Field Notes from the FOAK Frontlines – Via Separations

Everyone wants to decarbonize industry. Not many talk about what happens after the pilot works.

Scaling hardware isn’t linear.

It’s exponential — in pain.

Case in point: Via Separations

Their FOAK gamble? Scaling their membrane-based heat separator 100x at a commercial paper mill in Alberta, Canada.

* The science? ✅ Solid

* The pilot? ✅ Promising

* The scale-up? ❌ A swamp of unexpected engineering nightmares:

🔧 Labour costs exploded — getting a good welder on site during snowstorms = great for the schedule, brutal for the budget

🧳 The team wore every hat imaginable and spent weeks on-site

❄️ Winter storms delayed shift changes and logistics

📦 Equipment had to be ordered on-demand, not upfront — shaving 18–24 weeks off lead times to keep the project alive

This wasn’t a “tech readiness” issue.

It was ops readiness, supply chain readiness, and above all, mindset readiness.

FOAK means debugging the real world.

Despite it all, the team got it done.

Was it painful? Yes.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

If you're on the FOAK frontlines, building tech for hard-to-abate sectors, let’s trade war stories.

I’m building a living archive of real-life scale-up pitfalls and tested FOAK frameworks.

The original interview of Shreya Dave, CEO of Via Separations, can be found here.