AMHERST -- Thirty companies are in the pipeline, waiting to use a $3.9 million water technology demonstration center that could be built at the University of Massachusetts in as soon as two years.

About 250 people attended the "Innovations and Opportunities in Water Technologies" conference Monday at the Amherst campus.

Now the job is to get the money, already called for in a 2014 state bonding bill, and include it in a state spending budget, said Richard K. Sullivan Jr., president and CEO of the Economic Development of Western Massachusetts.

The plan is to build a test bed for new technologies on campus and attached to the existing Amherst wastewater treatment system, said Michael Murphy, director of water innovation for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

It would be a relatively modest facility that would have a building with test bays, Murphy said. Companies with water treatment technology would slide their equipment into those bays, hook it up to wastewater in whatever stage of treatment the company is studying and then make their technology work.

"Startups coming out can use the facility test out and get their technology and get it verified," Murphy said. "What we are trying to do is accelerate technologies getting out into the marketplace."

Companies cannot do it alone, he added.

"It takes partnerships. You need the university, the state and the utilities to get up to scale," Murphy said.

No one will buy or invest in a researcher's data set, said Guy Marchesseault, vice president of Clean Membranes which is a Woburn-based company currently doing research at UMass Amherst's drinking water labs.

"You need to get over that hump," Marchesseault said. "The hump that separates a technology from a product."

Stephen Pike, CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center said wastewater treatment companies are reluctant to buy new technology. To buy in, they need to see it work in a real-world scenario.

"This has to go beyond a lab bench test or a small-scale experiment," Pike said. "The water treatment industry says we do the same things we've done for 100 years because it works."

But that century-old technology is inefficient, consuming too much energy and might not be up to dealing with contaminates folks are worried about today.

The Clean Energy Center commissioned a study looking at three locations: Amherst, Deer Island where Boston has its sewage plant and there is a little-used lab and the Massachusetts Alternative Septic System Test Center in Barnstable.

For each site, consultants Woodard & Curren came up with three levels of investment and recommend the middle of the three.

UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said the other need the industry has is trained talent. UMass Amherst with its large science and engineering programs is uniquely positioned to fill that need.

Sullivan said its is not yet know how many jobs a demonstration center at UMass Amherst would create. But Murphy said each company researching at the center would have two or three employees. But the companies that research here could end up establishing headquarters in the Pioneer Valley.