In late December 2025, a system that uses electric fields — rather than mechanical means — to generate nanometer-sized gas bubbles entered operation at a commercial site in Saudi Arabia. The nanobubble-generating technology was developed by the startup company AquaB Nanobubble Innovations Ltd. (Kildare, Ireland; www.aquab.com) and was deployed in December 2025 at multiple Saudi Aramco (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; www.aramco.com) facilities. There, the nanobubble generators will be used to enhance oil-recovery efficiency.
The oil-recovery application for the Vulcan-500 nanobubble generator models in Saudi Arabia is one of several potential uses of the platform technology, which was lead-invented and developed by Niall English, an inventor and professor of chemical engineering at University College Dublin (www.ucd.ie) and chief technology officer at AquaB.
The novel nanobubble generator takes an entirely different approach to generating bubbles than mechanically driven methods, such as cavitation or forcing air or gas through membranes at high pressures. The AquaB technology applies a static electric field across the water where the bubbles are to be generated. The presence of the electric field aligns the molecular dipoles of the water molecules, causing the water to densify as it packs together more tightly than when molecules are randomly oriented in the absence of the electric field.
As the density increases, the volume of the liquid decreases, creating temporary vacuum conditions at the surface of macro-scale gas bubbles that are introduced to the system. “This condition is what we call ‘electro-striction,’ and it creates tiny bubbles from the surface of the larger ‘mother bubbles’ already present in the system,” English explains.
The result is a dispersion of stable 40- to 90-nm nanobubbles with surface charges. “The surface polarization of the bubbles drives their density higher, allowing them to persist for days or weeks in a water sample — they’re tough little buggers,” English says. Because they are stable for much longer periods than the residence times of macroscale (seconds), mesoscale (minutes) and microscale (tens of minutes) bubbles, nanobubbles have advantages in many applications.
The electric-field method of generating nanobubbles, which has been patented, uses considerably less energy than mechanical devices. “The bubbles per dollar cost of this method is at least one or two orders of magnitude less than that of mechanical methods, even when taking into account differential hydrodynamic or pumping costs,” English remarks.
In addition to improving oil extraction and oil-water separations, the initial applications targeted by AquaB for the Vulcan-500 series include the following: improving oil extraction; facilitating oil-water separation in produced water, adding gases to fuel mixes for cleaner-burning transportation fuels; and controlling algae growth in water.