Interview with Anthony Migyanka Inventor of CLLEEN Self Powered Water Treatment System
In this inventor interview Anthony Migyanka, the inventor of the CLLEEN Water System (waterdesalinationplants.com) talks about how he created a system that could help with the problem of the shortage of clean water in many parts of the World. This interview is available both as a podcast or in written form below.
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Tara: Please could you tell me a little bit about where you are based, your background and how you started inventing?
Anthony: I’m based in Irving, Texas. I majored in chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, one of the best engineering schools in the world, then transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, which has the best chemical engineering program in the world (in my humble opinion). I also minored in economics.
While at Pitt, I co-op’d with Betz Laboratories, doing industrial water treatment for steel mills, power plants, virtually all heavy industry. After college, I got a job with Betz (which became Betz-Dearborn, which was later sold to GE and is now GE Water and Process) in New York, in industrial water treatment. I worked on Long Island, four of the five boroughs of Manhattan and Northern New Jersey.
I worked briefly for Calgon Corp in Texas in industrial water treatment as well, but I didn’t have a good experience with them. I left after less than a year and was kind of tired with water treatment. I moved to Dallas and worked in business media, making commercials and corporate videos and investor relations media. I also worked briefly in commercial banking and finance.
But as of 2010, I became interested in water treatment again, with all the shale “boom” talk. It happened sort of coincidentally. I was visiting family in Western PA where I am from (Conemaugh, PA, near Johnstown), and I began researching the acid mine drainage problem.
This is embarrassing to say, but I didn’t know how big of a problem it still is. I knew that Western PA (and elsewhere) has orange rivers, but I didn’t know we have about 600,000 abandoned mines in the US polluting 30,000 stream miles.
I was explaining to my 8-yr-old son why the river we were riding our bikes along was orange. He said, “Dad, you know about science, you should do something about that.”
Then, a friend of mine from college (actually my old ChE lab partner senior year at Pitt), who still works in engineering, asked me to attend a meeting his company was having about the Marcellus shale boom in PA.
I went to listen, and I ended up speaking for about 30 mins about industrial water treatment.
I also took a tour of some of the abandoned coal mines where acid mine drainage pollutes 29 miles of the Little Conemaugh River in PA.
I decided to pursue this full time and I started doing some experiments on the AMD.
Prior to this, while I was still working in finance, I invented a lotion applicator (US Patent #: 7,597,494). I wrote the business plan for manufacturing it, and partnered with a great non-profit research lab, Concurrent Technologies Corp (CTC) to bring it to the market. We are currently applying for an STTR (technology transfer) grant to fund it.
I recently got a letter of interest from AOTA, the American Occupational Therapy Association, the largest organization that would use this product for medical and retail use, with 40,000 members in all 50 states. So we’re including that in our grant proposal and providing it to interested investors.
I received notice of allowance on Oct 6, 2009. I applied in 2007, and got a call Dec 2008, and got notice in 2009. I actually didn’t expect it to be approved that quickly. I am a member of the Texas Inventors Association (TIA), which is a great group I can put you in touch with. It’s all inventors with either working patents, or patents pending, and patent agents and a few patent attorneys. They all told me to expect 4 years for a notice of allowance, so I didn’t really do much to prepare to fund the prototype.
By the way, I’d like to give a shout out to my patent agent, Jeffrey Roddy, of Avviso Associates, who is the best. They initially said they would break my patents into two, but Jeff advised against it, and contested it, and won. It took an additional 9 months, but I have one broad patent, 11 claims.
Tara: Please could you explain what CLLEEN Water System is and how you came up with the idea?
Anthony: I decided I was going to solve the problem of AMD, which is really three problems. Abandoned mines are in the middle of nowhere, have no power handy, and run continuously. So I had to invent a system that could handle at least 150 gallons/minute, could take out the iron and other heavy metals, but return the water to the river. All without power. So I sampled and tested for a few months, and a few things worked pretty well, but it really didn’t solve the problem of actually removing the metals from the premises. I could take them out of the water, but then what to do with them?
So I decided that simply drying them as best as possible (in a brine/slurry/sludge) would work best. It provides the least amount of stuff a mining company (or an environmental group or watershed group) would have to truck away.
Then I found these obscure battery designs that use either solar power, or permanent magnets to run a long time and essentially recharge themselves. What they were using really didn’t work for me so I redesigned the battery pack/charger to that it could be inverted to AC power (the design is actually a trade secret, I’m not filing a patent on this one) and run pumps and the equipment to power the AMD treatment unit.
Once I got that to work, I knew it was a matter of marketing it properly to get business.
Tara: How did you go about developing the system and how did you fund development?
Anthony: All of that testing was self-funded with private loans (very little money) from family and friends. Then Jan, who I have known professionally for a few years, suggested a partnership whereby her company, which has been in the mining business for years and has contacts all over the world, would do sales and marketing, and I would remain the OEM.
Tara: Did you file a patent application or protect your IP in other ways?
Anthony: The internals of the chamber that actually treats the water are an improvement in Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) distillation, which is basically evaporating the water. Pure H2O is recovered as condensate and the junk stays in a brine/slurry sludge which is shipped to a landfill or further treated elsewhere.
I am keeping them and the battery/charger as trade secrets, so my company follows all of the rules (having vendors, employees, associates, sign non-disclosure/non-compete/non-circumvention agreements, etc), and leasing the technology, rather than selling it outright, so that we are protected under the US Economic Espionage Act of 1996.
Since we are working in virtually every country in the world, we feel better protected by the US Justice Department, rather than filing a patent and have people circumvent it, if not steal it outright and spend years in court fighting over the patent.
With this way, we simply don’t tell anyone the secret sauce. And the US Justice Department has had many successful prosecutions worldwide for trade secret violations.
Even though I am a patent holder for another product, filing a patent in many circumstances is simply giving the blueprints to the Chinese or other countries that don’t respect intellectual property rights and daring them to undercut you on price because of their cheap labor.
I was able to design the system so that it a 200 gallon/minute unit can fit on an 8′ X 8′ X 40′ long trailer (which is the perfect size for a tractor-trailer for mobile units on mine sites and oil and gas drilling sites) and a smaller version: 8′ X 8′ X 20′, which is within the US Navy spec for ships and Marines mobile units. By the way, we have an upcoming proof-of-concept demonstration with the Navy to replace their reverse osmosis (RO) units for both shipboard and mobile units, as their increased missions in littoral environments is really diminishing the capacity of RO, and basically, as Yale University as recently said in a report on water treatment, that RO is at a dead end of sorts. They are about as efficient as they’re going to be. They are at about 60% conversion, meaning for every 100 gallons of salt water they treat, they get 60 gallons of fresh water, and 40 gallons of brine, which isn’t too great. Ours does 70-100% conversion, depending on the customer.
Tara: What are some of the applications that CLLEEN Water is currently being used for and what are it’s future possible uses?
Anthony: AMD, frac water, wastewater (sewage and other industrial wastewater) and seawater desalination.
We just partnered with Quantum-ionics of California, which is the world leader in ElectroCoagulation, to treat AMD, industrial wastewaters, and septage.
Qi has a neat process. They hit the water with a small electrical charge that coagulates the junk into big particles that can be easily filtered. Not only that, but the EC also converts heavy metals to their “Earth-friendly” oxide forms, which means that the sludge goes from hazardous waste to non-hazardous, which means you can put it on your lawn, your garden, or any other fertilizer application. (Which has been tested and approved by the State of California and EPA tests).
Then, we (CLLEEN) treat the remaining water (evaporating it) and recover pure H2O, which is now potable (drinkable) water again.
So it opened a whole new world of opportunity. In fact, we are now designing a wastewater treatment plant for an island nation to not only treat their residential sewage, but to return clean drinking water to them. There was a recent piec
