That's how Waterloop's Travis Loop opens the latest episode of How Water Works, a series that goes behind the scenes of water innovation across the United States. This time, the cameras came to Moleaer's Los Angeles headquarters for a closer look at nanobubble technology: what it is, how it works, and why it's gaining traction across some of the world's most water-intensive industries.
The result is one of the clearest explanations of nanobubbles available, told through the science, the lab, and the real-world applications already in deployment.
Watch the episode:
Nanobubbles are microscopic pockets of gas, about 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt and invisible to the human eye. Unlike ordinary bubbles, they don't rise to the surface and burst. Because they're so small, they have almost no buoyancy, and their negative surface charge keeps them from coalescing with one another. The result: they remain suspended in water for months.
That stability is what makes them so useful. Nanobubbles increase dissolved oxygen in water, support beneficial biological activity, and attract contaminant particles, a process Moleaer's VP of Reasearch & Development, Sohail, describes in the episode as "flocculation," where contaminants cluster together and can be skimmed off the top or settled to the bottom, leaving cleaner water behind.
Nanobubbles also favor the growth of beneficial bacteria over the kind that cause odor and water quality issues, and they make that bacteria more active. The combined effect is healthier water, with less intervention required.
Moleaer's R&D Scientist, Zening, takes Travis into Moleaer's lab, where simple experiments make the invisible visible.
In one demonstration, two glasses of water look identical to the eye, until a laser is shone through them. The beam passing through the nanobubble-treated water is dramatically brighter and more intense, scattered by the billions of nanobubbles suspended inside (scientists call this the Tyndall effect.)
In another, the nanobubble-treated water holds onto gas and foam in ways untreated water can't, demonstrating the high gas-holding capacity that makes nanobubbles so effective in real-world applications.
To actually count and measure the nanobubbles, Moleaer uses a Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis system, an instrument widely accepted in the nanobubble research community, which can quantify hundreds of millions or even billions of nanobubbles in a single glass of water.
From the lab to the field
Today, Moleaer's systems are deployed in thousands of installations around the world and the episode highlights several of the most impactful applications.
Wastewater treatment: Through collaborations with Xylem, U.S. utilities are using nanobubbles to pretreat water as it enters the plant, removing surfactants and other inhibitory compounds that drive up the energy cost of treatment. At a wastewater treatment facility in California, Moleaer's technology reduced ammonia in the effluent by more than 60% and BOD by 40%. At one of the world's largest wastewater treatment operators, aeration was reduced by 40% and total plant-level energy use by more than 10%.
Agriculture and greenhouses. With more than 1,000 greenhouses now using Moleaer's technology as standard equipment in their irrigation water, growers are reducing reliance on chemicals like peroxide while cutting disease pressure dramatically, including more than 90% reductions in pythium in some cases. Most greenhouses see double-digit yield improvements after integrating oxygen nanobubbles into their irrigation water.
Aquaculture: In Norway and the broader Nordics, the world's largest salmon-producing region, Moleaer has approximately 300 nanobubble generators installed. Customers have saved more than $5 million through improved fish welfare and lower mortality, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 20,000 tons.
Lake restoration. Perhaps the most visible story is Lake Elsinore, the largest natural freshwater lake in Southern California. After years of harmful algal blooms shutting the lake down each summer, Moleaer was brought in roughly two and a half years ago to treat a significant portion of the lake. It has been open every summer since. Water quality has improved, odors have been reduced, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been reinvested into the surrounding city.
Warren Russell speaks to how the technology translates across these very different applications, while Nick Dyner looks at where it's headed next.
When asked where we are in the history of nanobubbles, Nick offers a baseball analogy: "We are in the first out of the first inning of a nine-inning game."
The opportunity ahead is enormous. Nanobubble technology is showing that it's possible to reduce chemical usage, reduce energy usage, and reduce water usage while still achieving, and often improving on, the outcomes that water-intensive industries need. That's good for customers economically, and good for the planet at the same time.
As Travis puts it at the close of the episode, "Something you can't even see is fundamentally changing the behavior of water."
Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1d466A2awo