Thanks for joining me and welcoming, this afternoon, 374Water. Its ticker SCWO. This afternoon we have the opportunity to hear from the company's President and CEO, Chris Gannon, as well as the company's CFO, Russell Klein. We're going to give these gentlemen about 20 minutes to go through the presentation and share this story, their story, after which time I'm going to open it up to Q&A for about 10 minutes. If you do have any questions at all during the presentation, please feel free to type them into the Q&A box, and we will get to as many as we can, time permitting. With that said, please join me in welcoming 374Water, and Chris, I'll hand it over to you. Thank you so much for being here.
Great, Daniel. Thanks so much for hosting, and welcome, everybody. So yeah, my name is Chris Gannon. I'm the CEO, and I'm really excited to share with you 374Water's story. So if we jump into that, the company, 374Water, has developed an organic waste destruction technology called AirSCWO, which addresses the needs of the municipal, federal, and industrial water, wastewater, and waste management markets globally. When you look at all of the market participants in these spaces, what you see is that they're all seeking alternatives to conventional solutions like incineration, digestion, land application, landfilling, deep well injection, and storage, which are all principally moving waste around from one location or company or environment to another versus completely destroying it. Add to that the advent of PFAS, forever chemicals, and massive litigation, and you have the perfect storm and perfect opportunity for us.
So conversely, our technology, AirSCWO, utilizes the power of supercritical water oxidation, or SCWO for short, to destroy and mineralize both non-hazardous and hazardous organic waste, and then produce in that process safe dischargeable water that can be turned into potable water standards, safe mineral effluent such as CO2 that can be sequestered, and then an immense amount of heat energy that can be utilized to not only power our technology but sent back to the grid or facilities and so forth. So what does our technology do? We destroy waste, pure and simple. So traditional waste streams are things such as biosolids or sludge from municipal wastewater treatment facilities, landfill leachate, oily sludges, huge amount of different military waste, and then just industrial organic waste.
Then we talked briefly about emerging contaminants, PFAS, which are long and short-chain forever chemicals that are toxic and negatively impact human health, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and so forth. Essentially, what our technology is designed to do is either augment, meaning bolt onto, or outright replace the conventional infrastructure that exists today. This is two kind of specific examples I think maybe will resonate with you. Orange County Sanitation and the City of Orlando, which are two very, very large municipal wastewater treatment facilities, they have publicly stated their desire to replace their existing infrastructure with AirSCWO at various sizes. Jumping to the next slide, which is a bit about our kind of key events in our history and outlook, we were founded at Duke University by a brilliant professor named Marc Deshusses in the 2011 timeframe.
We eventually developed our first commercial-scale system at Duke, and then the business was spun out to become 374Water. We, in 2021, inked a partnership deal with Merrell Bros, who have been an incredible supporter to us. They are the third largest wastewater waste hauling and processing company in the United States. We were on site at their organization in Indiana for several years. Earlier this year, we moved to the City of Orlando and in that area have not only our waste destruction operations but our manufacturing facility. We went public in 2022 through a reverse merger with a company called PowerVerde, and then we uplisted to the Nasdaq in 2022. 2024 was the year that I joined the company in April, late April, early May, and then I immediately set upon building our leadership team with Russell being our new CFO.
The key for 2024 was all about converting our company from what I would have characterized at the time as a late-stage venture company that happened to be public to a growth company. And that's what we did over the course of 2024. We put in the infrastructure that we needed. We hired the people we needed to scale our organization. We did multiple extended demonstrations at both the municipal and the federal and the industrial levels. And now 2025 is all about converting our backlog into revenue, converting our pipeline into backlog, and so forth. We've also announced our AirSCWO Destruction as a Service business, which would be a service offering to the industry. And we are making great strides there and will be generating revenue from that throughout the year.
We are also actively selling our technology into these various market segments and will be announcing a significant amount of those throughout the year, and then throughout this year or first half, we anticipate we will more than double our employee base so that we can begin to execute on all of these various opportunities that we have in front of us. Jumping to the next slide. On the left, there is a schematic or process flow diagram of our AirSCWO system, and then on the right is the definition of supercritical water and supercritical water oxidation. Essentially, in the simplest of form, what we are doing is we are taking some type of liquid or slurry waste.
We are taking it into our technology, forcibly putting it into our reactor and combining it with supercritical water, which I'll define, and oxygen as an oxidizing agent to immediately break down the organic material in that waste stream. We do that in a matter of seconds, and so what we're essentially doing is we are oxidizing those organic compounds and converting them to minerals and gases and leaving no waste byproducts in the process. Our technology has been shown to destroy waste at 99.9% to seven or nine nines or to non-detect levels with that waste. Our system produces on the back end safe water streams that can be converted to potable water standards, those inert minerals that I mentioned, some safe vent gas, which is mostly CO2 that can be sequestered, and again, all of this immense amount of heat energy.
Not only does our technology contribute to waste destruction, but it also, from an investing standpoint, contributes to the sustainable investment side of your businesses if that's a thing for you, and just generally the circular economy water energy nexus. Jumping over to the right there, you see what is our supercritical water oxidation. Most people think about water as having three forms, namely a solid, a liquid, and a gas. Well, there's a fourth form. That fourth form is supercritical water. And supercritical water, to get there, you need to reach a certain temperature, 374 degrees Celsius, though we operate around 600 degrees Celsius and 221 bar of pressure. When you get to that stage, water takes on incredible properties to eliminate, again, organic waste. And we're harnessing that power of supercritical water in our process. Next slide.
As it relates to materials that our AirSCWO has destroyed, this is just a select few of those. The key there is these are all organic waste streams. So sludge or biosolids, we've talked about, there are 16,000 wastewater treatment facilities nationally. All of them are processing, they're processing millions and millions of gallons of waste a day. Historically, it's been land applied onto farmland and other lands as fertilizer and also thrown into landfills. It's creating huge issues. There's mass litigation nationally going on there as well. We have a solution to destroy organic waste at the source and eliminate that whole value stream that we're talking about. That is why we are in partnership with the City of Orlando and Orange County as examples. Landfill leachate is another example of waste we can destroy very effectively.
There are thousands of landfills across the country all dealing with landfill leachate issues, and we have a solution there to destroying that fully before it gets into our waterways and so forth. When you think about wastewater or water treatment facilities, there are 15,000 water processing facilities across the U.S. alone. They utilize granular activated carbon and ion exchange as part of their filtration processes. Eventually, that ion exchange resin or granular activated carbon gets spent or used up. Our technology can destroy it. AFFF, firefighting foam, highly toxic substance being phased out across the country. There are stockpiles of this everywhere, and the federal government, municipalities, industrial players like in the oil and gas are all looking for means of addressing it. We have a technology that can, at commercial scale, destroy it, and again, you can go through the rest of those lithium-ion batteries.
Dirty little secret there is they create an immense amount of toxic waste in the manufacturing or recycling process. We can destroy that as well. Plastics, we are very effective at destroying. Going to the next page. In terms of the market opportunities, we look at the market globally as about $250 billion. We break the market down into three main segments, those being the municipal, federal, and industrial markets. We've talked already about the municipal side. We have a backlog and pipeline of around $600 million there that we are starting to convert to revenue. On the federal government side, we have a roughly $900 million backlog and pipeline with the DOE, the Department of Energy, and the FAA. When you think about the DOD, we're really talking about 715 bases across the United States that are highly contaminated and need to be cleaned up.
There are billions of dollars that have already been allocated to the cleanup, and we are in the process of getting purchase orders related to that. On the industrial side, lots and lots of different subsectors there. Some of them are listed: oil and gas, big opportunities there, pharma, lithium-ion batteries like we talked about. Underlying all of these industries or market opportunities are what are called RCRA permitted treatment, storage, and disposal facilities or TSDFs. That adds another layer to the waste management ecosystem. There are 860 RCRA permitted TSDFs across the United States. We are talking with all of the major players about actually placing our technology on their facilities to destroy waste on site there through a revenue share joint venture partnerships, which we'll be announcing throughout this year.
Then, again, there's significant EPA regulation around drinking water and Superfund sites that I think are bipartisan issues, as well as there's recent guidance from the EPA on wastewater and that contaminants, which we kind of talked about prior to that. Going to the next slide, we have four main sizes of our AirSCWO system. The first one is a one metric ton per day, our small unit, which is a highly mobile unit. You can visualize this as being on a flatbed and being pulled around by an F350. These are used to do not only demonstrations but do small site cleanups. Our medium-sized unit, which is a six-ton per day unit, is the unit that's on site at the City of Orlando, will be installed in Orange County here in a number of months.
We also will be using initially in our AirSCWO Destruction as a Service operations in 2025. We also have a 30-ton per day system, so clearly much larger. That is a semi-mobile system that we will be utilizing and already have funding with the City of Orlando and Orange County related to those units as well. Then we have a much larger 100-200 metric ton per day. These are buildings, bespoke buildings specifically designed and built for specific waste streams as well. Going to the next slide, what I'd like to leave you with before we get to question and answer is that our focus over the near term are on key stock catalysts, namely capital sales and destruction as a service revenue throughout 2025.
We have an immense amount of things going on in the biosolids space, City of Orlando and the completion of that work, Orange County Sanitation. We have a bunch of announcements coming out related to factory acceptance test and installation, landfill announcements over the course of the first half, and then a significant amount of government DOD-related demonstrations that will unlock the federal pipeline that we have. We will be going to Detroit with the DOD, Arcadis, and Clean Earth, two major players in the industry as well, to do a very large head-to-head demonstration for the federal government that will then unlock that market as well. And again, the market itself is about $250 billion. And our systems are highly customizable depending on the waste stream and the needs of those end customers.
Okay, Chris, thank you so much. We do have some extra time.
As a reminder, if you have questions, please type them into the box and we'll get to as many as we can. Chris, we've already got quite a few that have come in, but if I can start myself, you and I touched on this a little bit beforehand, but just curious, you're recently new to the company in 2024. Can you discuss a little bit more about what you saw maybe to make you join and the decisions that you've made in terms of the leadership since joining?
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question. So when I saw the technology, I got a call from somebody I'd known for many years. And he said, "Hey, man, you got to take a trip and look at this technology. It's amazing." And so I was skeptical, very skeptical of this. I was on a sabbatical.
I was coming out to start to look at new opportunities. I was looking at much larger businesses, quite frankly. And I went and saw the technology with a host of several of my technology partners from my past. And we were all blown away to see biosolids, for example, go into the system, real nasty sludge go in and water come out. It was incredible. And so when I saw that and I saw the opportunity to generate a technology and take it across the world, I wanted to sign up and be part of that. Clearly, from an investor standpoint, I think it's important to also state that me and the rest of the leadership team and, frankly, all of the employees are highly motivated and compensated related to growth of this business. So we're directly in line with it.
But that's the genesis of how I got involved and how this team came here.
Perfect. Thank you for doing that for me at the very least. We've actually had quite a few more come in, so I'll start combining some questions if that's okay. Can you talk a little bit about if your service is directly or indirectly subsidized in any way by the government? And then along those same lines, realizing it's still new and fresh, but does the change in administration affect your business model in any way?
Yeah. So it's not directly subsidized. Our business is not directly subsidized by the federal government. The federal government has been very clear that they're interested in destruction as a service.
And so what they are looking for is for us to have a fleet of our AirSCWO systems strategically located around the country, frankly, around the world to service government agencies. That's how that looks. And we see, again, an immense amount of opportunity there, both on-site destruction at bases or central locations. So a lot of the military doesn't want you to know what they have on base. And so it doesn't want to transport it off. So we need to go to them in some cases. Others, where it's like AFFF and certain other waste streams, we can take it to central facilities. That's, again, why the TSDFs are so important for us and for them, frankly, related to that destruction. As it relates to the Trump administration, it's a natural question: what's the impact potentially with the Trump administration?
What I would say is that if we were in other clean tech areas, I'd be really concerned, right? But with us, our focus is on water and wastewater primarily, and then cleaning up areas that already have huge allocations of government funds, namely the military. In all of those contexts, I think those are bipartisan issues. In fact, I know they are. Take Florida as an example, which is a Republican stronghold. They are one of the leaders in changing their approach to how biosolids, as an example, is reduced greatly in terms of land application because it's so toxic. So again, I think that while there may be certain areas of clean tech or green initiatives that will absolutely go away for at least the next four years, I don't see that with our business at all.
This is tagging on to another question, but just in terms of the environmental solutions and the projects that you have planned for the near term and even longer term, because of the bipartisanship and the bipartisan issue, it doesn't really change anything from your perspective.
We don't see any change. The Republican that will lead the EPA, that I think will lead the EPA, is focused on clean water. I think that's an easy issue. It's a circular issue because wastewater goes to water treatment facilities. If it's contaminated, it's going in and contaminated that source as well. Again, I just think it's a bipartisan issue as far as I'm concerned. This all started really significantly under the last Trump administration. Unless he's going to undo things he put in place before, which doesn't make much sense to me.
We've already seen hundreds of executive orders. None of them are touching this issue.
Can you touch a little bit upon the competitive landscape and then just how your solution compares to other alternatives that may be out there?
Yeah. There's not a lot of competition, honestly. So the two major other players in the space that have systems are General Atomics as well as Revive. And so in our corporate deck, you could see that and discuss. But they have different technology from the standpoint of supercritical water oxidation. General Atomics has a batch process system, not a continuous flow system like ours. And Revive just has lower scale, much lower scale. So what I've heard is that they also have challenges with very specific federal government waste destruction needs. And these are not issues we have. And so we're feeling good about that.
Some of the other players in the space, there's electrochemical oxidation that also exists. There's several players in that: Aclarity, Axine, Vivo, some of those. Those are very high energy consumption, no means of recycling energy to reduce costs there. And they're just more emerging technologies and so forth. And of course, Deep Well Injection and those other things are, I guess, alternatives as well.
Okay. Thank you. Quite a few financial questions have come in, and I'm going to just roll them up. Can you discuss a little bit what you foresee as your capital requirements over the next 12 months or two years? And then maybe what the desired avenue of funding would be for that. And then what your capital needs are going to be to reach cash flow breakeven.
Yeah. So in terms of our business right now, we are scaling it.
That's the whole end game here for this year. The nice thing is that we have a good amount of revenue to offset certain expenses related to that. So we have enough capital to get us through this year for sure, and then when we look at financing means, certainly additional equity financing for very specific growth initiatives may be on the table, but we are moving into a situation where we can also utilize debt financing effectively or project financing for these DOD facilities, destruction as a service facilities, and whatnot, so I'm feeling pretty good about where we sit today and what we can execute.
Yeah. I was going to ask you about project financing because that seems like it may be a good avenue for this type of business.
Yeah, I think so.
That's something we are just starting to explore and look at so that we, again, can execute. When we're doing a capital sale, we can get a lot of pre-early payments from our customers. Then with destruction as a service, it's all on us. When we think about the federal government as an example, and even a lot of just general state and local municipalities, they want service. They don't want to buy the technology.
Going back to one of the first questions here was you touched on pipeline and just curious how you define pipeline and then maybe what the backlog for the company looks like right now.
Sure. Pipeline are purely opportunities. People have approached us very specifically. These are project-based, itemized by customer, by location, and so forth.
Up until this year, we were not able to execute or convert that pipeline. Now we're in a position to start to convert that to real backlog or purchase orders to move forward. And again, the combination of backlog would be destruction as a service as well as those capital sales. So right now, we have roughly $15 million or so in backlog, but we're in that process, again, of conversion right now.
Have to go back to a couple more finance, but can you just talk a little bit about maybe what your important metrics are for revenue and then to the extent that you've disclosed any goals by the end of 2025?
Yeah. So we did a year-end letter to the shareholders, which I would ask everybody to take a look at.
But essentially, what we outlined is all of those things we mentioned about last year, 2024, and what we were doing there to set ourselves up for growth in that transition to a growth company. And we laid out within that all of the different things that we are committing to do this year, all of which are focused on delivering substantial revenue this year. And so that's where we're focused.
Okay. Okay. Well, I'm trying to, I think we've touched on, oh, just a last quick one, Chris, if you don't mind. The technology, is that proprietary? And then have you secured any rights to that extent?
Yeah, it is proprietary technology. We have a host of patents around the core technology.
We have a whole host of other ones that we are in the process of filing as well, both on our pre-treatment process and how we deal with the waste at the front end, and then also just the operation of our technology and then on the back end, certain approaches as well to harness all of the energy, other things that we talked about, so we will be filing a lot of patents, additional blockbuster and nuisance patents in the first half of this year to build that moat even more around our business but it is totally proprietary technology. Nobody has it like we do or at scale. I invite everybody to reach out to Orange County or City of Orlando or, frankly, the federal government to talk about the technology because there's been a lot of public disclosures there, and they're all happy to talk to people.
Sounds like it's going to be a fun time for the legal team.
We're excited.
Yeah. Well, Chris and Russell, on behalf of Sidoti and everybody that attended the presentation, thank you so much for sharing 374Water's business model and your expectations moving forward. For those of you in the audience, thank you for your questions. I believe that we were able to touch on just about every single one of them. Again, Chris, Russell, thank you. We look forward to following your story and seeing you again soon.
Excellent. Well, thank you, Daniel. Thank you, everybody else, for listening to our spiel and hearing about our company. If you have other questions, please reach out to Russell or myself directly.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye now. Thank you.