Meet the Resurgence Cohort 1 Startups: Natural Science, LLC

Team Members

• Arden Warner – Cofounder and partner, scientist, and inventor of the technology
• John Nelson – Cofounder and partner, business development, logistic and operations
• Gary Cullen – Partner, business development and legal affairs

What does your company do?

Natural Science has developed methods and technology for separating oil and chemicals from water and other surfaces with the use of electromagnetic forces and natural environmentally benign materials. The technology introduces a new paradigm in the environmental remediation space which we call “Electromagnetic Remediation Technology.”

We have developed a magnetizable absorbent that is organic, buoyant and non-leaching, as well as magnetic systems for directly separating hydrocarbons and by-product from the environment.

How did you get the idea?

The Gulf Oil Spill in 2010 was the largest marine oil spill in history. This encouraged Arden to think about how to safely separate oil from water. Magnetization of oil is not a new concept, but we realized that the phenomena that allows oil and magnetizable particles to bond at the molecular level also prevents oil and water from mixing. This was not being exploited to recover oil from water. Standard booms are passive devices, and skimmers rely primarily on surface tension effects to work and are inefficient. Exploiting the very same electromagnetic forces that prevent oil and water from mixing seemed natural to us and basically mimics nature in solving the problem. We then did several fundamental experiments on a small scale to verify that this could work prior to scaling up.

What are you most excited for as part of Resurgence?

Resurgence provides the knowledge base and resources that we need to optimize our potential for success as a startup. We are most excited about opportunities to get our company aligned with interested parties in the energy and environmental remediation space. We are also very interested in gaining the knowledge required to properly assess and develop our company strategies and processes. Startups are very difficult to get off the ground and having several resources for expertise in one place is extremely valuable.

What do you hope to get out of Resurgence?

We hope that we can gain access to the resources that allow us to build a company with a solid foundation which solves what we see as a major problem in our space and brings world changing technology to the market.

Where do you hope your company is a year from now?

We hope that in the next year we will have successfully introduced our new paradigm for remediation to the market and have thereby changed the approach to environmental remediation in some way. We hope that through our customer discovery process we will find several customers and partnerships.  Many of the technologies that are used to clean oil and chemical spills have not seen any major development in over 30 years. Chemicals, passive booms, and inefficient methods are still being deployed to tackle these environmental problems. We hope we have the opportunity and the space to introduce new hardware, controls, and concepts in places where our technology has advantages.

Housed within the Polsky Center’s Deep Tech Ventures initiative, Resurgence provides full-spectrum support for its cleantech startups that are dedicated to bringing life-saving, world-changing products and services to market.  To learn about the other teams, click the links below.

Alpha Nur | Blaze Power | C+UP | ExPost Technology | Stranergy