John Brinkman, President of Imbibitive Technologies. Hydrocarbon absorbing polymer IMBIBER BEADS!

Hey everybody, I'm Matt Hill and I'm in Oklahoma City, well really in Edmond, and fortunately for me, a night fire specialist, I wanted to support the Hazmat Conference and I got to come out here and cook, but then I get to come up here to take classes, learn a lot of innovative techniques, technologies, see how we can fit them into oil and gas. And a friend of mine coming through Oklahoma City said, you've got to stop in and check this conference out. This is in your lane because of his disruptive and important and impressive product.

Introduce yourself, please. Good morning. My name is John Brinkman. I'm the president of Ambivative Technologies.

And our flagship product, imbiber beads, is, as far as I'm aware, the world's only oil-sensitive superabsorbent polymers. And most people are familiar with superabsorbents in the form of disposable baby diapers. However, those are water-sensitive. They're engineered to wick water away from a baby's bottom and hopefully keep the baby's bottom free from rashes and infections.

So the imbiber beads act in a manner similar to those superabsorbents with one huge difference. They only react with organic liquids, so oils, fuels, and solvents. But they eliminate the liquid phase once they imbibe. Imbibe and absorb are synonyms, by the way.

This is a demonstration-sized imbiber bead. It has no practical purpose other than to allow you to visualize that the beads themselves are solid plastic spheres. There's no voids or capillaries to fill. But how they differ from everything else on the market, and American Society for Testing and Materials has written performance standard definitions, that if it doesn't swell at least 50% or more, it's not an ab-absorbent.

It's an ad-absorbent. D isn't dangerous, especially if I'm dealing with fuels and solvents. So this bead here, Matt, started off exactly the same size as that bead there. Okay.

And as you can see, it's swollen to two to three times its original size, and in doing so, it's picked up several volumes of solvent in the imbibition process. And it only soaks in hydrocarbons. Yes. Or hydrocarbon-based.

Yeah, most oils, fuels, and solvents. Yes. So the working size is quite a bit smaller than the demonstration size. Yeah, you showed me.

Roughly the size of salt. And I know you colored this, but this is the tiny, tiny, tiny beads. Yeah, roughly about 150 to 400 microns. So the size of salt or sugar granules.

There's no mystery here. We make the bead particle smaller because it increases the exposed surface area and speeds up the rate of imbibition. or absorption. So I've got a little demonstration liquid here.

It's nothing more than paint or mineral spirits. I'm going to show you two things. The ability of the beads to eliminate the liquid phase. So I don't know if your camera is going to pick that up.

Immediately. Yeah, you can see that the liquid is diffused into the polymer and is no longer available as a liquid. The liquid's gone. The liquid is gone.

That has a number of occupational safety and health benefits. One of those being that you eliminate secondary contamination. I didn't realize it was going to be that fast. Okay, well I told you it's pretty cool.

He told me. That's all in my own eyes. Anybody that's used this, this is just matted polypropylene fibers. It's a really cool looking brawny towel.

I wish I had a plaid shirt on right now for you. My bias is showing, but it's a glorified rag. Anybody that picks a liquid up with this knows that as soon as you retrieve it, an amount will start running out with simple gravitational pull. So that's the first thing is to eliminate the secondary contamination of both personnel and of the local environment The second thing I want to show you is the ability of the imbiber beads to pick up several volumes of solvent I just going to set this here while we talking without stirring it Don stir it okay Yeah just going to let it sit And for ease of retrieval as opposed to using it in particulate form, we have demonstration size packets.

So they're good at a trade show. But just like the super absorbance in that disposable baby diaper, the imbiber beads in that retained fabric is going going to draw the liquid off of that and that'll be dry to the touch. One of the other benefits of eliminating the liquid phase is we knock the rate at which hazardous vapors off gas. Yeah, all of our products out there have the off-gassing.

So I'm not just taking care of absorbing the hydrocarbon-based products, the off-gassing. That's all being picked up too. And this does not address that. This actually makes the problem even more dangerous.

What this is relying upon is the liquid filling interstitial space, but the liquid's still available in discrete droplets. And as such, it actually enhances the rate at which the fabric off-gasses. Oh, I can smell it now. Not only does it run out with gravitational pull, but because the liquid is now spread out over the increased exposed surface area.

That's why I can smell it immediately. Right. And it raises the concentration in air, which is an explosion and flammability issue. And also, it's the vapors that are toxic when inhaled.

So, this is exacerbating. I'm exposed again. Right. This is exacerbating the problem.

So with the imbiber beads, as you can see, it's literally less than a minute here, and the fabric, outer fabric is actually drying and turning a white, a pinkish hue. The beads are also unaffected by water. That's okay. And again, another reason I wanted to meet with you, because right now we're kind of working on collaboration, like our fire suppression systems and the foams we have, being able to incorporate imbiber into there just to see, hey, we've got a lot of rudimentary testing to do, but, man, we never know.

That's why I wanted to come to this Hazmat conference. If this all works together, we're going to have solutions where we not only extinguish fires, but we also start working on the mess of the cleanup. Yeah, as long as the liquid remains, or the contaminant, rather, remains in a liquid state, that's your source of off-gassing. So as long as this is still sitting here in a liquid phase, the vapors are still coming off and actually lowering the flash part.

I mean, hey, look, they tried their best, right? I hate knocking other people's stuff because they just didn't know. Maybe they should have collaborated with you a long time ago and put all this together. Let's put it back.

I don't want to take the finish off of that. This isn't for us in a one-gast. That's rough. So actually, this is complementary to the suppression systems that you have got.

This pad's been sitting overnight in my car. Okay. The application here, aside from spills on water, is sit-and-soak applications like oil water separators, which tend to be labor-intensive. You put an imbibra bead blanket in there, it'll take the oil off.

They all change color. Right now, I've got the dye in the solvent, but all of our pillows, packets, blankets, and boons have an oil-sensitive dye, so they actually change color and turn red. You can see, without any stirring or agitation, the liquid is actually going into that demonstration-size packet, and within a couple of minutes, I'll be able to squeeze it. All that will run out will be water, so it's selective for the organics.

So getting back to your particular systems, standard operating procedure at a number of refineries is to redirect a large spill onto a separation lagoon, suppress the spill with vapor-suppressing foam, knock that down, and then float and biber bead blankets in underneath to selectively pull it out and contain it. What you doing is actually starting the cleanup process as well as eliminating the source of the vapors that are off This is truly mind I mean, I just didn't know this existed.

What's the background in all of this? I mean, you kind of gave me a brief history. This has been around a long time, but you've created novel applications for this. Well, that's a good question.

How did you get into this? Let me backpedal a little bit further on that. So, and barber beads were originally invented by my partner, Dr. Richard Hall.

Unfortunately, Dick Hall passed away in 2010. At Macondo. Yeah, during or just after Macondo. But Dow never pursued it because they're simply, by their own admission, unless they could move it by train loads they weren't interested in selling pillows packets blankets and whatnot but coincidentally um 1966 a scientist at procter and gamble invented uh the first oil water sensitive super absorbent went on to become known by the brand name pampers and we know it revolutionized the personal hygiene industry so dr hall invented imbiber beads in 1968 as an application for a particular monomer that he had invented the process to make for Dow.

And he didn't invent imbiber beads just as an entity unto itself. He invented it as an application for the monomer. The campaign that Dow was looking at getting involved with would have provided the monomer to be used in train loads. But that project got canceled, and the imbiber beads was a casualty of that business decision, not because they weren't a technical success.

so that's the you see why i love meeting people like you because i was so siloed and you know oil and gas as far as like drilling right and then i was fortunate to like break out of my silo you know so i get to see mechanical engineers and chemists you know and on and on there's every every person i meet that's part of this little circle that we keep creating together right it's all energy related and we need each other. This is anybody that's in our industry, we hear a lot of negative things about our industry.

Oh, you're not very eco-friendly. We are the solution provider. We care about all this because what you told me earlier, our industry does not like to waste money. So if it's an environmental waste and hazard, it's also a financial waste and hazard.

And what you're doing here is encapsulating or imbibing, absorbing all of the hydrocarbons. And then what you told me earlier, what can we do with this after? Right. You know, we're not, so we collect all of this either in, in beads or pillows, or you've got a lot of applications.

Now you're working on to incorporate this, but people are taking this and going and turn it into, fuel. Right. Energy from waste is the number one disposal option. So one pound of the bulk particulate will generate in excess of 15,000 BTUs.

So as an energy source without the contaminant, very, very good. Energy from waste, let's create a benefit instead of just a waste stream. That, I mean, each step of what you've We talked on the phone before you came through Oklahoma City, and I forced you to come to this thing, and now I've already got you talking to all these environmental firms. I connect people, but I love this product.

I love what you're doing. You're not just selling a product. You've got skin in the game, and you're an educator. Well, that's critical.

Absolutely critical that we educate the market. You really do care about all this. Right. Well, coincidentally, and this will be my last point I love this This is actually crude oil It was proposed during Macondo Deepwater Horizon That imbibber beads be pumped in at the wellhead Instead of the detergent that they ended up using What happened is in this case this is bulk particulate crude oil the proposal was that it would agglomerate the oil into chunks float to the surface pick it up with fishing nets or whatever take it to a refinery and through relatively simple thermal processing you can crack the imbibed oil and close the environmental loop.

Dr. Hall proposed this in a paper 1970. Okay, let's take it out of the environment. Let's close the environmental loop.

So, you know, a lot of options that are available, very positive. I have been bothering you with some very rudimentary questions because this is the first time I got to see this, but you can make this into a fiber if you wanted to, correct? I'm working on that. It's not available yet, but we're working on that.

And then what sizes can you envision? Okay, so we have a range of sizes. You have a range of sizes. You have this particular size of powder.

The optimal size is roughly 300 microns. So we range anywhere between 50 and about 450. And you showed earlier, I mean, this will soak. I mean, it's 100%.

It soaks everything up to 100%, what you were explaining. Yeah, the only restricting condition would be the amount of time for the imbibition process to take place. Yeah, the other options out there, the core of them is still pristine and only soaks in so much, and this completely absorbs all the way through. Right, yeah.

Like that. There we are. I mean, here we are. You can see I doubled up the dosage on this little packet.

You guys got to help me. Send a lot of good questions in the comments because I've got to let him go eventually. He's got to get back home. But how big can you make these if you wanted to?

Well, that's demonstration size. So that's several processes. It's more a factor of the increased exposed surface area. So the smaller we make the beads, the faster the rate of imbibition.

However. But the constant is the swell ratio. Yes. Regardless of the particle size, the swell ratio remains a constant.

It was a lot faster than I thought it would be. Right. Yeah, that one, for it to swell to this size might have taken two or three days. Two or three days.

Not practical in the real world. Well, but there might be applications. You know, so say we have a wellhead blowout, right? I mean, they make shot buckets nowadays.

I mean, they're filling up like, hey, can we throw basketballs and diapers down this thing to clog up this, you know. just pour the imbiber you see what I'm saying I'm like if you can get stuff that swells up quickly you know you have you know better chance of maybe making a well bore you know stop pushing out working on orphan well application right now to cork those yeah this is fascinating thank you for doing this with me I know I know I have a million more questions and I'll bug you all the time about it but I just again this is this is why you know I've been so fortunate and blessed to get to meet people like you and hopefully give you a platform.

If you don't know about this, get a hold of him. What's the best way to get a hold of you? What's your website? www.

embiberbeads.com www.embiberbeads.com You're on LinkedIn.

I am on LinkedIn. John Brinkman. email address is my initials j s as in scott b as in brickman j sb and imbiberbeads.com god bless you thank you for doing this with me yeah appreciate the opportunity this is so good um get a hold of him follow him support this uh our industry is a solution provider we do care about the environment and uh we make energy reliable and affordable and we harvest resources for human flourishing.

So what you do is important. Thank you for all. Take care. God bless you.

See you next time.