BioLargo, Inc. announced that its first municipal wastewater treatment demonstration pilot of its AOS and AEC water treatment technologies will take place at a wastewater treatment plant near Montréal, Québec. Experts in water treatment and technology development from the Centre des Technologies de L’Eau (CTE) will supervise and validate the performance of the pilot on-site.

The purpose of the pilot is to assess BioLargo’s proprietary water treatment technologies – the Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) and Aqueous Electrostatic Concentrator (AEC) – as effective, cost-efficient, and complementary solutions for disinfecting and eliminating a broad range of recalcitrant contaminants from municipal wastewater in an operating wastewater treatment plant. The AOS and AEC have previously been shown to effectively remove hard-to-treat contaminants such as pharmaceutical pollutants, as well as other micropollutants like per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), respectively.

This new pilot comes shortly after the conclusion of the company’s first demonstration pilot for the AOS technology at a poultry farm and processing facility near Edmonton, Alberta, where the technology was proven capable of providing effective and affordable treatment of poultry wastewater to the U.S. EPA’s safe water discharge standards. The company next sought to demonstrate the technology in a municipal wastewater treatment application.

The joint AOS/AEC demonstration pilot is funded in part by the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), through an Applied Research and Development (ARD) program grant, which will provide $225,000 for the project. BioLargo’s engineers and scientists are building the AOS and AEC units for the pilot, and hope to have them installed and running by the end of October. Because of the pilot’s scope, the company expects to report initial results in the first quarter of 2021.

The CTE is a recognized college research center for technology transfer attached to the college of Saint-Laurent in Montreal, Quebec. The mission of CTE is to carry out applied research and development activities, technical assistance, and information dissemination in the field of water technologies. The pilot project is led by the CTE researcher Dr. Rimeh Daghrir, expert in the development of advanced electrochemical technology and the remediation of micro-pollutants from water.

Dr. Daghrir commented, “We are very excited to help move the AOS program along to commercialization. These pilot assays will generate real-time data to show the AOS performance in a real wastewater stream. This AOS innovative technology developed by BioLargo Water is positioned in the water treatment market as an effective and cost-efficient tool for the disinfection and the decontamination of persistent organic pollutants such as the residual of pharmaceutical products. Certainly, this advanced pilot combining AOS technology to AEC system offers an innovative and sustainable solution to problems of water conservation and high cost of industrial water use because it is an extremely powerful, safe, and cost-effective water treatment platform. Thanks to this successful collaboration with BioLargo, funded by NSERC, we have succeeded in training highly qualified experts and graduating students from the Department of Water Technology of the College Saint-Laurent in the environmental electro-technology field.”

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