Black & Veatch partnership has a hand in Covid-19 'air vaccine'

Black & Veatch has helped create a way to purify the air of pathogens — including Covid-19 — in real time.

The Overland Park-based firm worked with Energy Cloud Inc., a clean-tech company that focuses on energy efficiency, sustainability and healthy building environments to create the Hummingbird EQ.  

Black & Veatch Program Director Lance Lippencott and Energy Cloud CEO John Carrieri told the Kansas City Business Journal that the Hummingbird system has been proven to deactivate 99.5% of Covid-19 virus by decomposing pathogens without producing any harmful ozone or byproducts.

A building's indoor air quality is continuously monitored by the Hummingbird system, which collects data. The system has a QR code scanner that shows visitors the air quality, and the historical data of the air quality. Every building with the system will also have a unique URL, which could be beneficial for schools or marketing information.

“We don’t want to just say that we’re purifying the air. We want to prove that we are purifying the air,” Carrieri said. “Both employees and customers want to know that the buildings they are going in are safe.”

Photocatalytic oxidation is used beyond deactivating the virus. It breaks down the organic compounds that could be circulating the air. The actual infectious dose that was aerosolized during testing was 3,000 times the average infectious dose, proving the Hummingbird unit can thoroughly neutralize and remove active Covid virus from the air that passes through the system.

“Even though they are invisible, they are there, and they are affecting our health,” Carrieri said. “Essentially, we are the vaccine for the air.”

A year ago, Lippencott was helping build biosafety laboratories in Ukraine and previously used similar technology, working with scientific partners to research other pathogens. With this history, Black & Veatch determined that working with and funding Energy Cloud’s Hummingbird project was a good fit.

“We already knew a lot about pathogens and were trying to control bad stuff to make sure it doesn’t go into good places,” Lippencott said.

When the pandemic hit, Black & Veatch provided hard data science to help the company independently test the product against the virus.

“We basically adopted some technologies that we found were being used in fertility labs,” Carrieri said. “We tried to make that very expensive technology more commercially available for all commercial buildings so we can make all buildings healthy.”

The Hummingbird system is scalable and can be adopted into any size of commercial building. Existing systems typically cannot support filters or other traditional methods of controlling pathogens in the air. The Hummingbird deactivates Covid without the extra filtering, Carrieri said, making it easy to adopt to any HVAC unit.

“If you just go with a normal filter, which is everybody’s inclination, that’s going to add to your fan load that you have and will add to your electricity over time,” Lippencott said. “This technology doesn’t have that same kind of impact on energy.”

The system can also be installed in what Carrieri refers to as high-density air zones, such as elevators, restrooms, or anywhere in a building where a crowd going through the same area.

The study team was made up of engineers from Black & Veatch and 10 scientists, including top bio-aerosol expert Joshua Santarpia, who was, Carrieri said, the first U.S. scientist to prove that Covid was airborne. This provided an independent, peer analysis review of the study. Black & Veatch, through the IgniteX Covid-19 Response Accelerator, provided the funding for the project.

“The protocols for lab work with this kind of thing are fairly established for low velocity and the normal stuff, but everything we were trying to do was a little bit different from that,” Lippencott said. “It was a little more challenging and a lot of new protocols were set by this study. In that respect, I think it was a really groundbreaking study.”

Most systems, Carrieri said, deactivate the virus in 60 minutes, which he believes is too long. The Hummingbird is taking care of it immediately. The U.S. government hasn’t offered insight into how to treat airborne Covid pathogens, he said.

“We know that it’s airborne, yet all we hear about are the vaccines and masks,” Carrieri said. “While those are obviously extremely important, they are only pieces in the puzzle. If we don’t upgrade our air quality in our buildings, we’re never going to completely solve this problem."

To Carrieri’s knowledge, the Hummingbird also is the only unit that is proven to deactivate a Covid variant. The system deactivated the beta variant, as the delta was not yet present.

“If we can break down one, we can break down any of them,” he said.  

“We accelerated this to save lives and we know we can. While we’re getting a handle on (Covid) here in the U.S., worldwide, they don’t have a handle on it,” Carrieri added. “I don’t think anyone believes we will be fortunate to be safe and wait another 100 years before a pandemic hits again, so this is going to really improve our health overall.”

All biosafety work on the project was performed within The Hastings Foundation and Wright Foundation laboratories at the University of Southern California. Other resources were supported by a grant from the W.K. Keck Foundation's Covid-19 research fund.