Pushkin. I grew up in southern California, where there is this really striking You could call it a juxtaposition, you could call it irony. It's this. You're sitting there right next to this vast ocean, and yet fresh water drinking water is extremely scarce, has to be piped in from hundreds of miles away, sometimes still runs short. So you know, as you're staring out from the semi desert, how to cross the ocean. This thought inevitably comes to your mind.
If only we could take the salt out of just a teeny fraction of that ocean water, our fresh water problems would be solved. And in fact, we can do that a little bit. In San Diego County, for example, a desalination plant provides about ten percent of the county's fresh water. But desalination is limited because it has some pretty significant problems. First, when you suck in the seawater,
you tend to kill some marine life. And then you have to push that seawater through a membrane to take the salt out, and that pushing requires quite a lot of energy, which is expensive. And then only about half of that seawater in fact turns into fresh water, and what's left is this really salty brine that goes back into the ocean and can mess up the local ecosystem. And on top of all of that, in a lot of places, people just don't want to put a big
industrial desalination plant right next to the beach. And so for all of those reasons, people just don't do desalination that much. But there is this other idea. It's actually been kicking around for decades. What if you could do desalination at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of meters down, where the pressure is so great that the weight of the ocean itself would push the sea water through that membrane to create freshwater. Such an efficient idea. I find
it just delightful in its cleverness. It wouldn't solve all the problems associated with desalination, but it could significantly reduce them. If you could get it to work cheaply and at scale, maybe southern California and other dry coastal places around the world could start getting a lot more of their fresh water from the sea. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today
is Michael Porter. He's the chief technology officer of a company called ocean Well. Michael's problem is this, how can you desalinate water at the bottom of the sea and do it cheaply enough to compete with other sources of fresh water. As I mentioned before, this idea has actually been around for a long time. But Michael told me that this is a good moment to be working in the field, in part because of breakthroughs made by the oil and gas industry.
You know. Luckily for us, the timing is right because over the last couple decades there have been major improvements in remote operated vehicles and what I would call electrification of the seabed. So in you know, a few decades ago, the oil and gas industry, who drill for oil, you know, not only on land but also offshore, they have developed a lot of these high pressure deep sea technologies in
order to drill deeper and deeper. And so there's a bunch of platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, where they're constantly drilling, and so we're leveraging a lot of the knowledge that's been gained in those offshore industries and applying that to water essentially.
So the guy who ends up being your co founder comes to you some years ago with this idea. At that time, like what was the state of undersea desalination at that time?
There have been a couple of tries here and there that we were aware of, mostly small whether you call them startups or just you know, curious people that have the ability to try this technology out. You know, those things were out there, but there were really no companies other than us and another Norwegian company that were looking at this seriously.
I read that you built a proto type in your kitchen. Is that true? And what was that?
Like?
It's true.
We came to this impasse where we had to find a space to build and the question was do we do it ourselves or do we work with a contractor? And so we looked at some contractors and ultimately decided it's best to do it ourselves because we're going to move faster, it's likely going to be a lot cheaper,
and we're going to learn a lot more. So we were looking for a place to do this work and I just happened to have a house that was partially under construction at the time, So I decided it would be okay to move all of this equipment into our kitchen and build it in pieces there. So for a couple months, two members of my team and I essentially lived out of this you know, under construction house and built this prototype for several months.
What does it look like? So, like, what am I picture? I'm picturing like a kitchen or it's just like a room that's like framed in with drywall, but it's not a kitchen yet, Like what's going on in the room.
So we essentially had a working kitchen. But yes, all the drywall was removed, okay, and you know it was functional but not aesthetic.
Okay, So you could cook, Yes.
We could cook, and we could live there.
And like in the middle of the room or something like, where's the prototype and what's it look like?
Yeah? Yeah, So the kitchen's got a not an island peninsula that sticks out, okay, And on one side of the peninsula there was enough space to put half of the machine, which is about a four foot diameter by six foot tall, and then on the other side was another four foot by six foot cylinder, and those two cylinders essentially needed to be stacked on top of each other and married up before they're put into the reservoir
where we're testing it. Okay, So we built it in pieces and then we had to disassemble the thing completely to fit it through the door because four feet was too wide to fit through.
The foot door. Did you know that was coming? Yeah, we did. We play at fourth seed. Okay, it's funnier if you don't, right and you're like taking the door off the hinges. No, right, Like, okay, so you build this thing in your house, you take it out of your house, you put it back together, and where do you take it?
So we take it up to North La County through a water district called Los Virginis Communicipal Water District. They partnered with us to help us on this pilot prototyping path and they have a reservoir there, a fresh water drinking reservoir where we ran this test. And probably the first question you're gonna ask, as well as freshwater not seawater.
Crossed my mind. Yeah, and how can you test it if it's fresh water? I'll take the bait. Yeah.
So submerged reverse osmosis by itself is just a system to you know, remove all the non water molecules, and so at freshwater lake, while it is fresh and doesn't have a lot of salt, it does have some total dissolve solids or salts.
But it's basically the theory if you can do reverse osmosis in fifty feet of fresh water, then it'll probably work in fifteen hundred feet of seawater. Yeah.
The difference is you need more pressure in the ocean because there's more salt in the ocean.
So you put the thing in fifty feet of water, and are you piping the water back out? Yes?
Yeah, we drop it down there, we turn on our pumps, and the pumps essentially circulate the lake water through our system.
And as the lakewater passes through our system, we have another pump that sits behind our membranes and it creates that low pressure on the fresh water or the permeate side of the membrane, and that creates that pressure differential for the water to come through the membrane, and then on the outlet, it creates a pressure high enough that it can boost that water up to the surface where we then have a little spicket that it comes out of at the top and then just discharges back into the lake and.
Did it work. It worked.
Actually, just last week we passed a pretty big milestone of making one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of produced water, which is equivalent to about three months more than three months of runtime at more than one gallon a minute, which is what our system was sized to do. And that is the theory that we predicted, and we successfully passed it, and so it meets the models that we thought.
And that's the machine you built in your kitchen. Yes, yes, that's great. So okay, the technology seems promising at least, but for this to work, it has to be super cheap, right, because the product you're selling is just water. So tell me about the economics of the business.
You know, I like to think about it in three sets of costs.
So you have your cap X costs building the play into.
For equipment, you know, building the actual physical equipment, and you have your operational costs, and I like to separate that from the energy costs. The energy we know is less, so we have about a forty percent energy savings there. The capital costs are actually likely to be less or at least on par with what you see on shore, and that's because we don't have to create an artificial
pressure environment. And so what that does removes a bunch of big pumps and big heavy piping that they would typically use on shore to create that artificial pressure environment.
That's the good news. There's a bad news part.
The bad news part, yes, the bad news part is you can imagine it's pretty easy to just walk up to a plant on shore and put your hands on a vessel that is leaking and fixing it, right, that's very hard to do when you're fifteen hundred feet deep
in the ocean. You have to take a vessel out, which are often expensive, and then you have to either lift the system up or bring an rov down because it's too deep for humans to go, so you can't send divers down, and you then have to either maintain in place or pull the system up, and that is expensive. It's not unfounded. This happens all the time in the oil and gas industry, but it is expensive. And so that's the trade off that we get there.
So as long as you build a machine that never breaks your goal.
Done exactly, and so we've essentially developed what I call a pilot program where this reservoir test that we're running is one piece to that overall puzzle where we're testing lots of different systems in different environments, including the ocean in the deep and shallow ocean waters, and using all of that data, we can then develop models of our own to predict what that membrane life will ultimately be
in the deep ocean. And I'm really focused on membrane life and and filter life because those are the things that will foul up and essentially stop production other things like pumps and structures and all the you know, the parts that's used to build the frame and all the piping that's well established material selection problems.
I mean, that's the stuff that oil and gas companies use. It's the membrane and the filter is what is what you're doing differently and therefore is not right tested in a kind of industrial setting.
And we are using commercially available membranes and filters, but we're doing them in a different environment that's relatively unknown, the deep ocean beyond two hundred meters, which is known as the aphotic zone. That means you have about less
than one percent of light that shines through. It's relatively unknown and unexplored, and just like on land, you know, you'll have regional variability, global variability in the ocean, and so we really need to know, you know, in the site that we want to install the system, what does that site look like, what does the seawater like, they're the bioactivity, where the currents like. And then we have to design around that site for understanding how long the
system will actually work. Each site will be a little bit different, and so the focus for us is twofold. It is making the system last as long as possible and making the cost of intervening on that system or maintaining that system as low as possible.
So assuming you're able to do that, then the marginal gallon of water you produce is going to be cheaper than when produced on land, right because your energy costs
are lower. That's what's driving the marginal cost. And as I understand it, that actually is part of the way you're hoping to solve the brine problem, the problem of desalination plants putting out salty brine, because the economics will mean that you don't have to separate as much fresh water per unit of sea water, which means you don't have to create such nasty brine. And that's how you're
solving the brine problem. Sort it seems like that's potentially or you tell me how do you deal with that?
So there's two parts to this. Like you said, we don't squeeze as much water as possible through these membranes, and instead we're just lightly sipping the water off the membranes. As a result, our brine is only about five to eighteen percent saltier than the surrounding ocean, rather than the two times saltier from an onshore plant. So that's a
good starting point. The other thing we're doing is brine, which has more salt in it than seawater, is heavier than seawater, and so it wants to sink to the bottom. And what would happen is if you were to discharge it near the seafloor, it would essentially pull up on the seafloor and create something called a brine pool, which
is generally toxic to the native biological life in that area. Okay, So what we're doing instead is we have what we call a brine riser, and it discharges the brine above our system high enough that it doesn't settle on the seafloor and cause any problems to the benthic environment on the sea floor. So this brine riser allows us to essentially discharge our brine into the open water column into
natural currents where it will be rapidly diffused. And we've run some initial modeling on this brine discharge and diffusion and our model suggests it will be much less than one percent above ambient salinity within the first meter of discharge.
So that's the brine problem. What about the sucking in marine life problem.
Yeah, the sucking in marine life problem is on the intake side. The first thing is we're in a different environment than the surface. So while there still are organisms down there, microorganisms, macroorganisms, there's still life down deep, it's not the same type of life. You don't have all the phytoplankton that live up there that need the light, and those are Earth's primary producers. They generate a lot of the oxygen that we breathe, and we generally do
not see those down at that depth. The other organisms that are down there, the big ones are easy. You just essentially screen off your intake system so the big ones won't go through the screens, and then the little stuff that could fit through these screens. We have essentially developed this filtration system that allows us to catch those microorganisms and then backwash those organisms back out of the system unharmed. And we've got some initial data from our
reservoir testing that says this is absolutely possible. We've actually seen little critters get sucked into our system and then we blow them out and they're still swimming around on the other side. So this life safe system is really one very unique thing about our system, as well as the brine riser that make it more environmentally friendly than just say, taking an onshore plant and putting it on the bottom of the sea floor.
We'll be back in just a minute. So you did this pilot in a freshwater reservoir. It worked. What's next? You can put what are these in the ocean soon? Yes, we are.
Currently near the final stages of building a system that's going to go off the back of the boat and be tested in the ocean, and we're gearing up to design the next stage or scale up from that, where we'll be building a bigger system that will also go into the ocean for a longer period of time, and we need to know how long this thing can last so that we can make, you know, relatively accurate projections of its economics overall, which is what our customers want to see.
Talk to me about where you are with the technoeconomics, Like, sure, presumably there are places where they would take that trade off Huntington Beach, you know, wealthy communities where they would say, yeah, we'll pay a little more for fresh water if you can put it on the bottom of the ocean, even if they don't care about the environment, just so they don't have to see it right, And maybe they care about the environment too, Like where are you with the technoeconomics?
So ultimately the cost is going to be tied to how long the membranes will last and how often we have to swap them out or do maintenance.
That's the big unknown that that's the big unknown that you have to put the thing in the ocean to festra out.
And so we have, you know, one piece to that puzzle figured out, and over the next couple months we'll be getting data on the rest of those pieces where we'll be able to make fairly accurate models of how long memoranes last subc for sure.
Well, and then there's also all of the other parts of the system presumably, and I know, you know, in individual components they have been under the sea before, but presumably, I don't know. Things just break right as you said, like it's really hard to fix a thing at the bottom of the ocean. So there's the life of the membrane,
which is, you know, straightforward. It seems rather straightforward to test, like when you worry or when you think about what might not work and might not work, I don't even mean fail, I just mean might make what you're doing economically not feasible, Like what do you think about what might not work? Besides the membrane?
I mean, a lot of things can break down. But one of our more expensive components, for instance, is the umbilical, which runs the power from shore to our pumps, and it's one power line.
How far is that, by the way, how far is that?
It will very much depend on the location. For example, the Big Island of Hawaii, you only have to go just under a mile offshore. In California it's about five miles. Around the Mediterranean, you'll say anywhere from like three to seven miles, but generally speaking, I would say anything about less than ten to fifteen miles is where we are most economical.
And you were saying, there's one essentially power cord, one wire that you need, and presumably that wire needs to not break exactly.
That's the thing that for me gives me the most fear. You know, what they do in when they build these umbilicals is you know, if you need say three three lines of copper, they'll build in six so that if one fails, you can just move to the other. So you know, there is some redundancy in that system along
with others like the pumps. You know, we're we're looking at, you know, what is that trade off between having redundant pumps versus the cost of having two versus one, or three versus one, And so these are the things that we need to consider when we're you know, scaling up and building a commercially viable system.
It's an interesting optimization problem. It's like a techno economic optimization problem, right. It is more pumps are more expensive initially, but you really don't want to have to go to the bottom of the ocean to replace a pump exactly.
And surprisingly, my background in biomechanical evolution actually lends itself well because I was studying the optimization of trade offs that nature uses to you know, optimize solutions in natural systems like Darwin's finches for instance. Or I actually used to look at seahorse tails and compare the mechanics of a tail and how it could be potentially used for you know, a robot arm. But then I looked at
all these different mechanical features. You know, it's a multidimensional problem with many, many different variables, and looking at how nature optimizes these things. So in many ways, I'm applying those same methods of looking at these multidimensional trade off problems to help us optimize you know what, that right number of pumps is to make our system redundant and reliable but not too costly.
Survival of the fittest is survival of the most optimal.
Exactly, Yes, and we're trying to be that fit company.
Yeah, I mean, evolutionary biologists talk about things being costly, right When fish that live in caves evolved to not have eyes anymore, it's like it's costly to have eyes that if you live in a dark cave, you're wasted your energy budget on eyes exactly. So when are you going to know if it works?
Well, know when it works when it's down there working.
If it works, when's that going to be.
So we're targeting twenty twenty eight as our first you know, commercial demonstration, and along that path, we have a handful of varying scale prototypes and varying environments that we're going to be testing, and so we'll be building confidence along the entire path.
If it works, what'll, you know, what all the Pacific coast of the Americas look like, or what'll the world look like in what number of years? Shall we say, ten years, fifteen years?
Sure, so you know, ideally, in my head, you know, my sort of more long term, grander vision of this is, if you know, if the ocean well really does do what it's designed to do and takes off around the world, we will see more water staying where it belongs. For instance, in California, in southern California, most of our water comes from the Colorado River and from the north through what's called the State Water Project. And those two sources of
water are not local. They both travel really far distances to get to us, and it takes a lot of water away from the natural ecosystems that exist there on the Colorado River and in northern California, and it also takes away from all the residents in places like Arizona
and Nevada and Colorado. And so I would like to see that water stay where it belongs naturally, so that all the eCos systems and the planetary systems that we need to sort of keep our climate and our planet, you know, thriving for generations, can continue to stay healthy essentially.
And so you know, my goals that we can make some of these coastal cities that are currently not what I would consider sustainable in terms of water more sustainable and allow these other ecosystems to continue to thrive, you know, maintaining their own local water resources.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. I want to do a lightning round. Now, Okay, where's your favorite place to surf?
That's a good question. I mean I have many favorites in different locations. I mean, I've been lucky that, you know, I did my master's out in Hawaii, and so I've got a handful of spots out there that I really liked. I actually learned to surf in Costa Rica. That was a very fun experience. And then I don't know, a big rock out here in La Joya, where I currently live is kind of my local favorite.
Right now, tell me about one wave.
One wave, I'll say the first time I got a barrel, that's probably the one that stands out. So I grew up in Virginia, and growing up in Virginia, the waves aren't great, but we live driving distance from Cape Hatteras, which are the outer banks of North Carolina, sticks out further in the Atlantic than anywhere else. And when you get these hurricanes that come through, the ones that don't hit land but sit right off the coast just pump
beautiful waves into the shore. But yeah, my first barrel was in Hatteras on one of those days, and you know, it was well overhead and head high. That's how we talk about the height, I guess, you know. And it was one of those things where you see it coming in front of you and usually I would have just crashed and fallen, but I made it through and it came over and I was fully standing up on the other side and it was a beautiful moment.
You wrote a paper on the shape of the seahorse tail, because the seahorse's tail is a square, and in the paper you asked why is the tail of the seahorse that shape? Why is it square? And like, first of all, why is that a question? Like would you expect it to be like a triangle like other fish, seahorses, a fish or what. Yeah.
For my PhD, I worked in a lab where we looked at all of these different natural organisms and we looked at the structure and function from a mechanical perspective. And so in that class, we had to give pitches on what we were doing that we thought might turn into a company. And so I took the seahorse tail as my sort of product. And I was like, I'm going to turn the sea horsetail into a robot arm or a catheter or you know something that could you know,
help in the medical field. And I was giving this pitch on oh, the seahorse tail would be great for this and that and that and this, and someone in the audience said it's square. You know your veins are round, so wouldn't you want it to be round? And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, you could make it round. Sure, we could just make it round. And so I went back to the lab and I was like, Okay, I'm going to print out a round version of a sea horse tail and you know,
satisfy this question. And then I started playing with the round version and I was like, this thing's terrible. It doesn't work anything like the square one does. And that's where the question came from, Well why is it square? And then we wrote this whole paper with some biologists to sort of explain the evolutionary advantages that a square tail had to a roundtail.
What are the advantages of it being square?
Yeah, so there's two main advantages, I believe. One is that it resists this twisting or over torquing the tail itself. So you've got this spinal column that runs through the center, okay, and you can imagine if you take a bunch of nerves and other things that are running through your spinal column and twist them, that would be bad.
And if it's round, it's like more likely to twist.
Exactly because the square structure and the way that it's built with these little pegs that sort of stick into the sockets of the square component in front of it, it resists over twisting that section of the tail. And so as a result, it would help it not get hurt or essentially even die if it were to be pulled in one direction or another. So that's one advantage.
The other is that these square plates, the way they overlap, they're like little L shapes, and so you have four l's that overlap each other a little bit, and so those overlapping sections allow them to slide a little bit. So you can imagine if a predator was to come up, like a bird come up and grab the sea horse, it would crush the tail if it was to grab onto the tail, and these little plates would allow them to slide because the square and the overlap creates these
linear sections of slide. It allows it to just sort of absorb the impact and bounce back.
Huh.
But the circular structure, the circles don't allow have that sort of linear overlap. Now you've got these two overlapping sections that want to pivot, and so that pivoting would cause more damage in the tissue that would tear away when it was grabbed. And so those are the two sort of primary reasons why this tail is square. And then I say a third would be it also allows more surface contact onto things that it's grasping, So it's better for grabbing grasping, and it's better for armor.
Did you ever end up coming up with a commercial application for something built on the model of a sea horse's tail.
No, I mean we had many ideas, but nothing that actually took off. And after I left, I've casually kept track of what else is going on in the seahorse world. And there are new groups out there that have been developing robots that mimic the tail and they look quite cool. There's one funny paper where they even made a life sized human scaled tail and stuck it on the back of a human to see how it changes the balance of a human as they're running.
Oh, if they're running. I thought they were going to put them in water. It was going to be like a mermaid, some kind of a robot mermaid.
There are some interesting academic ideas out there. Yeah, Academics is a lot of fun and often leads to some really cool, groundbreaking knowledge, often really silly stuff too.
You've talked a couple of times about sort of comparing academia and industry and work, you know, working in the private sector, Like, what's one thing you would want to tell your colleagues in academia about industry, What's one thing you wish professors understood about business or working.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I would say.
That you have to work within the system that you you live. So, you know, we live in a economic driven, capitalist society for the most part, at least Western culture, and really nothing gets done without some economic incentive, it seems. And so in academics there's a lot of you know, alarms raised on climate environment, you know, the mass extinctions, things like this, but it's very rarely tied to real economic incentives or real you know, real things that would
move the needle. And I think there needs to be more emphasis on how the two can work together to make solutions happen. For instance, with ocean Well, you know, we have identified a commodity water that can be sold to make money, and we are developing a technology that can hopefully put a dent in one area at least
of planetary health and climate. And so I think there needs to be more of that type of thinking in academia, just bringing in the whole picture of what human society really is right now.
Michael Porter is the chief technology officer at ocean Well. Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah briguerrett. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Pop