October 30, 2025 • 31 mins
Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer of OceanWell.
Michael's problem is this: How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the ocean – and deliver it to land at a cost that’s competitive with other sources of fresh water?
On today’s show, Michael explains how he built OceanWell’s prototype in his kitchen, what it takes to make a system that’s less disruptive to marine life, and why innovations from the oil and gas industry are making his work possible.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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
(00:35):
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
(00:59):
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,
(01:20):
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
(01:41):
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
(02:03):
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
(02:24):
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
(02:49):
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
(03:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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
(03:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:39):
other than us and another Norwegian company that were looking
at this seriously.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I read that you built a proto type in your kitchen.
Is that true? And what was that?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
built this prototype for several months.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So we essentially had a working kitchen. But yes, all
the drywall was removed, okay, and you know it was
functional but not aesthetic.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Okay, So you could cook, Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We could cook, and we could live there.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
And like in the middle of the room or something like,
where's the prototype and what's it look like?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
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
(06:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Crossed my mind. Yeah, and how can you test it
if it's fresh water? I'll take the bait. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The difference is you need more pressure in the ocean
because there's more salt in the ocean.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So you put the thing in fifty feet of water,
and are you piping the water back out? Yes?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
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
(08:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Did it work. It worked.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
You know, I like to think about it in three
sets of costs.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So you have your cap X costs building the play into.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
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
(09:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
That's the good news. There's a bad news part.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
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
(10:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
So as long as you build a machine that never
breaks your goal.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
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
(11:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:55):
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?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
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,
(13:35):
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,
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So that's the brine problem. What about the sucking in
marine life problem.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
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,
(14:58):
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
(15:19):
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
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
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,
(16:24):
we are.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
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
(16:47):
so that we can make, you know, relatively accurate projections
of its economics overall, which is what our customers want
to see.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
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?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
That's the big unknown that that's the big unknown that
you have to put the thing in the ocean to
festra out.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
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,
(18:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
How far is that, by the way, how far is that?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
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
(19:01):
most economical.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
And you were saying, there's one essentially power cord, one
wire that you need, and presumably that wire needs to
not break exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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,
(19:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Survival of the fittest is survival of the most optimal.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Exactly, Yes, and we're trying to be that fit company.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well, know when it works when it's down there working.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
If it works, when's that going to be.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
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
(22:37):
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
(22:58):
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.
(23:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
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?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
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
(24:19):
big rock out here in La Joya, where I currently
live is kind of my local favorite.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Right now, tell me about one wave.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:23):
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
(26:45):
to sort of explain the evolutionary advantages that a square
tail had to a roundtail.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
What are the advantages of it being square?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And if it's round, it's like more likely to twist.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
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
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
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
(28:36):
more surface contact onto things that it's grasping, So it's
better for grabbing grasping, and it's better for armor.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Did you ever end up coming up with a commercial
application for something built on the model of a sea
horse's tail.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
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
(29:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I would say.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
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.
(30:25):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
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.
(31:54):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Pop
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
(00:35):
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
(00:59):
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,
(01:20):
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
(01:41):
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
(02:03):
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
(02:24):
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
(02:49):
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
(03:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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
(03:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:39):
other than us and another Norwegian company that were looking
at this seriously.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I read that you built a proto type in your kitchen.
Is that true? And what was that?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
built this prototype for several months.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So we essentially had a working kitchen. But yes, all
the drywall was removed, okay, and you know it was
functional but not aesthetic.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Okay, So you could cook, Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We could cook, and we could live there.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
And like in the middle of the room or something like,
where's the prototype and what's it look like?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
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
(06:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Crossed my mind. Yeah, and how can you test it
if it's fresh water? I'll take the bait. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The difference is you need more pressure in the ocean
because there's more salt in the ocean.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So you put the thing in fifty feet of water,
and are you piping the water back out? Yes?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
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
(08:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Did it work. It worked.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
You know, I like to think about it in three
sets of costs.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So you have your cap X costs building the play into.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
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
(09:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
That's the good news. There's a bad news part.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
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
(10:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
So as long as you build a machine that never
breaks your goal.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
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
(11:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:55):
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?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
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,
(13:35):
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,
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So that's the brine problem. What about the sucking in
marine life problem.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
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,
(14:58):
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
(15:19):
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
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
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,
(16:24):
we are.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
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
(16:47):
so that we can make, you know, relatively accurate projections
of its economics overall, which is what our customers want
to see.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
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?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
That's the big unknown that that's the big unknown that
you have to put the thing in the ocean to
festra out.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
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,
(18:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
How far is that, by the way, how far is that?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
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
(19:01):
most economical.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
And you were saying, there's one essentially power cord, one
wire that you need, and presumably that wire needs to
not break exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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,
(19:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Survival of the fittest is survival of the most optimal.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Exactly, Yes, and we're trying to be that fit company.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well, know when it works when it's down there working.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
If it works, when's that going to be.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
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
(22:37):
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
(22:58):
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.
(23:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
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?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
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
(24:19):
big rock out here in La Joya, where I currently
live is kind of my local favorite.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Right now, tell me about one wave.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:23):
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
(26:45):
to sort of explain the evolutionary advantages that a square
tail had to a roundtail.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
What are the advantages of it being square?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And if it's round, it's like more likely to twist.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
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
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
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
(28:36):
more surface contact onto things that it's grasping, So it's
better for grabbing grasping, and it's better for armor.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Did you ever end up coming up with a commercial
application for something built on the model of a sea
horse's tail.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
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
(29:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I would say.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
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.
(30:25):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
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.
(31:54):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Pop
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