Finding Opportunity at Every Turn

U.S. Water Services is at the forefront of customer-focused solutions for the water industry. LaMarr Barnes, vice president of marketing and business development, sat down with Modern Pumping Today to discuss the company’s strategy on finding custom solutions to meet changing regulatory demands and client needs.
Modern Pumping Today: Recently, U.S. Water announced a strategic alliance with Allete. How will this partnership further strengthen your goals in these markets?
LaMarr Barnes: U.S. Water is a fast growing company, and fast growing companies always need to be building infrastructure to support where they are today and where they will be tomorrow. Allete’s expertise in this industry allows us to draw upon their existing structures in areas across all operational needs—human resources, purchasing, you name it! That helps us keep our eye on growth.
Plus, Allete’s history in power generation opens many doors in terms of expertise, business partners, as well as the underlying customer base that they serve. They provide us with the opportunity to amplify what we already do internally and increase the efficiency of our organic growth.
MPT: We’re increasingly seeing the intersection of water and energy as a hub for innovation. What new approaches can your customers expect in the near future?
LaMarr Barnes: From the standpoint of where U.S. Water is headed, the regulatory climate continues to change: water scarcity and environmental regulations are squeezing many industrial customers between a rock and a hard place. An important consideration with regard to innovation is that water issues, while global in nature, are local in solution. So we look for technology and innovations that can provide a broad capability but our main goal is to produce the best solution for our customer. In some ways, you might say we’re somewhat “technology agnostic.” We will leverage any technology available so long as it provides the best benefit for the customer’s needs.
MPT: What can customers expect from the new PhosZeroTM sustainable cooling water system? In which applications do you foresee the most immediate benefits?
LaMarr Barnes: U.S. Water was aware of changing phosphorous discharge regulations in multiple areas of the United States, especially in the Great Lakes basin, the Mississippi River drainage basin, the Chesapeake Bay area, and others. With that in mind, we assessed what we already knew about non-phosphorous chemistry for cooling water treatment and were able to find a synergistic blend of chemistry that provides both scale protection and corrosion protection in cooling water, which we call E-FeXTM technology. E-FeXTM technology can be found in our PhosZeroTM product line, which we believe is the only non-phosphorous solution that can provide both scale and corrosion protection on some pretty high degree of hardness in the water. Customers were finding products that could do one or the other, but now we can provide them with both.
PhosZeroTM and its E-FexTM technology should have immediate benefits in those geographies already searching for solutions to help meet their phosphorous discharge regulation levels. For example, in Wisconsin we had a customer who had been discharging directly into the environment and would be unable to do so unless they could find a solution that could reduce their levels basically near a point below detection—far below what any conventional cooling water program could provide.
Also, U.S. Water has a large operation throughout California, where we’ve played a crucial role in helping our customers reduce their water use—and we were recently awarded the California Game Changer of the Year for 2014. But now that the need for reduced water use has ramped up even further, we’ve equipped all of our representatives with the tools and knowledge to engage water re-use issues with all of their customers. Opportunities are everywhere and customers don’t always require complex applications to find real benefits. ◆
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MODERN PUMPING TODAY, May 2015
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