NBIF-backed Enovex Gets $2.3M For New Polymer

Excerpted from « Ottawa pledges $12.3M for two New Brunswick companies, » by George Halim, Telegraph Journal, July 9, 2014 – link to original article

Saint John company Enovex Technology Ltd. is receiving more than $2.3 million [from the Atlantic Innovation Fund] to work on its product.

Founded by University of New Brunswick business graduate Scott Walton, Enovex will use the money to further develop its product, called the Enovex adsorbent, at lower costs than competitive products.

“We’ve invented a material for producing industrial nitrogen,” said Walton, president of Enovex. “Basically it’s an adsorbent material that we synthetically created using chemistry but separates oxygen and nitrogen from regular air, and the industrial gas companies will use this material to produce industrial nitrogen and industrial oxygen.”

To date, gas companies have been using carbon molecular sieves that has been on the market since the 1970s, according to Walton. The existing product is a commodity that is extracted by carbonizing different materials and it’s being made by about four or five suppliers on the market.

He said the issue is it’s very limited in its characteristics and performance, whereas Enovex’s material is synthetically created, so it can fine tune it.

Enovex isn’t the first company, though, to make a go at replacing the existing product, Walton said. Many companies have tried and failed, but Enovex broke through with a different chemistry approach.

“Each of the technologies had an Achilles heel that prevented it from being used, whereas our design approach gave us a technology they can use and it’ll have significant impacts on their operation,” he said. “It’ll reduce the cost of producing the industrial gases by roughly 50 per cent and it’ll decrease their production unit sizes by two thirds.”