S4E15 - Is Supercritical Water Oxidation a Solution for PFAS, Energy (&More)? - a podcast by Antoine Walter

with 🎙️ Kobe Nagar, CEO & Co-Founder at 374Water  

💧 374Water is a cleantech company, that builds and develops Innovative physical-thermal technology (Supercritical Water Oxidation - SCWO) for resource recovery from waste and emerging contaminants elimination.

What we covered: 

🥖 How Supercritical Water was discovered 200 years by a French engineer: Charles Cagniard de Latour 

⚗️ How substances have a critical point, and where that one actually sits for water 

🍏 How water's physical properties change when we go past its critical point 

🍏 How one can leverage these changes to run supercritical water oxidation 

🧮 How supercritical water oxidation (or SCWO) works, and what it can deliver in terms of pollutant removal and resource recovery 

⚡ The perks of supercritical water oxidation: how fast it goes and which feedstock it works with (spoiler: all of them) 

🧪 How the process can be energy positive by tapping into the chemical energy dissolved in wastewater 

🍏 The perks of taking time to evaluate options when developing a new tech (and of leveraging previous experiments) 

🧱 How Supercritical Water Oxidation draws on simple building blocks available everywhere 

🎚️ How scale effects unlock even better energetical mass balances 

📺 How SCWO developed since the 1990s (and how some developments were unnecessary complex) 

🍎 How challenging it is to introduce a new technology in the Water Industry (and which technologies SCWO intends to replace) 

📈 374Water’s business model and recent (external) growth 

🚽 Spinning out of Duke University, Bill & Melinda Gates’ “Reinvent the Toilet” challenge, using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, great French discoveries, being feedstock agnostic... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥 

➡️ Get the Full Story (including an infographic and full transcript)      

Further episodes of (don't) Waste Water!

Further podcasts by Antoine Walter

Website of Antoine Walter