Devesh Sharma

Devesh Sharma did not so much join the water industry as grow up inside one company in it. His father, Prem Sharma, was an Indian-trained water engineer who settled in Pittsburgh and started Aquatech in 1981, then died suddenly ten years later, in 1991. Devesh's elder brother Venkee took the company over at the age of 24, when Devesh himself was only 14, and the two have run it together ever since, with Venkee now executive chairman and Devesh the CEO. When Devesh calls it a family business he means it twice over, because alongside the actual family there is a management team where he talks to people every day who have been there 25 or 30 years. As he put it on my podcast, he has worked closely with some of them for longer than he knew his own dad.

Devesh Sharma runs what is, at its core, a 90-percent industrial-water company, and the thing he is proudest of is not a single gadget but a habit of mind. Aquatech is a system integrator, which is the unglamorous business of stitching many different treatment processes together until the combined plant actually hits the performance number a client is contractually promised, what the industry calls a process guarantee. "Water is hard," Sharma told me, "it's never just one thing." That philosophy is why, twenty years before it was fashionable, Aquatech leaned into zero liquid discharge, the brute-force goal of sending no wastewater off site at all, which today makes up more than 80 percent of its business. Sharma's teams then spent years trying to make that cheaper, with hybrid designs and a membrane-distillation process they call AVMD, so that smaller plants could afford to stop trucking their brine away.

Devesh Sharma's most interesting move is what happened when the world suddenly needed lithium. For forty years Aquatech had been taking dirty industrial water, pulling the clean water out, and being left with a concentrated brine full of dissolved salts that somebody had to deal with. Lithium, it turns out, is just that problem run backwards. "This is the flip," Sharma said, "we don't want the water, we want the lithium." The chemistry of pulling a valuable metal out of a brine is close enough to the chemistry of cleaning that brine that Aquatech could walk straight in, and it did: a multi-year partnership with Lithium Americas on the Thacker Pass project in Nevada, the largest known lithium reserve in the United States, where Aquatech's process turns raw brine into lithium carbonate at 99.9 percent purity (you can read more about that race for domestic lithium over on my Leviathan database).

Devesh Sharma's worldview is the opposite of the move-fast story you normally get from a founder. Early in his career, as a student, he wrote a school project on the great 1990s roll-up of the American water industry, when one acquirer swallowed dozens of companies before being sold on and on, and the lesson he drew was to never do that. "The goal isn't to be the biggest, it's to be the best," he says, and he keeps a picture of his father on the office wall under a line about how an entrepreneur is like a cyclist who has to keep pedalling or fall over. His two hard-won rules are blunt: you can't fight economics, so a clever technology that does not pay is not a technology he will sell, and there are no shortcuts in an industry where you still have to commission a real plant and hit a real guarantee, a discipline he sums up in a line he jokes he would print on a sweatshirt, "meeting process guarantees since 1981."

“You take a brine and your focus is separating the water and reusing it and then taking the impurities. This is the flip. We don't want the water. Let's take the water out. We want the lithium.”

Devesh Sharma is, in the end, the rare water executive who would rather grow slowly and be the first name an industrial client thinks of than chase a headline, which is most of why a quiet 40-year-old family firm from Pennsylvania ended up at the centre of America's lithium story.