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Financial Mail Reports

Last month Bernard Jacobs and Ian Vroom heaved a sigh of relief. After 200 rejections, one of SA's venture capital firms gave their novel technology and commercialisation plan the nod.

The Southern African Intellectual Property Fund, which is managed by Triumph Venture Capital, agreed to invest R6m in the company in exchange for board representation and a significant minority stake in the business.

"It's a fair deal," says Jacobs, the commercial brains behind Resource Ballast Technologies. "Now we can get on with proving our technology and taking it to the international market."

His partner, Vroom, an engineer with a passion for water and water purification, has developed a novel process to remove pollutants and organic molecules from water.

The need for a technology like this arose in February 2004, when the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) adopted a convention to provide legislative guidelines for the regulation of ballast water treatment globally. Overnight, an industry worth an estimated US$10bn-15bn was created as the bulk of the global shipping industry found itself bound to comply with the new regulations.

Since the early 1980s the IMO has been battling with the spread of harmful aquatic organisms across the oceans. They are spread by the shipping industry, which moves over 80% of the world's commodities and each year transfers 3bn t-5bn t of sea water from one ocean to another. The transported sea water is called ballast water and it's pumped into vessels to provide balance and stability when the ship sails unladen.

The problem is that about 7 000 different micro-organisms are being transported around the world in ships' ballast tanks. Once the tanks are emptied in the new port, some of these organisms flourish - to the point that they become alien invaders.

In the US, the European Zebra Mussel has infested over 40% of internal waterways, clogging up hydro-electric schemes and costing about $1bn to control. In the Black Sea, the filter-feeding North American jellyfish has depleted native plankton stocks to the point that it has contributed to the collapse of entire Black Sea commercial fisheries.

Jacobs and Vroom believe that their technology is the answer. "There are about seven other known vendors with a solution," says Jacobs, "but right now ours has certain advantages." The other solutions, he says, are large, expensive and have been adapted from technologies designed with different applications in mind. "Ours is the silver bullet. It's relatively small; it is easy to retrofit into older vessels and it is cheaper than other solutions."

The regulations stipulate that after an initial phase-in period (between 2009 and 2016) ships of a certain size will have to be fitted with systems that purify ballast water to within acceptable levels. The system has to be approved and certified that it satisfies minimum purification standards. Technologies include filtration, sterilisation by ozone, ultra-violet light, electric currents and heat treatment, and chemical treatment methods.

Jacobs says the company's first priority will be to build a purification test facility into a 40 ft container at Cape Town Harbour. Then they will have the technology and its water purification results certified by the relevant local and international agencies.

The technology had proven itself on a small scale but funding was required to build a test facility with the capacity to produce meaningful test results.

Armed with these results and certification the company plans to present papers at the IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee meeting and the Ballast Water Convention. Both events take place in Singapore later this year.