BioLargo
combines science and engineering to create innovative products and technologies with global impact. Its areas of expertise include PFAS contamination cleanup, wastewater treatment, odor control and eradicating volatile organic compounds (VOCs), improving air quality, and mitigation of infections and infectious disease. (PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.)
Dennis Calvert, CEO, BioLargo “We call ourselves a sustainable innovator and solution provider,” says Dennis Calvert, president and CEO, BioLargo. “We’re a team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs focused on some of the biggest problems that face our world. Our slogan is, ‘We make life better.’ So sustainable innovation, a high-impact focus on transformative technologies are our specialties. Everything we focus on and innovate with can become a cornerstone of creating business opportunities that are good for people, good for the planet and good for commerce.”
The company’s business model has BioLargo as the parent company that supports its subsidiaries that are executing sales, marketing, commercialization, and distribution of each platform technology-based product. The subsidiaries are made up of product teams that take the products to market and support its commercial partnerships. Each is headed by its own CEO. BioLargo has four operating units focused on four very specific challenges in the environment.
“The first is odor and VOC elimination, which includes our flagship product called Pooph and it’s wildly successful,” says Calvert. “We also have an industrial division that sells a comparable product. You’ll notice in the promotional video for Pooph, they say the formula is based after those used in public works nationwide to make communities safe and clean. That’s how we learned our craft – in community cleanup and odor-elimination for areas near landfills. The product is a full-circle story of innovation for us. We wanted to launch in a consumer market and find partners who are experts in branding. It currently represents about 88% of the revenue the company.”
Pooph breaks down an odor at the molecular level so it doesn’t just cover it up or neutralize it, it eliminates it. Safe for humans and animals, it’s marketed to pet owners with the assurance it can be used on toys, beds and on the pet itself. Pooph projects a continued goal of 20% quarter-on-quarter growth and based on those estimates, Calvert and Co. believes it will double again this year.
For Pooph, BioLargo is the supply chain partner and manufactures the product and then delivers it to its partners at Pooph, Inc., who market and sell the product. The company’s partners buy Pooph at wholesale prices and then sell through retail distribution.
Calvert even uses the product on his own beloved family dog, Duke. “We have a lab with allergies that cause a drippy eye,” Calvert says. “I spray a soft cloth every couple of days to wipe around his eyes and it erases any odor while keeping the fur and skin really healthy.”
Calvert goes on to say: “The product could lead to an exit somewhere north of 1/2 a billion, 20% of which we are entitled to , so Pooph is a big deal for BioLargo, which just announced growth of 108% for the year ending December 2023 and, then another record quarter in first quarter of 2024 – the largest quarter in the history of the company as the company turned positive cash flow.”
There are additional operations ready to go commercial. One has a potentially high global impact: its PFAS removal system. PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances that are “a large, complex group of synthetic chemicals that have been used in consumer products around the world since about the 1950s and are ingredients in various everyday products,” per the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences .
PFAS molecules have a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms that form an extremely strong bond, which makes these chemicals very difficult to break down in the environment and are contaminating water supplies, worldwide. BioLargo AEC – aqueous electrostatic concentrator – is based on years of research and uses an electrostatic charge that can remove PFAS in water more quickly, efficiently and with a smaller footprint than filtration systems, per company literature.
“We expect to release Q3, Q4 and it will be the first substantive revenue from that asset,” says Calvert. “We have more than $100 million worth of projects in the pipeline. Many are still in the ‘early adoption phase,’ so they may take a little while to go online. Once we get to critical mass though, things should really start moving. After that, we can seek scaled deployment and continuous-growth contracts. That’s a business that could easily see hundreds of millions of dollars a year coming in so it’s very exciting.”
One of the youngest innovations for the company is its battery tech but it isn’t going to sell batteries – it is selling battery factories that will specialize in long-duration, energy-storage systems. Another major energy demand will be from AI data centers.
“We’re talking about batteries the size of 20-foot trailers or the size of small air conditioner next to your house,” Calvert says. “These are for balancing energy with the grid or offloading renewable energy. The big hook is this technology is competing with lithium. Lithium has several issues – it requires rare elements, it has runaway fire risk, it’s expensive and it’s in short supply. Additionally, it loses its charge over time. With ours, there’s no fire risk, 2.9 times the energy density of lithium and higher voltage packs more power to the punch, and can be charged to 100% and used back to zero without degradation to the battery cells.”
New and cleaner technologies and energy sources require greater energy storage. What’s the point of generating wind and solar if that power can’t be stored? This technology was developed by a group of scientists from the University of Tennessee who had commercialized several batteries.
“This concept went through eight years of R&D,” says Calvert. “And sadly, the principal developer passed away after a brief illness. His son, who worked for the company for 14 years, saved everything and brought it to us. Once we brought the son on, we surrounded that effort with talent and deploying a PhD electrochemist battery specialist.”
BioLargo has built a small pilot production facility and will start testing the cells to verify performance soon, while working with potential partners to expand the commercial opportunity.
“One of our partners is an infrastructure builder called 22nd Century Tribal Infrastructure Group,” Calvert says. “A gentleman named Forrest James has been doing infrastructure for tribal nations for almost 20 years and has helped fund and organize over $950 million worth of infrastructure.”
“The intention is to bring battery factories as well as water treatment systems to tribal lands to create an entire future for underserved communities that need the energy, industry, tax revenue and jobs,” he concludes. “This also allows the areas to access 30% tax credits available under the Inflation Reduction Act and 10% Made in America, and additional financial support for work force development. Our thesis is that for the right partner, they can capture those credits and use them to be in the battery manufacturing business and, once that is accomplished they could even migrate into micro-grid development to support the capture and use of renewable energy.
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