The Challenge

Water enables industrial production but becomes severely contaminated in doing so. Compromised water is expensive to deal with and can punish the bottom line. New efficient low-cost ways to clean and recycle heavily contaminated wastewater are in-demand.

The Solution

Forward Water is advancing a new proprietary membrane process for the treatment of wastewater that can only be thrown away or thermally treated today. In doing so, FWT can reduce treatment costs by up to 40%, lower energy needs up to 20x, reduce greenhouse gas emission output by 30-40%, and reclaim clean water for re-use.

The Success

The Canadian Scale-up conducted an initial pilot with Vopak during the 2019 Rotterdam program whose success led to a signed contract during that period. The contract includes a 2-step process. First, a larger scale test at one of Vopak’s Canadian terminals, which if successful would eventually lead to a global rollout of the solution, making it worth millions for Howie Honeyman & the Forward Water crew. Their solution makes wastewater clean again, and the tests in Canada have shown amazing results – it took them only 6 hours of work time (once everything was set up) to turn 400L of contaminated water in 20L, with the remaining 380L clean and ready to be reused at Vopak’s terminal.  The repercussions of which have massive potential.

For more details, see: https://portxl.org/alumni-feature/major-wastewater-treatment-breakthrough/