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The Hull Whisperer
Atlantic Business Magazine’s inaugural ECOpreneur of the Year emerged from the Halifax marina with bubbling skin and questions—and built a Dartmouth company that’s now coating ships in Chinese dry docks, overturning decades of tradition along the way.
When Mo AlGermozi was a boy, newly arrived in Halifax from Yemen, he and his friends used to swim in the marina. Some of them earned pocket money scrubbing the hulls of the sailboats docked there. AlGermozi mostly remembers coming out of the water covered in bubbles.
“Every time I went into the water next to a lot of boats, I came out very bubbly. My skin bubbled, and I had this very aggressive reaction,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what it was, and that really made me so curious to understand what’s being put on these sailboats.”
What was being put on those boats was antifouling coating—the toxic, copper-and-biocide paint used to keep barnacles and algae off a hull. Roughly three decades later, the curiosity that started in that marina has become a company. AlGermozi is president and CEO of GIT Coatings in Dartmouth, N.S., a graphene-coatings firm that has talked more than 600 vessels in 20 countries into abandoning the industry’s century-old chemistry. He’s also Atlantic Business Magazine’s first-ever ECOpreneur of the Year.
It is, on its face, an unlikely business. Six companies have dominated marine coatings for decades. AlGermozi is trying to unseat them—from a lab in Atlantic Canada.
The insight
The pitch rests on physics anyone can follow. Every ocean-going vessel needs a coating to stop marine growth from colonizing its hull; a fouled hull drags, and drag burns fuel. Traditional coatings fight fouling with copper and silicone oils that leach into the water. GIT’s patented XGIT technology takes a different route. Its flagship coating, XGIT-FORCE, is a graphene-based paint that leaves the hull exceptionally smooth. Less drag, less engine load, less fuel, fewer emissions—and, crucially, no biocides in the water. A companion product launched this past June, XGIT-VORTEX, does the same job on propellers.
Graphene—a carbon material one atom thick, prized for its strength—is the buzzword, but the selling proposition is both more mundane and more powerful: a slipperier boat is a cheaper boat to run.
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