Hydro Volta's EIC Accelerator Desalination: Sales Against Pilots

Reverse osmosis, the standard way to desalinate water, pushes water through a membrane at high pressure and leaves a salty concentrate behind. Hydro Volta, a Leuven company founded in 2016, says it can do better by pulling the salt out of the water with electric current instead, and by keeping its membranes clean with ultrasound. In the European Innovation Council's October 2020 cut-off, the last round of the Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot, it was selected for a grant-only award for SonixED, listed by the European Commission as "Desalination technology for the water challenge of the 21st century". The list names Hydro Volta as the only beneficiary of the project.

The EU contributed €2,294,075 to a project costing €3,277,250, which ran from 1 June 2021 to 30 November 2023, according to CORDIS. The proposal promised three field trials, an industrialised product and sales "over a global network of distributors". The trials took place. The sales network has not appeared in any public source, and the company's filed accounts show a business that is still small.

Where Hydro Volta Stands Now

Hydro Volta is active. The Belgian company register lists it as an active private limited company with a "normal situation" and the same two directors since 2016, according to the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises. It filed its 2024 accounts with the National Bank of Belgium on 30 August 2025. In September 2026 George Brik met Egypt's minister of electricity and renewable energy, Mahmoud Esmat, at the ministry in Egypt's New Administrative Capital to discuss treating saline groundwater, desalinating seawater with existing power plant infrastructure and recovering minerals such as magnesium from brine, according to Daily News Egypt and Arab Finance. Both reports place the talks within Egypt's national plan to desalinate 10 million cubic metres a day by 2050; neither reports a contract.

The company has also changed how it sells itself. The EIC proposal was about seawater: two container types, for seawater and brackish water, aimed at a market the company put at €20 billion. Today the Hydrovolta website leads with "brackish groundwater" and recovery rates of up to 95% in a single pass, and presents SonixED as an answer where reverse osmosis struggles with scaling or brine disposal, not as a replacement for large seawater plants. The technology is the one the EIC funded, so this is a change of market focus rather than a pivot to a new product.

The projects page labels its references by maturity. It describes a paid pilot with Water Corporation, Western Australia's main water utility, at one Perth site, with three more bores to follow in 2027; an "active project" in Morocco from 2025 to 2028 funded by the Flanders Climate Action Program; a signed letter of intent in Brazil; and a memorandum of understanding in Saudi Arabia. None of these could be confirmed in a source independent of the company, and no financial terms are published.

The Technology: Salt Pulled Out, Not Water Pushed Through

In electrodialysis, an electric field drags dissolved salt ions through stacks of membranes that let through only positive or only negative ions, so the water itself never has to pass a membrane. Electrodialysis reversal (EDR) periodically flips the polarity to shake off deposits. It runs at far lower pressure than reverse osmosis, which the company says cuts energy use at low to medium salinity, but it cannot stop fouling entirely. Hydro Volta's addition is ultrasound: transducers at the membranes whose sound waves break up scale as it forms, which the company says removes the need for anti-scaling chemicals, as described in a CORDIS results article and on the company's technology page.

The idea is protected by European patent EP3566764 for an "electrodialysis device" with chambers of cathode and anode pairs and parallel ultrasonic transducers, filed by Hydro Volta on 3 May 2019 with priority from 3 May 2018 and naming Brik and Yousef as inventors, according to the European Patent Office. Google Patents shows it granted on 13 January 2021 and lists no family members outside the European patent.

The performance claims vary by source and have not been independently tested in public. The CORDIS objective promised "60% higher efficiency" than conventional desalination. In August 2022 Brik told the Brussels Times the system used "30% less energy consumption and 50% fewer chemicals than traditional techniques" and produced 5 to 7 litres of drinking water per 10 litres of seawater. The company's own figures for a 90-day cooling water pilot in Germany give a recovery of 90 to 98% for SonixED against 50 to 75% for reverse osmosis on the same feed water, at 0.19 to 0.7 kWh per cubic metre, according to its technology page. Those are the company's numbers from its own pilot.

What SonixED Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The periodic report for the second period, June 2022 to November 2023, says the team redesigned, built and tested "the first big-scale prototype" of the SonixED module, designed modules and skids for mass production and assembly, built monitoring tools and prepared two trial containers. It named three use cases: seawater to drinking water with De Watergroep, a mix of seawater and brackish water with the utilities Farys and Aquaduin, and recycling of cooling tower blowdown water at BASF in Germany.

The CORDIS results article reports two sites. At the Farys desalination plant in Ostend, where Farys already turns brackish canal water into drinking water, as Travel Tomorrow reported in 2022, the container was built into the existing microfiltration line; CORDIS says the conversion rate to drinking water "exceeded 85 %" and energy savings reached "up to 47 % for a projected output of 500 m3/hr". At BASF's Schwarzheide site, the system used 0.164 kWh per cubic metre of purified water. The article says both seawater and brackish applications were tested "during a large-scale field trial with Belgian water supply companies"; a separate De Watergroep trial is not reported. The utilities and BASF have published nothing on the trials that could be found.

1. Prototype and pilot phaseDeliveredFirst big-scale prototype built and tested, per the CORDIS report.
2. Three field trialsPartly deliveredTrials at Farys in Ostend and BASF in Schwarzheide reported; no separate third trial, and results come only from the company and CORDIS.
3. 60% higher efficiency than conventional desalinationUnverifiedFigures published by the company and CORDIS only; no independent test found.
4. Industrialised modules, skids and containersPartly deliveredDesigns for mass production reported; no production line or output volume made public.
5. Sales through a global network of distributorsNot deliveredNo distributor or system sale announced; 2023 turnover was €93,515.

The project ended on 30 November 2023, and the second report covers the period up to that date; CORDIS does not show whether the end date was ever moved. At the close, CORDIS wrote, Hydro Volta was "raising funds to bring it to the market". No funding round has been announced since.

The Money

Hydro Volta files micro accounts, which do not have to show revenue, and has never published an outside funding round. Its share capital has stayed at €18,600 since its first accounts, according to its filings with the National Bank of Belgium. The company does not appear on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all of its pages; its award was grant only.

The EIC money is visible in the accounts. Cash jumped from €86,962 at the end of 2020 to €697,292 a year later, and total assets from €357,560 to €1,953,572. Staff costs rose from €40,007 in 2020 to €535,567 in 2022. Since then both have fallen, and long-term debt has risen to €716,000. Equity was €2,159 at the end of 2024, after a loss of €8,666, with accumulated losses of €54,541.50. Companyweb reports the same equity and results for 2021 to 2024 and lists one full-time equivalent employee; the company's about page names six people, so the two cannot be reconciled from public data. The last filing that gave a headcount, for 2020, reported an average of 1.4 full-time equivalents, according to the 2020 accounts.

The company has stayed close to break-even throughout. With €21,355 of cash and €2,159 of equity at the end of 2024, it has little room of its own to build the production and distribution the proposal described.

Awards and Recognition

Hydro Volta was among the winners of the Water Europe Innovation Awards at Water Innovation Europe 2024 in Brussels, held from 17 to 19 June 2024, according to Water Europe. The company's about page also lists an Accadueo H2O Innovation Award in 2023, a special mention at the Global Prize for Innovation in Desalination in 2022 and an Aquatech Innovation Award nomination in 2021; these could not be confirmed in an independent source. The EIC lists Brik as one of its ambassadors.

Why Europe Should Care

Water scarcity is now an EU policy priority. The European Water Resilience Strategy, presented with a water efficiency recommendation on 4 June 2025, asks the EU to improve water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030 and lists a planned water technology challenge with the EIC, according to the Commission's actions tracker. Its "water efficiency first" principle puts desalination behind saving and reusing water, as Euronews reported in August 2026. A process that recovers more water and leaves less brine fits that order better than a conventional plant, and reuse of industrial cooling water, tested at BASF, is one of the uses the strategy wants to grow.

Hydro Volta's case also shows the limit of a grant on its own. The EIC paid for a working prototype and two trials. What the company has not found, five years after signing the grant, is the private capital or the industrial partner to turn them into a product line, and its most recent prospects are outside the EU, in Australia, Morocco and Egypt.

The Verdict

Hydro Volta has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.