Moleaer CEO Nick Dyner recently joined Molly Wood on the Everybody in the Pool podcast to discuss how nanobubble technology is reshaping industries from aquaculture to irrigation to spas. In this episode, Nick shares the story behind Moleaer’s founding, the science of nanobubbles, and the many ways this breakthrough technology is helping reduce costs, improve efficiency, and deliver more sustainable outcomes across water-intensive sectors.
Listen to the full podcast, Episode 98: Nanobubbles, aquaculture and spas with Nick Dyner, and follow along with the transcript below.
Episode Transcript
Molly Wood: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.
This week we’re talking ocean tech in an ever-so-slightly roundabout way because it’s technology that can apply to all kinds of extremely carbon-intensive water-based activities like wastewater treatment or irrigation or aquaculture.
It’s also kind of a whole new class of science that has all kinds of existing applications but also all kinds of FUTURE applications that range from like a soap replacement to blowing up tumors inside the body. AND an extremely drool-worthy jacuzzi. Has it been a minute since I said I love my job? Let’s get into it.
Nick Dyner
My name is Nick Dyner. Our company is called Moleaer. It's derived from the terms molecular air or tiny air because what we manufacture are systems that produce tiny bubbles that are used to catalyze or enhance different types of physical, chemical, and biological reactions.
Molly Wood
Amazing. We are, don't worry, audience. Don't worry. We're going to take that apart bubble by bubble. Let me start actually by though asking kind of at the top before we dig into the technology, how is this a climate solution? Like how do you see it as in the sustainability space writ large?
Nick Dyner
Yeah.
So what we're finding from our customers and our customers are primarily industries and municipalities. We don't touch healthcare where there's a lot of research being looked at around using these bubbles for different types of purposes. We don't do too much in the consumer product space so that we have one very important partnership with Jacuzzi that is specific to the sustainability story that's a touch on the second here. And what we look to do is try to help find a find in our customers a way to do two things. Reduce their operating expenses while improving some sort of water based or liquid based process and to do that through a more sustainable means. And that sustainable means, which actually ties to the reduction in cost, is by helping them either reduce their energy consumption, their water consumption, or their chemical consumption for a given process or a given purpose.
Molly Wood
Can you give me some examples of the types of processes and purposes that are tackled by this technology?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, our company today primarily is selling our systems, our technology in the four key markets, aquaculture, irrigation, wastewater, and surface water, which for surface water is treating large lakes, ponds, reservoirs, rivers that have some sort of impairment typically due to nutrient runoff or some sort of pollution. To give you some specific examples, take irrigation water.
We have over thousand different growers or farmers who integrate Moleaer's technology into their irrigation process to put high purity oxygen and tiny nano-sized bubbles into the water to reduce the amount of sometimes cleaning chemicals like hydrogen peroxide or bleach that they need to maintain a certain water quality and prevent disease or even to reduce the amount of fertilizer and nutrient they need because what happens when you put our technology in irrigation water is by elevating the oxygen levels you reduce the presence of disease. By putting these tiny bubbles in
water, you help water flow through the roots more effectively so it takes up nutrients more efficiently. And what ends up happening for them is they can reduce the amount of water and fertilizer or chemicals they're using but also increase their yields so they get a double benefit, increase in productivity and reduction in operating costs or operating efficiency.
Molly Wood
What is the, what's the founding story? Like who set out to solve this problem? And it's so, these are the kinds of solutions I love where it's like, just make bubbles smaller. That seems pretty straightforward, except like, no, it's not. And who thought of that?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, but the background of it is exactly that. Let's make bubbles smaller for a particular purpose.
So rewind to 2016. Our two co-founders, gentleman named Warren Russell, our chief commercial officer, and Bruce Scholton, our chief technology officer, were, although independent of each other, collaborating from time to time on certain types of wastewater projects where Warren was offering his beneficial bacteria, it's called bugs or microbes in the world of wastewater, that is used to improve very traditional biological wastewater treatment processes.
So the way biological wastewater treatment typically works is the wastewater comes into some sort of hole tank or basin or lagoon. You put bugs in there that will then break down the organics until you get to a better water quality and then you can discharge that wastewater typically into the environment once it reaches a certain water quality that is defined locally by the regulatory agencies. Those bugs, that bacteria that you're adding need oxygen. They're aerobic.
And to get oxygen to water, you typically are aerating. Aeration consumes about 2 % of the world's energy. You take blowers or compressors, you take air, you drive it into the wastewater, and the bubbles start to rise, and it's very inefficient. Those bubbles are rising. The size of the bubble dictates how fast they rise. The depth dictates the distance, and it's a race against time.
Typical air bubbles would dissolve only about 1 to 3 % of the oxygen per foot of water. So if it's 10 foot deep tank, which would be relatively deep in the world of wastewater, only 10 to 30 % of that oxygen going to dissolve before the bubble reaches the surface and disappears. Pops, it to atmosphere. So again, very inefficient. Yeah, so Warren had a project in Abu Dhabi, high temperature shallow water and the warmer the less dissolved gas it can hold that's why your soda tastes more flat when it's warm than when it's cold same thing applies to oxygen and so warren was struggling to get a dissolved oxygen level that allowed his bugs to do its work and so he was working with bruce who was providing him dosing equipment for other types of purposes to develop a technology that could make bubbles small enough that they would stay in the water long enough so that he could get the oxygen levels to rise what he knew he was going after were bubbles that were in the nano scale because those bubbles don't rise, that was already known.
What they didn't know was the effect it would have.
So when they finally installed their prototype after filing the patents on it, they saw the oxygen levels go through the roof, the bacteria was able to do its job and was highly successful in overcoming the auction challenges that he had. They ran another project to do a similar thing, so to speak, worked and decided to set out to form a company together and that's how Moleaer got created.
Molly Wood
Got it. And then side note, when did you enter the picture and what's your background?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, so Bruce and Warren were out there trying to start a company and raise money, and myself and a few others who previously worked together in the world of reverse osmosis membranes. My former boss who had founded that company called Nano H2O, which we sold to LG, he and I were looking for another technology to support in the water and wastewater world. Met Bruce and Warren, thought it was interesting.
put some investors together. We invested in them and I joined them to help grow the business back in early 2017.
Molly Wood
Let's go back to something you just said, because I think there's an even simpler way to talk about this sustainability impact and just the parts that your lay people do not understand. You just said that aeration accounts for 2 % of global energy use.
Nick Dyner
Roughly, it's estimated to be around that.
Molly Wood
And so aeration, that process, sounds, I mean, clearly based on your customer base, that process exists in industry, it exists in aquaculture, it exists in irrigation. Like, let's go all the way back to, that's a thing.
Nick Dyner
Correct, it's not only it's a thing, it's primarily for wastewater.
So you've got to treat that wastewater and you want to do as cost-effectively as possible. Nobody really wants to wastewater. We do it because it's the right thing to do for both environmental reasons and health and safety reasons. And so we're always looking for the most efficient way to do that. And one of the most efficient ways to do it, if the wastewater quality permits and the footprint that you're available permits, is a biological process. Very well understood. But it's typically an aerobic process. And so to allow those bugs to do their job to flourish, you need to give it air. You need to create an aerobic environment.
Molly Wood
Okay. And then is it a situation where the nanobubble technology solves that aeration need in wastewater treatment, but is also applicable in other areas where aeration already existed or like didn't? Like are you introducing this as a brand new process in certain areas?
Nick Dyner
Yes, but not as an alternative to aeration.
So what we have found is that the value of our technology is far more interesting when we think about what the bubbles can do independent of dissolving oxygen and what the ability to efficiently dissolve oxygen can do for other industries that are less dependent on traditional aeration methods.
And that's sort of how the evolution of Moleaer goes from when we first thought this was an alternative to aeration in 2017 to what we've really come to learn over the last two or three years about the power of these tiny gas particles, which are bubbles by definition that behave much more like a particle, combined with what other industries can do when you can dissolve gases as efficiently as Moleaer can in these continuous processes.
Molly Wood
Okay, so say more about that.
Nick Dyner
The way to think about our technology first is picture a pipe. You've got something that from the outside is shaped like a pipe because that's what it is. And inside has certain geometry and certain material that are really important to do those two things I just mentioned before. Dissolve the gas that's applied to the liquid as it flows through it incredibly efficiently. And independent of that, we take a small amount of that gas and we convert it into a bubble that's 1,000th the thickness of human hair. That's what 100 nanometers is. And a bubble at 100 nanometers doesn't rise, lacks the buoyancy to overcome the other forces in liquid, doesn't dissolve for reasons that the academic community is still trying to properly understand, is hydrophobic, which means it doesn't like water because air naturally is hydrophobic, all bubbles are hydrophobic, that's why they're not dissolving quickly, and has a charge around it. Think of a charge like the way a magnet has a charge. And that charge that forms around the bubble prevents the bubbles from bouncing into each other and forming a larger bubble, they'll actually repel off of each other.
And so what happens when the liquid leaves the nanobubble generator, is that pipe sort of shape that I was describing before, is you have a higher level of dissolved gas, typically oxygen, in the water, combined with a high concentration, hundreds of millions to billions per milliliter, of these charged particles or bubbles that then go on to improve some sort of process, typically enhancing the biological, physical, or chemical aspect of a given process.
Molly Wood
Got it. And there's been a process of discovering that that is possible and then pitching it that way. It sounds like the underlying technology doesn't change. It's just more about discovering new things that it can do.
Nick Dyner
That's right. So about eight years ago when we met the co-founders and they were getting started. If you would do a Google search on nanobubbles, maybe you found 100 or 200 papers that were out there if you were really good at Google searching. Almost all of it coming out of Japan, where much of the history of discovering whether bubbles at this scale exist and if they do exist, what they can do started. Last year, over 2,000 scientific papers, peer-reviewed were published on the use of nanobubbles for different types of purposes. So there is an explosion or exponential growth in studying what these bubbles can do, where you can apply them, and what the outcomes are that are extremely diverse, from improving fuel efficiencies to enhancing microbial processes to better shower heads. And if you go to hotels in Japan, you'll find nanobubble shower heads that do work. They give you a different experience.
Molly Wood
Wait, what kind of whoa? Whoa? What kind of different experience like a massage like does it feel like a pop rock shower?
Nick Dyner
No, just, nah, feels like the water's little softer. Like you've got a bit of a softener type of effect. The shampoo comes out of your hair a little easier.
Molly Wood
Okay. The best, that's the best. Please solve that. Yeah. Huh.
Nick Dyner
Yeah, you do notice it. You do notice it. So you're seeing this just incredible diverse range of research around nanobubbles. What Moleaer does is two things. We think of and we develop different ways to form these tiny bubbles in liquids based on the application or use case. So our core technology is one of eight different patent and patent applications we have around making nanobubbles.
And then we also think about what we can do with them. And we think about what we can do with them. We try to align that either with our core markets that I mentioned before, irrigation, aquaculture, surface water, wastewater, what we can do with strategic partners who have either come to us or we've approached them because we've identified something that we think is interesting but it's best developed and commercialized through the capabilities of some of our partners. And that fits in the world of oil and gas, that fits in the world of spas with jacuzzi, it fits in the world with certain chemical companies that are under pressure from their customers reduced chemical footprints and need to figure out to clean surfaces more effectively. And so that's how we think about our mission as a company.
Molly Wood
So to reflect that back, so you sell product directly or you license the technology so somebody else can develop it for their specific use.
Nick Dyner
Yeah, and then just one caveat, we also offer a service. So one of our customers only need it for certain periods of time. So for seasonality purposes, if you have a large lake and you're in Minnesota and it freezes into winter, we may only be there for nine months of the year, for example.
Molly Wood
Got it, okay. So if there's like a lake in Oakland that consistently gets covered in algae and no one can swim in it, that's something like you could fix? Okay. I have some people I'm gonna put you touch with later, because it's always happening and dogs go in there, it's like a nightmare. Let's go through, it's a growing problem. I'm saving my two favorite parts of this for last, but let's go through some of the industries that you work with. So.
Nick Dyner
and it's a growing problem.
Molly Wood
You mentioned, for example, how it can work in irrigation and wastewater treatment. Talk about oil and gas, like how it can improve extraction and efficiency in that industry, which, still exists.
Nick Dyner
It still exists, yeah. And so in oil and gas, play on sort of two sides of the production process. We have customers who inject certain gas nanobubbles into the well to increase oil recovery from existing oil wells.
that there's two benefits to that besides the economic benefit of seeing some pretty significant improvements with paybacks that are in months, not years, when you deploy our technology. One of them is you're reducing the amount of chemicals you need. There are a lot of different chemicals that are used to try to get more out of existing well. There's surfactants, there are acids, friction reducing chemistry. What we're finding is that you got a sustainable alternative to that chemistry and more cost effective. And we see real improvements in terms of the oil production as a result, varies from well to well, the payback is always in months. It's not in years. It's incredibly fast and incredibly successful.
On the other end of it, we treat things like produced water. So when produced water comes out of the ground, sorry, when fluid comes out of the ground, you separate the oil from the water and you got all this water left over and you got to do something with it. And the industry more and more is trying to reuse that water. They're trying to recycle that water so you're not just discharging it back into the environment and it becomes of no use to anybody. And so you have to do something called oxidize.
You got to remove the hydrogen and sulfide in the iron from that water so you can reuse it. There's a lot of ways you can oxidize something. There's bleach, peroxides, different types of harmful chemicals, or you can use air, oxygen, or in some cases ozone, different types of oxidant gases that Moleaer can inject into that liquid very efficiently and be able to provide you similar outcomes.
And so what our customers there are getting something that is comparable, sometimes a bit lower in price in the chemistry, but you're doing it more cost effective, much safer from a handling perspective, and it's permanently installed, so it's easy to apply.
And we do a lot of that in West Texas today.
Molly Wood
And then talk about food and beverage safety. Is that a thing that's part of one your business lines?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, it's a new sort of application we're developing with some new products.
What we've been able to demonstrate through both pilot testing and third party lab testing, and now we're going through the commercialization process, is the ability to wash both food production surfaces and the food surfaces themselves using our technology instead of chemicals that are often used as biocides or some sort of sanitizing chemistry. So when you look at the most widely used sanitization chemistry for things like produce in a restaurant, they'll achieve sort of a three log kill things like salmonella, E. coli, pseudomonas, is what often you're testing for to make sure you're getting a proper wash. When you apply our technology, you're getting four to five log removal. And you're just using tap water going through our technology into the sink, wash the produce, then serve it. And so you're getting a chemical free and more effective sanitization of those surfaces, whether it's the production surface or the food surface itself. And I think it goes along with a trend that you're seeing
That's not just emerging in US, but globally, where consumers are concerned about what kind of chemicals are being used on the things that they are consuming. And that's an area that we are able to address very well and getting the tailwind of that type of consumer demand or consumer pull.
Molly Wood
And then you are, this conversation is part of a bit of a mini series that I'm doing on ocean technology. And you mentioned aquaculture at the beginning of our conversation. So talk to me about how this technology is used there.
Nick Dyner
Yeah, so in aquaculture, primarily we focus on high tech cultivation which is fin fish and the predominant species in fin fish is salmon. So more than half the world's salmon today is farmed. It's principally farmed out of Norway and Chile and some of the neighboring countries around Norway, Scotland, Faroe Islands, et cetera. The salmon are either grown on land or on land and out sea. where our technology comes into play is for two purposes. One, you need to oxygenate that water. The more oxygen you can put in that water, the more fish you can put in that water.
In that environment so you can increase what they call stocking densities, becomes far more efficient for producers to grow it and also becomes more sustainable when you can do that effectively and I'll touch on that in a second. And then we're also trying to improve water quality in the processes where the fish is being grown on land.
And so in the first, our technology is used everywhere from when the fish are spawned in what they call hatcheries and freshwater. Then in the vessels that bring the fish out to cages where if you've seen pictures of how what aquaculture looks like, you'll immediately see these large cages offshore in these fjords. Some of the fish waste and fish debris goes to the seafloor. In Chile, there's rules being put into effect that you've got to remediate that seafloor.
Our technology is highly effective at doing that. So we're to help restore the seafloor from the pollution associated with that cultivation process. And then as the fish go from the cages back to land for processing, we're also used in that step. In addition to being able to improve fish welfare and reduce mortalities, our customers are in some cases getting more than 50 or 60 percent reduction in oxygen usage. That translates to a similar percentage in energy usage, especially if you're on a vessel using diesel fuel. That translates directly to a similar percentage in greenhouse gas emissions. So not only are able to reduce your cost, because if you're more efficient in how you dissolve oxygen, you are going to reduce the cost of using it, but also the additional operating expenses of producing that energy, grease out of greenhouse gas emissions also are going to come down or we directly improve through the use of our technology. So it's sort of good example of how it's used there.
Molly Wood
What is the process of installing this? What does it take to add some Moleaer to your salmon farming operation?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, almost all of our installations occur in hours, not days. So our systems come in a number of different configurations. To think about the nanobubble generator first, meaning that core technology that I described at the beginning looks like a pipe, that's going to come in any flow rate. the larger the pipe diameter, the larger the pipe diameter, we'll design it to that pipe diameter to be able to allow for seamless integration. Many of our customers want us to provide a pump so that they can actually pump the liquid through it. Some of them want us to provide the air, oxygen or ozone gas source that's going to be applied. Sometimes they don't want the pump, they just want the gas, sometimes the other way around. We have the capability to be able to provide it so it's seamless to integrate into any industrial municipal process.
Molly Wood
Got it, so there's not a big, clearly not a big retrofit involved. I mean, is it insulting if I say I'm just imagining like a giant bubble machine? Like it's kind of a bubble machine, but it makes the smallest.
Nick Dyner
It's definitely not insulting, but you can't imagine it because you can't see something at that scale. So it's very hard to intellectually picture something at 100 nanometers. 100 nanometers put a thousand of these bubbles next to each other, and that's a strand of human hair. The distance between these bubbles, 100 million bubbles in one milliliter, is like the distance from here to the sun. It's just very hard to get that of picture in your head of what we're talking about.
Molly Wood
Yeah, it really is. what you might see is a pump and a pipe. And then to the human eye, you would see sort of nothing coming out of that.
Nick Dyner
Other than the liquid now that has just more dissolved gas if you measure it. But what customers can see very quickly is the effect. So we're able to demonstrate something is happening typically within hours or days. In the world of irrigation, our customers will see something quickly as it relates to water quality and oxygen levels, but they have to wait to go to harvest before they'll see that 10, 20, 30 % yield improvement, which depending on what you're growing is typically what our customers will see.
Molly Wood
Are you contributing at all to that just out of curiosity to that growing body of research about, because it sounds like there are still some really interesting unknowns. I love how, by the way, every one of your sentences has like a little nugget in there that's like, wait, what? Like they don't know why nanobubbles don't dissolve?
Nick Dyner
Yeah.
That's one area that we're trying to understand as well. Typically what happens is if you get to saturation, which means the amount of dissolved gas a body of water can hold. So think of your soda. Your soda is saturated with CO2. Any new CO2 you introduce, that bubble is not going to dissolve. It's just going to rise until it comes to a certain pop because the dissolved gas can't go anywhere. With nanobubbles, you can be below the saturation point, produce these tiny air oxygen CO2 bubbles if you wanted to, and most of them don't dissolve. Some of them might dissolve. And so they stay there. And they stay there for weeks or months, not minutes or hours. So we can put a jar of nanobubble water on the counter and months later nanobubbles will still be present.
Molly Wood
Are there any potential unintended consequences of that as you introduce that into natural systems?
Nick Dyner
No, I think that's the unique advantage. if you equate the basic properties of a nanobubble to what you read about in terms of different types of nanomaterials or nanotechnology that's being used to improve different types of processes. The big difference is that in our case, they're completely benign because it's just air or oxygen. And there's no adverse effect if they end up leaving a process in in nature. And over time, whether it's the turbulence, something that disturbs it, they'll rupture, they'll implode, and they'll just no longer be there.
Molly Wood
Right.
Nick Dyner
Certain types of nanomaterials could last indefinitely, perhaps forever, and that's a big risk around using different types of nanotechnology for different types of liquid-based processes.
Molly Wood
Right, wild. Okay, now let's talk about my favorite thing, my future purchase, my bucket list item, the jacuzzi. That just happens to be sustainable. It's like a business expense for the future.
Nick Dyner
Hmm, yep.
So for anyone who is interested in buying a spa, you need to buy the J series from Jacuzzi. That's where our technology is being deployed. So several years ago, the Jacuzzi's credit, they saw a emerging trend where the desire to reduce the amount of chemicals, chlorine and other types of cleaning agents in a spa is something that consumers would want. And so we were fortunate enough to get connected with them and work together. And we were a much smaller company with less capabilities at the time to develop a solution that
Now is integrated into certain jacuzzi product lines that provides nearly a chemical free spa. Now you can never guarantee it's chemical free because what people do to their spa, to their water quality is always highly dependent. So you can never guarantee something depending on what someone wants to do to it. But generally speaking you're going to be able to reduce your chlorine usage. In the case in the research that we did with them the third party validation that's been done by experts it's 99.9999 percent chlorine free if you manage a spa according to how it should be.
And, it allows people to have that clear, clean, odor-free sort of experience on demand. So when you open the lid and you want to go in the water, you're not having to sit there and say, a minute, I got to chlorinate it or I got to drain it and reheat it. And by the time that's done, you don't want to go in.
Molly Wood
Right. Well, that side note, you're not, every time you empty that, you're not just like pumping a bunch of chlorine, chlorinated water into the ground. Like it's less polluting too. Which, I mean, I think that just, go look it up everyone. Like most of you probably can't afford it right now, but like you want it, I want it. But what, tell me like, that sort of opens this question of what is possible.
Nick Dyner
Right, exactly. Yep.
Molly Wood
Like it's, you I think again, you're very matter of fact about this because you live it every day, but you're describing a relatively new technology that seems to have some new capability uncovered all the time. Like what are the most interesting future usages for nanobubbles?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, so you said the word technology and I would almost ascribe as a new class of science, which makes it even more sort of foundational and yeah, and also more challenging. So the biggest challenge for our company is deciding what to pursue and what not to pursue based on, you know, limited resources and where we see the best opportunity to create value for our customers and our partners. I think one of the most exciting areas for bubbles is in cleaning. And so we're only starting to scratch the surface in terms of what we can clean. We've done internal testing on how could it be used to even reduce the amount of soap that you use at home, right? Like dish soap, for example. And if the technology was properly integrated into, say, a sink or into your house or under your sink, what would that mean in terms of being able to save a consumer both some money in terms of buying?
Cleaning detergents, which are not overly expensive, but also reducing the amount of that that goes down the drain and the amount of water that goes with it. And the funny downstream effect of that is one of the biggest cost drivers to treating waste municipal wastewater is all those surfactants and soaps that go down the drain because they actually make those processes more inefficient. So when you start to think of things and using an expression, you know, the circular economy or more importantly, like how do you start to connect the dots of what you do upstream to downstream? That's a really
Where we can reduce the amount of cleaning agents or cleaning chemicals that are used to clean different things that has an enormous sustainability impact and cost impact to both the user and then the downstream processes and whoever's responsible to address those issues that emerge. And I think that's an area that we haven't really tapped into yet. We've done a lot of internal research. We're starting to talk with partners who are very large players in the world of cleaning chemistry because they recognize that there is a market need and a sustainability need, meaning it's the right thing to do to address that.
That and I think that's where a big area for the future of both the company and the technology plays.
Molly Wood
How does it aid in cleaning?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, so the hydrophobicity of that sort of water-hating nature combined with the charge of the bubble affects both the interfacial or surface tension. That's how soap works. It gets below the dirt and lifts it off, combined with the scouring effect. These bubbles seem to scour, almost like a roughness in the water as it covers over the surface. And so it's very good at lifting and removing. And so we see when we remove things like, you could do a simple, like just put butter or grease on a surface and compare tap water to nanobubble water.
Done things where it's the similar effect as what Dawn is used at the right concentration when you're either soaking or rinsing. Now that's on a specific test. Was it ever going to replace all of your palm oil of at home? Probably not. But can it be used to reduce the amount you need? Yes.
Molly Wood
What is stopping it from becoming the only cleaning product that you need? Is it an energy question, like everything, or? Yeah.
Nick Dyner
Yeah, so, no.
No, it's more concentration. So there's a limit to how many bubbles we can produce in a given process or to change the process by which you introduce nano bubbles is not worth the effort. So you're confined to what's being used today. And so if you say I've got a sink and I got to open the faucet, we're not going to go redesign all the piping in your house, the sink in your house that we can increase the bubble concentration. It's not worth it. And probably there's there's there's unintended consequence from a sustainability perspective that backfires. So we're limited by the process that exists.
And how much either dissolved air or gas plus the concentration of bubbles we can put into that liquid. Whereas the soap you can just pour more. So that's how we think about sort of the trade-off, right? And we have to play within the constraints that exist. Chemicals you can just dump more in as long as there's no regulatory or cost driver that prevents it. And so when you marry the two, you get a much better outcome, both in economic benefit and more sustainable outcome because you're reducing that chemical footprint.
Molly Wood
But if you were building like a space habitat from scratch, like go all the way sci-fi here, it sounds like this could be just what you use to take like a space shower, maybe. Yep.
Nick Dyner
Yes, could get there. We've never tried it, we've never pushed the envelope, but the science suggests you could get there.
Molly Wood
Right, this new science that you're contributing to all the time. What's the, mean, separate from the responsibility that you have to produce product lines that are, you know, that you have brand permission for or industry contacts or that makes sense. Like, what is there, is there a super sci-fi use that you would love to just get to work on?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, some of the research and only a few people playing in the healthcare space. Some of the healthcare usage that's more developed in the, a research perspective is improving things like ultrasound imaging, right, which is very dependent on using bubbles that come in these contrast agents that go and bond to whatever it is that you want to detect. And then the image uses those bubbles and the vibration of bubbles to, sorry, the ultrasound uses the vibration of bubbles to create the image. And the smaller the bubble, the easier it is or the better it can at getting to whatever it is you want to be able to image. And so you're seeing improvements in that area.
I think some of the more sci-fi area or what the very far future could hold is using bubbles to destroy things. So imagine you have a bubble that has the ability to bond itself to a cancer cell or a tumor. And once it's done that, you apply certain energy that allows the bubble to explode and it blows the tumor up with it. That is being researched and applied today in the academic community to see if that's possible. So how to use bubbles for those types of purposes or improving the way certain types of pharmacology is delivered to its intended targets I think is a really interesting area that it wouldn't surprise me could be decades I don't know the pathway to market in healthcare but could be decades but that would be a use case for nanobubbles I think most people will see or experience.
Molly Wood
That is fascinating. All right, but so back to Moleaer, how real is this moment? So the company's been around a little while. You came on in 2017. What's the, what is the state of things now? What does your market penetration look like?
Nick Dyner
Yeah, thanks for asking because it's a new class of science. Many people think it's still in the development or R &D phase and are curious, you when will this be real?
So we have over 4,000 nanobubble generators installed globally in 55 countries. We manufacture here in the US and we manufacture in Spain for our international customers. We have warehouses in Northern Europe and Norway for aquaculture, Chile for our salmon farmers as well. And probably over thousand, not probably, we probably close to 2,000 customers, meaning unique customers who are using
Moleaer's technology to drive some sort of improvement in their process while also delivering that sustainable benefit through the chemical water energy reduction. We also do develop new applications which are much earlier in their sort of life cycle and maturity but the technology itself is proven. There's no technology risk, there's only the risk as to whether or not it's going to deliver the economic benefits that they hope but that's the same risk anyone has any time they buy anything in an industrial process.
Molly Wood
Nick Dyner is the CEO of Moleaer, a guy who's super casual about just being on the cutting edge right now. Nick, thanks so much for the time. Amazing, love it, love it, love it. I know, I'm always like, be more, this is sci-fi. You're working on sci-fi every day. that's amazing.
Nick Dyner
Thanks, Molly. Appreciate it.
Outro
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool the kind of thing I absolutely love
The new thinking and new technology that could be totally commonplace to our kids and grandkids someday and we’ll be like I heard about nanobubbles here first.
Thank you so much for listening. NEXT week we’re talking about ocean intelligence with a company that’s deploying buoys in places they’ve never been before and creating Google Maps for ships which trust me helps eliminate a LOT of emissions.
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Together, we can get this done. See you next week.
