When Brian Deurloo of Sheridan got an email inviting him to be a speaker at the United Nations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this month, he deleted it immediately.
“Honestly, I thought it was a scam,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “So, I deleted it the first one or two times it came.”
But it turned out the email wasn’t a scam at all. Deurloo, who is the CEO of startup Frog Creek Partners, which manufactures gutter bins and filter systems to remove pollutants from water, really was being invited to become a panelist on the world stage. He’ll be one of the panels at the 16th session of the United Nation’s Conference of the Parties (COP16) Convention to Combat Desertification on Dec. 10.
The multi-day conference includes topics ranging from land restoration and drought resilience to protecting and restoring grass and rangelands. Deurloo’s topic, meanwhile, on Artificial Intelligence in Water Security, is something near and dear to his heart.
“Water security is not about walking around a dam with an AK-47or a machine gun,” he said. “It’s about access to clean water, access to agricultural water, access to water that we can use for drinking, growing our food, or for manufacturing.”
Water used to be easy to get, Deurloo added.
“You’d just pop up a town next to a lake or stream,” he said. “But the Colorado River, down near the mouth of it, is drying up. It’s a big problem for a lot of these huge rivers. By the time they dump into the ocean, they’re almost dry because so much of it is being used for human use, whether it’s agricultural or urban.”
AI Is A Water Guzzler
Artificial Intelligence isn’t really as new as the AI buzzwords flitting around media these days. It’s been surrounding us for years, built into things like smartphones and other devices.
Chat-GPT was an advance that resulted in ever more applications and will likely spur ever more apps requiring ever more data centers — something that Wyoming has, to some degree, capitalized on.
Wyoming has the right climate for data centers. A long cold winter, and a cooler than average climate in the summer. It also has the right business climate, and communities that are eager for economic development.
“I like to ask people, where do you think the cloud is?” Deurloo said. “And I’ll bet you 50% of them don’t have any idea where the cloud is.”
But Deurloo knows exactly where it is in Wyoming. It’s in Cheyenne, where Microsoft and Facebook have already built huge data centers, and are even getting ready to expand.
“Those use a lot of water,” Deurloo said. “They’ve got to cool the server somehow, because those get hot.”
Use AI To Solve Its Own Problems
Wyoming is a state where people totally get the old adage, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.”
“Most of the state only gets about 12 to 13 inches a year of precipitation,” Deurloo said. “But we’re also at the top of five major watersheds, so it’s a really unusual and special place.”
It’s a little ironic to Deurloo that artificial intelligence companies are locating in the arid West — though he gets it, and welcomes them. He thinks artificial intelligence might one day help solve future challenges for water use.
“We can use artificial intelligence to run huge data analysis, like who’s drawing the water, how much water is being replenished, what dam is at certain capacity,” he said. “All these different data points that lie within a water model, whether it’s rain, snow, irrigation and all that.”
The analysis can also look at how to manage water rights if there’s just 6 inches of rain one year, or what to do to manage flooding, and whether pipes are large enough.
“Every continent is seeing desertification of some sort,” he said. “Meaning that some arable land that we planned to use for growing food is turning into desert land. And that’s happening on every continent in the world except for Antarctica.”
That has huge implications for ongoing water quality, Deurloo said.
“Everybody’s got their own thing about climate change and CO2,” he added. “But I know that pollution is happening in rivers and oceans, and that’s what I’ve chosen to dedicate my life to.”
Brian Deurloo holds a gutter bin lid during a ceremony to mark the install of the devices around the Wyoming Capitol. (Courtesy Brian Deurloo) 
A gutter bins made by Frog Creek Partners branded for the state of Wyoming. (Courtesy Brian Deurloo) 
The gutter bins made by Frog Creek Partners are accessible for easy emptying. (Courtesy Brian Deurloo) 
Brian Deurloo with a gutter bin his company installed, branded by the Sheridan Rotary Club. Deurloo's innovative storm drain inserts filter trash out before it can get into the city's water system. (Courtesy Brian Deurloo)
Inventions From Dreams
When it comes to clean water, Deurloo likes to point out there’s no such thing as red or blue water.
“We’ve got to take care of it,” he said.
And taking care of water is what Deurloo’s company, Frog Creek Partners, is all about. It manufactures gutter bins, to take pollution out of stormwater, at facilities in Casper and Sheridan.
The company has done all kinds of projects across Wyoming and is now in 22 different states as well.
“We have gutter bins from California to Maine and Vancouver to Florida — all over North America,” Deurloo said. “We’re in about four Canadian provinces.”
The idea for the bins came to Deurloo in a dream.
Deurloo had been wrestling with ideas to remove pollution from water, after learning that a single smoked cigarette butt placed in a liter of water in a jar along with 10 minnows would kill half those fish within four days.
“I literally shot up in bed on my daughter’s eighth birthday at 2:37 a.m. in the morning with an idea for storm water filters,” he said. “And so I got up and started building the first prototype in my garage at 3 a.m. with cardboard and duct tape.”
Within a couple of months, he had submitted patents for his invention, and he walked away with some cash from the Casper Startup Challenge in 2016.
He was ready to roll with an invention he thought could solve not just the problem of too many littered cigarette butts getting into creeks and rivers, but lots of other pollutants as well.
“That’s just crazy that one cigarette butt can kill five fish like that,” Deurloo said. “And there’s over 4 trillion of them littered around the world every year.”
In Cheyenne, Deurloo estimates there are at least 50 million cigarette butts thrown down every year.
“That’s a conservative number,” he said. “Just imagine what that’s doing to Crow Creek.”
Taking A Wyoming Company Global
Since then, Deurloo has been perfecting his product with an eye toward going global.
“I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting the product so it can be used worldwide as easily as possible,” he said. “And so now, after eight years of kind of perfecting the product, we’re ready for the main stage, so to speak, ready to expand this globally.”
That makes the United Nations invitation particularly fortuitous for his company at this time.
“I was blown away to get invited to this,” Deurloo said. “Especially when I saw the other panelists I’m sharing the stage with. They are seasoned professionals who do this kind of on a regular basis. So I feel blessed to be chosen as part of that, and I’ve worked really hard. I’m on a mission to help clean up rivers and oceans by removing pollution from stormwater.”
Coming from the least populated state in America and getting to represent the Cowboy State on a global stage is another point of pride for Deurloo, one he hopes brings more opportunities to his home state.
“I hope to make some great connections with people around the world that we can do more projects with,” he said. “I want to expand into Europe and Australia here soon, and even Asia, where pollution is an even bigger issue than it is here. But so I’ve been riding on Cloud 9 being chosen for this.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
