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Imagine a world where water scarcity didn’t exist, and desalination wasn’t environmentally harmful. That’s the dream that Calgary-based Ionic Solutions is working hard to achieve, and it believes it has the technology to make it happen.

Ionic Solutions is a water-tech company which owns and manufactures the greenest, most sustainable, desalination technology and is striving to develop and market its societally impactful hardware to help solve the world’s water crisis and ensure water security for generations to come.

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It’s an innovation born out of passion by co-founders Azar Yazdanbod and Barry Johnson.

Yazdanbod was born in Iran. It was growing up there that he became so aware of the importance of water, and its scarcity. He wanted to solve the world’s water crisis and ensure water security for generations. After graduating with an MSc degree in civil engineering with a speciality in geotechnical engineering at the University of Houston, TX, Yasdanbod started on his personal research into the desalination of water.

He brought his family to Calgary in 2007 and almost immediately constructed a water lab in his basement. In 2009 he met Johnson, an engineer/entrepreneur with 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry and former president of Bunker Energy. Johnson shared Yazdanbod’s desire to bring much-needed innovation to the water technology sector and within 24 hours of meeting they began to develop ideas which would eventually lead to Ionic Solutions and the Capacitive Electrodialysis Reversal of saline waters, known now as C-EDR.

Johnson is the company president, and vice-president research Yazdanbod is chief innovator who has dedicated himself to analytical research. He’s conducted hundreds of tests to determine an intimate knowledge of the behaviour of ions in electrical fields. Executive vice-president Jordan Grose says after a decade in R&D, Ionic Solutions has developed proprietary technology with applications for salt removal, freshwater recovery, brine concentration and waste water reduction and re-use.  It’s game-changing technology that is greener and cleaner, removing ions from all kinds of water using incredibly low amounts of electrical energy. It’s more flexible and efficient than any other desalination solution currently on the market.

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Reverse osmosis is the usual method of removing salt from water, pressuring water through tiny holes that will not let the ions flow through. However, Ionic’s process lets salt through exchange membranes, but not the water.

The process is manufactured in Ionic’s Calgary plant, each cell being around half a metre tall and a metre wide. Pilot projects are ongoing, with the first being a successful water softening for the District of Taylor, B.C. on the banks of the Peace River. The six-month on-site operation was conducted through a trailer fitted with C-EDR technology to prove the viability and benefits of municipal water softening for hard water communities, and the Taylor region is notorious for the hardness of its water.

The result was selectively removing hard water minerals such as calcium and magnesium, processing 45 gallons per minute of drinking water. That unit has now been transferred to Saskatoon for a five-month trial at a power plant. And next month a similar pilot project will be launched in New York City with the power company that produces steam to heat the skyscrapers in Manhattan. Currently, that company can only use 85 per cent of the water that flows through its pipes, but the expectation is that Ionic will help save the wasted 15 per cent.

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In California, farmers have strict water licenses. Grose is working with a partner there to help an orchard production facility to take out the salt from highly salted aquifer. Currently, waste salt has to be trucked back to the ocean. Ionic technology can rid those shipping costs while allowing full use of the water quotas.

NGen, the Canadian industry-led not-for-profit organization granted 50 per cent of the cost of the manufacturing facility here. Ionic Solutions recently embarked on a program to raise more capital to increase manufacturing space and hire more staff to develop and build impactful hardware to make water less problematic and more palatable.

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Sunflowers are known for their size, but they don’t come any bigger than the giants on a mural being painted on the side of JEMM Properties’ Hive apartment at 223 – 9A Street N.W. Calgary artist Alex Kwong is the creator; the building also has a pollinator and beehive on its roof.

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David Parker appears regularly in the Herald.

Read his columns online at calgaryherald.com/category/business. He can be reached at 403-830-4622.

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