Buck is an entrepreneur and inventor with a background in environmental engineering. His fifth, and most recent, endeavor is a patented system to remove hydrogen sulfide from natural gas. If the final stages of testing are as successful as previous rounds, Buck’s work could transform the gas and oil industry.
Transcript
My name is Buck Cox. And I have a degree in Environmental Engineering from Tech. And I am pretty much an entrepreneur. Develop patents around chemistry. To treat nasty chemicals in the environment. And we do work with industrial outfalls, with municipal waste water and with the oil and gas industry, primarily. Well, I'm waiting, in three weeks we'll know whether we've changed the way things are being done in the oil and gas industry actually. There's a nasty compound within natural gas called hydrogen sulfide. And our technology, it turns out is extremely effective at taking out sulfide out of natural gas. So we started down the path with FMC corporation actually. To treat sulfide in water in municipal waste water plants. And it turns out it did a phenomenal job of that. And we had an idea that it would work on gas. But when you go to the oil industry, and you ask them to send you a sample of hazardous gas, they're not really too anxious to do that. So it's very difficult to get a test site to pull this off. That was the first big issue. But we overcame that because we actually found an oil field in Tennessee of all places, 500 acres, very small. They're a lot less restrictive there. It's pretty close to Virginia. So I could drive down, they gave me a way to get in to the system to try it. And fairly low levels of sulfide, 100 parts per million, not too bad. And we put it in the bottom of the vessel that we built for it. And it came out zero. Lead me to a meeting in Texas with a big oil company. And went in and showed 'em the data. They said we're gonna put this through the paces. We're gonna give it a shot. You have huge amounts of sulfide to deal with as compared to what you did. 18,000 parts per million as opposed to 100. We'll repurpose a vessel to do this. They did that. We applied the technique to the natural gas and it came out zero again. So we knew we were really on to something at this point. So... We're further down the line now with that company. They have thousands of wells. So this could be a pretty good deal for us. Well, I'm always creating new things. That's the thing that drives me in business and using my degree. And right now I'm... So most of my days, now I've turned administrative aspects, accounting aspects, all that sort of thing associated with my business over to people better at it than I am. And I spend my days largely doing research. Trying to find better ways to use the chemistry.
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