EFD’s patented system combines existing technology in a novel way to convert brine to distilled water and mineral salts or metals. More specifically, EFD’s system utilizes flue gas from a factory, power plant or industrial boiler to heat the brine and feed it through a spray dryer or other drying system apparatus to disperse the heated brine and separate the water from the particulates. This process reduces the brine to distilled water and creates a solid mineral salt.
EFD technology satisfies global demand for less costly mineral extraction and water production from current brine sources worldwide. Moreover, this can be done as a retrofit with no need for a particular change in the composition or the current brine production operation. Lastly, this circular process can be easily adjusted to produce minerals in crystalline or slush form depending on the next step application or customer needs.
This circular process also offers significant cost advantages over traditional mineral production by utilizing wasted energy to treat environmentally harmful brine. The process also extracts more valuable water from what would otherwise be wasted and improves air quality by reducing heat pollution.
Our mobile units can be installed quickly and we license our technology for the largest customized installations to solve problems like:
(*) water that contains salt is called brine
Based on our research and engineering over more than ten years, we built a first prototype to prove the workings and its performance. Our solution doubles the amount of fresh water that is extracted and can do so for a competitive cost.
The technology is patent-protected in the US and internationally.
Terrestrial mining of ore to obtain metals and minerals is diminishing due to lack of reserves and the increased cost of recovery. In addition, traditional mining operation causes negative environmental impact. The public and government demand significant change in mining and ore refinery operations to reduce environmental impact. These changes increase production costs. Thus, industry is looking for less costly methods and sources.
Aqueous solutions from industrial sources and seawater brine contains valuable metals and elements. These include rare-earth metals, platinum group metals, lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, magnesium, chloride, sodium, silver, uranium, molybdenum, platinum, vanadium and gold. Targeted element recovery processes (hydrometallurgical ion or other selective chemical reaction) will be made much more efficient and cost effective when the element or mineral is in solid form or highly concentrated solution.
To meet global demand, the source of minerals must be large, readily available, and sustainable. And the process of extraction and use must be environmentally friendly and capable of circular operation. Waste brine meets all the source criteria. And EFD’s scalable and sustainable technology is one of the few available industrial solutions to use waste heat to treat waste brine to produce fresh water and minerals. Driven by their own waste energy, this presents a significant opportunity for brine producing countries, particularly in the Middle East, to convert the nearly 10 million cubic meters of brine produced each day into valuable commodities.
Investor in our upcoming Series A
Trial partner to test the first mobile units
Salt and solids producer or chemical plant vendor/operator to open new revenue sources and business opportunities
Our management team has on average 25 years of international work experience.
Robbie Magnuson
CEO and President
Robbie is running the day-to-day operations and does all legal (incl. patent coordination) work. She is your contact for investment opportunities.
Shahram Shafie
CTO
Shahram designs and builds our mobile units and also custom-made large-scale solutions.
Mike Lord
Co-Founder and Chief Engineering Officer
Mike is the brain behind the original idea and did the engineering design. He is still the “brain” behind what engineering does and earns our deepest respect.
Tim Cowart
CFO
Tim looks after our finances and does the critical sourcing of all required components to build our mobile units and prize customized large-scale designs.
Khosrow Ebrahimi, Ph.D.
Thermal-Fluids System Design and Modeling Director
Khosrow designs both fluidic and thermal management systems at EFD. He uses simulation tools effectively not only as part of the design process but also in analyzing the current status of the current systems. He has been using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) extensively in the past 14 years for system energy optimization.
Tengyan Zhang, Ph.D.
Director of Process Design and Simulation
Tengyan has more than 20 years of experience in the areas of experimental design, system design, process simulation, techno-economics analysis, and life cycle assessment. She performs calculations for detailed system modeling and design as well as evaluating environmental emissions and cost for various desalination systems at EFD.
Please feel free to reach out with any questions. We would love to hear from you.