Q3 2024 374Water Inc Earnings Call
Greetings.
and welcome to the 374 Water 3rd Quarter 2024 Earnings Call.
At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.
Speaker Change: If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to our host, Heather Crowell, Investor Relations.
Heather Crowell: Hello, everyone, and welcome to 374 Water's third quarter 2024 earnings call.
Heather Crowell: My name is Heather Crowell, and I'm here today with our President and Chief Executive Officer Chris Gannon and Chief Financial Officer Adrienne Anderson.
Heather Crowell: During today's call, we may make projections and other forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company.
Heather Crowell: These statements may discuss our business, economic and market outlook, growth expectations, new products and their performance, cost structure, and business strategy.
Heather Crowell: Forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us and on management's beliefs, assumptions, estimates, and or projections.
Heather Crowell: Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and other factors.
Heather Crowell: We refer you to documents the company files from time to time with the SEC, specifically the companies form 10-K and 10-Q.
Heather Crowell: These documents identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements.
Heather Crowell: All statements made during this call are made only as of today, November 14th, 2024, and the company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances unless otherwise required by law.
Heather Crowell: Note that our earnings release and transcripts will be available on the Investor Relations page of our website.
Speaker Change: At this point, I will turn the call over to our President and CEO, Chris Gannon.
Chris Gannon: Thank you, Heather. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today.
Chris Gannon: Over the past quarter, we have continued executing on our strategic initiatives.
Chris Gannon: Taking major strides towards the commercialization of our air flow technology to capture the expansive and growing markets
Chris Gannon: for destruction of organic waste, estimated to exceed $250 billion globally.
Chris Gannon: Our vision remains clear and executable, namely to deliver a scalable solution for organic waste destruction across municipal, federal, industrial, and TSDF sectors.
Chris Gannon: Today, we will discuss our technology and our major advancements towards commercialization.
Our recent deployment to Orlando, upcoming
Chris Gannon: recent waste stream destruction successes, as well as the market opportunities we are pursuing, including near-term destruction as a service revenue opportunities, our go-forward capital strategy, and our growth strategy.
Chris Gannon: As in prior calls, I will start with a discussion of our technology. We believe our AERSCO system sits at the forefront of clean tech innovation, offering a vital solution to global wastewater treatment and organic waste destruction challenges.
Chris Gannon: The core of our AERSQLO system is our patented supercritical water oxidation technology.
Chris Gannon: Designed to permanently destroy and mineralize a broad spectrum of organic, non-hazardous,
hazardous waste streams.
Chris Gannon: producing safe, dischargeable, clean water, safe mineral effluent, safe vent gas, and recoverable heat energy.
Chris Gannon: Importantly, air squal eliminates recalcitrant organic waste including emerging contaminants like PFAS in the squal process without creating waste byproducts.
Chris Gannon: Our AERSCO technology is designed to destroy organic contaminants across municipal, federal, and industrial waste streams. Traditional wastes include biosolids,
landfill leachate, oily sludge,
foam fractionate, military waste,
Chris Gannon: granular activated carbon, ion exchange resin, and other organic industrial wastes. While emerging contaminants include PFAS,
like a triple-f firefighting foam pharmaceuticals
pesticides, and plastics.
Chris Gannon: In addition to our AERSCO system, our technology incorporates certain pre- and post-treatment systems. These solutions ensure our AERSCO system receives waste in the right form for ease of processing and destruction.
Chris Gannon: Pre-treatment systems consist of macerators and or crushers, screens, mixing tanks, chemical feed, and dewatering solutions.
Chris Gannon: while post-treatment systems consist of clarifiers and filters. As we encounter new forms of waste, the pre- and post-treatment processes will be adjusted and or refined to accommodate the particulars of these waste streams.
Chris Gannon: We plan to offer four commercial-scale air squat models and corresponding pre- and post-treatment technologies to fully support our end customers' organic waste destruction needs.
Chris Gannon: These air school models consist of our AS-1, AS-6, AS-7, AS-8, AS-9, AS-10, AS-11, AS-12,
AS-30 and larger capacity systems like our AS-100s and larger.
Chris Gannon: Our highly mobile AS1 unit is designed to process up to one metric ton per day of wet waste and is ideal for onsite demonstrations, cleanups, and small-scale destruction-as-a-service, or DOS, projects.
Chris Gannon: Our mobile AS6 unit is designed to process up to six metric tons per day of wet waste and is ideal for smaller municipal, federal, and industrial sites.
Chris Gannon: We plan to utilize this mobile unit for both permanent on-site destruction and mobile DOS opportunities.
Chris Gannon: RAS-30 is designed to process up to 30 metric tons of wet waste a day and is semi-permanent. We believe this unit is ideal for mid-sized municipal, federal, and industrial sites as well as regional TSDFs and landfills.
Chris Gannon: Finally, our largest bespoke AS-100 systems will be designed to process 100 or more tons of waste per day and would be permanent installations.
Chris Gannon: We believe these systems will be well suited for the largest municipal wastewater treatment facilities, like the City of Orlando and Orange County, as well as large industrial facilities which process large volumes of waste daily.
Chris Gannon: Over the past six months, we have made substantial improvements to our air flow system, which has materially advanced our technology towards commercialization across multiple waste streams.
Chris Gannon: Our technology effectively processes solid waste, which can be pre-processed into slurries for treatment, including wastewater sludges and biosolids.
Chris Gannon: spent granular activated carbon or GAC, ion-exchanged resins, and hard-to-degrade plastics, and liquid wastes such as firefighting foam or AFFF, industrial solvents, and fomate streams.
Chris Gannon: Recent system improvements include upgrades to our pre-treatment systems, feedstock delivery to our reactor, water process controls, mixing geometry and atmospheric monitoring, controls and automation systems,
Chris Gannon: Air squirrel processing and post-treatment, to name just a few of the significant improvements we have made to our system recently.
Chris Gannon: These and other system upgrades contributed to our confidence in completing the commercial-scale deployment to Orlando.
Chris Gannon: This deployment has allowed us to process biosolids at scale in a real-world wastewater treatment facility environment, as well as begin to execute on a range of waste destruction demonstrations for clients.
Chris Gannon: and test additional liquid and solid waste streams at scale to prove our system's capabilities across multiple organic waste streams.
Chris Gannon: Through our technology development and testing processes, we have been working along parallel paths related to sludge and liquid waste. We are now pursuing near-term revenue opportunities across both waste streams. I will discuss these revenue opportunities shortly.
Chris Gannon: In September, we announced the successful deployment, commissioning, and full operability of our AERSCO system.
Chris Gannon: which consists of our core AERSQLO technology and our biosolids dewatering unit at the City of Orlando's Iron Bridge Regional Water Reclamation Facility
which offers us a real-world stage to demonstrate our system.
Chris Gannon: The Orlando deployment marks a major milestone in our technology commercialization journey and affords us the opportunity to process not only biosolids, but also other solid and liquid municipal, federal, and industrial waste streams.
Chris Gannon: In fact, we are doing just that. We are executing various contracted demonstrations, as well as our own internal commercial-scale waste destruction projects to advance our technology to further unlock other key market verticals.
Chris Gannon: I will provide further updates on our Orlando deployment and next steps there in future calls.
Turning now to Orange County Sanitation,
Chris Gannon: As previously disclosed, we are building an AERSCO system for delivery to OCSAN in 2025.
Chris Gannon: Prior to this deployment, we will complete a factory acceptance test, and upon delivery, the system will undergo a six-month operational period managed by 374 Water Engineers, followed by another six-month operational period managed by OCSAN staff.
Chris Gannon: We were pleased to host the team from OCSAN at the Orlando facility in October to show them the system in a real-world environment and had a day of productive conversations about our strategy and ongoing partnership.
Chris Gannon: As a reminder, following these successful demonstrations, the City of Orlando and OCSAN have announced their intentions to upgrade to our larger AS30 system and have already secured relevant funding.
Chris Gannon: Following the AS-30 installations, OC-SAN also intends to purchase multiple AS-100 or larger units to manage waste for their entire plans.
The city of Orlando has expressed a similar intent.
Chris Gannon: Now let's turn to materials that contain per- and polyfluoroalkylene substances, or PFOS for short, which are synthetic chemicals known for their persistence in the environment, which cause adverse effects in humans and animals.
Chris Gannon: We have been hard at work developing our technology to effectively destroy
Chris Gannon: PFAS waste streams. This work has paid off as our technology has successfully processed and destroyed a host of PFAS contaminated waste with destruction results north of 99.99% and more.
Chris Gannon: One such PFOS contaminant is aqueous film forming foam or AFFF firefighting foam.
Chris Gannon: Developed by the U.S. Navy and 3M in the 1960s, AFFF is used to suppress Class B fires involving flammable liquids like gasoline, oil, and jet fuel.
Chris Gannon: Since that time, AFFF has been widely used in state and local fire departments, military bases, airports, refineries, and chemical plants for fire suppression.
Chris Gannon: AFFF is highly persistent, leading to long-term contamination of soil and water resources.
Chris Gannon: Further, exposure to AFFF has been linked to various health issues, including cancers, immune system effects, birth defects.
and developmental challenges in children.
Chris Gannon: Due to environmental and health concerns, several regulations have been enacted to limit or prohibit the use of AFFF. The National Defense Authorization Act
Chris Gannon: For fiscal year 2020, mandated that the VOD phase out the use of PFOS containing AFFF by October 2024. In addition, various states have implemented bans or restrictions on AFFF use.
Chris Gannon: For example, California prohibited the sale or distribution of AFFF containing PFAS starting January 1, 2022 and banned its use for training purposes.
Chris Gannon: Importantly, many states across the U.S. are also evaluating similar bans and are initiating programs that move towards destruction of their stockpiles of AFFF.
Chris Gannon: We have completed numerous internal AFFF destruction tests on our lab-scale system and commercial-scale AS1 and AS6 systems, which have demonstrated 99.999% plus AFFF destruction results.
Chris Gannon: These tests have also informed additional technological improvements to our Air School system.
Chris Gannon: Based on these successes and improvements, we now feel confident in pursuing near-term AFFF destruction as a service revenue opportunities within the local, state, federal, and industrial markets.
Chris Gannon: We are also advancing our development efforts to address GAC, IX, and fomate destruction.
Chris Gannon: So far, we have experienced meaningful results and are currently focused on pre-treatment process changes to deliver these wastes in easily processed form to our air-exposed technology.
Chris Gannon: We intend to continue to expand our testing of these waste streams in response to changing regulations to address PFAS in water and wastewater.
Chris Gannon: Granularly activated carbon, or GAC for surface absorption, properties including water treatment facilities.
Chris Gannon: industry, pharmaceutical manufacturing, air purification systems, oil and gas, and environmental remediation firms.
Chris Gannon: GAC is used to absorb contaminants from liquids and gases. While GAC effectively removes contaminants, spent GAC can become a hazardous waste if it absorbs toxic substances.
Chris Gannon: Improper disposal of spent GAP can lead to secondary environmental contamination.
Chris Gannon: Ion exchange resins, or IX for short, are polymers used to remove ions from solutions commonly employed in water softening and purification processes.
Chris Gannon: Over time, these resins become saturated with contaminants are referred to as spent ion exchange resins.
Chris Gannon: These resins are used in various industries including water treatment, chemical manufacturing, and nuclear power.
Chris Gannon: Spent ion resins can become hazardous substances, making their disposal a potential environmental concern, as improper handling can lead to the release of toxic materials into the environment.
Chris Gannon: The foam fractionation or foam frack of landfill leachate is a treatment process that concentrates pollutants such as PFAS and various organic contaminants from liquid waste into a fomate, making them easy to manage.
Chris Gannon: While SQUO destroys organic pollutants, any heavy metals that may be present are not degraded. Instead, they are separated and captured in the stable, non-reactive inert form, allowing for safe disposal or potential recovery and reuse.
Chris Gannon: We have achieved great success running GAC, iX, Fomate, and other industrial solvents at lab scale and AS1 commercial scale and have seen the destruction levels greater than 99.99 percent.
Chris Gannon: In the coming months, we will be running full destruction trials on our AS6 and anticipate similar destruction results.
Chris Gannon: Now, turning to our lab operations. Based on our internal technology development and customer needs, we moved our lab operations to a state-of-the-art biosafety level one laboratory in Morrisville, North Carolina.
Chris Gannon: This new facility more than triples our lab testing capacity, enabling faster throughput and ability to handle more complex materials.
Chris Gannon: We utilize this facility to complete initial lab-scale waste destruction tests for our customers to showcase the effectiveness of our AERSCOA technology and the supercritical water oxidation process to destroy organic waste.
Chris Gannon: 374 Waters Lab is often the first experience for customers to learn about the power of AERISCLO to destroy organic waste and provides a revenue source for the company.
Chris Gannon: We also utilize our lab as an important part of our research, development, and engineering organization to develop pre-treatment protocols on waste streams, identify and evaluate potential challenges with processing various waste streams,
Chris Gannon: through our air flow system and develop a robust approach to effectively processing those waste streams.
Chris Gannon: Now, let's turn our attention to the waste treatment and destruction market. As a reminder, we estimate the global market opportunity for our AirSQL waste destruction technology to be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Chris Gannon: While the global market is truly massive, we consciously made the decision to focus our on cultivating the U.S. market at this time.
Chris Gannon: With this in mind, we have a robust and growing municipal, federal, industrial, and TSDF backlog and pipeline of more than $1.8 billion.
Chris Gannon: As public awareness of emerging contaminants grows, traditional technologies focused on waste removal, such as land application, land filling, incineration, deep well injection, and hauling and storage,
Chris Gannon: which changed the markets decades ago, are now increasingly viewed as insufficient as they only move the problem and liability from one median, one geography, and one organization to another.
Chris Gannon: We believe our commercial-scale AERSCO system will offer a comprehensive and final solution for the most challenging organic waste streams.
Chris Gannon: From a cost perspective, we believe our technology is competitive with current waste removal alternatives when considering all cradle-to-grave costs, including future liabilities.
Chris Gannon: Further, recent legal settlements and federal remediation budgets indicate substantial financial obligations and funding associated with addressing existing and future liabilities.
Chris Gannon: Recent EPA regulations, state mandates, and the bipartisan concern over emerging contaminants ensure stricter and more robust disposal practices and requirements will continue, regardless of the results of the recent election.
Chris Gannon: These developments are accelerating the transition, which was already well underway, to emerging commercial-scale destruction solutions like our AIRSQO system.
Chris Gannon: With this in mind, let's discuss the markets in which we participate.
Chris Gannon: First, let's discuss the $120 billion U.S. drinking water and municipal wastewater management market, which includes approximately 152,000 water utilities,
Chris Gannon: 16,000 wastewater treatment facilities, several thousand capped and uncapped landfills, and more than 52,000 state and local firefighting units.
Chris Gannon: All these areas have waste streams which must be managed, disposed of, and or destroyed.
Chris Gannon: U.S. drinking water utilities are increasingly impacted by contaminants like PFAS.
microplastics, and pharmaceuticals.
Chris Gannon: leading to widespread adoption of treatment methods like granular activated carbon and ion exchange to filter these substances.
Chris Gannon: As these materials become saturated with PFAS, processes like supercritical water oxidation are essential for safely destroying the spent GAC and IX, offering a more complete solution for PFAS disposal.
Chris Gannon: We believe we are well positioned to provide a compelling solution here.
Chris Gannon: The U.S. municipal wastewater treatment market is experiencing significant challenges as it relates to the management and disposal of biosolids, which are highly contaminated with PFAS, microplastics, and other harmful substances.
Chris Gannon: Traditional methods of biosolid disposal including land application as fertilizer or soil supplements, landfill burial, incineration are simply not adequate.
Chris Gannon: In fact, the state of Florida's House Bill HB1405 places stricter limits on sludge land application due to nutrient pollution.
particularly near sensitive water bodies.
Increasing demand for alternative sludge management.
Chris Gannon: Note previously Florida used land application as one of their primary biosolids disposal methods.
Chris Gannon: As a result of these recent changes, Florida municipalities now transport this additional biosolid waste out of state extremely long distances to dispose of them in landfills, which increases their costs dramatically.
Chris Gannon: The regulatory landscape, including Florida mandates, has created a perfect storm, which landfills increasingly closing their doors as biosolids and fees are on the rise.
Speaker Change: Municipalities are urgently seeking solutions and we are well positioned to deliver here.
Speaker Change: Now let's turn to landfills. There are over 3,000 landfills across the U.S. facing leachate issues.
Speaker Change: including nearly 1,700 open landfills and over 1,300 closed landfills. Landfill leachate is a liquid that forms when water percolates through waste material in a landfill, picking up various dissolved and suspended substances.
Speaker Change: This contaminated liquid is the result of rainfall, surface runoff, and decomposing waste within the landfill, which can include organic materials, chemicals,
heavy metals, pathogens, as well as biosolids.
Speaker Change: We are in discussions with waste management companies surrounding landfill leachate destruction demonstrations within the lab.
Speaker Change: We anticipate these early demonstrations will translate into full-scale construction and service opportunities for our company shortly.
Speaker Change: Now let's discuss AFFF firefighting foam. Both scale removal and disposal of PFAS laden AFFF firefighting foam is now underway at the state and municipal government levels.
Speaker Change: 16 U.S. states currently offer AFFF buyback programs to help fire departments safely dispose of this toxic firefighting foam.
Speaker Change: These programs enable fire departments and agencies to return obsolete or unused AFFF stocks, which are then safely stored and processed for disposal.
Funding for the destruction of collected AFFF varies by state.
Speaker Change: For example, Ohio's program run by the Ohio EPA and state fire marshal.
Speaker Change: is funded by a settlement from a PCB-related case. In contrast, North Carolina's Take Back program leverages state support
Speaker Change: and it collaborates with the North Carolina Collaboratory to research and apply PFAS destruction technologies.
Speaker Change: We are now starting to bid on AFFF waste destruction opportunities using our air flow destruction as a service model.
Speaker Change: We believe state and municipal AFFF destruction opportunities represent near-term revenue opportunities for our company.
Speaker Change: As of today, our municipal backlog and pipeline stands north of $600 million.
Speaker Change: Now, the $15 billion U.S. Federal Waste Management Market, which includes 715 DOD sites,
Speaker Change: 50 DOE sites, and 150 airports under the oversight of the FAA.
Speaker Change: These agencies have stockpiles of waste streams, such as AFFF firefighting foam, chemicals, narcotics.
Speaker Change: biosolids, and other wastes which must be treated, stored, and destroyed. These agencies are actively seeking solutions to eliminate this PFAS contamination.
Speaker Change: The DoD estimates cleanup costs of over 29 billion for PFAS contamination.
Speaker Change: Full-scale removal and disposal of PFAS-contaminated firefighting equipment and AFFF firefighting foam is now underway in military bases around the country.
Speaker Change: Hundreds of millions of dollars are already being allocated to eliminate AFFF from all U.S. military facilities. Federal funding for this cleanup activity is available and growing.
We see a very real market opportunity here.
Speaker Change: As such, we intend to bid on ALLF destruction opportunities using our AERSCRO destruction as a service model.
Speaker Change: We believe federal government AFFF disruption opportunities represent a very real near-term revenue opportunity for our company, and we intend to capitalize.
Speaker Change: We also see growing demand for the destruction of PFAS contaminated filtration media such as granular activated carbon and ion exchange waste streams using the cleanup of soil at DOD facilities.
Speaker Change: Over time, we expect to broaden our focus to include GAC and IS waste destruction, leveraging the billions of dollars in federal funding earmarked to support destruction and cleanup efforts.
Speaker Change: Further, and importantly, we anticipate continued strong bipartisan political support for PFAS remediation and destruction will remain with the DoD as they continue to spearhead federal action.
Speaker Change: 374 Waters contractually engaged into 2025 with multiple DOD entities for evaluating PFAS and other organic waste stream destruction effectiveness.
Speaker Change: As of today, our federal backlog and pipeline exceeds $900 million.
Speaker Change: Now, for the $80 billion U.S. industrial waste management market, which includes a diverse group of industries from landfills and oil and gas to healthcare and battery manufacturing verticals.
Speaker Change: As a reminder, industrial facilities generate tons and tons of organic waste annually that are either pre-treated on-site and discharged to wastewater treatment plants.
Speaker Change: treated and discharged directly into our water bodies, or transported off-site for expensive treatment and disposal of final residuals.
Speaker Change: Downstream handlers and disposal facilities are now beginning to reject waste material because of the increasing threat of liability and remediation costs.
Speaker Change: We continue to experience traction across the industrial market, targeting sub-verticals like oil and gas, pharmaceuticals,
chemicals.
Speaker Change: and battery manufacturing. We have and we will continue to provide waste destruction tests to industrial market participants to demonstrate AERSCO's efficacy in destroying and eliminating liability associated with their persistent organic waste streams.
I will now walk through each of these markets.
Speaker Change: The oil and gas industry generates significant volumes of non-hazardous and hazardous wastes, including drill cuttings, produced water and sludge, all of which require specialized treatment.
Speaker Change: The U.S. oil and gas waste treatment market is valued at roughly $10.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow, driven by regulatory pressures and a focus on environmental responsibility.
Speaker Change: In addition, the oil and gas market has significant stockpiles of AFFF firefighting foam, which again represents an important near-term destruction-as-a-service revenue opportunity for our company.
Speaker Change: The U.S. battery recycling market, valued at north of $500 million in 2024, is expected to grow rapidly, driven by the increased demand for electric vehicles and the need for sustainable battery disposal methods.
Speaker Change: With a projected CAGR of 38% through 2030, this expanding market represents a significant opportunity for air squill.
Speaker Change: Key industry players recognize SWO's potential to serve as a central waste management solution providing safe and sustainable processing while helping battery recyclers meet environmental regulations.
Speaker Change: The technology application within battery recycling highlights its role in advancing sustainability within hazardous waste management.
Speaker Change: The pharmaceutical industry is facing increasing regulatory scrutiny and environmental demands, driving the need for effective, sustainable waste treatment solutions.
Speaker Change: Valued at north of $600 million in 2024, the U.S. pharmaceutical waste management market is projected to grow as the industry emphasizes responsible disposal practices.
Speaker Change: Squo is particularly well suited for this market given its ability to break down complex and high-risk compounds effectively.
Speaker Change: Pharmaceutical manufacturers are actively seeking AirSquo as a solution to handle diverse waste profiles with minimal environmental impact. Positioning the technology is essential for the sector's compliance and sustainability goals.
Speaker Change: The chemical manufacturing sector accounts for roughly 50% of the industrial waste market, which translates into roughly 15 billion pounds of produced waste annually.
Speaker Change: And the annual industrial waste market from chemical production is valued at over 1 billion.
Speaker Change: Chemical waste can be in solid, liquid, or sludge form generated by chemical production, manufacturing, and other industrial activities.
Speaker Change: Many chemicals can be hazardous, toxic, or carcinogenic substances and can be in the form of synthetic organics.
organic solvents, oils, plasticizers, and the like.
Speaker Change: Industrial players are increasingly turning to sustainable solutions, not only due to regulatory requirements and public pressures, but because the use of recovery technologies like 374 Waters, AERSCO system, can save costs, streamlining internal operations,
eliminate potential liabilities.
Speaker Change: We currently see no effective commercial-scale final and permanent destruction solution for these industrial markets.
Speaker Change: We see a mix of capital sale and destruction as a service opportunities across the industrial market landscape which will benefit our business. As of today, our industrial backlog and pipeline exceeds 300 million.
Speaker Change: Finally, the U.S. Treatment Storage and Storage includes more than 860 RCRA operating permitted sites in the U.S.
Speaker Change: We are actively engaged with global and national materials, waste handling, and waste management companies to set up a national network of facilities to service customers from our three core markets.
Speaker Change: municipal, federal, and industrial, and provide a turnkey destruction as a service, or DAS, offering which will drive recurring revenues.
Speaker Change: As such, we are seeking to partner with existing TSDFs who are known to our customers, have experience in the non-hazardous and hazardous waste treatment spaces, and finally have the appropriate local, state, and federal permits.
Speaker Change: We will provide further updates as we sign these strategic and innovative partnerships that will drive recurring revenues and solve multi-stakeholder market problems.
Speaker Change: We believe the TSDF DAS market opportunity is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars to our company.
Now let's shift to how we sell our technology.
As discussed previously, we offer three
capital purchase, lease, and destruction
Speaker Change: Large municipalities typically desire to outright purchase the equipment within their facilities.
Speaker Change: So there may be some instances where these large municipalities opt for our DAS model.
Speaker Change: Smaller municipalities, landfill operators, and many industrial clients are drawn to our DAS model, which provides access to our waste destruction technology without significant upfront investment.
Federal government customers, including the military,
Speaker Change: I've also consistently articulated desire for our DAS model with centralized destruction facilities as well as mulch run type structures to facilitate on-site destruction.
Speaker Change: Finally, TSDF market participants have been focused on our DAS model and waste destruction revenue sharing. While we are in the early stages of inking these agreements, we are increasingly bullish on these opportunities to generate meaningful revenue.
Speaker Change: We will naturally keep you informed as our procurement vehicles and our discussions of these market verticals evolve.
Speaker Change: Now let's turn to how we fund all these opportunities. As previously disclosed, we are actively raising capital to expand our company and we'll be providing public disclosures on our progress here shortly.
Speaker Change: As mentioned previously, we have a backlog and pipeline of $1.8 billion in near-term capital sale and destruction of service revenue opportunities, which require capital to execute.
Speaker Change: In addition, we have discussed the need to expand our team to more rapidly commercialize our AERSQLO technology across several waste streams, including biosolids, AFFF firefighting foam, landfill leachate, and other PFAS-contaminated liquids.
Speaker Change: well as build, sell, and deploy our technology across these markets.
Speaker Change: First, we plan to expand our engineering field and manufacturing teams to fast-track technology commercialization and deployment.
Speaker Change: We are focused on advancing engineering efforts through parallel development paths to identify and resolve potential failure modes.
ensuring the technology's resilience.
Speaker Change: At the same time, the company intends to deploy field teams to conduct demonstrations across various market segments to gather critical data and validate the technology, as well as begin to execute on DAS revenue opportunities, particularly within the AFFF destruction market.
Speaker Change: Second, we plan to make key strategic hires. We are currently meeting with accomplished chief technology officer candidates with deep proven backgrounds in technology development, commercialization, and deployment. And we intend to announce our new CTO shortly.
Speaker Change: The CTO is an important hire as we scale our engineering organization to effectively execute our development, commercialization, and technology deployment goals.
Speaker Change: Third, we intend to establish a dedicated manufacturing and engineering facility to enhance production capacity.
Speaker Change: improve quality control, and support ongoing innovation as the company scales to meet growing market demands.
Speaker Change: Fourth, we are actively building two AS1 units, which are hypermobile for on-site demonstrations and destructions, including near-term revenue-generating AFFF DAS work.
Speaker Change: In addition, we are constructing multiple AS6 units, one to deploy to Orange County Sanitation in 2025, another to potentially deploy to a TSDF partner, and one to begin generating AFFF DAS revenue.
Speaker Change: Finally, we are in the process of creating an independent industry advisory board consisting of experts with critical connections and expertise across our municipal, federal, industrial, and TSDF market verticals.
Speaker Change: This advisory board will support leadership and the board of directors to strategically and quickly explore and unlock new market opportunities, which will enable us to more rapidly scale our business.
Speaker Change: In summary, 374Water's AirSquo technology is tackling some of the world's most critical waste challenges with a solution that is both unmatched in its commercial efficacy and scale.
Speaker Change: We have made substantial progress on the path to commercialize our technology across both solid and liquid waste streams. We continue to build a robust backlog and pipeline of actionable opportunities, which now totals more than $1.8 billion.
Speaker Change: In addition, we are pursuing near-term revenue opportunities across our air school capital sales.
Speaker Change: Emerging Destructions of Service Business Model, Destruction Demonstrations, and our Lab Tests.
Speaker Change: The progress we've made over the past six months is significant and I'm confident in our ability to continue driving value for our shareholders.
Speaker Change: Thank you for your support and interest and we look forward to sharing more updates in the coming months. With that, I'll hand it over to Adrian to update you on our financials.
Adrian: Thank you, Chris. Today I'll discuss our financial results for the third quarter of 2024, which reflects our business evolution as we begin scaling our business and enhancing our financial position.
Adrian: I'll touch on a few key matrix for the first three quarters of 2024.
Adrian: For the nine months of 2024, the company generated revenue of $434,000 compared to approximately $864,000 for the nine months of 2023.
Adrian: As we start to reach the end of the assembly and fabrication work on our sold unit,
Adrian: our direct cost decline, which has resulted in a reduction of our equipment revenues of approximately $527,000, offset by an increase in our service revenues from our treatability studies of approximately $97,000.
Adrian: Further, during the quarter, we deployed our owned ERSCO unit to the City of Orlando for the waste destruction demonstrations previously discussed.
Adrian: We anticipate recognizing revenue from this deployment as we complete these demonstrations during Q4 2024.
Adrian: Total operating expenses increased from $5.2 million in the first nine months of 2023 to $7.8 million in the first nine months of 2024, driven primarily by an increase in our general and administrative expenses of approximately $730,000.
Adrian: an increase in our professional fees of approximately $1,058,000, and an increase in research and development expenses of $581,000.
Adrian: Increases in general administrative expenses stem from the continued efforts to build out and establish our executive team, as well as the relocation of our manufacturing facility and continued commercialization and growth efforts.
Adrian: Increase in our professional fees are primarily non-reoccurring expenses related to the settlement of a legal matter and the changes in our executive leadership and board of directors that have been previously disclosed.
Adrian: The increase in our research and development expenses is primarily due to an increase in engineering expenses and our continued efforts to commercialize our systems.
Adrian: As of September 30, 2024, we have a working capital of $4.5 million and no outstanding debt obligations.
Speaker Change: With that, I will turn the call back over to Chris.
Chris Gannon: Thank you, Adrienne. We would now like to move to Q&A.
Chris Gannon: Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue.
Chris Gannon: You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions.
Speaker Change: Your first question for today is from Graham Price with Raymond James.
Thanks for taking the time to be with us today.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question.
Speaker Change: Ted, for my first one, I just wanted to ask one on the regulatory landscape, given the election. So, if the Trump administration curtails the EPA's ability to regulate PFAS, just wondering how you would think about that.
Speaker Change: Would that create a scenario of kind of a state-by-state hodgepodge for PFAS rules or how would you see that playing out?
Speaker Change: Well, Graham, I appreciate the question. When I think about that, I really
Speaker Change: I feel like the train has left the station. There are so many different lawsuits and other things going on, big awards and so forth.
Speaker Change: Geared towards dealing with this issue. It's in the news Gosh every day now as well about the issue so while that may occur they may delay or push out the
Speaker Change: full implementation. I don't think that's going to have a material impact on the opportunities that we have in front of us.
Speaker Change: Got it. Thank you for that. Then, maybe for my follow-up, kind of along the same lines, any changes do you see in your work with the DOD under new leadership?
Speaker Change: No, not at this time, you know, we're in an obviously constant contact with them. We have a host of different.
Speaker Change: federal government demonstrations, and we're not hearing anything from them about worry that those are going to
get delayed. When you think about
Speaker Change: The military branches and all of the various facilities that are highly contaminated, the military is very focused on cleaning up where they live, and so, again, I don't see that
materially changing for us or other participants in the industry.
Speaker Change: Got it, understood. Thank you very much. I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you so much.
Your next question for today is from
Speaker Change: Hi. Good afternoon. Yes, so my question was just if you guys could please give a little more detail on maybe the logistics of the operations at the Orlando facility, kind of what type of testing are you guys doing exactly? Is it the percentage of PFAS that the air slope systems can remove?
Speaker Change: And then, are those customer demonstrations currently going on right now at the facility? And if so, maybe what are some of the most important metrics that the customers are looking at during these demonstrations? Thank you.
Speaker Change: Justin, thanks for the question and thanks for being on the call here today. So in terms of the City of Orlando, we are fully up and running there. We have conducted some demonstrations for customers on-site there, but right now we are focused
Speaker Change: processing biosolids to meet that agreement with the City of Orlando as well.
Speaker Change: As far as what people are looking at, they're looking at a lot of different items as they evaluate the efficacy of our technology. One is that it's a continuous flow system, that it's operating very stably, and it is processing waste as we promised.
The other is they are looking at not only
Speaker Change: what that waste stream is as it goes into our system, but what's coming out. And they are taking samples, extensive samples, throughout the processing.
period to send off to labs.
Um...
Speaker Change: of their choosing to, again, be very focused on the destruction of the various waste streams. Certainly everyone is looking at PFAS.
Speaker Change: within those waste streams and evaluating the efficacy of our destruction of long and short-chain PFAS. As a reminder, when you destroy long-chain PFAS, it often turns to short-chain PFAS.
and the short chain PFAS is incredibly difficult.
to destroy. Our system...
Speaker Change: is able to be tuned to and have the resonance time or the length that that waste stream is within our reactor and we have seen incredible results in terms of the complete destruction of PFAS at a very very very high percentage.
Speaker Change: All right. Great. Thank you. That was all very helpful. Appreciate it. And then just for a quick follow-up, regarding the unit for Orange County Sanitation, how long is that factory acceptance expected to take before that unit can be shipped?
Speaker Change: Yeah, so that's that's basically a day test and then we would based on those results and we will of course have to perform that test down in Orlando which is where we're building the unit and then we would ship it out.
Speaker Change: Okay. Great. Thank you. I'll hop back in the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Justin.
Chris Gannon: We have reached the end of the question and answer session, and I will now turn the call over to Chris for closing remarks.
Chris Gannon: Well, thank you everyone for joining us today and we look forward to talking more in the near future. Also, please look for updates as we
have additional press releases and