New environmental technology company AirJoule is setting up shop in the Newark area’s Delaware Industrial Park for its main office and is also leasing space in Wilmington’s DuPont Experimental Station for research and development activities.
The company is a new joint venture that boasts using an environmentally friendly process to produce air dehumidification and harvest pure distilled water from the air, eliminating the need for refrigerants and reducing energy consumption.
Delaware Prosperity Partnership Vice President of Business Development Becky Harrington says the Council on Development Finance approved just over $1 million in grant funds for AirJoule if key performance milestones are met.
“They’re both performance grants, so the company has to demonstrate that they’ve invested the money into the facility that they said they would do as a part of the application process, and then also they have to provide documentation that they in fact created the jobs that they said that they would create," she said.
AirJoule projects an investment of up to $15.3 million to prepare the Newark site for its operations and anticipates hiring up to 60 employees for professional, skilled and semi-skilled technical positions.
Harrington says AirJoule chose to locate in the First State due to its robust talent pool of chemical engineers and its business affordability.
“It fits right into one of our most active industry sectors of advanced materials and chemistry, and this is a company that's creating breakthrough technology in the air conditioning, HVAC and water harvesting space.”
AirJoule is a 50-50 joint venture between GE Vernova and Montana Technologies — Montana Technologies is a publicly traded corporation that developed the AirJoule system based on a concept developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
