Blockchain’s WaterChain Is Thirsty For Success In Industrial Treatment

by Bruce Haring (Block Tribune) WaterChain is developing a blockchain solution for cleaning up the water industry. The company is working on an initial coin offering (ICO) that will allow investors to stake tokens and facilitate the funding of water recycling projects.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Okay, so the last time I was speaking with you was to enlist you for an algae biofuels summit. Now, is this an offshoot of that, or are you still working in algae?

RIGGS ECKELBERRY: Well, let me just tell you quickly how we progressed over the years, because as you know, we started as Origin Oil, the original oil, which was algae, right? Sure enough, we developed a really phenomenal way to harvest biofuels. That’s pretty hard to do and shows that it could be done for biofuel. The problem was that right about 2010, the fracking and horizontal drilling phenomenon just blew away the algae industry as a biofuel. The big players, like Solazyme, just disappeared. Today, algae is kind of an afterthought. Now, we do have algae customers and we have equipment that’s been running for five, six years with nonstop and very good, but what we had to do was, in a sense, find new traction because algae became a science project. It’s reinforcement, because we love it.

What we really did was we realized that our electric way of pulling algae out of the water is really good for cleaning up really dirty, really oily water. Sure enough, that’s what we became. We became … If you can’t fight the enemies, join them. Sure enough, we started cleaning up the frack water and then we extubated that out to the general water clean up industry. We now are commercial phase on cleaning up industrial, and commercial, and agricultural water. That has become very stable. Also, I should mention, in 2015 we started acquiring companies and we have an excellent operating company in Texas that generates good revenues and we’re doing more of that.

Now, finally around Christmas time, we really finalized months of research into how to reinvent the water industry because what was happening in the water industry is that there’s a break down of infrastructure, problems in Flint, Michigan and so forth, where end users — some people call “polluters,” but really what they are is the user of water: agricultural, oil and gas, etc. — are being saddled with the duty of cleaning the water because the municipalities can’t take the dirty water anymore. They’re having to turn it down, which means that now all of a sudden if you’re Intel, you got to clean your own water. Well, Intel doesn’t want to do that. They just want to keep paying on the meter like they always did. This is what we call forced decentralization of water, where now, literally satellite water treatment has become the big thing, and that’s where waterchaining comes in.

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WaterChain is really a way to raise capital to fund these next generation modular onsite water treatment systems that people are being forced to do.

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BLOCK TRIBUNE: Where does the clean water go once you’ve fixed it?

RIGGS ECKELBERRY: Oh, this is great, because the municipalities have been saying, “Don’t send us your dirty water, send us your treated water.” Well now, you’ve just cleaned the water on site and you had to pay for that, so heck, why not reuse it, right? There’s an opportunity. The U.S. only recycles a tiny percent of its water. I don’t know if you’ve heard this stat, but Israel is the leader in the world, 80% recycling of their water. Next one down in the world is Spain, which is 20%. The U.S. is at 1%. We have a problem where the water just gets thrown away. Now, with satellite or distributed water treatment decentralized, if they treated their own water, what the heck, why not reuse it? Because that’s free. I believe it’s going to lead to a tremendous increase in reuse of water. Bruce, we need to start recycling the water, because there is water shortages just about everywhere, even the mid-west.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Are you only working in the US at this point, or are you international as well?

RIGGS ECKELBERRY: Right. Well, what we started doing … I mean, I’d love to do this … Our first project in Bakersfield, because it’s so close, but I was in Puerto Rico last month for a week and there’s a great report on RT that is actually on our homepage that shows some of the things we did. READ MORE