Brian Kalt would normally enjoy snowboarding and skiing at this time of year.
The new president of North Shore-based Fairmont Brine Processing has little time for that these days, though, as he focuses on his company's mission to treat wastewater from the oil and gas industry.
“This is my life right now,” he said.
Kalt, a Knoxville, Tenn., native who lives Downtown, joined Fairmont about 2½ years ago as the company's general manager.
Fairmont was founded in 2012 after buying the assets of AOP Clearwater's wastewater recycling plant in Fairmont, W.Va. The company is raising money for its next plant, which mostly likely will be in West Virginia or North Central Pennsylvania.
Before coming to Fairmont, Kalt spent three years as an operations manager at a water treatment company in Texas. He has a bachelor's degree in public relations from Suffolk University in Boston and served for four years as a noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps, deploying three times to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He now leads a 26-employee company that is unique in several respects. Clients pay whether or not they deliver wastewater for processing.
“We were probably one of the first and only companies to be able to negotiate something like that,” he said, noting it has helped Fairmont weather the low prices that are hurting other companies connected to oil and gas.
The company also uses a patented evaporation and crystallization process to recycle fluids produced in hydraulic fracturing.
“We are an alternative to deep-well injection,” Kalt said.
The treatment process produces a dry sodium chloride rock salt that Fairmont sells to local communities to treat roads for snow, and a liquid calcium chloride that can be reused in drilling and fracking.
Kalt expects the unique processes and material it produces to allow for growth and hiring at Fairmont. Its biggest challenge is convincing oil and gas industry veterans that Fairmont offers a cost-effective, environmentally responsible alternative to injecting the waste into deep wells for disposal, he said.
“I mean the big problem is they're used to deep-well injection and they've been doing it that way for years,” Kalt said.
