Symbios puts focus on water and energy

Symbios Technologies took a few twists and turns in its brief, four-year life, but founder Justin Bzdek now has his company squarely focused on creating a better, cheaper way for oil and gas companies to treat waste water.

“It’s easy for people to get confused about Symbios because we’ve done a lot of things,” said Bzdek, who also is Symbios CEO and president.

So how does Bzdek now describe the company?

“We’re a technology development and commercialization company focusing on the interface between water and energy,” he said.

More specifically, Symbios has put the vast majority of its work in the past couple years into developing a tubular plasma reactor for water treatment.

Symbios’ tubular plasma reactor uses electricity to create a plasma discharge that in turns creates an oxidation process that cleans wastewater impurities such as hydro-carbons, including volatile organic materials, and bacteria and other harmful micro-organisms.

Symbios has developed a laboratory prototype tubular plasma reactor that does all of that.

Bzdek said his technology is “a more powerful and less-costly alternative” to conventional technologies such as ozone, chlorine or ultra-violet radiation treatment. Another benefit is that a plasma discharge can treat some chemicals not affected by the other technologies, he said.

The technology is a natural for the oil and gas exploration industries, Bzdek said. “It’s a big deal in Colorado because the natural gas industry is taking off,” he said.

A practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses high-pressure water to break up rocks underground and free the fossil fuels contained in those rocks. The practice uses lots of water, nine barrels of water for every barrel of fossil fuel. The issue is what to do with the wastewater. Some companies truck the water to treatment facilities and others inject the wastewater into deep wells.

The fossil-fuel recovery water treatment is a roughly $50 billion industry, which means a start-up that is able to capture even a small market share can reap huge rewards. “We want to be a technology vendor into the oil and gas industry in order to decrease the cost and improve the sustainability of water procured from extraction activities,” he said.

The next step for the company is to get its reactor into the field for pilot tests, a step Bzdek expects to take late this year.

Bzdek says he’s focusing on oil and gas because the need for better water treatment technologies is evident, but he also sees applications for his technology in drinking water treatment and in other industrial applications. The semiconductor industry, for example, also uses enormous amounts of water and access to relatively inexpensive water is a key concern when semiconductor companies make location decisions.

Two federal agencies, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, found Symbios’ technology intriguing enough to each make a $150,000 grant. If the technology shows enough promise, the agencies could together boost their grants to $1 million. Bzdek hopes to receive $3 million to $5 million in grant funding over the next two to three years.

Symbios’ also is beginning to quietly court individual investors and hopes to generate about $1.75 million from those efforts. Down the road, Bzdek expects to begin courting venture capital firms.

If all goes well, he sees Symbios growing from a company with one full-time employee – that’s him — to as many as 80 employees a few years down the road. At the moment, however, Bzdek and his seven part-time employees work out of Colorado State University’s Research Innovation Center. It’s a good fit for Symbios, because four CSU faculty members are helping with the plasma reactor research.

Symbios also is an active member of the Rocky Mountain Innosphere, a technology business incubator supported by CSU and Northern Colorado cities. Bzdek calls the Innosphere “a really good ecosystem” that provides support for developers of promising, yet unproven, technologies such as his.

Bzdek is a CSU graduate with a degree in chemistry and an entrepreneurial bent that has sent him on a decade-long journey through various sustainability ventures, including biofuels.

The common theme, however, is evident in his current focus on the plasma reactor. It’s all about turning industrial waste streams into usable resources.

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