Market huge for cooling system
Lakewood company, cited as top exporter, to develop invention
By Robert Schwab
Denver Post Business Writer
A small Lakewood company that has made a business of building cooling towers around the world said Wednesday it has signed agreements
to commercialize a Colorado inventor's water-purification technology that eliminates chemicals from the process.
George Kast, president of Psychrometric Systems Inc., said the worldwide market for the recycling system could exceed $1 billion because it can
eliminate "hazardous waste'' created by chemicals that are injected in industrial and commercial cooling systems to prevent corrosion and to kill
bacteria.
But technology developed by Colorado Springs inventor Dennis J. Johnson, president of Alpha/Omega Environmental of New York Inc.,
separates and filters pollutants from cooling water so it is near the quality of municipal drinking water, said Kast and others involved in the
technology.
The system has been tested for the past six months at the Tabor Center, a Downtown Denver shopping center, but results have not yet been
announced.
In New York, officials of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which is helping to finance the Tabor Center tests,
said the technology was used successfully to correct an air-conditioning problem at Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery Museum.
F. William Valentino, president of the authority, said Johnson's technology "not only treats and purifies water, but does so in an
environmentally sensitive manner that avoids the need for chemicals and eliminates chemical sludge byproducts.''
Kast's company announced the agreements after a U.S. Commerce Department luncheon at the Petroleum Club, where it was honored as the
local Small Business Administration's exporter of the year.
About 30 percent of Psychrometrics' $17 million in coolingtower construction in 1996 was done in foreign countries. It was ranked 30th in
Entrepreneur magazine's 1996 list of hottest new companies.
The company expects revenues of $24 million this year, Kast said. Last month, it announced a merger and the acquisition of a Texas company
that will double the size of its workforce, from 50 to about 100 employees, as it expands into water purification systems.
The agreements that allow the expansion, struck with Alpha/Omega and Aqua-Asia Ltd., an Englewood firm formed last year to market
Johnson's technology in Asia, will result in the creation of two new firms, Advanced Oxidation TechnologiesAsia, and AOT-North America,
which will sell Psychrometrics cooling towers and the purification systems as a package, said Kast.
In November, Psychrometrics and its merger partner will change the company's name to Global Water Technologies. |
