Land-locked Alberta is not the first province one might think of when it comes to water technology innovation. British Columbia, with 26,000 kilometres of coastline, is a more obvious pick.
But a handful of local firms are proving that water-tech innovators can thrive in Alberta. One such company is Ionic Solutions.
Based out of Calgary, Ionic stands among Canada’s most investible clean-tech companies, according to The Foresight 50, which recognizes ventures nationwide and across sectors.
An overnight success? Hardly—Ionic’s story reaches back two decades.
Azar Yazdanbod says his passion for water was ignited earlier in the millennium while working as a senior Geotechnical Engineer in Iran, where water scarcity poses a challenge to farmers and threatens food production. In 2007 he emigrated to Canada with his family—and that is where is connected with Barry Johnson in 2009, which is when Ionic formed.
Since then the pair have combined science, engineering, and other expertise in a bold bid “to solve the world’s water crisis and ensure water security for generations to come.”
Ionic’s desalination technology, called Capacitive Electrodialysis Reversal or C-EDR, reduces the power required to remove dissolved minerals from all kinds of water—converting the vast majority of drawn saline water into freshwater.
“As water scarcity continues to challenge communities and nations around the world, demand for desalination is growing at an unprecedented rate,” says executive vice president Jordan Grose. “Traditional methods of desalination are energy intensive and produce huge amounts of CO2; Ionic Solutions’ technology uses up to 90% less power while recovering more water, meaning far less greenhouse gases and huge cost incentives for our clients.”
Ionic Solutions’ technology is currently being piloted with major power suppliers in Canada and the United States, with use cases also applicable to industrial, oil and gas, and data centre cooling sectors.
“Our proprietary technology has a wide range of applications where it excels, including salt removal, freshwater recovery, brine concentration, wastewater reduction and wastewater reuse,” the company states online.
“We are a small team, proud to be developing and manufacturing our product in Calgary,” added Grose, who was “thrilled” to received recognition from Foresight. “We are passionate about bringing our incredible desalination technology to those markets where we know it will have a global impact on water scarcity.”
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