Michael Doran

Michael Doran did not come to water through engineering. He trained as a marine and freshwater biologist at the University of Guelph, spent his early career watching the environment decline, and went looking for a technology that could actually push back. The one that stuck was ozone, which is just oxygen with a third atom bolted on, a gas that is one of the most aggressive oxidants there is and tears apart contaminants on contact, then breaks back down to plain oxygen with no chemical residue left behind. What struck Doran was that ozone was common in Europe and oddly absent in Canada, and that gap is the whole reason Aclarus exists.

Michael Doran started Aclarus Ozone in 2011, and when you ask him where, the answer is disarming: he built it from the kitchen table. He started it with his cousin Adam Doran and a handful of local Peterborough investors who believed in the idea, with no venture round and no big launch, just a first sale to a customer who wanted to give them a chance and then, in his words, organic growth from there. He decoded the hard part for me too: making ozone is easy, but dosing it onto water at variable flow rates, in a tight space, run by people who are not ozone experts, and still getting stable high-quality water out the other end, that was the real engineering.

Michael Doran built Aclarus around the customers the industry overlooks. The big firms, the ones he calls “the big boys,” chase the very large municipal ozone systems, so Doran went the other way and aimed at the small communities and industrial sites that genuinely need treatment but are too small for anyone to bother with. His systems run from 30 grams of ozone an hour up to several kilograms, treating drinking water and wastewater for dairy farms, food producers, breweries and remote towns, and they fold ozone into a full treatment train rather than selling a box. The line that sums up his philosophy is that he does not think of it as selling equipment “as much as inheriting clients,” because he is signing up for the whole lifespan of the system.

Michael Doran is proudest of the work that is hardest to monetise, which is getting clean water to remote First Nations communities in Canada that have struggled with their water for years. He has called those projects the most impactful thing Aclarus has done, and they sit alongside municipal retrofits like the town of Cobourg getting off chlorine because it was discharging into a trout stream that fed a public beach. The reason this is happening now is that source water keeps shifting with the climate and a new class of contaminants of emerging concern (the pharmaceuticals, illicit-drug residues and microplastics that older plants were never built to catch) is forcing utilities to add a barrier, and a small-footprint ozone retrofit is one of the cheaper ways to add it.

Michael Doran has since moved on from Aclarus. He left in 2024 and now runs Sublime Environmental, also in Ontario, where he is extending the same playbook (ozone, advanced oxidation processes, biological activated carbon filtration and integrated system design) toward water reuse, the practice of treating used water clean enough to use again. His worldview has not changed, and it is best caught in the one question he says the water sector keeps dodging: what is the true value of water. He compares the blind spot to the years before anyone took lead poisoning seriously, and argues that until we put a real number on the health and economic cost of bad water, it will keep being treated as an expense to skimp on rather than the thing everything else depends on.

“I don't think of it as selling equipment as much as inheriting clients. So we truly are about the long-term lifespan of the solution.”

Michael Doran is, in the end, a biologist who learned to build hardware and run a shop floor, the rare founder who bootstrapped a water-tech company by being honest about which fights he could win and which he could not, and that discipline is most of why a kitchen-table idea ended up treating water in nine countries.