Jordan Grose

Jordan Grose is not the inventor of Ionic Solutions' technology, and he is the first to tell you so. The company was founded in Calgary in 2009 by Barry Johnson and Azar Yazdanbod, and the original spark was Azar's, a geotechnical engineer who grew up in an arid part of Iran and spent years working with soils and clays before noticing that clay has a capacitive nature, meaning it can hold an electrical charge. He wondered whether that same charge-holding trick could be turned on salt water, and a decade of tinkering (the founders apparently started the very next day in a Home Depot parking lot, buying parts) turned that hunch into a working desalination chemistry.

Jordan Grose joined that effort as employee number three, and his job is the one most deep-tech companies underrate. A Calgary mechanical engineer by training, with a P.Eng. and an MBA from the Haskayne School of Business, he spent roughly seventeen years at the engineering firm Wood (and the smaller Beta Machinery Analysis it grew out of), where his whole career was commercializing new product lines inside a big company, from anti-vibration machinery to a regional expansion into South-East Asia. So when he describes his role at Ionic, it is refreshingly plain: taking a great idea and a great technology that is sitting at lab and benchtop scale and getting it out into the real world, which means product development, manufacturing scale-up and sales all at once. He calls it a jack-of-all-trades role, and for a startup trying to sell something genuinely unfamiliar, that is exactly the job that needs doing.

Ionic Solutions is worth a portrait because of what its technology actually does. Reverse osmosis, the desalination method the whole world runs on, works by pushing water molecules through a membrane under enormous pressure, somewhere between 600 and 1,800 PSI, while the salt stays behind. Ionic's C-EDR, short for Capacitive Electrodialysis Reversal, does almost the opposite: it runs the water through an electric field and pulls the salt ions across an ion-exchange membrane while the water stays put. Because nobody is pressurizing the water with high-pressure pumps, the system runs at roughly 30 PSI, and that is where the energy savings live. In Grose's own words, in most applications Ionic can desalinate for 60 to 90 percent less power than reverse osmosis, and in one low-salinity brackish case the company has presented a figure of 97 percent less, the kind of number it now takes to conferences like the International Water Conference to make people believe it.

Jordan Grose is candid that belief is genuinely the hard part. The market knows and loves reverse osmosis, and there is an older, weaker version of electrodialysis out there that cannot do what Ionic claims, so the company spends as much energy on education as on engineering. Its way in has been industrial customers with real pain, like a large New York City utility where Ionic treats the reject stream that ordinary reverse osmosis throws away. For every 100 gallons a minute of that reject it turns back into usable water, Grose says the utility saved about a quarter of a million dollars a year on its city water bills, which is the sort of arithmetic that gets a pilot signed. The same machine has a second life concentrating lithium brines (one pipe in, two pipes out, as he puts it, where the drinking-water people want one pipe and the lithium people want the other), and an unexpected champion has been the Electric Power Research Institute, which paid for early piloting and then opened doors across the power sector.

Jordan Grose frames all of this around what he calls the everyday Joe, which is a striking thing to hear from someone selling industrial hardware. His logic is that when a thirsty industry stops over-drawing the local supply, the saved water flows back to the people living around it, and he points out that the New York utility alone can use 20 to 30 percent of Manhattan's water at full tilt. So the mission he describes, increasing water security for ordinary people, is pursued one industrial reject stream at a time, and his bet is that a desalination that costs a fraction of the energy is the version that finally gets built at the scale the problem deserves. Ionic Solutions was named to the Foresight 50, Canada's list of its most investable cleantech ventures, which suggests the market is starting to agree.

“My role is kind of taking a great idea and a great technology that's in the lab stage, prototype, benchtop scale, and really getting it out into the marketplace in the real world.”

Grose is, in short, the translator a lab-born technology needs: the engineer-operator who can take a chemistry the founders spent a decade perfecting and turn it into a project a utility will actually buy.