S5E19 - What if your Microbial Fuel Cells could Reach Out on Twitter? - a podcast by Antoine Walter

with 🎙️ Carol Maxwell - CEO & Director of MICROrganic Technologies and a Founding Member of ENYA Funds 1, 2, &3 

with 🎙️ Brent Solina - CTO of MICROrganic Technologies 

💧 MICROrganic Technologies builds a Microbial Fuel Cell platform that aims to change the way the world deals with wastewater

What we covered:

📅 How Microbial Fuel Cells open a new paradigm in plant operation - the era of bacteria that can communicate and interact with your Google Calendar 

🧑‍🔬 How limited we are today, with our chemical tests and lab analysis 

🤔 How we don't know much about the root cause of most of the upsets a wastewater treatment system encounters 

⚒️ How Microbial Fuel Cells work and how their core characteristics trigger the operation opportunity we just described 

⚡ How wastewater treatment blowers represent 3-5% of the US's energy use and how microbial fuel cells could enable turning them down 

📉 How microbial fuel cells could represent an overall decrease of 85-90% in energy use 

📈 How beyond today's benefits of microbial fuel cells, there's even more to come tomorrow with for instance microbial desalination cells 

🌱 How MICROrganic Technologies' VIVA modular series could be the fundamental brick for those future applications 

0️⃣ How it all boils down to a fundamental feature of Microbial Fuel Cells: they set the path for a decarbonized wastewater treatment 

🚀 How MICROrganic interacts with companies and acceleration programs the like of Xylem's Innovation Labs 

💪 How anybody can take off a start-up, assuming you’re creative enough and push hard enough. 

🤝 How you can learn sales and marketing the hard way, and how that’s beneficial to aspiring entrepreneurs. 

🏭 How the bottleneck to turn MFCs into a large-scale solution lies on the cathode’s hardware - and how MICROrganic strives to solve it. 

🔋 How building an MFC is very close to making a battery - just with additional constraints, using wastewater as a fuel 

🔼🔽 How large and small plants have different challenges and how that reflects in their KPIs. 

🪜 How MICROrganic’s product works yet isn’t fully ready for commercialization - and what the next steps are. 

💩 Wastewater being liquid composting, wastewater containing 7x the energy needed to treat it, VIVA being the size of a refrigerator, MFCs powering predictive maintenance and potentially decentralized systems, VIVA being a kind of biosensor... and much more!

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

      

➡️ Send your warm regards to Carol on LinkedIn 

➡️ Make sure to also reach out to Brent over there   

➡️ Check out the full story (and an infographic) on how Microbial Fuel Cells  can turn plant operation on its head!

Further episodes of (don't) Waste Water!

Further podcasts by Antoine Walter

Website of Antoine Walter