The patented Membrane Aerated Biofilm Reactor (MABR) achieves these gains through a re-engineering of the treatment process.

The standard process uses micro-organisms to break down and digest the waste particles in water.

The micro-organisms require oxygen to do their work and this is normally supplied through an energy intensive and wasteful system involving pumping air into the treatment unit. Instead of using pumps the Oxymem system uses a series of hollow tubes made of gas permeable silicon membranes in the tank itself to transfer the oxygen to the microbes.

The plaudits have continued to roll in for the company and in 2014 it took the Water Innovation SME Award in Europe, the Overall Excellence in Intellectual Property Award at the Intellectual Property Awards and was named in the Global Top 30 by the Global Cleantech Cluster Association.

Already this year it has been named as a finalist in Imagine H20's Water Infrastructure Challenge which takes place shortly in San Francisco.

"These awards have been very welcome as they have given us international profile which is very important in terms of fundraising and the search for partners", says Oxymem managing director Wayne Byrne.

“The past year has been a particularly good one in that respect. We closed out our ‘A’ round of funding and raised €1.6 million from investors and we started working with a number of key strategic partners.”

Suez International

The company has had a relationship with the giant Suez International for almost two years and that is now bearing fruit.

“Suez took an interest in our innovative technology almost from the beginning and so far we’ve had more than 30 people from Suez companies looking at the system. As a result, we have now partnered with Aqualogy which is part of the Suez group. This is a major company which is heading for €1 billion in turnover next year and it has just taken delivery of an industrial scale MABR unit in Barcelona. Aqualogy will test the unit over the next six months but we already have an early stage go-to-market strategy agreed with them. The South American market will probably be our next step with them.”

Xylem is another partner which has come on board in recent months.

"This is the market leader in the aeration systems market and we will shortly deliver our first unit to them in Sweden. We are also working with another strategic partner in the pure oxygen area. Pure oxygen is not used in traditional treatment plants because it is expensive to produce and 70 per cent of it would be wasted. However, plants running on pure oxygen would be a lot more efficient and capable of handling a lot more wastewater.

“The low levels of waste from our system means that using pure oxygen is a viable option. The potential of this application is enormous – a unit could handle five times as much waste using pure oxygen.”

Progress is also being made in winning new customers.

"We shipped the largest MABR in the world to Severn Trent Water recently and we will ship our first small unit to the US this month.

" The Severn Trent unit will be a significant lighthouse site for us and we have brought in a lot of people to see it in action. We also have a couple of other units in operation with clients such as South Dublin County Council. "

Significant uplift

Byrne anticipates a significant uplift in demand as a result of these partnerships and customer wins.

“We are gearing up our production capacity in Athlone to meet what we believe will be a wall of demand which will come through over the next year or so. We are also looking forward to our next funding round which will be for around €20 million and some very significant international investors have expressed an interest in participating. This level of funding will be required to support our quite aggressive expansion plans.

“I was in China recently and the government there is building 600 large-scale wastewater treatment plants every year. We will be looking to put a lighthouse site in the Chinese market in the next six months and this will generate very significant demand for our technology.”