What a client actually buys

The Reading

Late in a hot summer a bay stops mixing. Warm water sits on cold, nothing crosses the boundary between them, and the oxygen at the bed is spent by the things living in it and nothing replaces it. NOAA defines coastal hypoxia as dissolved oxygen below 2 milligrams per liter, the level too low to support most aquatic life.

That number is a definition. It is not a specification, and the difference is where most water contracts go wrong. The Delaware River Basin Commission's literature review on sensitive estuarine species puts lethal-level dissolved oxygen requirements at 4 to 6.4 milligrams per liter, with about 5 adequate for many species and 6 to 7 protective. A program written to hold water above 2 would be a program contracted to the line where most things stop living, and it would meet its terms every week of a bad summer.

So the first question to put to anybody selling a water outcome is not what the system does. It is which number, for which organisms, over what duration.

Sources. NOAA on the hypoxia threshold: https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/crp/hypoxia/ — the Delaware River Basin Commission review: https://www.nj.gov/drbc/library/documents/Review_DOreq_KeySensSpecies_DelEstuary_ANStoDRBCnov2018.pdf

A definition is not a specification, and the difference is where most water contracts go wrong.

How a Regulator Writes One

California's statewide order for residual aquatic pesticide discharges from algae and aquatic weed control, Water Quality Order 2013-0002-DWQ as amended and corrected in 2016, is a public document. Two passages in its monitoring program are worth more than the rest of it put together, and neither is about chemistry.

The first fixes the unit of generalization. Samples must be collected from a minimum of six application events for each active ingredient in each environmental setting, flowing water and non-flowing water, per year. A result obtained in still water does not stand for moving water. The board wrote that into the instrument rather than leaving it to whoever holds the bottle.

The second fixes the depth. California fixes the sampling depth at three feet below the surface, or at mid water column if the water is shallower than three feet. It is a small clause and it is doing the same work: two samples are only comparable when they are the same kind of object, and in a stratified water body depth is the whole difference between one reading and another.

Source. California State Water Resources Control Board, Order 2013-0002-DWQ as amended, NPDES No. CAG 990005, Attachment C: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/npdes/pesticides/docs/weedcontrol/weed-control.pdf

The Boundary Is the Object

A service zone is a line drawn on a chart before anything is signed, and where that line goes is not a commercial decision dressed up as a technical one. It is the other way round.

A boundary is only meaningful if the water inside it can be told apart from the water outside it. That is a question about exchange, not about acreage. A basin behind a sill and an open shelf of the same area are not the same purchase, because in one of them the water a program is answerable for is still there next week and in the other it is somewhere else. A zone drawn around an intake answers a different question from a zone drawn around a lease, and the two should not carry the same parameter.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. The boundary, the parameter and the measuring party have to be agreed before anybody quotes a price, because all three change what the price is for.

From the Program

An Aquatic Prosperity Program is a subscription to a stated water outcome inside a defined service zone, measured against a baseline taken on that water before the work begins, on year-round terms. It is not bought for an event and it cannot be summoned to one. It ends on performance outside the agreed specification, or, once the minimum subscription period has been served, because the client is not satisfied for any reason at all. The paragraph gives no price, term length or notice period, as none is published.

Caveats

The two Californian passages above describe pesticide applications on inland water. They are not a continuous marine program and nothing here claims the transfer. What they demonstrate is narrower and it is the only thing taken from them: where a regulator intends a statement about treated water to be defensible, it writes the comparison into the instrument instead of leaving it to the party with an interest in the answer.

Before a calibration phase, what a buyer can inspect is the specification and the exit, which is why both are written out in full.

The Delaware River Basin Commission review describes sensitive estuarine species in one estuary. It is not a table of thresholds for fish in general, and a lower figure circulating from an appendix of it is a nineteen-hour result for juvenile White Perch alone. No operating alarm should be set from it.

A Question

From an engineer at a utility, put more bluntly than this: if you cannot show me a result, what am I actually buying?

A specification and a way out of it. The specification names the parameter, its unit, the boundary it applies inside, the period it is measured over and the party holding the instruments. The way out is the two grounds above, one of which does not require the client to prove anything. Neither of those is a result and neither is offered as one.

The question is fair, and putting it first is right. A term sheet written this way is Alarivean taking on the risk the question describes. What the client is asked to rely on is a specification the company can be held to, and an exit the company does not control. At this stage that is what there is to weigh, in place of a record of the company's own. It belongs on the table at the start rather than surfacing in a procurement review.

What Now

One definition that is not a specification, one regulator's sampling design, and a commercial object described as four things a client can check.

For a utility, port or authority weighing an Aquatic Prosperity Program, the next step is a calibration phase inside a boundary agreed in advance, which is where the parameter, the period and the measuring party in the specification get their numbers. Alarivean has not yet published open-water data for its advanced nano-oxidation systems. A client sees that data on their own water in a paid pilot, which carries no obligation to subscribe, or in the calibration phase of an Aquatic Prosperity Program (APP), where payment waits until Alarivean has delivered the water-quality outcomes it committed to.

A situation report starts it: https://alarivean.com/company/connect/