Adding the ATEC business to the Cadiz portfolio diversifies its range of clean water solutions and expands the company’s mission to provide safe, affordable drinking water to underserved communities.
Cadiz’s flagship initiative is the Cadiz Water Conservation and Storage Project, which captures surplus groundwater before it evaporates in the desert and stores it underground. Cadiz will transport conserved and stored water to communities in Central and Southern California through a network of underground pipelines that once carried oil. Capturing, storing and transporting water underground saves billions of gallons of water from evaporation each year– enough to serve millions of homes in communities impacted by drought.
Hollister, California-based ATEC has produced water filtration systems since 1982. It initially pioneered technology to provide a cost-effective high-rate removal of iron and manganese and then expanded its reach to a full range of contaminants, including arsenic, Chromium-6, nitrates and other contaminants found in groundwater that pose serious health risks in drinking water.
Cadiz has been in a strategic partnership with ATEC since 2015, and installed ATEC systems to test the removal of naturally occurring minerals for operation of the Cadiz Water Project.
When the acquisition closes, ATEC will retain its name and operate as a unit of Cadiz led by Lee Odell as chief operating officer. ATEC’s founder and principal owner Dave Ketchum will retire after a short transition period.
“We are proud to combine our expertise with ATEC in delivering innovative and affordable water solutions, particularly for small, rural and low-income communities without the financial resources to access to safe, reliable water supplies,” said Susan Kennedy, executive chair of the Cadiz board. “ATEC’s technology and expertise in conjunction with our state-of-the-art conservation and conveyance technologies will help us deliver affordable clean water solutions to communities throughout and beyond California.”
ATEC has built more than 450 water filtration systems for cities, water districts, investor-owned utilities and small communities and businesses in 10 US states, as well as Canada and Sri Lanka, with system treatment capacities up 60 million gallons per day (mgd). ATEC systems can be scaled in size to serve small, rural communities as well as larger municipalities, and require less maintenance and upkeep than traditional filtration systems.
