Ocean Power + Bitcoin = Human Flourishing: Nate Harmon (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
O-TEC is just another one of these base load renewable power sources that's available in

(00:07):
a certain band.
And turns out a lot of that geographic band is highly dependent on the flow of marine
diesel.
They're burning diesel fuel, not even like petroleum.
They're burning the worst of the worst using 70 year old technology that is no longer manufactured.

(00:29):
They can't get replacement parts and it's just breaking down and the logistics of getting
oil to a lot of these places is driving the cost up.
There's been a nice confluence of events in O-TEC over the last two decades with the
development of offshore oil and gas infrastructure.
This offshore oil and gas infrastructure development has brought the costs of a lot of the components

(00:53):
of O-TEC, turbines, pumps, heat exchangers, larger and larger vessels down to the point
where it is now competitive in a lot of these regions with oil and gas.
And that means more cheaper, more plentiful energy for these regions, which of course

(01:14):
means more human flourishing there.
Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 842-738 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.

(01:36):
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up.
Today, that guest is Nathaniel Harmon.
Nate is a chemical oceanographer and the CEO and co-founder of OceanBit.
They're building Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion or O-TEC technology to deliver 24-7 base load

(01:56):
power across the world.
Bitcoin mining is also a key part of their technology stack.
This was a fascinating conversation and I know you're going to enjoy the heck out of
it and learn a lot along the way.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin Podcast wherever you're listening
and give this show a 5 star rating or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care but I sure would appreciate

(02:22):
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(02:44):
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Nate Harmon.

(03:35):
I started doing the role from the top things after it was kind of a meta podcast.
I interviewed Peter McCormick, who I've just always really enjoyed.
His is still one of the podcasts I listen to the most.
And he was like, no, mate, you got my accent.
My Peter imitation is terrible.
I got to work.

(03:56):
I'm like, no, mate, you got to roll from the start.
Pre-roll is the best pot.
And I was like, okay, I learned something new.
You just start talking and you see what happens and sometimes you get some gems in there.
But as part of my preparation for this, I was watching your chat with Peter.
It was from about a year ago, I think.
And just fascinating stuff.

(04:16):
It was a good primer on a lot of this, but also excited because a year is a long time
in the Bitcoin space.
A lot can be done there.
So Nate, excited to have you here today.
Thanks for coming on another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
Oh, it's awesome.
Thanks for having me.

(04:38):
Really excited.
Yeah, besides Peter's, yours is great.
But really, I'm just not, I don't know, I have too much work to do and I rarely, rarely
listen to too much outside of YouTube.
Wow.
I'm honored that I'm included in that list with Peter.

(04:59):
And I found the same for myself because I early in the Bitcoin journey was like podcasts
were hugely helpful for me because sometimes you read stuff and it's like, this is going
over my head a bit and I want to hear somebody like explain it in more detail and I want
to be able to be driving or doing whatever else I'm doing while that's happening.
And so loved podcasts.

(05:19):
And then the further along you get, it's like, I still mind Fiat for a living.
So this is, you know, this is my side hobby, which I enjoy very much.
But Fiat work is not always conducive to having podcasts in my years.
So I've had to cut down my consumption.
Now I'm making one now too, you know, another fucking Bitcoin podcast.

(05:40):
And so it's like, I still have my top ones.
I love Peter's.
I love Guy Swans because he just reads literally everything.
Preston Pish has his great like Bitcoin show on the Investors Podcast Network.
But I've kind of tamed it down from the list that I had before to basically those ones

(06:00):
that I at least are in my recurring cycle.
But glad that you're on this one.
You know, Bitcoin podcast number go up, I think is a good thing.
We need to saturate the podcast market and just really, really overwhelm all of the Fiat
monetary podcasts.
I think that's the key to mass adoption.
Right, right.
I think maybe a good place to start out here, let's start at the very beginning.

(06:26):
And I like to ask a question that's pretty broad and you can take it any way you want
to.
There's no rules with it.
But just quite simply, who are you and how did you get here today to be doing what you're
doing?
Yeah, uh, it's a great open-ended question.
So my name is Nathaniel Harmon.

(06:48):
I go by Nate.
I am an oceanographer by training.
So I studied the ocean in particular.
I studied, I, you know, specialized in marine geology and geochemistry.
So the things in the water that are not moving or moving by are not alive, right?

(07:16):
So no biology.
I'm not really a biological oceanographer.
My wife is the biologist in the family.
I am a chemical oceanographer.
I did analytical chemistry, method development, process engineering, platform development.

(07:39):
So you know, autonomous institute measurement platforms, buoys and whatnot.
Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's been a life, you know, multiple phases.
Uh, at one point I was a scuba instructor, which is really where I fell in love with
the ocean.

(08:00):
Um, you know, I taught, taught people how to dive in the keys, uh, and then moved out
here to Hawaii with my wife, who at the time was a dolphin trainer.
So we were, you know, a very ocean-centric, uh, couple.
We got, uh, we decided we met in the keys and the Florida keys and decided to move to

(08:24):
Hawaii after about three months of being together.
So it was, uh, it was a quick turnaround.
We've been together ever since.
Um, yeah, we're, we've been married now.
She's going to kill me for forgetting how long.
We have, uh, one, one small child and, uh, you're a father now too as well.

(08:45):
It's a trip that having this little human running around all of a sudden, it's just
this fully fledged person and you're like, I'm just trying not to screw you up.
You know, I'm just, you're, you're who you are.
And, uh, I'm going to do my best just to, to nurture that.
But yeah, my, I'm very early in this journey.
It's only four months for me.
So I've got some learning to do still.

(09:07):
But not running around yet.
No, no, flipping over constantly.
Uh, just really, oh yeah.
And so it's like just constant rolling over.
It seems to really enjoy that, uh, smiles constantly, which is great.
Finds everything hilarious.
Uh, so he's going to be a prankster and a joker.
I think that's, that's the vibe I get from him.

(09:28):
I remember my, uh, my daughter's first method of locomotion was the continuous
turning over and we would just see her rolling into the kitchen, rolling out of
the kitchen cause she couldn't go forward and backward.
It was just, you know, rolling over, uh, you know, over, and oh, forget it.

(09:50):
It was the silliest thing.
That's creative problem solving right there though.
It's like, I can't figure out how to go forward.
That's okay.
I'll move side to side.
Yeah.
You have the tools in front of you.
Uh, you only have a certain skill set, certain set of tools.
And then you got to figure out how to use those tools in a creative manner.
Right.

(10:10):
Absolutely.
So she did.
And he did it quite well, uh, apparently because here we sit on another
fucking Bitcoin podcast, uh, because, uh, as a direct or a, well, few orders
down results of this guy, people, whoever deciding to just make money.

(10:31):
Uh, it's kind of wild.
Like sometimes I sit back and think about him like, what, what, what would the
world look like?
What would like many of our lives look like if Bitcoin just didn't exist.
If there was that vacuum, you know, what would, what would all of us who are
somehow involved in the Bitcoin space be doing?
And it's kind of hard to, to imagine, I guess more of the same.

(10:53):
Maybe some of us would have found tangential paths.
Maybe somebody else would have come to market with some other sort of, you know,
some other cryptocurrency, maybe if Bitcoin wasn't the, the progenitor of all
of this, I don't know.
It's a, that's always what I figured.
It's a wild thought experiment.
I always, I always liken Bitcoin to a, um, a discovery rather than an invention.

(11:16):
Um, like it was always out there.
The tools to create it were always out there, but, um, nobody had put them all
together in the correct order and somebody would have done it eventually.
Uh, you know, realizing that the key, the thing that no one had tried was to
just disappear.

(11:40):
It, it's a thing that I think is almost, would be almost impossible for most people.
Like that took a special type of person to be able to remain anonymous and then
to completely pull back from it and, and truly disappear.
And then to whatever he, she, they are doing now has not touched the coins.

(12:01):
Maybe they're no longer alive.
Who knows, but it's, it's wild to think about like Bitcoin would not exist as
it does today.
If, if Satoshi did not disappear, it's, it's not, it's not possible for it to
exist.
That's a throat to choke.
And as it is now, there is no throat to choke, which is wonderful because
there's a lot of people who want to strangle it.
It's a kid.
It's turd with it.
Yeah.

(12:22):
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of regulatory problems by simply not existing.
When we were in the hospital, you know, the, for the birth of our daughter, you
know, the lady comes in and is like, Oh, do you want me to fill out the social
security form?
And I took a second.

(12:43):
I was like, wait a second.
Do I?
And I had to.
So they say, yeah.
There's no choice.
Yeah.
There kind of should be a choice though.
Social security is such a weird thing because that system, like we were never
meant to use the social security number as our like de facto government

(13:06):
identifier.
That was never the idea.
They just had no other system.
The social security law do not use this, this number for identification.
It's.
And then here, here we are now.
However, many years later, and it's like, nope, that's, that's basically the one
number that you need to be able to do anything and prove that you are a person,

(13:28):
a citizen in the U S and of course, so that you can, you know, be taxed
appropriately and such.
But it, it's just so, it's kind of an example of a really good example of a
temporary solution just becoming permanent because of inertia.
And we're, we're not going back on that.
And then meanwhile, it's just childishly easy to scam people out of their social

(13:50):
security, their socials and get access to that.
And you send it unencrypted so many times and it touches so many people and it's
like, oh God, this is a really terrible system.
Like shock.
It's just blown out there for everybody.
It's, it's a mess.
Well, now speaking of systems, if I may, I would love to kind of dive in a little

(14:13):
bit and talk about systems involving the ocean.
I would like to talk about O-TEC specifically, which is what you are
passionate about, focused on building a company around.
Can you talk about ocean bit a little bit at, at maybe a, a high level in terms

(14:33):
of what O-TEC is, what it, what it kind of enables.
And then we can maybe get into some of the more, the more nitty gritty about it.
Sure.
Yeah, so ocean thermal energy conversion or O-TEC, which I hate the acronym because
it's not intuitive.

(14:53):
So I'm trying to, trying to, trying to start saying ocean thermal now, like
geothermal, because that's essentially what it is.
It's a, it's kind of an offshoot of geothermal where instead of using the heat from the,
you know, the coming up from, you know, the center of the planet, right?

(15:16):
You're using the heat that's retained in the surface layer of the ocean.
So right, the sun shines on the ocean, gets nice and warm here in Hawaii.
It's very warm all year round, right?
No wetsuit required.
I don't know where, where are you located right now?
Oh, in, in just Balmy, Illinois.

(15:36):
Uh, we'll just say Illinois generally.
The, I, I've lived, I've lived in a couple of places.
I've lived out on the West coast for a little bit, but I've somehow found my way back to
the Midwest.
I'm a small town Wisconsin guy, like very small town.
That's why I'm still, you know, habit of drinking Miller light.
I can't get around it.

(15:57):
It's like my, my body requires it somehow.
But yeah, Wisconsin and Illinois is where I've lived for most of my life.
I've never been to Hawaii and it is on my list of places I need to go like as soon as
possible.
It just looks too beautiful to ignore for too long.
Yeah.
It's, it's definitely a very special place.

(16:19):
And you know, we, we got warm water all year round, right?
As does most of the tropics and a lot of small island development states.
And yeah, it, uh, ocean thermal energy uses that difference in temperature between the

(16:39):
warm surface water and deep cold water.
You run what's called a Rankin Cycle.
So it's just like a steam steam engine.
You're taking heat from one location and moving it to a heat sink.
So the cold water, you're moving heat from the warm water to the cold water, uh, which

(17:00):
is mediated by a working fluid.
So in our case, we use ammonia.
Um, it's the best for the particular temperature range.
And you use the warm water of the surface to boil that ammonia, right?
Turn it into a gas.
That gas now flows through a turbine, which spins, of course, you can extract electricity.

(17:23):
Then you condense that gas back to a liquid using the cold water.
And then you just pump that ammonia back to the warm water heat exchanger and it just
goes around and around and around in a big loop.
Um, so it's a, you know, a base load component and we can go into that, you know, a little
more later.

(17:44):
Um, it's a base load energy source.
So it's available all year round, right?
I don't have to wear a wetsuit in Hawaii, even on, you know, the coldest day of the
year.
Uh, that's, that's energy.
And there's a lot of places in the world right now that are hurting because of the uncertainty
in the, you know, the cost of diesel fuel.

(18:07):
Uh, you know, just the logistics of getting oil or diesel or coal to, uh, you know, some
of these far flung places just drives that cost up here in Hawaii.
We're paying 46 cents per kilowatt hour.
Um, because we're, you know, we're not, we don't have that energy independence and O-Tech

(18:29):
ocean thermal can provide that energy independence to a lot of places.
I appreciate the primer on it because, uh, until you were the person who actually, when
I started following you on Twitter, this was, you were the one who introduced me to this
concept and I, I had looked into it, uh, back then, I don't even remember exactly when

(18:50):
that was, uh, but then I've been looking into it more since and it's really kind of fascinating
and it seems so in a way obvious and simple that you kind of say, well, well, wait a minute,
why hasn't, why is nobody doing this?
And I understand it, the technology itself has been around for like a hundred years,

(19:13):
something like that.
Can you talk a little bit about, okay, this is a technology that's been around, I mean,
for multiple generations, why did it not find traction?
What, what, what was the barrier to it that like it's been around for so long and it seems
so obvious, especially for places like Hawaii, places in the tropics, places around the equator.

(19:34):
Why did this not catch on?
Well, yeah, like you said, it's been around for first conceptualized like 150 years ago,
Jules Verne in 20, 20,000 leagues under the sea was the first real inspiration.
Um, then, uh, the first plant was constructed in the 30s, 1930s.

(20:01):
Um, of course, that was not great timing for alternative energy sources, right?
I mean, there were, uh, you know, electric cars at the time.
Uh, there was a big competition between electric vehicles at the time and, you know, combust
ICEs, uh, internal combustion engines.

(20:21):
And there were, uh, you know, there was a couple of massive oil discoveries in the Middle
East in the US.
Um, and that, that was the end of it, right?
It's, uh, I always liken, uh, I always liken fossil fuels to, you know, fiat.

(20:43):
Um, you know, you're borrowing against tomorrow for gains today.
Um, and that's kind of been the story of O-TEC is they've been competing with fossil fuels.
Uh, and, you know, there was, see the largest O-TEC plant built to date was the one megawatt

(21:04):
O-TEC plant here in Hawaii.
So, you know, uh, decent scale and floating ship conversion, uh, here in Hawaii deployed,
everything went fine.
And there was, um, a project to build a 40 meg right.
The next step after the one megawatt O-TEC plant was a, uh, 40 megawatt O-TEC plant

(21:26):
here in Hawaii.
And that was done during the Carter administration, Jimmy Carter, and after Carter lost reelection,
Reagan came, took all the solar panels off the, you know, the White House roof, but he
also cut funding for, um, all the renewable energy projects that were going on.

(21:48):
So it set us back, that one action set us back on solar, on wind, and of course on O-TEC.
They had that project, the one through which I have the copy of the full, full design study,
engineering report design study here.
And they, these things only now exist in, uh, in paper because it was done in the 80s.

(22:14):
See, I kept this plan that they spent millions of dollars on, uh, you know, to develop, to
go get the parts, to do the feasibility studies, the environmental impact studies, all ready
to go.
Reagan comes in and just chops its head off.

(22:34):
Uh, and if that, that single decision hadn't been made, we would have O-TEC all over the
world right now.
And I'd probably be working at some other O-TEC company.
Um, yeah, it's just been, you know, bad timing, right?
Fossil fuels are great source of energy, right?

(22:57):
They're super energy dense.
Uh, they're transportable, right?
Coal, you can just put coal in your pocket, light it on fire and get energy.
You know, oil is a liquid, so it's easy to transport.
Natural gas is a little more difficult.
Um, but they're trade easily transportable.

(23:17):
They're super energy dense and most importantly, they're centralizable, right?
So you can have centralized control over the flow of oil.
Think there's a couple of kingdoms located in the Middle East that are, you know, Petro
states, right?
The United States is one of the top producers and the exporters of fossil fuels.

(23:42):
We've got a handful of super majors that essentially run the show, right?
They influence, you know, a handful of people sitting on the boards of these very few companies
influence geopolitics.
And I think it was like just a few days ago that there was a report about illegal collusion

(24:07):
between all these companies and Saudi Arabia to keep the price up of oil today, which is
of course one of the reasons we have this inflation problem.
It turns out that it was collusion within a couple, with just a couple of people.

(24:28):
And here we're talking, just to clarify, OPEC, not OTECH, which I think is another
reason to maybe change the acronym.
It's really too close to OPEC.
Can be too easily confused.
But apologies for the interruption.
Wanted to clarify for the listener, OPEC colluding here, not OTECH.
And it's not just OPEC.

(24:51):
It's all of the U.S. companies too.
Or was it?
Honestly, yeah, I'm curious.
I mean, this is the interesting thing.
So I think that if I talk about the Bitcoin space specifically, there is oftentimes a
knee-jerk reaction to any sort of, quote, renewable or green energy.

(25:16):
And that's because obviously there have been, well, we look at things like wind and solar,
which have some massive drawbacks.
If we talk about solar specifically, you're completely tied to the production of these
rare earth metals that are dug up by literally children in Africa.

(25:39):
Like this is not a, it's an exploitative industry that has also been massively subsidized to
even have a chance of existing because the economics didn't make sense.
And I think there's this general knee-jerk reaction to anything that is deemed as green
or renewable, again, to say that, well, this must just be another scam.

(26:01):
But I think it'd be helpful.
I'm curious, would you agree with the statement in general, more energy use, more energy abundance
equals more prosperity and more human flourishing?
Like we should be trying to harness as much energy as possible.
A statement you agree with?
100%.
I think that's important for people to realize as they're, if you're listening to this and

(26:25):
thinking this is some other green tech climate change, we, Fagenda scam, you're a person
who believes that we should harness as much energy as we can.
That is good for human flourishing.
And with ocean thermal, you see, and not to put words in your mouth, but an opportunity
to harness a massive amount of completely untapped energy.

(26:49):
Can you maybe expand that a little bit?
Because I think it's important for Bitcoiners who maybe are looking at anything renewable
and saying, okay, I'm not falling for this one again.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like most renewables, they are location specific.
Geothermal only exists where you have geothermal available.

(27:13):
You can't just, I mean, I guess you could drill down farther, but there's economic
problems with that.
You can't just build a river where one was not.
You can move a river, but there's consequences.
So with a lot of baseload renewable energy sources, they're only available where they're

(27:35):
available.
And this is even inclusive of nuclear as well.
You need massive amounts of pooling water for nuclear power.
And that's just simply not available.
You also need restrictions on, you have fallout zones like nuclear, does it work for Hawaii?

(27:56):
And OTEC is just another one of these baseload renewable power sources that's available in
a certain band, geographic band.
And turns out a lot of that geographic band is highly dependent on the flow of marine
diesel.

(28:16):
And they're burning diesel fuel, not even petroleum.
They're burning the worst of the worst using 70 year old technology that is no longer manufactured.

(28:37):
They can't get replacement parts.
And it's just breaking down.
And the logistics of getting oil to a lot of these places is driving the cost up.
And there's been a nice confluence of events in OTEC over the last two decades with the
development of offshore oil and gas infrastructure.

(28:58):
So then, and, you know, this offshore oil and gas infrastructure development has brought
the costs of a lot of the components of OTEC, you know, turbines, pumps, heat exchangers,
larger and larger vessels down to the point where it is now competitive in a lot of these

(29:20):
regions with oil and gas.
And that means more cheaper, more plentiful energy for these regions, which of course
means more human flourishing there.
I appreciate the clarification on that, because again, for folks that are listening or watching,

(29:43):
I think it's important to take a step back to check our biases at the door when we encounter
new things.
And this is one of those things where, again, I don't see a ton of reasons to be anti-ocean
thermal.
I guess what are the common pushbacks that you encounter when you're raising this topic?

(30:09):
What do people bring up as why, you know, I don't like this or why it won't work or why
we should forget about ocean thermal?
Well, it's been proven for almost 100 years now.
1931 was the first plant built.
So there's no question whether it works or not.

(30:31):
There's always been a question of the cost, but that's simply a matter of production capacity,
economies of scale, which luckily, like I just said, with advancements in offshore oil
and gas, some of those gains have already been made in production capacity, economies

(30:55):
of scale, right?
We can buy our first, for our first commercial development, we're just going to buy off the
shelf components thing, you know, the HDP extrusion pipes, you know, these turbines
exist, large scale water pumps, ammonia systems, you know, every ice cream refrigeration facility

(31:16):
is using an ammonia refrigeration system, which is just a rank in an ammonia ranking
cycle run in reverse.
In fact, for our R&D facility, we're going to run a ammonia compressor in reverse because
it's cheaper than getting a custom turbine made.
Yeah, it's, you know, cost.

(31:42):
The environmental impact is extremely minimal.
You know, you're pumping cold water up to the surface.
Of course, anytime you have a large piece of equipment in the ocean, you're going to
have some impact, but it's, you know, one, rather than a, you know, wind turbine or wave

(32:04):
buoys, they're, you know, singular.
So they only have, you know, one mooring system rather than dozens and dozens and dozens of
mooring systems driving multiple piles, causing, you know, massive amounts of sound pollution.
There's a lot of the problems in offshore renewables are avoided with O-Tech and, you

(32:31):
know, it's fairly benign.
It has almost no carbon, you know, virtually zero carbon emissions and it can be run carbon
negative.
So, you can produce, you know, CO2, marine CDR, so marine carbon dioxide removal just

(32:54):
by harnessing the deep water, the nutrients in your deep water.
So there's really not that many objections, you know, altering fishing patterns is one,
you know, one thing, but of course you put something big in the ocean, fish are attracted
to it.
So it becomes an easier spot to fish.

(33:17):
And really the environmental impacts are numerical model or Dr. Zirard Nehaus had done, you know,
large scale global couple climate modeling on this and found that it's not really until
you get to the, you know, sort of five to eight terawatt range for electricity production

(33:37):
that you start altering, you know, the thermal structure of the ocean and then cooling it,
right, which is kind of the direction you would want to go because I don't know if you've
seen this year, but it's been a absolute torture.
We're breaking, you know, records six Sigma above the average.

(34:01):
It's been absolutely brutal.
But you know, I look at the, I look at the sea surface temperatures just straight and
moaning, and I go, well, that's, that improves the efficiency of O-Tech.
So yeah, I mean, five terawatts of electricity is more electricity for some, so then all of

(34:21):
humanity uses today.
So it's, there's a lot of potential and very little drawback.
You can build it with off the shelf components.
So it's not like you'd have to, you know, create a new industry.
You're just, you know, outside of titanium, it's steel.

(34:43):
We have plenty of sources of steel and I think Norway just sound a massive titanium deposit.
So I think the price of titanium is going to come down, which is always a good thing.
Speaking of good things, it's always a good idea to review your Bitcoin security setup
and upgrade it with the latest and greatest open source hardware.

(35:05):
Head to bitbox.swiss.walkr and use promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source
Bitcoin only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
Then get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody.
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(35:26):
starting out or you're a seasoned psychopath and maybe you already have a few hardware
wallets.
Again, it is fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify for yourself.
Please do not just trust me.
Plus, when you go to Bitbox.swiss.walkr and use the promo code Walker, not only do you
get 5% off, but you also help support this fucking podcast.

(35:49):
So thank you.
Now, I appreciate that because again, it seems that so much of this, so much of the pushback
is again, cost driven.
It's about the economic feasibility of this.
Like with so many projects that involve harnessing energy in stranded or in isolated places where

(36:10):
there is a potential energy abundance, but because the location is isolated, because
perhaps the population around it is small and also perhaps not having a ton of capital
to invest in this themselves, it requires external investment.
And that external investment says, well, when am I going to see a return on my investment?

(36:34):
Obviously, what's in it for me?
Is this going to make money?
And it seems that now this is kind of this beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that you
have now a new way of making these sorts of projects not just viable, but profitable,

(36:58):
where you no longer need to justify, well, you're going to be spending however many millions,
billions of dollars.
And we can't exactly say how many years until you start to see a return on that, but we
swear it's coming.
It's like, no, no, no, we'll plug in some miners and get it going from day one.
So I would love maybe, perhaps before we get into the Bitcoin side of things, can you talk

(37:22):
a little bit about where OceanBit is at in this process?
I know you're running some proof of concept, some pilots, but can you talk about that and
what kind of the planned build out is for you guys in terms of what sorts of facilities,
whether they be land-based or floating and mobile?

(37:45):
What does that look like?
You mentioned already some of the inputs that are becoming more economical already, but
where are you guys at right now as a company, as an organization?
And what are you targeting in terms of actually starting to deploy this at scale?
What does scale look like for OceanBit?
And maybe what kind of timeline are we talking about here?

(38:07):
Sure.
So right now we are operating and executing on three major components of the business.
So first is technical development of what we call demand response O-Tech, which is that
coupling of not just Bitcoin mining, but high density compute in general.

(38:31):
Like most companies in the mining space, we realized fairly early on that Bitcoin mining
is just one type of high density compute and other options are super computing, large language

(38:54):
model training, things that require purpose built data centers.
You can't just convert easily plug-in high density compute to an Amazon cloud server
data center.
Those are general purpose computing, general purpose cloud computing servers.

(39:17):
But you really need to, for high density compute, you have to custom-mild your HVAC
system, custom-built electricity distribution, and oftentimes build purpose-built power
plants like all the supercomputers, Lawrence Livermore, at all the different national labs,

(39:38):
they all have power plants built specifically for them.
And so Bitcoin is just one flavor of that high density compute.
So we're doing the technical development of demand response O-Tech, which is our, you
know, patented coupling of high density compute with low temperature heat engine or, in our

(40:01):
case, O-Tech.
We are doing the technical qualification of our vessel design with, we are working with
one of the marine classification societies, DNV, on the technical qualification of our
vessel design.
So we're building vessels, re-purchasing, refitting existing vessels into power plants.

(40:29):
And we're working on the technical qualification with DNV.
You know, this is de-rissing that, you know, for insurance purposes, for project financing
purposes.
And then we are now engaging in commercial development with our first 25 megawatt power

(40:49):
plant.
So we're, and I will let the, we have an agreement with a country, and I will let them, you know,
I'm going to save the announcement for them once we finish the initial feasibility analysis.
Yeah, so that's really where we are and what we're executing all at the moment.

(41:15):
That's quite incredible.
I appreciate you keeping it close to the chest with the country.
But you know, I'm just thinking, okay, it's tropical, perhaps equatorial, given that that's
a nice sun.
I won't ask you to reveal anything else, but that's fascinating.

(41:36):
And I think, you know, maybe I can ask this without giving anything away.
Does the country involved also plan to utilize this O-Tech generation for Bitcoin mining?
Is that part of the plan that you guys are working on with this country?
Or how does that work?

(41:57):
We, this will go back to, you know, demand response O-Tech, demand response ocean thermal.
The demand response to the Bitcoin mining component is a key piece in the economic and
thermodynamic puzzle and electrical puzzle of our, you know, novel plan ship designs.

(42:24):
So the, you know, I don't know if you've ever been in a data, a mining data, Bitcoin mining
data center.
It's hot, right?
So these computers put off quite a bit of heat that needs to be processed, needs to
be dealt with.
Well, since O-Tech relies on a, you know, 30 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius, Delta

(42:53):
T, difference in temperature between that warm surface water and the deep cold water.
And the, you know, the heat coming off the miners is about 50 degrees Celsius.
We can reincorporate that heat back into the initial power generation cycle.
So essentially getting changed back.

(43:15):
So we can produce a little bit more power.
We can increase the, if you want to get, you know, go down the rabbit hole, we can increase
the quality of the working fluid at the turbine outlet, which increases the lifespan of the
turbine.
Right?
So it's a pure gas coming out.
We get more energy, you know, better, you know, more efficiency for the cycle.

(43:42):
But it also serves, and it also serves as a demand response mechanism.
You know, the, you know, if, in order to respond to differences in load on a power plant, you
know, we're able to cycle miners on and off at, you know, within seconds rather than,

(44:05):
you know, hours, right?
If you want to turn on a natural gas, a simple cycle beaker plant, if it's not already spinning,
it's going to take hours to turn on.
If you're, you know, going from cold start on a diesel generator, it's going to take
hours to start versus miners, right?

(44:28):
They can, you know, be shut off.
I don't know if you've ever seen how to turn off a Bitcoin miner.
It's not the best way to do it.
You just kind of pull the plug out, right?
There's no, like, on off switch on it.
Usually you want to suspend the mining process and you drop your, you know, usage down to
like 0.4 Watts, 0.4 to the lots or something, and then you just pull the plug, but you still

(44:56):
just pull the plug.
You can turn these mires off in seconds.
And so as a response mechanism to differences in end consumer consumption, that is a very
powerful tool to balance out, you know, supply and demand issues, right?
If they need more power, we can turn the miners off, make that available almost instantly.

(45:22):
If they need less power, we can turn miners on.
And then the other interest, so that's the thermodynamic coupling, the electrical coupling,
and then on a sort of Otec unique aspect is that, you know, I've mentioned that Otec

(45:44):
is baseload power, but there's a little caveat there.
It's only baseload power based on the coldest day of the year.
So, you know, the coldest day of the year, right?
If I have a 25 megawatt power purchase agreement, I need to be able to supply that 25 megawatts

(46:07):
year round, right?
And you know, the annual cycle and even the diurnal cycle, right?
The water gets warmer during the day and in the summer and it gets colder at night and
during the winter.
So, in order to meet that power purchase agreement, I have to be able to generate 25 megawatts

(46:28):
of power year round.
And so that means that every other day of the year that's not the coldest day of the
year, I'm actually generating more power than that power purchase agreement.
In the past, Dr. Luis Vega, who's an advisor to our company and is the godfather of Otec,

(46:51):
also happens to be my neighbor, he had been able to negotiate a power purchase agreement
for, you know, that baseload component based on the coldest day of the year and then a
variable intermittent rate on the, that excess energy that you produce every other day of

(47:11):
the year.
And one of the things that's never been really discussed in the literature around Otec is
the economic impact of having to sell during the summer 20% of your power production at,
you know, dog shit, you know, four cents per kilowatt hour price.

(47:37):
And so this is another way that Bitcoin mining plays a big role because we, what we can do
is we can stack just a little bit extra.
So instead of having, you know, 25 megawatts of power production on the coldest day of
the year, in this particular case, we would have 27.0 something megawatts available on

(47:59):
the coldest day of the year.
We have a, you know, data center running a bunch of miners, able to soak up that excess
energy, you know, and during the cold, the cold, during the winter time, winter in the
tropics, it's a slightly colder, right?

(48:20):
But not just a little bit.
You can run the miners underclock.
So you have 100% of the miners running underclocking them.
So they're slightly more efficient.
And then throughout the year, as the sea surface temperature heats up, but you're producing
more power, you can shift those miners from underclocking to overclocking throughout the

(48:42):
year, so the same number of miners can be run throughout the year, going from underclocking
to overclocking.
So you're not, you don't have anything sitting there idle, idling, you know, no dead weight.
And then now, because you have that excess power and you have a buyer for that power,

(49:05):
rather than an intermittent rate, you can now negotiate a peaker rate.
So not only can the O-Tech plant function as a base load production, but also in a peaker
capacity, so, which is having more energy available for peaker capacity in the summer,

(49:26):
when it's, you know, 40, when you're pushing 40 degrees Celsius, takes a lot of air conditioning,
you know, to deal with that.
Of course, it's only getting hotter, and you can, this year has been absolutely brutal.
So having that excess capacity that can be made available within seconds is very useful,

(49:51):
because now we can sell that at a peaker rate, that capacity if needed, at a peaker capacity,
it's, which gathers a much higher rate.
So, you know, we're looking, targeting around for our first power plant, roughly 20 cents
per kilowatt hour on a first of its kind bill, which is pretty, which is damn good.

(50:13):
And then, you know, using that Bitcoin mining stacked on top of that as our margin, so we're
able to sell at, you know, sell into a PPA at, you know, just about the LCOE, use the
Bitcoin mining on top as a margin, then that's somewhere between 12 and 20% of the production.

(50:37):
And then that capacity is available as peaker capacity, which gets, you know, upwards of
40, 50 cents per kilowatt hour.
So yeah, that's a lot.
It's a, you know, very useful function, you know, turning what once was an intermittent

(50:59):
production, and most of the time, it would just be thrown away.
Now we're able to monetize that excess consumption and make it available for, you know, times
of emergency.
It's either you buy the peaker capacity or you have an entire grid blackout.
And so, you know, that's, that adds to grid reliability.

(51:24):
And it's just incredibly important faucet.
I love that.
And I think this is such a fascinating rabbit hole.
And again, for me, like, I only found out about like what the hell Otech was, even though
it's been around for 100, 150 years, whatever it is, I only found out about it because I
started following you on Twitter and was like, Otech, what the hell is that?

(51:48):
And I'll, let me do some research on this.
And again, it's, it seems that it's such a, a beautifully simple solution, like you're
using a difference in temperature that in tropical zones always exists between the deep,
deep cold water and the surface tropical temperature water where you can swim without a wetsuit

(52:08):
year round feels great.
And I'm curious for these miners, I would assume you're using immersion miners.
Is that correct?
Are there any additional benefits there?
Like are there any additional efficiencies that can be gained by using immersion miners
versus, you know, a lot of, I've, I've, I've seen, I was toward riots facility during
BitBlock boom when I went there and I got to see kind of the standard setup where they've

(52:32):
got kind of the, the hot room in the middle of one of these, you know, massive racks and
boy, that room, it could have been a sauna.
Like it was already hot cause it's Texas.
And I'm, again, I'm a Northern climate guy.
So I was, I was not doing so well in the heat.
I'd also, I was a bit hungover too.
So I was especially not doing well, but then we went into the immersion facility that they

(52:55):
were building out there and it was quiet and it was cool.
And so are you guys using immersion miners?
What does that look like?
Anything interesting that's able to happen because of that immersion mining?
Yeah, we're, I mean, that's the plan is to use immersion mining, right?
We're, you know, we're limited in space, right?

(53:18):
We're on a, on a vessel.
So we have limited space.
So we need to create as much energy density into a small amount of space as possible.
And so two phase immersion is the highest energy density available.
And it's a simpler system, you know, rather than right now, I think a lot of people are

(53:42):
using single phase.
But over time, you know, as these miners get more and more efficient, as you're able to
put more and more power into each, you know, each unit, you're going to inevitably have
to move to two phase immersion.
And it's a, you know, there's less pumps involved.

(54:05):
It moves on its own.
And it enables us to, like I said, with the thermodynamic coupling, dump that heat very
efficiently back into the, the Rankin cycle itself.
So when, you know, the miners boil the, the immersion fluid, it turns into a gas, then

(54:28):
you need a, you know, heat sink to condense it back to a liquid.
And we can dump that right back, use the working fluid of the O-Tech cycle power, you know,
power system to, as that coal source.
So we get that heat back into the power generation.

(54:50):
At least that's the, that's the current plan.
We will, you know, things could change, but that, that has been and is still the current,
the current thinking on there.
Okay.
That's, that's, that's fascinating.
Maybe can you just kind of paint a picture of these vessels?

(55:11):
Like what they, what they actually look like, what kind of rigging, I mean, I'm assuming
you're, you're dropping some piping really deep, like really deep.
So it's a lot of piping, presumably, but can you paint a little bit of a picture of what
do these vessels, what will they look like?
And what's kind of like, like how, just out of curiosity, how big of a crew do you need

(55:31):
for these things?
Are they pretty much stationary?
Do they move around a little bit?
What, what is the actual operation of one of these ocean thermal vessels look like?
Well, the vessels themselves are just repurposed container ships or bulk carriers or, you
know, oil transport.
The, depending on, you know, the market at the time, you know, they got their, it's a

(55:57):
very cyclical market on vessels.
There's usually one type of vessel that is more expensive at a time, at any given time,
and there are, and then the other ones are, you know, cheaper.
It doesn't really matter.
We just need a, you know, a hull.

(56:18):
So regardless of what vessel we would acquire, it would look like a container ship from the
outside, and we're just going to hollow it out, stick a power plant.
So from the outside, it's not going to really look like anything, it'll just look like a
container ship without a bunch of containers on it.
And then, yeah, so you have the vessel as top sides, having a, you know, big vessel.

(56:46):
We can weight it, you know, we can ballast it so that it sits really, really low in the,
in the water, which improves the efficiency, cuts down on parasitics, you know, parasitic
to pump, you know, load, things like, cunts.
The higher you have to pump water, the more energy it takes to pump that water, right?

(57:08):
So if you have, you know, you're pulling water into a vessel from outside and you're sitting
nine meters below the surface, you've got nine meters of head available that you don't
have to pump, right?
So you want those heat exchangers, all that water to be as low as possible in the vessel
because it increases efficiency.

(57:29):
So that's helpful.
For our initial vessel, we are, which we're going through the technical qualification
on, we are considering a freestanding hybrid riser system.
So there will be, you know, down to, there'll be a mooring system and between two and three,

(57:55):
either three, 3.2 meter diameter pipes or two, four meter diameter, HDP rigid pipes, you
know, go extending down from 30, 40 meters down to the 1000 meters, then there will be

(58:17):
a flexible piping from there that will, you know, slightly, there'll be a, you know, a
valve that goes to flexible piping, which will then come up out of the, you know, from
the surface and will actually, you know, come over the side of the vessel rather than having

(58:37):
a, rather than having a gimbal or having to, you know, drill through the hull, hull penetrations
are a big pain in the ass to get, you know, insured, clasped.
So having them for the initial system, having them come up and over the side is, you know,

(59:02):
I'm going to cut down on costs, cut down on insurance costs, cut down on time and make
it easier to attach, detach for the initial deployments.
Yeah, I think that answered all those questions.
No, I love, I mean, no, no, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's really, it's, it's really, it's

(59:24):
really, really cool.
And I was kind of wondering, cause I'm, you know, imagining like this pipe just coming
right from the bottom of the ship, but obviously that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Like if you get some really intense weather and you need to be able to presumably like
drop that pipe and, and go, you don't want that thing to be actually, yeah.

(59:45):
That's how in the past that, that was the, the initial thought on, you know, previous
vessel designs of ours and of others.
Yeah, you can just, you know, you have a gimbal system or just a, you know, pass through

(01:00:06):
and it's absolutely possible in your, you know, HDPE is fairly flexible, even though
it's rigid.
So you've got, you know, you've got wiggle room and the, you know, the two systems are
really, because the vessel is so large, they would be uncoupled.

(01:00:27):
They wouldn't be a cup, they wouldn't be, you know, acting as a coupled system.
So they'd be uncoupled and you can, you can handle large pipes coming through the, you
know, right through the hole.
Just it's wild, wild to think about this, the scale of this.
And so, I mean, again, this seems like an idea whose time has come.

(01:00:53):
But when I say whose time has come, the time has been here, but the economics have come,
perhaps it's finally at a place where because of the component costs being reduced because
of other factors, and then also because of the fact that Bitcoin exists, Bitcoin mining
exists, the need for not just Bitcoin mining, but other, other really high density compute

(01:01:16):
operations exists.
This is kind of this beautiful confluence of factors that is like coming together.
And again, it seems, it seems crazy to me that for all of the, the talk of climate change
out there that I don't hear more about OTEC, like this, this is what kind of blows my mind.

(01:01:37):
Because again, once I learned about this, it seemed just like really obvious, like,
well, okay, cool, you're using the Delta T that the difference in temperature and you're,
you know, okay, is there a minimal ecological impact around?
Yeah, yeah, probably, you know, your chain, you're pumping a lot of water up and you're
putting water back in.

(01:01:58):
Okay.
But these things as you're building them can be mobile, you can move to a spot where you're
going to have the least amount of impact, but it just seems crazy to me.
Is there more coming out in, let's say the mainstream scientific literature that is supporting
OTEC?
Ocean, I'm going to start saying ocean thermal.
I'll stop saying OTEC, I promise.
But is there, is there more that's starting to come out for like in favor of this, like

(01:02:21):
a second, you know, renaissance of this technology where people are saying, hold on, it's been
around for a hundred, hundred and fifty years.
It now makes sense.
Why aren't we?
Why aren't we trying to do this more at scale?
I mean, are there other, are you guys one of the only companies I would assume focusing
on this?
Are there a lot that I just, I'm not educated and I'm ignorant of these?

(01:02:42):
I don't know.
What does that landscape look like?
Yeah, the competitive landscape is really starting to pick up.
There are a number of companies that are working in the space.
There's, you know, there's Global OTEC is one.

(01:03:03):
They're out of the UK.
They're deploying, they're doing their technical qualification on a circular platform design
right now.
There is OTE Corporation.
They have been working on a SBIR program.

(01:03:29):
I think with the army on that one and there may, there may be a plant in development with
them.
Mitsui, which is one of the largest shipping companies in the world, has been in the space,
and is starting to really ramp up their involvement in the space.

(01:03:53):
Shell has put some capital into a couple of companies, one out of companies and organizations
out of India, a couple here, one here in Hawaii on the heat exchanger side.
Phil Mackay, Shell has invested in one of an OTEC company out of Houston that's working

(01:04:18):
on a multi a multi purpose power state offshore power station.
So the incorporated solar, wind, wave and OTEC with pretty sure if I remember correctly,

(01:04:39):
their, their, their focus is on subsea OTEC.
So, you know, melting the OTEC to the sea floor rather than at the surface.
There are the Koreans, the Japanese are ramping up their OTEC in the Chinese as well.

(01:05:02):
So the Chinese last year deployed a floating, a floating 20 kilowatt OTEC power plant.
So that was their first OTEC deployment just last year.
So it's, yeah, I mean, it's, it, it feels like OTEC is at a inflection point right

(01:05:24):
now.
And, you know, we're, it's, once the first power plant is built, there will be a gold rush.
You know, once the first at scale power plant has been built, it turns into just an absolute
bold rush.
Are these other companies, organizations, nation states that are pursuing this right

(01:05:48):
now, are they incorporating Bitcoin into their economic models like you guys are?
Or is it some are some aren't, I assume that China perhaps is not given their, their stance
on Bitcoin mining at least publicly.
But what does that look like?
Are you guys unique in that respect?
Yeah.
I mean, that's really what we brought to the table.

(01:06:11):
Our unique innovation was that coupling of high density compute with OTEC.
You know, we have the patent.
We have a PCT, the PCT patent that covers 140 countries or something.

(01:06:32):
So you know, it's, we, you know, we've had discussions about incorporating our demand
response IP, into their economic, into, you know, some of their economic models, and we'll
see where that goes.
It's interesting because one would think that given the history of, of ocean thermal, and

(01:06:55):
even though many of the component prices have become more economical, that there is still
a huge kind of gap in, in capital to deal with here.
And that what you guys are doing at OceanBit is uniquely positioned to address that gap,
to actually make it not just like, oh, we need to subsidize the heck out of this thing.

(01:07:19):
And then maybe in the future, once we've subsidized it for enough years, it'll be profitable enough
for the free market to take over, which, which seems to be how the, at least as an American,
the United States treats a lot of things.
Like that's how the United States treats solar, right?
We're, we're reviving these, these solar companies that went bankrupt however many years ago,
and bringing them back.

(01:07:39):
And there's, I think a lot of, anytime you involve like large, large government subsidies,
which get larger by the year thanks to inflation, there's a lot of potential for just corruption
and mismanagement and misuse.
And it's, it's a market distortion.
And so what I see from you guys is an opportunity to make ocean thermal genuinely make economic

(01:08:04):
sense from the start without needing to ask for these subsidies, without needing to pump
a bunch of taxpayer or printed money capital into this.
It's like, it actually makes economic sense to do this right now.
And so I think that's just, that's beautiful.
And again, it seems that that
I'm not going to turn down any money, you know, any subsidies.

(01:08:26):
Well, no, no, no.
I mean, we're still in the fiat system, right?
And if the fiat system wants to give you a subsidy, absolutely.
But what I'm saying is it, it gives me a lot of hope in the economic model that you're
discussing that it actually does make sense that you, yes, if the government says I want
to hand you a billion dollars, well, you know what, it's we're a late stage fiat, like why

(01:08:50):
not, why not take it, but you don't need to like you can actually make this work.
And perhaps the subsidies would speed things along a little bit.
And perhaps one could make an argument in favor of subsidies.
I'm, I am generally against them at a principal level.
But that being said, if, if late stage fiat wants to throw you a bone, you know, you may

(01:09:11):
as well chew, but you know, it is what it is.
But I think, I think that this is just such a, a fascinating area again.
And I'm curious if there are perhaps like, what are the air?
So we, you know, we've discussed a little bit like what, what is ocean thermal and kind
of how it works and ocean bits approach to it in Bitcoin mining, how that factors in.

(01:09:34):
Are there some kind of second order potential effects of this?
Like, like, I know, you know, desalination is going to be something that the world needs
in the coming years, but it's incredibly expensive because it's incredibly energy intensive.
Does ocean thermal help some of these things?
Like does it, does it help speed along some of those or make them more economical?

(01:09:57):
What are, what are the other kind of pleasant unintended benefits of ocean thermal, maybe
outside of just what it appears on the surface?
Yeah, what's really interesting about ocean thermal is that it, it's able to sort of hack

(01:10:18):
these, you know, these fundamental equations, right?
On the, both the desalination side and the carbon, you know, carbon dioxide removal side,
you know, in order to, you know, desalinate sea water, which as you point out is going

(01:10:40):
to be as, you know, water scarcity ramps up, you know, it's getting hotter and hotter,
especially at the equator, you're going to have water, you know, increasing water scarcity
in order to desalinate water, you have to remove, you have to remove the salt content

(01:11:00):
from it.
And the only way to do that because it's in solution is to boil it.
You know, you can, you just have to, you have to boil it.
And so when you boil it, the, you know, the, the water vapor rises up and the salt's left
behind.
So the equation is, you know, you have your water, you have to add its water and salt,

(01:11:24):
you have to add energy to the equation, outcomes, you know, water vapor and solid salt.
That's the equation, right?
You have to put energy in there.
O-TECH gets around that particular equation through what we've been discussing has been
our closed cycle configuration.

(01:11:45):
There is a, a second way to run ancient thermal power plants.
That's called open cycle.
And you use a flash evaporation process rather than having a working fluid, ammonia in our
case for the closed cycle, you use a flash evaporation in a, you know, you create a vacuum,

(01:12:09):
you have a filter, large filter, fancy filter, but a filter, you create a vacuum, you run
that, you know, that warm water through the filter and into that vacuum chamber.
That causes some of that water to flash evaporate on the spot creating, right?

(01:12:32):
You know, you leave the salt behind, you leave a brine behind.
So some portion of the warm water that you're running through the system, flash evaporates,
then you can take that vapor, run it through a turbine and then use the cold water to condense
it back to a liquid.
But now that liquid is, of course, fresh water.

(01:12:56):
So and you have a, with open cycle, there's a different set of challenges, not challenges,
it's been proven for a long time.
Luis Vega, Dr. Vega had built a 210 kilowatt open cycle power plant here in Hawaii, back
in the, back in the 80s, is the first power, first OTAC power plant connected to the grid.

(01:13:25):
You know, the difference really is, is in costs and of the size of certain components.
So for closed cycle, you need large heat exchangers, no way to get around it.
On the, on the open cycle side, you don't need as many, you need way less heat exchangers,

(01:13:49):
but you need a giant turbo.
Happens to be the low pressure side of the, of a nuclear turbine.
So if the, you know, nuclear industry is to ramp up, open cycle OTAC becomes far more
viable.
Right now it's hard to get your hands on one of those turbines.
So we're, you know, not, our initial focus is on closed cycle.

(01:14:12):
We visit very simple.
All the components are available.
Yeah.
So it's, it's an interesting dynamic where you can get both energy and desalinate water
from the same system, right?
Rather than having to put energy in, you get energy out and water.

(01:14:33):
And this is, you know, definitely very, very useful in a lot of small island development,
developing states.
And then on the MCDR front, right, permanent dioxide removal, the, you know, thermodynamic
equation is you take fossil fuels, right?
Big chunk of hydrocarbon.

(01:14:53):
You light that, you know, hydrocarbon on fire with some oxygen.
You produce, you know, outcomes energy and, you know, CO2, right?
That's the equation.
You hydrocarbon, oxygen, fire, outcomes energy and CO2.

(01:15:13):
So in order to get that CO2 from the atmosphere back into a, you know, more manageable form
that can be stored, sequestered, you know, for long periods of time, you have to reverse
that equation, right?
So you need to put energy into the system to get that, to pull that CO2 out of the air

(01:15:37):
and then, you know, turn it into some, you know, more manageable form.
That's an issue because as the energy transition ramps up and, you know, the CO2 in the atmosphere
is going to just snowball, right?
It's an exponential, you know, it's an exponential sort of equation where the more we burn, the

(01:16:03):
longer it's going to continue to rise for and, you know, it's just compounding on itself.
We're going to have to not only develop new energy sources to replace the aging fossil
fuel infrastructure, plus more energy to, you know, keep humanity going, but we're also

(01:16:26):
going to have to develop more energy sources and more power generation to remove CO2 to
get us back to where, you know, today.
The OJAC gets around this thermodynamic equation because that deep water that you're pulling
up to condense the work, either the working fluid or that, you know, that water vapor is

(01:16:51):
highly nutrient debts.
And you can harness those nutrients to grow, you know, phytoplankton.
And those phytoplankton will uptake carbon from the atmosphere and as they die and sink,
below the photic layer, they take that carbon with them, sequestering it for, you know,

(01:17:15):
a thousand years.
Of course, depending on where you are in the thermal k-line circulation, you know, somewhere
between 500 and a thousand years, which is valuable, right?
And you're, you have that cold water, you're using that cold water to produce power, so
power comes out of the situation, out of the, you know, the system.

(01:17:36):
But also on the back end, almost as, you know, for free, you can, you know, there's a little
bit of tweak you have to do.
You have to increase the density by combining it with your warm water flow.
You need to, you know, introduce some turbulence into your return flow so that it mixes faster
so that the settling velocity, the settling plume settling depth, you know, where that

(01:18:00):
deep water plume settles is still within the photic layer, but essentially you can, you
know, with the right configuration, you can get that MCDR for free, which is of course
a product that you could sell carbon credits or, you know, renewable energy credits or

(01:18:21):
whatever the, you know, the system that's inevitably developed to help offset other
emissions of other carbon based power plants.
So that's really, again, I continue to be more and more fascinated by this because this
seems to be a much like Bitcoin and never ending rabbit hole.

(01:18:45):
And again, I think that it's, it's really important, like I'm of the opinion that, that
pretty much everything is good for Bitcoin.
Even when I see Bitcoin being used in Bitcoin mining, being used in new and innovative ways,
I think that's wonderful.

(01:19:05):
And I don't care if that is being used in Texas to, to balance the load that ERCOT is
dealing with and to, you know, take some of those gas peaker plants owned by, I think
a lot of them are owned by Buffett and Charlie Munger rest in peace.
And also deal with the fact that the sun sets at night and, and wind blowing is intermittent.

(01:19:32):
I don't care if it's being used there or if it's being used to literally just handle
excess power generated by the difference between the cold water at the bottom of the
ocean and the warm water at the top.
I think that's just fascinating.
And I think that the more ways that we find, because that's the beauty of, that's the beauty
of Bitcoin mining is it's like, you just, you just need power.

(01:19:56):
You just need electricity.
And the more ways that we find to find these stranded areas of electricity, like that's
great for Bitcoin.
And so again, I think this is just, yeah, that's all it is, right?
And it's so much energy.
Yeah.

(01:20:16):
Go ahead.
Oh, it's just a tool.
It's a new component of, you know, of the grid stack.
And it, it has use within the entire supply chain of, you know, energy, how we, you know,
the pipelines themselves that transport oil and gas throughout the country.

(01:20:42):
There's wasted energy there, you know, the awesome things that are being done with, you
know, methane flaring, which is very important, right?
It was uneconomical to go in and cap that methane.
Well, now, now there's an economic incentive to do that.

(01:21:04):
You know, the waste, waste gas from landfills.
I mean, there's just so many use cases to where, you know, Bitcoin mining can be applied
to, you know, improve the grid in just a multitude of ways.
It's just a, it's a tool that you can use, that it's just a new tool that we have access

(01:21:30):
to.
And it's, it's quite a wonderful multi-tool at that.
And I talked with, with Daniel Batten on, on this show about CH4 Capital.
He's a fascinating guy, a lovely guy.
And that was such an interesting conversation.
And again, this is one of those cases where, as with ocean thermal is as with landfill

(01:21:54):
gas mining.
It's one of those things where it's, it's so, like it seems too good to be true.
It seems like in the case of ocean thermal, like you mean you're just, you're just dealing
with a difference in temperature and because of that, you can generate power and that power
can be actually financed by, that build out of that power can be financed by Bitcoin mining.

(01:22:15):
And with Daniel's case with landfill mining, it's like, you mean you can literally turn
trash into treasure?
You can literally take methane, which I think, I think that everybody, no matter where you
stand on the quote, climate debate, I think that everybody can agree that they don't want
to breathe methane.
And like, if you say that, yeah, I want to breathe methane, that's great.

(01:22:38):
Go stand on a, go stand in a landfill for a while and then I'll believe you.
Like I don't think that anybody wants that.
And it's again, one of those things where it just, I don't find very many, very many
reasonable critiques to it.
And again, I think that fossil fuels, as you pointed out earlier, are incredibly important
because they're a super energy dense medium, right?

(01:23:01):
That's, they're incredibly energy dense.
They have allowed us to, you know, progress as a civilization to where we are right now.
And through that, we're also able to build incredible pieces of machinery and all these
other things that then enable us to explore other technologies like ocean thermal, which

(01:23:22):
previously were not economical, but now are.
And I think that it's beautiful.
And renewables are low time preference versus fossil fuels are high time preference.
You know, it's, it's their, you know, their fiat fuels, right?

(01:23:43):
I mean, the US dollar is propped up by, of course, oil and the trade of oil in US dollars.
And you know, there's unintended consequences, right?
Yeah, you're using that energy, you know, today, but we're going to have, we're starting
to see those effects of, you know, 150 years of burning coal on, you know, prop yields,

(01:24:10):
right?
Prop yields this year have been abysmal all over the world.
You know, temperatures across the world are just, I mean, six sigma above what they, you
know, what the pre industrial average is, you know, every, this is the hot 2023 was
the hottest year we've ever recorded.

(01:24:33):
You know, water scarcity issues are popping up all over.
You're seeing massive, you know, floods, droughts.
You're seeing, I mean, it's, it's.
And it's the result of, you know, centralized, centralized fuel source.

(01:25:00):
And had I always liked to think about the, you know, the alternate universe of what if
fossil fuels, we hadn't had access to, you know, easily accessible fossil fuels, and
we were forced to develop society around alternative energy sources like, you know, hydropower,

(01:25:21):
right?
Where, you know, since we build cities, large societies around large sources of renewable
energy, yeah, we would have, it would have taken longer to develop, but we wouldn't be,
you know, we want it would be more, you know, it would be a more robust system to changes.

(01:25:42):
You wouldn't be, you know, a lot of our agriculture, a lot of our, you know, infrastructure is
built around stable climate, and we've, we're jeopardizing that at the moment.
And that's going to have, you know, adverse effects.
You're going to see people having to move out of certain areas because they just become
unhospitable.

(01:26:06):
And you're, you're already seeing this, you know, migrant crisis is all over the world
are, you know, political instability caused by famine or drought, right?
Those are, you know, first and second order effects.
And I mean, this year has been 2023 has just been, and when I say six Sigma, that means

(01:26:27):
that there is, there is no ambiguity in that.
Like it's, you, there is no explanation.
It's, I think it's like, oh, what is a six Sigma?
It's like one in so many billion chance.
But, you know, it's how we, we determine if, you know, something is real or not is how

(01:26:49):
many, you know, order, how many orders of magnitude, how many standard deviations away
we are.
And you know, I think Bitcoin is the key to this energy transition because it's uniquely
suited for it, right?
You know, with fossil fuel infrastructure, it's, you know, I'm going to simplify things

(01:27:13):
here, but fossil fuel infrastructure in general, it's a low capital expense, high operational
expense, right?
You know, spinning up, trying to can build, you know, a bunch of coal power plants, because
they're generally pretty cheap to build.
Um, you know, we've built on the, for 100, 100 years, the economies of scale exist.

(01:27:38):
So you can build them cheap, but you have that additional cost that you need to acquire
the fuel to burn, right?
And so that's operational expense versus renewable infrastructure, you know, hydrodans, geothermal
nuclear, um, Otec, these things are high capital expense, but relatively lower operational

(01:28:09):
expense, right?
It doesn't, once you build large scale renewable power plants, well, it costs nothing for the
sun to shine.
It costs nothing for the wind to blow.
It costs nothing for the geototherm.
Um, and, you know, it's that difference that, and you can't turn it off.

(01:28:31):
Like if the sun is shining, or, you know, the river is flowing, it's really a use it
or lose it sort of situation where, you know, you either have someone to use that energy
or it's just wasted.
Um, you know, with fossil fuels, you simply just don't burn the excess fuel.
That's the most economic solution as you know, with the happening and the hash price, uh,

(01:28:56):
you know, collapsing, you're going to end up with a, you know, each, each epic, uh,
Epoch that continues that hash price is going to go further and further down.
And eventually that operational expense of having to, you know, acquire that fossil fuels
is never going to, you know, never going to pay for the mining itself.

(01:29:18):
But if you have very low marginal cost solar or wind or, you know, geo where, well, now
it's all, it's essentially zero.
If no one's going to buy it, it's zero.
Uh, it has no cost.
You had zero.
So regardless of what the hash price is, Bitcoin mining has a incredibly important

(01:29:42):
function in taking that curtailment and dealing with that curtailment and providing a revenue
source to these, you know, renewable energy developers.
Um, and I think it's, you know, it's the, it's the key piece of the puzzle that's been
missing, uh, is that, you know, how do you deal with curtailment?

(01:30:05):
And that's again, uh, where Bitcoin as with ocean thermal or as with landfill gas money,
Bitcoin mining itself, at times seems too good to be true, right?
Because it's like, well, and I think that's where a lot of the skepticism comes in from
the outside where it's like, okay, yet you're saying Bitcoin fixes this and Bitcoin fixes
that.

(01:30:26):
And now you're saying Bitcoin mining fixes all of this and it is our solution.
But, but I think we're seeing the narrative shift.
I think, I think there's a palpable change in the palpable shift in the overton window
around Bitcoin mining where the evidence is stacking up so much that it's becoming, I
mean, just really an untenable position to hold that while Bitcoin is, you know, burning

(01:30:50):
the planet or whatever.
But I'm curious kind of what, from your perspective, like what, what is your, if you had to explain
it like I'm Elizabeth Warren, for example, how, how would you explain like the, what's,
what's your elevator pitch for ocean thermal plus Bitcoin equals good thing that you should

(01:31:14):
support?
Yeah.
Uh, yep.
24 seven base load renewable power with a demand response, a built in demand response
component for coastal communities and the blue economy.
I mean, I'm sold.

(01:31:36):
You know, out of curiosity, I think maybe you touched on this a little bit earlier,
but just to, to make sure we drive it home.
What are we actually talking about in terms of the scale of potential power generation
for ocean thermal?
Like what, to, to a layman, like what are we really talking about here in terms of numbers?

(01:31:59):
Um, yeah.
So I mean, the rate limiting step on ocean thermal power production is going to be the
feedback, right?
The cooling of the, the ocean, um, you know, the changing in the thermal structure of the
ocean and it's about five terawatts of electricity, which is just a, a, a mind, mind blowing amount.

(01:32:29):
Um, yeah.
That's so, and, and again, for the layman out there, including myself, typically we see
like Bitcoin's energy consumption measured in, in terawatt hours, which is the amount
of terawatts over the, the course of, uh, like they typically average out like this is how

(01:32:50):
many terawatt hours it will use over one year.
Can you equate that just again, uh, for those of us who, who do not know, uh, what's the
thing, not have these things sort of top of mind?
What does that kind of look like?
So because I mean, I assume we're talking total number of hours in the year, uh, amount

(01:33:11):
of generation at any given time.
To get to terawatt hours per year, uh, you know, terawatts is a unit of power.
Uh, terawatt hours is a unit of electricity.
So, you know, you multiply terawatts by what is it, 8,760.

(01:33:33):
And you get, uh, what is this?
44,000 terawatt hours or so.
Um, from, yeah, yeah, five terawatts times 8,760.
Yeah.
40, 44,000 terawatt hours.

(01:33:55):
So wait, that's, uh, if I'm correct, I think according to, uh, to Cambridge, uh, Cambridge's
research, Bitcoin is like 150 terawatt hours, right?
Per year, something like that.
I mean, so we're talking multiple orders of magnitude greater than the Bitcoin network.
I mean, this is, this is like an unfathomable, unfathomable amount of energy.

(01:34:18):
I can't even say unfathomable right now.
That's how unfathomable it is.
Yeah.
That, that's nuts.
And, and it's, I mean, that's the crazy thing is it's just kind of like it's just sitting
there.
Most of our planet is, is water, is salt water, you know, but it's, it's all around us.

(01:34:38):
And again, it's kind of one of those things where, I mean, I, I love an idea whose time
has come.
And I love the symbiosis of something like ocean thermal with Bitcoin because I just,
it's incredible when one technology can make another actually viable.

(01:34:59):
And it's this, you know, a hundred years ago, of course, they couldn't have conceived that
something like Bitcoin was going to come along and change this equation of economic
viability.
But now here we sit at this really fascinating time.
And to think as well about the, the second and third order effects of this sort of technology

(01:35:20):
and how, I mean, so much, there are a lot of people living in tropical climates and,
and equatorially that can genuinely benefit from this and that can drive down their cost
of energy, i.e. their cost of living, because energy is, that's the base component of most

(01:35:40):
of every economy on the planet, right?
What is your cost of energy?
And to see that driven down by the natural resources that they have around them, and
again, it's just like, what's your delta T?
What's your change in temperature?
I just think that's, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful to see.
Yeah.
I'd appreciate it.

(01:36:04):
It's cool.
And I'm curious.
So, I mean, if somebody's listening to this and they're like, okay, this is really fucking
cool.
Are you guys, if you can talk about this, are you guys, are you guys, are you guys, are
you guys, are you guys hiring?
Are you still seeking investment?
Anything like that for somebody who, who's like, I just think this is really cool and
I want to drop what I'm doing and get involved in this somehow.

(01:36:26):
Is there a way for them to do that?
Absolutely.
On both of those in Cal's, we are, you know, you've been in touch with me on Twitter, Nate
Hawaii, on LinkedIn, Nathaniel Harmon, through our website, we have contact, reach out if

(01:36:49):
you have a skill set.
And you know, this is, I mean, that's how I met my, our, our co-founder, Sam Benson.
He reached out after he heard one of our, one of our podcasts.
And you know, we've been working together now with him for a year and a half.
We, you know, he's, he's been kicking ass.

(01:37:14):
And so we made, you know, brought him on as a, as a, as a co-founder.
And yeah, if, you know, he, he was a, he managed vessels for TK.
He'd, you know, overseen vessel conversions, vessel refits for the Australian Royal Australian

(01:37:37):
Navy.
He'd done sister integrations on RVs, research vessels.
He's like, I've been working in, you know, in and around the ocean my whole life.
And this is something to add together.
So absolutely.
If anybody, if you have any sort of, you know, technical skill set, business skill set, we

(01:37:59):
can absolutely use, use your assistance.
That's awesome.
I'll link your Twitter of course and the website in the show notes.
I'm curious also, this is a completely unrelated topic, but are you reading anything right
now that you would recommend for others to ingest?
Am I reading anything?

(01:38:22):
Fiction, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
I, I, I, I, I read, I read, I read a lot of scientific papers.
So that makes sense.
Yeah.
If I could recommend one book that really assisted me, I'm not, not currently reading

(01:38:45):
it, but it would be a Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty.
It's a monetary history of modern age, you know, going back 350 years or so, looking
at, you know, the, the Bank of England and just the movement of capital.

(01:39:11):
It helps, you know, when I first started learning about Bitcoin, I knew I had to go teach myself
C++ to read the cupboard, right?
And if you're to understand monetary history, you need a good history lesson, how we, where
we came from and how we got to where we are today and the need for, you know, Bitcoin.

(01:39:36):
And yeah, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty, it's heralded as one of the, one
of the best economic books of the last 100 years.
And then he has a follow up on a Capital and ideology, which is, you know, how I, how ideology

(01:39:57):
influences the movement of Capital throughout an even longer history period.
I haven't checked either of those out myself.
So now I've got a couple of good recommendations to dig into.
I appreciate that.
900 pages of real thickness.
Oh, wow.
Okay.

(01:40:17):
All right.
So I got it.
So it's, it's a real dig in type of book.
Well, and it's the type of book where you need to use the, you know, the, you know,
the, the, the web portal, which has, you know, the, you know, the addendums, the, yeah, it's

(01:40:38):
a real thick.
It's a real thick, please.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate the warning in advance, just so we all know what we're prepared for.
You know, I, first of all, I appreciate you sharing your scarce time because, you know,
time is scarce, Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.

(01:40:59):
And I appreciate you joining me on this one.
Anything else to leave us with?
Anything else that we failed to cover here today?
Because, I mean, again, this is just fascinating and I love what you guys are doing.
I'm very certain it's going to be very successful and I wish you the best of luck.
But is there, is there anything we failed to cover or any parting words?

(01:41:24):
The ocean is life.
We came from the ocean and it holds the key to humanity's future, you know, we need to
take care of it.
Need to take care of the land as well.
Yeah, try not to throw trash into the ocean.

(01:41:44):
That's it.
This is good advice for everyone.
Throw it into a landfill at least so that Daniel Batten can mine Bitcoin with it.
At least do that much.
You'll be doing it.
You're in a good service.
Well, Nate, thank you so much for your time again.
Appreciate it.
Looking forward to seeing you in the flesh here hopefully soon at some conference or

(01:42:08):
another.
But until then, thanks so much.
Awesome.
Aloha.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.
If you're a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,

(01:42:31):
head to bitcoinpodcast.net slash sponsor.
If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving a five star review wherever
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You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker.
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(01:42:54):
at Walker America.
You can also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com slash at Walker America
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There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.

(01:43:16):
Until next time, stay free.

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