Green Entrepreneurs Assemble—The newsletter for green entrepreneurs and professionals.

A rising tide lifts all boats 🙂 

Hi, I am Akhoy, all the way from North-eastern India.

I put in 100s of hours every month to reach out and interview business people around the world, who are working towards creating a more sustainable future for the planet. Some of them are just starting, while others are generating millions in revenue. There are invaluable lessons you can learn from people at different stages of growing green businesses.

I live in a biodiversity hotspot myself that is undergoing rapid urbanization and deforestation (these two are BFF, to be honest). I understand the importance of successfully monetizing activities that are meant to protect the earth’s ecosystems.

Interestingly, there is very little first-hand content online on green entrepreneurship, which is why I decided to create this newsletter.

Podcasts demand a good deal of time to listen to, but the written format is easier to consume. I have also highlighted important words and phrases to make each interview a quick read.

Without further ado, let’s welcome today’s guest—

Table of Contents

1. Backstory

2. Nanogas Environmental

3. Process

4. Costs

5. Business Model

6. Earthquakes & the Oil Industry

7. Traditional Methods

8. Service Availability

9. Risks and Mitigation

10. Oil Spills Treatment

11. Funding

12. Business Development

13. Competitors

14. Team Members

15. Biggest Success and Challenge

16. Day in Life

17. Future Plans

18. Collaborate with Len

19. "1 Minute Summary" of the Interview

(Note: I have preserved Len’s voice, but made slight edits for readability)

🟢Please tell me a little bit about your backstory and how you started in this field.

I started my career as a CPA, great financial foundation but I didn't love it. Shortly after that, I got my MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Business. I liked information systems, so I helped companies like Unisys and Kraft Foods automate their business processes.

Then I had the opportunity to go to work for a Silicon Valley software vendor. I ended up being Vice President of Sales for a couple of software companies.

Nineteen years ago, I started working with an AI company, raising capital, and I discovered my true passion. I love providing insight that leads to entrepreneurial growth. I started preparing entrepreneurs for investment, providing financial, strategic, and communications advisory services.

And then I was introduced to a world-changing invention I just had to be part of, and that became the basis for Nanogas Environmental.

🟢Please tell me more about Nanogas Environmental and what you do.

We clean dirty water with tiny bubbles. We are cleaning sewage ponds and lagoons. We're cleaning oil industry wastewater. And, you know, as long as we're using oil instead of using chemicals and requiring cracking and drilling, we can just pull nitrogen out of the air to improve the production of oil wells.

🟢How does the process exactly work with the Nanogas?

The way it works is that we create nanobubbles of gas in solution. We do that without having to use any membranes or cavitation. We have our own patented method for doing it, and that lets us put dirty water through our system without clogging it up.

And when we do that, it works really well for different markets. I talked about the three markets we're focused on. They're all huge markets that deliver huge value to the customer.

About how it works… We were in a small community in West Texas. They had treated their sewage in a series of lagoons. The problem is they had so much algae covering their lagoons that bugs were walking on top of it. They had so much sludge built up; it was starting to build up sludge islands.

They were releasing methane, and they had to release water from their lagoons three times a week, and that water was dangerous. So, they went out to find how to solve it.

So, the industry said you need to dredge, and they got a bid for that, and they were told it was going to cost them a million dollars to dredge their lagoon for their 300-home community.

The problem is that although there are good microbes that will eat up that stuff—and that's the natural way of handling it—but they were starved for oxygen. They weren't getting enough oxygen; the lagoon was shallow; you couldn't put bubblers in there because they wouldn't be able to deliver enough oxygen to make a difference.

What we do is we create nanobubbles of gas in solution. When you put nanobubbles, the gas doesn't rise, so it doesn't bubble up, and so you have more oxygen in solution. So just compared to normal tap water, the highest you might get is 14 parts per million of oxygen in solution.

We measured the highest of anybody we know having 140 parts per million of oxygen in our solution, and that's just measuring the dissolved oxygen. That is not measuring actual nanobubbles that are in addition to that dissolved oxygen. We could have as much as 3,500 times more gas in liquid, and that changes how water works.

🟢What does it cost for your clients compared to traditional methods of cleaning?

Let's look at what happened. So, the pond was algae-covered. Within the first day, you can see that the algae started to disappear. Within four days, the algae was back to normal levels. It took several months, but the bacteria ate up the organic sludge and ate up 95% of it. And the rural community saved over $800,000.

And after our treatment, fish and turtles and sandhill cranes were thriving on the lagoon because it had been restored, and they didn't need to dredge it at all. So, it is much cheaper than the traditional methods, yeah, 100%.

The problem is that when the lagoon is shallow. Wastewater treatment plants think they could build a deep ditch, and they could put bubblers in there, and it'll work, and you're right, it will. But building that deep ditch is really expensive, and even when you do that, sometimes those get clogged up.

But we're targeting shallow ponds that don't have a deep ditch; you don't have enough time for oxygen to absorb, and so that's where the nanobubbles really, really help out. And then we can just use this dirty sewage water, this dirty pond water, and put that through our system so we don't get clogged up over time.

🟢What kind of business model are you currently using for the company?

We use distribution partners to make introductions. We're interested in partnering with water and wastewater service companies, and we've done that with CleanInfusion and IMR Systems. These people treat wastewater; they do lagoons, and we want to work with them.

So, one example of a lagoon rental: a wastewater treatment plant was told it was going to cost them close to $3 million to clean up their sludge, and we determined that if we charge them for a 4-month period, we can charge them $750,000 for our service. We could have an 82% gross margin, and the customer would save $2 million.

Now, another market is the oil industry wastewater. The oil industry has 13 billion gallons of wastewater that they pump out of the ground every day. And their typical method is to build a multi-million dollar saltwater disposal well.

And then they process the water through that, using chemicals, and try to clean it up and get all the oil out of it. Well, here's what they accomplish. The left side is before they treat it, and the right side is after they treat it.

So, even though they used all these chemicals and they had a multi-million dollar facility, they still have this hazardous iron sulfide in their water. That's this black stuff that's in the water, as well as hydrogen sulfide. So, they dispose of it in the ground where it didn't come from before, and that's causing earthquakes.

🟢 So even earthquakes are happening because of the oil industry’s wastewater?

Yes. If you look at Oklahoma and Texas in the US, you see an increase in earthquakes. Oklahoma, in 2008, had two earthquakes a year that were over three on the Richter scale.

By 2015, they had over 800 earthquakes a year that were over three on the Richter scale. They cut back on the amount of water being disposed underground, and the number of earthquakes started to decline. Even Texas started to get 5.4, 5.6 magnitude earthquakes, and they decided to stop this, and they told certain counties that they have to shut down their water disposal entirely.

Now, this is back to that example where you had the dirty water and the water they were disposing. When we treated it, in the same day, we turned it into this.

So that meant we collected all the oil, we dropped all the grit or suspended solids like sand, and we eliminated the iron sulfide and the hydrogen sulfide by chemically reacting with those just using oxygen. So that we can pull oxygen out of the air and yet we have water that's now reusable by the oil industry instead of disposing it down the hole.

So, we have prospects for that. We want to use the same model of using oil field service companies to get to that market. That's the same economics for us and the same economics for the customer

On a 5,000 barrel per day saltwater disposal well, the customer could save 80% of what the exploration cost and the production company could save 80% of what they pay for disposing for lost oil and for buying water. And at the same time, we could be making over 80% gross margin and have a five-month payback on our equipment.

The other market I mentioned is doing a better job recovering oil from oil wells. I don't know how many people know, but most of the oil is in the ground when you do a new oil well and you do fracking or drilling or something like that, you get the biggest production right away, but you only get about 15% of the oil that's in the ground out of the ground.

And so then what do you do with that well?

This is what I wanted to show you when you asked how does it work. So, we can go by ourselves or we could work with our partner.

In the case of Nano Catholyte, we're working with a partner and just by introducing water, salt, air, and electricity together, we create Nano Catholyte.

This is a patented product that gets pumped down into the oil well and it stimulates the oil well and produces more oil. We can see how that worked when we did our testing.

This is a sample of Earth from an oil well, it's called a “core”, and when you use just salt water in 4 days, nothing really came out. But when you took the same core and the same kind of water and you put nanobubbles in it, now you see the oil coming to the surface, coming out of that core, and rising for recovery.

So when we applied this in oil wells, we've seen, when nanobubbles are applied, there's been anywhere from two times to five times increase in oil well production.

🟢So from what I understand, in traditional methods, most of the oil is lost. They try to take it out from the ground, but most of it is wasted?

It's still in the ground, it's not lost. It's just hard to get. We make it easier. So, we are working with the company ENXL. We're treating two wells to prove that it works for them.

They like the results so far, and once they see that it works, they'll give us an opportunity to treat 115 more wells that they have. And we've got other prospects to do the same thing, and the business model for treating one well might be $17,000.

We have a 60% gross margin, but the customer can make so much more. They're used to treating wells, they use acid or they use chemicals or they use something else to treat their wells, they might have to do a workover that costs $100,000.

And here with this simple treatment, we can replace those. It's all natural. So, that gives you an idea of what we do.

🟢Are your services only available in the United States or in other countries as well?

We're targeting initially the United States and Canada. We know it's going to work around the world; we've licensed our technology to other people. We've licensed the use for agriculture, for example, to our manufacturer.

Eventually, we'll offer it around the world, but we need to get all the data that we need to have to show people that it works, and to get that rich set of data, we're focusing on the US.

🟢Are there any risks associated with the nanobubbles, and how do you overcome those risks if there are any?

It depends on what solution you're trying to offer. In general, we're just using oxygen or nitrogen from the air, so there's no risk of that. There's no chemical risk, there's no danger to people of being exposed to that water.

In certain uses, people don't want to use certain gases. For example, in the oil industry, they don't want to put oxygen into their oil well because it's going to cause bacteria to grow and it's going to ruin their oil well.

And in addition, if they used oxygen, it might be a little corrosive to their pipes. So, what we do instead is we use nitrogen; it's safe. Eighty percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, right? It's safe, and they can put it downhole, and it won't react with anything; it's inert. So, it's a really good solution.

If you know what problems you want to solve for sewage, for example, if you want the smell to go away, you just put oxygen in, and it'll work. And it doesn't matter the level of oxygen you put in there, the more, the better.

But if you want to support bacteria growth? They like oxygen at a certain level. Even if we drink too much water, we can die, right? We can drown, even though we all need water to live. If bacteria get too much oxygen, if it's too oxygen-rich, that could kill them off. So, we want to deliver exactly the right amount of oxygen to them so they can grow and thrive and eat up all that waste.

🟢Can this technology be used to treat things like oil spills?

Yeah, in fact, that's how we originally thought we were going to go to market. We thought we were going to use the bacteria to eat up oil from oil spills.

That's been proven that will work, but when we started researching, the bigger market was separating oil and water and cleaning up the dirty water that the oil industry produces and cleaning up the dirty water in ponds and lagoons.

🟢How did you initially fund your company?

None of us have charged a salary. We've received over $2 million in investment, and with all the time that everybody's put in, altogether, the investment totals over $8 million.

🟢Could you tell me a little bit about business development, especially when it comes to the clean tech sector? Because I saw on your profile one of your skills was Business Development.

Yeah, the biggest factor is we have to choose the business model. What we've chosen is we want to use distributors to get to the market. And so, we are focusing on finding partners that we can work with in sewage ponds and lagoons, and oil field service companies that we could work with, in the oil industry.

🟢Are other people also doing this kind of things with nanobubbles, or is it only you at this time?

There are lots of companies using nanobubbles. They mostly target indoor greenhouses, and the reason why they do that is because they need clean water or they need to constantly clean out their system because it's going to get clogged up. And so if they're in indoor greenhouses, they have an access to fresh or clean water, and so they don't clog up, and it works fine for them.

But if they go after the dirty water like we're doing, then they have a huge amount of maintenance, and it just doesn't make sense. Now, in addition to that, we have multiple patents that protect our technology.

So, we have 16 patents granted and 15 more pending. And those include everything from how we create our nanobubbles to being the only ones that could use nanobubbles to improve oil production from an oil well.

🟢How do your team members and your employees help you?

I've got some terrific people that are part of the team.

So, I was a co-founder in Patra Corp; they do back-office processing for insurance agencies and brokerages. I sold off my interest in the company for 600 times my investment, and the company later on sold part of itself off for $149 million.

Jeff Hardin is a huge influence and a huge contributor to the company. He's our chief scientist; he's a six-time successful serial entrepreneur. He has this amazing way to see science and business together and to get really deep into the science. So, one of the things he did is he saw that people were dying from AIDS and they couldn't afford their medicine. So he started buying their life insurance policies because they couldn't work, they had nothing else to sell him.

He started buying their life insurance policies and he studied how long they were going to live, what was going to happen with AIDS. He worked with CDC, worked with Dr. Salk who invented the polio vaccine. He eventually ran out of money pretty fast, so he said “How do I get this funded?”. He was the first one to go to Wall Street to get them to buy life insurance policies to invest in his business, and he created a multi-billion dollar market. So that’s the kind of great work that Jeff does.

We have an advisor, David Holcomb, who's a PhD chemical engineer with 50 years of experience in the oil industry. He's invented other products like Nanoactive for Nissan Chemical, and he's given over 5050 talks to the Society of Petroleum Engineers, which is like the gold standard for where you go to find out new things for the oil industry.

We also have our VP of research and development, Al Dazins. He has a background working in cleantech for the National Research Energy Lab for Dupont, and he's a terrific researcher. He was a professor of molecular microbiology at Ohio State.

And then our VP of manufacturing is Scott Fiedler, and Scott works to put together the equipment that makes all this work.

🟢As an entrepreneur, what has been your biggest success and your biggest challenge so far?

Let me talk to you about some of our successes. We've earned over $550,000 in lifetime revenue. We just signed a licensing agreement for agriculture with our manufacturer. They're going to go out to manure ponds and lagoons to grow plants bigger and they will be cleaning up golf courses for agriculture.

They're paying us a million dollars over 5 years plus a 10% royalty to go after that market. And the first thing they're doing is building our new generation of equipment, and we're going to be putting that into play in the oil industry.

We've got great partners; we're partnered with a company called 21st Century Energy for that Nano Catholyte solution. Together, it's like a one-two punch: they help recover the oil, we help recover the oil, and when we put them together, it works even better.

Those are some of the great successes we're happy about, as well as all the patents we've been able to secure.

And then we've had challenges over time with people trying to take our technology, and we were able to prove that we owned everything and win those cases.

🟢As an entrepreneur, what does a day in your life look like currently?

Entrepreneurs do everything. Sometimes I'm working on finances, sometimes I'm talking to investors. We're raising money right now and looking for more capital.

Sometimes we're talking to customers and distributors who want to take our equipment out to the market. And then we have internal meetings where we talk about the progress of the equipment, what's the progress of our customers, how do we move things forward.

🟢What are your plans for the rest of the year?

We plan to prove oil well stimulation out in the oil industry, then be able to expand to cleaning up oil industry wastewater and cleaning up lagoons, and just grow the number of oil wells and amount of equipment we have in place.

We’re doing research in the oil industry and in other industries, and as that research gets proven out, we'll be able to introduce those down the road. Our director of sales in Canada works with our Canadian company, and they're focused on things like cleaning up pulp and paper wastewater and cleaning up mine tailings for mining precious metals.

🟢If you would like our readers to help you in anything, what would it be?

Funding, partnerships, and customers.

Connect with Len Bland on Linkedin here: Len Bland | LinkedIn

🟢 “1 Minute Summary” of the Interview

1. Background and Career Path:

   • Len started as a CPA, then earned an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Business.

   • Discovered a passion for entrepreneurial growth and started providing advisory services.

2. Nanogas Environmental:

   • The company cleans dirty water using nanobubbles without membranes or cavitation.

   • Focuses on cleaning sewage ponds, lagoons, and oil industry wastewater.

3. Business Model:

   • Partners with distribution companies for market access.

   • Targets water and wastewater service providers, oil field service companies, and agricultural applications.

4. Technology and Applications:

   • Utilizes patented nanobubble technology for various applications, including oil well stimulation.

   • Focuses on the US and Canada initially, with plans for global expansion.

5. Team and Expertise:

   • Len has a team with extensive experience in technology, business, and entrepreneurship.

   • Collaborates with industry experts and advisors to drive innovation and market growth.

6. Challenges and Successes:

   • Faced challenges in technology protection but successfully defended against infringement.

   • Achieved significant revenue, secured licensing agreements, and patented technologies.

7. Future Plans

   • Plans to expand oil well stimulation, wastewater treatment, and other industry applications like cleaning up mine tailings.

My book “Green Heroes: Vol 1” will be dropping soon :)