Porifera snags carbon nanotube license for desal

Hayward, Calif.-based Porifera is looking to take new carbon nanotube technology to market that it has exclusively licensed from Livermore, Calif.-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The technology can be used to desalinate water and be applied to other liquid-based separations.

Liquids and gases can rapidly flow through carbon nanotubes—special molecules made of carbon atoms in a unique arrangement. Yet, the tiny pore size can block larger molecules, offering a less expensive method to eliminate salt from water.

Founded in 2008, Porifera is developing next-generation membranes based on carbon nanotubes for water desalination. Porifera says its membranes have vastly superior performance at similar cost relative to current membranes used in liquid phase separation. 

Porifera’s connection to the lab comes from its Chief Technology Officer Olgica Bakajin, a Lawrence Fellow who formerly worked for the lab on a carbon nanotube project as the chief scientist. Bakajin and chemist Aleksandr Noy, another Lawrence Fellow, first researched and demonstrated the ability to use carbon nanotubes as a less expensive solution to desalination.

But they have not been alone in their research. Researchers at the Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, India, found that carbon nanotubes have several advantages over traditional purification systems like polycarbonate in that they’re simple and inexpensive to install, operate and maintain (see Indian water purification goes nano).

Earlier this year, Porifera was raising a $5 million Series A round for further research and development (see SiXtron sees explosive market for safer solar coating). The company’s R&D team includes the technology's original inventors.

More recently, a research team including Bakajin and Noy has been looking at the potential advantages of carbon nanotube membranes being used in carbon sequestration applications.

The national security laboratory, Porifera, and University of California, Berkeley have recently been awarded a two-year, more than $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop the carbon capture technique using nanotubes.

Porifera also brought in $3.3 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, to develop a small, portable self-cleaning desalination system that could be used in the field.

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