Autotech startup revs after patent stall; signature tech removes emissions, waste from diesel logistics

Fresh fuel is pumping into NORDEF after the Kansas City autotech company finally received patent approval for its signature product, co-founder William Walls said, pushing the pedal on its mission to disrupt the automotive fluid industry.

Four years after applying for a provisional patent for its technology to produce diesel exhaust fluid on-demand — and receiving money from Digital Sandbox KC (when branded as AWA Technologies) as the very last group to get funds towards patent filing, he noted — the NORDEF team is partnering with an engineering firm in West Virginia to develop its MVP and is working on raising capital.

“The patent was kind of a natural lull because we hadn’t heard from them,” Walls said, “like, ‘Do we continue to work on this if we can even carve out a niche and convince the patent office that we are unique in this way and novel?’ But in the end, we got the patent and it put a little more life back in the project. And we’re still working on it constantly.”

Walls — along with co-founders Austin Hausmann and Adam Bronge; all veterans in the trucking industry — developed technology that reintroduces water to diesel exhaust fluid, which is required to meet EPA diesel engine emissions standards. The mix occurs at the point of use with localized feed water, urea pods, and an in-depot mixing machine.

“We’re not trying to redefine the product,” Walls explained. “We’re trying to redefine the route to market. That’s the inefficient and wasteful part of all of this.”

“When we first started talking about it, people thought we were trying to redefine diesel,” he continued. “It’s like, ‘No, no, no, no. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re just fixing the way the fluid gets to the market.’ And it’s not novel. Campbell’s did it by taking water out of Campbell’s soup. Tide did it with Tide Pods by not shipping the water. That’s the same thing we’re doing.”

According to NORDEF, the result is the potential removal of millions of tons of harmful NOx emissions from upstream logistics and millions of tons of single-use plastics from landfills, while providing high-quality, long-life diesel exhaust fluid as it’s highly susceptible to sunlight, temperature, and has an overall limited shelf life

“For a product that has a six-month shelf life, half of that time is eaten up just getting to the end user, the customer,” Walls noted. “Then once there, it sits on the shelf for a little bit. So the majority of its whole life has just been spent shipping it around. And with the dynamic costs of the world we’re in today, freight costs, fuel costs and last-mile handling fees, it’s just very inefficient.”

On top of eating up the shelf life, he continued, it’s wasteful to ship a product that is two-thirds water via trucks consuming diesel fuel all over the country.

“So not only are we solving a problem,” he added, “we’re also helping — in a roundabout way — reduce the number of trucks that are having to be driven to deliver products and all those single-use plastics that just end up in landfills and creeks.”

Austin Hausmann, AWA Technology, Pure Pitch Rally 2020; photo by Mikaela Wendel Photography

NORDEF — which won the 2023 Farm Bureau Ag Innovation Challenge and participated in Pure Pitch Rally in 2020 (as AWA Technologies) — is now working with a product engineering firm in West Virginia to get the technology from proof of concept to MVP, Walls shared.

“Then the idea is to deploy 10 to 20 of these hyper-local diesel exhaust fluid machines throughout the Midwest, probably Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska,” he continued.

Parallel to that activity, he noted, the team plans to raise capital.

“We’ve been living off contests,” he explained, noting the team aims to deploy the technology while further learning, iterating and refining its product along the way.