Aquatech Brand Guidelines: From Pittsburgh Steel Mills to Desalination & Zero Discharge

A chemical engineer and the mills of Pittsburgh.

Aquatech began in 1981 in western Pennsylvania. According to a 2023 profile in the Pittsburgh edition of Smart Business, it was founded by Prem Sharma, a chemical engineer from India, as a regional maker of industrial water treatment equipment for the Pittsburgh steel industry, and through the 1980s it widened the range of water problems it took on. The company gives the same founding year and names Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, as its home.

Leadership passed to the next generation early. Smart Business reported that Venkee Sharma, the founder’s son, took charge of the company in 1991, and that his younger brother Devesh Sharma joined a few years later; the two have run it together since. The company’s website now lists Venkee Sharma as executive chairman and Devesh Sharma as chief executive.

The 1990s took Aquatech abroad. The magazine wrote that the company opened subsidiaries in the Middle East, India and China during that decade to follow clients expanding into those regions; in 2023 it still ran those operations and employed more than 700 people at sites around the world. The same profile said that in the early 2000s the company built up in-house research and development, licensed water treatment technologies and developed systems for zero liquid discharge, in which a plant recycles its wastewater instead of releasing it.

In July 2016 Ecolab, the water, hygiene and energy technology group that owns Nalco Water, announced a minority equity investment in Aquatech, WaterTech Online reported. The release described Aquatech as privately owned and based in Canonsburg, and listed its main product groups as raw water treatment, ion exchange, membrane processes, wastewater recycling and reuse, zero liquid discharge and desalination.

Hard water, from refineries to the sea.

Aquatech’s specialism is difficult water. Smart Business described its work on refinery wastewater, acid mine drainage and effluent from wastewater treatment plants, alongside the desalination of seawater where fresh water is scarce, and reported that the company had completed more than 2,000 projects in 60 countries since 1981. Its website gives the same figures and names its markets as power generation, oil and gas, chemicals, mining, semiconductors, data centres and food production.

The company sells its technology under a family of trademarked names. Among them are HERO, which it calls High Efficiency Reverse Osmosis; FEDI, a fractional electrodeionization process for very pure water; LoWatt, a low-energy membrane desalination process; and Q-SEP hollow-fibre ultrafiltration membranes. It also offers biological treatment systems under the BioMOD name, evaporators and crystallizers for thermal treatment, and, in recent years, processes for lithium extraction and other critical minerals; these are the company’s own descriptions.

The business model has been shifting from selling plants to running them. In the 2023 interview Devesh Sharma described the next stage as “delivering water technology as a service”: Aquatech would operate a system itself and sell the treated water to the client. The company now advertises outsourced operation, project financing and mobile water units, and it built a new laboratory and testing facility at its Canonsburg headquarters, adding to labs elsewhere including Milwaukee, Smart Business reported.

The company’s growth has also come through acquisitions. Its website names the members of the group as QUA, WEX Technologies, Century Water and FTS H2O, together with Metichem; it describes them as adding membrane treatment, high-recovery systems, process technologies and resource recovery to Aquatech’s range.

Plants, membranes and trade fairs.

Desalination and industrial water companies sell things that few people ever see up close. Their customers are utilities, governments, refineries, mines and factories, and what they buy is rarely a boxed product: it is a plant, a process, a long operating contract or a membrane that will sit inside a pressure vessel for years. That shapes how these companies present themselves.

The plant is usually the hero. Company websites and annual reports in this field tend to lead with aerial photographs of coastal desalination works, with intake pipes running out to sea and long halls beside the shore. Inside, the familiar image is a row of white or grey pressure vessels holding reverse-osmosis membranes, stacked rack upon rack, or the polished casings of pumps and pressure exchangers that recover energy from the brine stream. Engineers in hard hats and high-visibility jackets on site, checking a control screen or walking a pipe gallery, give the pictures a human scale.

The vocabulary is technical and often trademarked. Membranes, energy-recovery devices and treatment processes carry their own names, and companies list reference plants, countries and project counts the way consumer brands list stockists. Awards from the water trade press and industry bodies are often displayed prominently.

The industry also meets in person. Trade fairs such as IFAT in Munich and Singapore International Water Week bring utilities, contractors and equipment makers to the same halls, and the stands there, with their models, membrane cut-aways and video walls, are one of the few places where these brands show themselves to each other. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company and marks what rests on its own word.

From Innovation Flows Leadership.

The latest addition came in 2026. On 31 July 2026 Aquatech announced that it had completed its purchase of Metito Chemical Solutions, the chemicals business of the water company Metito, now renamed Metichem, an Aquatech company. The company said the deal combined specialty chemicals and operations and maintenance work across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia, and noted that it closed during Aquatech’s 45th anniversary year.

Aquatech remains a family-led company. The website names the Sharma brothers at its head and describes offices across the United States, with a wider presence through offices in India, Europe, the Middle East and China. The 2016 release described it as privately held, and the company still calls itself a provider of “water and process technology solutions” rather than a manufacturer of a single product line.

Its message has moved with its markets. Where the 2016 release spoke of reducing net water usage for industry, the current website leads with water scarcity, climate adaptation, the energy transition and the supply of critical minerals, and it carries the company’s line “From Innovation Flows Leadership.”

That path, from a supplier to local steel mills to a group selling desalination, wastewater recycling and mineral recovery worldwide, is the core of Aquatech’s story as Smart Business told it in 2023 and as the company tells it on its own website.

For a design guide, Aquatech shows how an industrial engineering firm can carry a single family name and a family of trademarked process names across four decades of change. Compare Metito, whose chemicals arm became part of Aquatech in 2026, and Kurita, another industrial water treatment specialist. For this guide we use a deep green, a sage and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Aquatech’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.