A Montana company founded near Shepherd has spent two decades engineering floating islands that clean water bodies — and recently discovered those same systems may dramatically cut methane emissions from freshwater lakes, which scientists now recognize as a leading source of the potent greenhouse gas.
The Company and Its Roots
Floating Island International, founded by Bruce Kania and Anne Kania outside Shepherd, has operated commercially since 2005. In that time, the company has deployed more than 14,000 floating islands worldwide, with manufacturing facilities in St. Paul, Minnesota and Lodi, California. The structures are built from armored recycled plastic and use natural microbial processes to filter and cycle nutrients out of water.
At the heart of the operation is Fish Fry Lake, a six-acre research site on the Kanias’ property near Shepherd. Bruce Kania has used it as a working laboratory since the company launched. “Our research lake has been my laboratory since I’ve lived here, since we launched the company,” he said.
A Major Methane Source Hiding in Plain Sight
Freshwater wetlands and lakes have only recently gained attention as a significant contributor to global methane levels. Scientists recognized aquatic methane as a major emissions source roughly ten to fifteen years ago. Today, freshwater wetlands are estimated to account for roughly one-third of all methane released into the atmosphere worldwide — more than double the output attributed to the oil and gas sector.
Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Based on Floating Island International’s own research at Fish Fry Lake, the six-acre pond generates approximately 4.4 tons of methane annually without any mitigation — a volume with a warming impact 88 times greater than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Kania and his team spent roughly five years investigating whether their floating island systems could address the problem. The answer, according to their findings, is a potentially large reduction: keeping a lake oxygenated from top to bottom cuts methane output by as much as 95 percent. “If we can keep the lake oxygenated from top to bottom, we reduce the methane by 95%,” Kania said.
The RAM Technology and Patent
That discovery led to the development of what the company calls RAM technology — Removal of Aquatic Methane. The system works by promoting aerobic microbial activity throughout the water column, which suppresses the anaerobic conditions that produce methane. Aerobic microbes have been found to be four to five times more effective than aquatic plants at cycling nutrients, making oxygenation a powerful tool for both water quality and emissions reduction.
Floating Island International received its first U.S. patent for the RAM technology in April 2025, with additional patents pending. Formal research projects at multiple sites are now underway to verify the results at scale.
Expanding Applications and an Alberta Project
The company is in discussions for an eleven-lake project in Alberta’s Prairie Pothole Region, a vast network of shallow wetlands across the northern Great Plains that represent a substantial methane source. If successful, that effort could serve as a model for broad deployment across similar water bodies in North America and beyond.
The climate stakes, as framed by the Kanias, are significant. Global atmospheric temperatures rose 1.5 degrees centigrade in 2024, and at current methane increase rates, researchers project a 2.5-degree average rise within roughly a decade — a threshold widely cited in climate science as a critical benchmark.
Montana’s Role in the Technology
While Floating Island International’s manufacturing footprint has expanded beyond Montana, the state remains central to its research and development work. The Shepherd-area research lake has driven the company’s core scientific discoveries, and the RAM patent traces directly to work done there.
The company’s trajectory — from a small Montana operation to a globally deployed technology with more than 14,000 installations — reflects the kind of natural-resource and environmental innovation that plays out across the state, where land and water management questions intersect with broader policy debates. The Trump administration’s recent move to shift grizzly bear oversight to states is another example of how federal and state governments are navigating environmental management responsibilities across the region.
