Hydro Energy Entrepreneur Wayne Krouse (Part 2)

SM: What was unique about what you were doing? How did it change the environment you were operating in?

WK: This particular product was different because we put it in the inlet of an ethylene furnace which can be 1,800–2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That is a very tough environment to work in from a chemical standpoint. It was a successful test project. They eventually gave me an opportunity to come into corporate marketing. At the time, I was the youngest person to get into corporate marketing in the history of the company. I could not turn it down. We then moved from New Orleans to Houston to accept the promotion in 1998.

I worked in that position and then took on some compressor anti-foulant products. I was working those two products for a while doing international business development. I was flying all over the world doing business development, and I had potential customers on every continent but Antarctica. Having lived in Mississippi I wanted to travel and see the world. It was great to do it on someone else’s dime.

I was flying in and out of the Middle East before 9-11. I saw all of the water from the plane. I remember seeing a National Geographic drawing of a big ocean device to create energy. I kept thinking that there had to be some way to make energy out of those waves. That is how it started.

At Exxon one of the things we did was mine the patent database to see where competitors were going with similar products. I applied that same approach to research on some theoretical big device out in the waves. The more I got into it, the more I realized there was a lot of intellectual property in the public domain. I saw a big gap in current-based hydrokinetics.

SM: Can you set the landscape in context a bit?

WK: There are two types of ways to make energy from moving water. The motion of water is hydrokinetic, as opposed to head-based hydropower, where water is stored and released at a pressure head like you see with a damn. In the hydrokinetics there are current-based hydrokinetics and wave-based hydrokinetics. In the wave-based hydrokinetic space a lot of companies were looking at buoys and devices that worked on the motion of the water. A lot of them centered around an oscillating water column, which is where you trap air around a wave and a turbine. The wave pushes the air in and out of the turbine, causing it to spin and generate electricity.

There was not a lot of activity in the current-based hydrokinetic space. This is applicable where you have a river or an ocean current, or in a tidal area. In 2001 there were one or two companies globally that were even looking at this approach.

SM: Did you even have a background in hydrokinetics?

WK: I did not. In chemical engineering we think of ourselves as the best of the best.

SM: All engineers in all disciplines do!

WK: I know! Chemical engineers do a lot of everything; you get exposed to the mechanical engineering, the statics and dynamics. You learn about fluid flow. Engineering physics is the same for everybody, but we also got exposed to electrical engineering and computer science. You then have that issue of the reaction systems in chemistry in mass production.

SM: So you had enough of a background to make sense of the landscape?

WK: Absolutely. I decided to take a Pareto chart to see what the issues were and why no technologies had come to the marketplace. I developed seven key parameters I thought prevented any technology from making it to the marketplace. When I started trying to create my design I was running off of those seven issues.

I left Exxon in 2001, filed a patent in 2002, and spent most of that year working on the ideas. I was working to find holes in the patent database to take large areas of the patent database. Retrospectively I think we have done a pretty good job of that. We had an IP strategy law firm that has reviewed our patents on behalf of some of the venture capitalists who have been interested in investing in us. It is a very broad and strong patent that should be quite valuable in the future. Over the years we have expanded into different devices and designs as well as ways to increase power output.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Hydro Energy Entrepreneur Wayne Krouse
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