It's been said that, in a time long, long ago, one of ancient Greece's most famous philosophers devised a way to purify water using only the energy of the sun. Fast forward some 2,300 years to a startup based in Los Alamos, which has taken that original concept, thought up by Aristotle, and turned it into a system it hopes can help reclaim massive amounts of oil and gas industry wastewater.
Undesert is the name of that startup, which Nicholas Seet, its CEO, founded in 2021. The New Mexico company wants to take a technology invented by its Chief Technology Officer, Hill Kemp, and turn it into a sustainable water purification solution for the energy industry.
Specifically, the Salty Wastewater Purification, or SWAP, technology — which Kemp has a near decade-old patent for — is a way to recover useable water from contaminated wastewater using a distillation method. But instead of using reclaimed water for drinking, for example, Undesert wants to use it for agricultural purposes, including large-scale farming operations and shareholder farms.
There's a massive market for wastewater desalination, Seet — who founded video tech company Auditude before it sold to Adobe in late 2011 in a deal worth over $100 million — told Albuquerque Business First.
Take produced water, for instance, which is water trapped underground and brought to the surface during oil and gas exploration and production. Figures included in a May article by Inside Climate News show New Mexico produced about 1.5 billion barrels of produced water in 2021, while Texas produced over 8 billion barrels.
That dirty produced water is normally stored underground in large reservoirs. But that leads to problems like earthquakes and groundwater pollution.
So, there's been a trend toward beneficial uses of produced water, which include livestock watering and agriculture irrigation, instead of storage. That's where Undesert's technology would come in, Seet said, in reclaiming produced water for those beneficial uses.
One of the company's end goals, he added, is helping fight desertification, or the withering of tree and other plant life due to lack of useable water. The startup has picked up some recent traction toward that goal thanks to a few accelerator programs, and through working with Shell Corp.
Techstars' Industries of the Future Accelerator tapped Undesert as one of the 10 startups for its 2023 class. The accelerator is based in the Oak Ridge and Knoxville, Tennessee, metro area and selects companies focused on "emerging technologies" in industries like artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and — in the case of Undesert — climate tech, according to Techstars' website.
Undesert also participated in the New Mexico Clean Energy Resilience and Growth program, run out of New Mexico State University's Arrowhead Center.
And, the Los Alamos company was part of Shell GameChanger, a program run by Shell Corp. to support early-stage startups with "ideas that have the potential to impact the future of energy," according to its website. Undesert got $100,000 through its work with Shell Corp., of which $50,000 came from the multinational company in the form of cash, Seet said.
He hopes such early advances can drive Undesert toward continued momentum. While the startup also received a $20,000 equity investment through the Techstars accelerator program, Seet said Undesert anticipates opening a formal seed financing round in early 2024. The company would target around $1.7 million through that seed round, he added.
That next round won't happen, though, until Undesert picks up a bit more customer traction. But it's already making some strides in that direction, Seet said, thanks to preliminary conversations with oil and gas companies operating in the Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas.
"Going from zero to one is very hard," Seet said. "Going from one to 100 is just a money thing."
In particular, Seet said Undesert could start that scaling process by placing four of its SWAP devices in a shipping container, for example. Those four devices, in that relatively small area, would be able to reclaim about 400 barrels of produced water per day, he said — a big jump from only having the capacity to clean one barrel of wastewater per day.
Ultimately, Undesert's long-term business model, Seet said, is forming partnerships with energy companies — including large midstream operators in the oil and gas industry — so they can employ the startup's water desalination technology to purify produced and other types of wastewater water. That purified water, then, could be used for agricultural purposes, primarily.
It's taking the massive amounts of "windfall capital" generated by those larger oil and gas firms, he said, and giving them the opportunity to invest that money in Undesert's tech, which the startup hopes can provide a more direct solution to the problems of produced water disposal and desertification.
"What I'm doing for my kid is I'm saying, 'Let's get those guys who caused the problem to be part of the solution,'" Seet said. "Because while it's very easy to say, 'I'm not going to have anything to do with them, they're the enemy,' it's another thing to say, 'I have the tool to allow you to be a part of the solution.'"
