Evoqua Water Technologies (NYSE: AQUA) celebrated the opening of its new Sustainability and Innovation Hub at RIDC's Tech Forge in Lawrenceville on Wednesday.
The new facility, expected to employ about 10 researchers, will aim to advance downtown-based Evoqua's development of new and sustainable water treatment technologies needed to address evolving water trends, including those caused by climate change, as well as health and safety. It replaces a previous lab in Warrendale.
The new 18,000 square-foot facility features a demonstration and training area, a pilot testing environment and laboratory space for the company to conduct analytical and feasibility studies.
Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto joined Evoqua's CEO Ron Keating, Evoqua board member and former Pittsburgh Steelers player Lynn Swann and Evoqua's Chief Growth Officer Snehal Desai during the ribbon cutting ceremony.
Noting the build-out for the new lab space came in on time and within budget, Keating called the opportunity to open the new facility thrilling as Evoqua works to build on its various technologies for which it now operates 200,000 installations throughout the world, employing about 4,000 people.
"You'd be hard pressed to find any industry in the world that isn't reliant on water," he said to an assembled audience of well wishers, noting the company's "great progress" toward the goal of being "the world's first choice in water solutions."
Mark Hunsaker, director of technology and applications for Evoqua, said the new facility is where the company will collect water samples from its various clients and installations to test them and devise new technological solutions to help treat and purify water.
He emphasized it's a facility that will operate as a "systems solution provider" that will be "technology agnostic," deploying both Evoqua technologies as well as those of its competitors to meet its various water testing needs.
It's a facility divided largely in half between a lab set up for micro-testing small samples of water along with some larger-scale equipment to provide testing of larger volumes of water.
Hunsaker said the facility will likely work mostly with industrial clients of Evoqua but expects the facility will be used for various municipal clients as well.
The company is already a key resource for all kinds of water testing and treatment, including of fracking water from the natural gas drilling in the region.
Hunsaker noted how the company works with a range of different kinds of industrial clients needing support in dealing with their wastewater, including power plants, oil and gas companies, and computer chip makers, a manufacturing process that can use an intense amount of water.
"In the past, we were really challenged with just getting water clean enough to discharge back into the environment, which was fantastic," said Hunsaker. "Now, we're still doing that. But now a lot of our clients are moving into the space of needing to be able to catch some of the water out of the back end of the facility and bring it back and feed their utilities or feed their process and reuse that water."
Mayor Peduto expects the company to continue to be a great asset for the region as water becomes a more and more cherished resource around the world due to the intensifying impacts of climate change.
