Traditional barbecue with charcoal briquettes, when you start those briquettes glowing red, that’s the process of smouldering. And STAR is the first technology to commercialize, to take smouldering, and apply it for soil remediation. STAR works very much sort of like laser surgery. So you figure out where the specific contamination is on a site, and we basically inject hot air. Because the coal tar is the fuel, it will start to naturally smoulder, just like the charcoal in the barbecue. About 99% of all of all the contaminants are completely destroyed.

Just in North America, there’s hundreds of thousands of coal tar sites that need to be remediated. Everywhere there’s been oil, you’re going to have a contamination problem. And so it’s a vast, vast market.

We are just researchers testing new ideas in a lab. We really need to partner with a company of engineers that work in the field every day. When Geosyntec came to visit us and we saw their enthusiasm right away, and there was a real synergy. There was a real connection.

We needed their ideas. There’s no way – we even didn’t have this on our radar screen.

They really like to push the boundaries, and try interesting, new technologies and really try to be at the leading edge.

The partnership is amazing, that we’ve trained personnel out of it, we’re getting new ideas, expansion of our application of the technology.

So many ideas from research never go anywhere, but to see one actually go from just a crazy idea over a cup of coffee all the way to cleaning up real sites is very rewarding.