Friday, October 28, 2016

Iceland:Using Silica from Geothermal Brine to Produce Health Products

Fida Abu Lidbeh, co-founder of GeoSilica (Iceland) (Social X)

Can you briefly describe the primary purpose of your company and what social or environmental problems you seek to address?

The main aim was to increase the utilization of geothermal water, doing that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. Also to create new jobs in our area here in Keflavik, where our town had the highest unemployment rate in all Iceland since 2008.

We are producing health products from a geothermal power plant byproducts. Geothermal energy is a renewable energy that is used in the production of electricity here in Iceland. However, silica scaling is a real problem at the power plants. It is where the silica causes scaling problems and shorten the lifetime of a borehole and makes the re-injection almost impossible. With our technology we can extract the silica from the geothermal water and minimize the silica scaling. We use the extracted silica in producing high quality health products. We launched our first silica supplement product to the Icelandic market January of last year.