Tim Unruh
November 2022
Three entrepreneurs native to Salina, have invested time and money in a venture that could help clean up groundwater contamination at home and beyond.
They intend to “prove it out” soon to leaders of their favorite town, with hopes to someday branch out.
Their company, Flotration Technologies, has leased space in the Salina Airport Industrial Center, aiming to launch a pilot study and prove the technology’s cleanup capabilities at the Former Schilling Air Force base.
If their demonstration project works, company leaders will be able to offer a new technology at clean up sites across the country. The compay's new technology targets “forever chemicals” that are of concern nationwide.
“One of the intriguing things about our system is that we’re able to re-inject treated water back into the ground where it can contribute to the Salina supply for generations to come,” said Rex Vanier, one of the trio. “That excites me.”
The partners are committed to their hometown and are pondering a relocation of some of Flotration’s “hazardous response assets” from Oklahoma to Salina, Rex Vanier said.
“This is in the early stages of proving up our technologies to them,” said Brett Johnson, of Overland Park, a Flotration partner with Jay Vanier, of Salina and Rex Vanier of the Kansas City area. Johnson is a first cousin to the Vanier brothers, and all spent their youths in Salina.
“We’re hopefully part of the solution team. I firmly believe it will prove out,” Johnson said. “We all grew up around Schilling.”
Vender and strategic partner, AeroMod, a water treatment engineering firm of Manhattan, Kansas, is developing a mobile pilot trailer containing the Flotration technology.
“We think we have a good application here. It almost sounds corny, but it’s homegrown,” he said.
Company officials signed a five-year lease Oct. 1 of 5,350 square feet of space in Unit A of Building 520, in the Salina Development Center.
While Johnson, Rex Vanier and another partner, Pat Beatty, of Overland Property Group, were building apartments roughly eight years ago in Salina, Jay Vanier discovered the new cleanup technology and educated himself on its capabilities. He invited the partners to invest in the venture, joining Mark Thomas, who lives near Lubbock, Texas.
“Rex and Brett brought a new set of eyes to the technology and skill sets that Mark and I needed
to get it commercialized. They’ve been invaluable.”
The former Schilling Air Force base operated in Salina from 1942 to 1965. Shortly after its closure, the Schilling base was repurposed to form a vital diversified economic engine for Salina and Saline County, through aviation, industry, education and military.
All along, however, remnants of the past lurked in the form of groundwater and soil contamination and threatened to hinder the continued growth of Salina’s Airport and Airport
Industrial area.
The military left behind years of pollution, primarily from the solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, in the soil and groundwater. Another contaminant is PFAS/PFOS, which stands for per-and-polyfluorinated substances.
The Salina Public Entities, consisting of the City of Salina, Kansas State University, USD 305 and Salina Airport Authority, have amassed the necessary funding — more than $65 million — after a settlement approved by the U.S. District Court, Kansas, to complete the cleanup.
During 2014, Jay Vanier began working with Thomas on the Flotration technology.
“Flotration is a technology that has the capability and has demonstrated there is a way to treat contaminants without the use of chemicals or excessive filters, by using physics,” Johnson said. “When you look at what else is out there, dealing with fracking water, the plumes at Schilling,
industrial wastewater, all of those have a limited number of ways to treat. Mostly, it’s using reverse osmosis that’s expensive and labor intensive.”
He touts the Flotration method of “reducing the carbon footprint,” while also reducing cost and time to perform the cleanup.
“If you don’t have to haul away waste to a disposal facility and can simply reuse the waste stream in a clean and clear product, then you’re way ahead of the game. That’s economics 101,” Johnson said. “Schilling is not the only example. There are more than 1,800 other sites in the
country (with similar issues).”
The goal with Flotration, he said, is breaking the molecular bonds and separating out the contaminants.
“What differentiates our technology is how we break those bonds,” Jay Vanier said. “Flotration is a technology based in part on physics that has demonstrated a capability to remove PFAS/PFOS and TCEs without the use of expensive chemicals, ion exchange resins and high-pressure membrane systems.”
In other words, Vanier and his partners claim “we can not only do it more economically, but in a more environmentally friendly fashion as well.”
The Schilling Project cleanup work is headed by Martha Tasker, Salina director of utilities, who is co-managing the project with Matt Schroeder senior environmental engineer at Dragun Corp. of Farmington Hills, Mich., which is designing the remediation plan with a group of sub-consultants.
Major cleanup is expected to commence sometime in 2023, Tasker said, with water remediation in 2024 or after.
