Business in Vancouver’s Curt Cherewayko profiled 2008 New Ventures BC Winner Saltworks Technologies in this week’s issue. In an article titled Vancouver company hopes desalination technology will generate liquid assets, Chereyayko learns more about Saltworks’ desalination process from Founder Ben Sparrow.
Ben Sparrow’s eureka moment occurred in the middle of the night in 2005 in a train-station bathroom while he was travelling from Beijing to Shanghai.
He was on a backpacking trip during a break from studies at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and had spent the night on a train mulling over how to use a thermodynamics law, in which the tension between two different concentrations of the same solution converts energy.
He applied the law to salt water and realized that the voltage from the ions of a hyper-saline solution could pull salt from a third water stream as the ions naturally move from a high to low concentration of salt water.
Four years later, Sparrow and his seven-person team at Vancouver-based Saltworks Technologies Inc. are making the final adjustments on a saltwater-powered battery that can desalinate water at a cost that the company says is up to 80% less than that of existing processes.
Read the rest of the article here.
Saltworks is in discussions with its first potential customers and has survived to date on roughly $2 Million in grants from provincial and federal technology-focused agencies, including B.C.’s Innovative Clean Energy (ICE) Fund and the New Ventures BC Competition Grand Prize in 2008.
Accorsing tothe article, Saltworks is looking to close a minimum $5 Million financing round in the next six months.