Energy Recovery, Inc. (ERII) Up 45% Since TWST Interview with then CEO Thomas S. Rooney Jr.

December 28, 2015

Featured in The Wall Street Transcript’s Best CEO Interviews of 2015

ERII logo
Energy Recovery, Inc.

Thomas S. Rooney Jr., then President & CEO of Energy Recovery, Inc. (ERII), interviewed with TWST for the Oil & Gas: Drilling Equipment & Services report. Since the interview, ERII‘s stock price has increased approximately 45%, from $4.9 to currently $7.1.

Thomas S. Rooney Jr.
Thomas S. Rooney Jr.

In this interview, Rooney discussed some of ERII‘s technology and its use in hydraulic fracturing:

The VorTeq technology, we just announced yesterday. It’s a technology that we’ve been working on for about 16 months. We believe it’s going to be very disruptive and create tremendous benefits for the shale gas industry, specifically in fracking.

One of the most significant operating challenges in the fracking industry comes from the fact that the industry uses very large, very expensive pumps to pump sand and proppant down into the holes to fracture the rock. Pumping very high-pressure fluids with sand in it is very destructive on these pumps. It’s an industry that deploys about $20 billion worth of pumps every year to do this and spends close to to $4 billion a year maintaining those pumps. So these are expensive pumps in a very hostile environment.

What we’ve been able to do is separate the sand from ever entering those pumps, and yet, still be able to pump the sand and proppants and the frac fluids all down the hole. So this should save the industry $1 billion a year in maintenance expenses. Obviously, that’s a tremendous benefit for the industry, close to or slightly over $1 million for every frac crew that’s deployed around the world, and there are about 850 of them. So that’s close to $1 billion of annual savings for the fracking industry, and it represents in the long run about $1.4 billion annual opportunity for our company. It is transformative for our company and highly beneficial for the fracking industry, all of which is predicated on a highly advanced technology that we developed over the years and now brought to bear for the fracking industry.