I was introduced to Ed Williams this week, who is the CEO of Novinda. Ed is a very successful entrepreneur and Novinda is an interesting story. Their heritage is in advanced materials and their focus in the last two or three years has turned to developing a portfolio of patented products that address mercury emissions in coal burning power plants.

The US market alone for mercury control consumables is a billion dollar annual opportunity if the April, 2015 required implementation date of the EPA's new MATS (Mercury & Air Toxics Standards) holds. The Company's primary technology, Amended Silicates HgX, provides 40-75% operational cost savings for mercury control under the new regs and is being tested in over 50 plants in the US currently. Now they are reliant on the regulation implementation to kick in and are out raising a $5M bridge to full scale production and sales in 2015.

Ed adds to the story as an accomplished manager and serial entrepreneur. He ran an $800M division of Apple, served as the CEO of Firefly Energy and has been successful in a number of other early stage development companies.

As an investor, the somewhat binary nature of their trajectory dependent on regulation over the coming year or two is somewhat unsettling but the story is interesting and the opportunity is large. The greenhouse problem is global, not local. The less coal we us in the US, the more cheap coal there will be for China and India to consume and it doesn't much matter where in the world it is consumed, everybody feels the impact so cleaning up coal is a necessary reality for all of us regardless of how prolific natural gas becomes in the US and Novinda appears well positioned in one segment of that important game.

Novinda could become quite large, very fast if regulation stays on their side which would be great for them and also for Colorado - definitely one to watch.