Gilad Yogev

Gilad Yogev did not set out to become the person who explains MABR to a confused industry, but that is what he became. He trained as an environmental engineer at the Technion in Israel, and as he says himself, the job description matters more than the diploma, because he started out after graduating as a process engineer at a small algae-based wastewater startup, connecting pipes and running pilots. He moved to Fluence a couple of years later as a sales engineer, and because MABR is the technology every Fluence wastewater engineer cuts their teeth on, he ended up being the global MABR expert almost from day one, preparing proposals from China to the US.

Gilad Yogev's whole subject is MABR, which stands for membrane aerated biofilm reactor, and that string of words is exactly why people confuse it with MBR and MBBR, so here is the plain version in his own framing. Most wastewater treatment bubbles air up through the tank and hopes the bacteria catch enough oxygen, which wastes a lot of the air. MABR instead grows the bacteria as a thin film on the outside of a membrane and pushes air through the inside of that membrane, so the oxygen diffuses straight into the bugs that need it. His favourite way to put it is that the membrane works like a lung: you breathe air into your lungs, they pass the oxygen into your bloodstream, and your blood carries it to the cells. The clever part for the energy bill is that the air flows freely through a dry channel inside the membrane, so you are not fighting water pressure to push bubbles down, and Fluence's submerged SUBRE systems claim up to a 30% cut in a plant's overall energy use as a result.

Gilad Yogev is also refreshingly honest about the limits of his own technology, which is rare for someone whose job is to sell it. A lot of the real work, he explained, is the unglamorous business of getting a new technology accepted in a famously conservative industry, which is why the Stanford demo plant Fluence ran in 2018 mattered so much: it earned a California Title 22 certification that then opened doors in Maryland, New Mexico and the Philippines. The numbers I keep in my Leviathan database back the company story he tells, with Fluence founded in 2017 out of a merger and MABR as its primary wastewater technology.

Where Gilad Yogev gets genuinely animated is decentralized treatment, the idea of building lots of small plants close to where the wastewater is, instead of one giant plant and a fortune in pipes to reach it. The numbers behind that conviction are sobering, because he points out that some 4.2 billion people lack safe sanitation and that 80% of the world's wastewater is discharged with no treatment at all, mostly from rural and fast-growing communities that were never going to get a centralized plant. His bet, and Fluence's, is that small containerized systems plus the wave of digitalization and remote monitoring now hitting the sector will let utilities run a whole network of little plants cheaply from a screen. After a detour into green hydrogen at H2Pro, he returned to Fluence in 2025 on the commercial side, still selling the same idea.

“MABR, if to rely here on John Lennon, we sometimes joke about the MFC times and spin off that famous quote: MABR is what happened while we were busy making microbial fuel cells.”

Gilad Yogev is, in the end, a translator: an engineer who can hold the chemistry of counter-diffusion and the economics of a decentralized plant in the same breath, which is most of why his episode is still the clearest explanation of MABR anyone has put on the (don't) Waste Water microphone.