Jim Lauria

Jim Lauria did not set out to spend his life on water. He took a chemical engineering degree from Manhattan College, and his first job was as a process engineer in the sugar industry, which, as he tells it, is a wonderful place to learn because a single sugar mill runs filtration, clarification, activated-carbon adsorption, boiler treatment and cooling-water treatment all at once. From there he became an expert in beer brewing and filtration, traveled the world visiting breweries, ran a few companies as president and CEO, and only around twenty years ago decided to point all of that process knowledge at water, mostly from the sales and marketing side.

Jim Lauria joined Mazzei Injector Company in 2015, and that is where the ozone story starts. Mazzei, founded in California in 1978, makes venturi injectors, which are a clever bit of plumbing with no moving parts: you narrow a pipe, the water speeds up through the restriction, and that speed creates a suction that pulls gas straight into the flow. The hard part Lauria spends his time on is ozone, a powerful disinfectant that is genuinely difficult to dissolve into water. Most gases go in easily, ozone fights you. Mazzei's answer is sidestream injection, where you pull off about 10% of the flow, supercharge it with ozone through a venturi, then shear that concentrated stream back into the main pipe through a series of nozzles that also do the mixing.

Jim Lauria frames this as a quiet efficiency win rather than a revolution, and the numbers are modest on purpose. Fine-bubble diffusers, the older approach where ozone bubbles up from the bottom of a deep basin, hit roughly 90 to 92% transfer efficiency, while Mazzei's sidestream injection gets to about 95%, with less bromate (an unwanted byproduct of ozonating water) and a much smaller footprint. To prove those claims before anything is built, Mazzei leans on computational fluid dynamics, which is software that simulates how water and gas will actually move through a design, so the company can promise a performance number and troubleshoot a plant without endless trial and error.

Jim Lauria's second act is the one that makes him unusual in a field full of engineers. He noticed that the data a water company needs to tell its own story is already sitting inside its walls, in the customer records, the project folders and the simulation files, and, taking a cue from fellow guest Megan Glover, he put Mazzei through a six-month deep dive into its own records, mining roughly 425 ozone installations to turn raw project history into a design engine and a story worth telling. That instinct, that the facts are useless until someone shapes them into a narrative, is also why he co-founded the "Water We Talking About?" podcast with Adam Tank, a whole show about how water companies should talk about water.

“people think they're telling a story by giving facts and figures, features and benefits about their products. They'll show their pump curves, they'll show their filtration capabilities, and they think they're telling a story, whereas we realize it's the journey. It starts with gaining credibility, it starts with understanding the audience.”

Jim Lauria is, in the end, a process engineer who learned to sell and then learned to teach, which is most of why a man whose day job is forcing ozone into water is just as happy spending his evenings helping the rest of the sector get its own ideas to dissolve.