Company: BCHT
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001477932-25-002237
Chunk: 8

Company: Birchtech Corp.
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 8
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 we expect that our technologies will also be valuable for industrial wastewater remediation.  Industrial wastewater is the liquid waste generated by industrial activities, including manufacturing, processing, and production facilities. It often contains pollutants such as organic matter, heavy metals, chemicals, oils, and other contaminants that must be treated before being discharged into the environment or reused.  We believe our water treatment technologies will be well suited to treat such industrial wastewater in an optimal and cost-effective manner. 

Additional Business Opportunities

We also maintain a license with respect to certain intellectual property owned by Dakin Holdings Ltd. consisting of a proprietary compound of materials engineered to treat a boiler to improve the combustion process and thereby reduce overall emissions, while improving boiler efficiency during the combustion of all types of fuels at power plants (the “Dakin IP”).  We believe the Dakin IP can be an effective supplement to our mercury emissions removal business at coal-fired power plants and provide an additional revenue stream utilizing our present infrastructure.  However, there can be no assurance that such license will lead to any significant revenues. For additional information, see Part III, Item 13. “Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence”.

Patents and Trademarks 

Our SEA® technology was originally developed by the University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center. It was tested and refined on numerous operating coal-fired EGUs, with the founder of our wholly owned subsidiary participating with the Energy and Environmental Research Center on these tests since 2008. The Energy and Environmental Research Center Foundation, a non-profit entity, obtained patents on this technology. Between 2009 and 2017, we maintained an exclusive worldwide license with respect to this patented technology, which applied to various domestic and foreign patents and patent applications. Such formed the basis of our mercury control technology. On April 24, 2017, we acquired from The Energy and Environmental Research Center Foundation all such patent rights, including all patents and patents pending, domestic and foreign, relating to the foregoing technology.

 5Table of Contents

We have a patent portfolio relating to mercury removal of 34 granted patents worldwide, consisting of 26 U.S. patents and 8 foreign patents (Canada, Germany, European Patent Office and China) with expiration dates ranging from August 2025 to September 2034.  We believe that our patent position for mercury removal is strong in the U.S. and such other foreign countries.  In addition, in 2024, we filed 2 provisional patent applications in the U.S. relating to water treatment.