Energy Tech Startups

0:00 Transform your startup journey with the energy tech nexus. Connect with fellow founders, access critical resources, and be part of a community shaping the future of energy and carbon tech. Your

0:10 path to building a Thunderlizard starts here. Learn more at

0:14 energytechnexascom. Welcome back to the show. Today we're here with Nate Harmon at the co-founder of Ocean Bit. And Ocean Bit is developing an OTEC, which we're going to spell out as Ocean Thermal

0:26 Energy, right? Is that what it is? There we go That's exactly right. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, Nate, and what's bringing you to Houston. Yeah, so at a high level, what we

0:37 do is we harness the power of the sun that's stored in the water. It's a concentrated solar technology that uses water's natural heat capacity to produce base load 24 carbon, 247 carbon-free energy.

0:58 Our terminal market is gonna be data centers. And the reason for that is that ocean thermal is unique where not only can we provide data centers with renewable energy, but also unlimited cooling.

1:16 And oftentimes, especially these high-density compute data centers, you'd think AI, your global climate modeling, super-computing, proof-of-work applications, 40 of their energy cost goes

1:31 straight to cooling costs. And we have access to unlimited HVAC. So in geothermal, the idea is the heat is deep underground, and you pull it up to the surface. It's warm. You reject this heat to

1:48 the atmosphere, and you put a turbine or something in between to extract energy and turn electricity. But where's the temperature difference in ocean thermal energy? Sure, so it's a reverse

1:58 geothermal gradient. like you said, with traditional geothermal, an ocean thermal is considered now a flavor of geothermal by the Department of Energy. It's a reverse geothermal gradient where the

2:13 heat source is that warm ocean water and the heat sink is freezing cold deep, cold water. And you can, about 850 meters or below, you start getting the appropriate temperature differential to

2:32 generate base load power. And that's available all year round, all day long, no need for batteries or any other storage method. So it's really ideal for places like my home in Hawaii where right

2:49 now we're paying 46 cents per kilowatt hour. And yeah, yeah And, you know, that, you know, that, that. No problem, 46 cents, you know, it's a lot. California pays 60, right? But this

3:04 same problem, right, we're in the middle of nowhere.

3:10 Fossil fuel, transportation, logistics, supply chain, break down the further you are from the source. So, which is nice that we're in here in Texas, where we're close to the source of the

3:21 energy's cheap, the further and further away you get the more expensive it is And California's paying 60 cents per kilowatt hour, but if you think about Hawaii, and then that same problem is echoed

3:36 throughout the world, right? Small islands are paying the same price as California without the income. So, when your daily income is a couple dollars a day, and every kilowatt hour of energy is

3:55 costing you 50 cents, that really hampers economic activity. So our commercialization path to data centers, electrification of offshore assets leads through small island development states,

4:14 coastal economies, who are really hurting by high oil prices. And this can really help a lot of people, not just myself

4:26 Are there any risks associated with doing this in the oceans? Does it like impact the overall biodiversity there? Does it impact the, are we gonna mess up the temperatures in the ocean further?

4:42 Just curious. Yeah, so I mean, at the end of the day, any large piece of infrastructure in the ocean is gonna attract some big fish, right?

4:53 so well you know the fisher the fishing industry is uh. keen on it So, for a lot of these small island developing states, fishing is right now their main source of income, doesn't require a lot of

5:06 fossil fuel, diesel infrastructure to paddle out. But

5:13 we are pulling up a lot of water and that deep water contains nutrients. Nutrients that the tropical oceans, they're oligotrophic, meaning they lack those nutrients, that when you reintroduce

5:27 those nutrients back to the surface, it produces algae, right? So if I can stop you there. So part of the reason why people think of the crystal clear ocean in Hawaii is because it's crystal clear,

5:39 while it's like that, 'cause it's a desert. There's no nutrients, no energy, right? And so the weird irony of it is you're gonna create life. And

5:51 so this sort of circumnavigates the energy requirement Carbon dioxide removal techniques, you know, everybody knows about direct air capture and that's a direct energy input, right? You put the

6:04 energy in, you spin the fans, it costs energy to pull carbon out of the air, right? We got energy by putting the carbon there, and so it requires an energy, that same energy input, if it's 100

6:19 effective, which it's not So it requires more energy than you released to bring that carbon back, and it's the same thing for, you know, ocean alkalinity enhancement where it may not be a direct

6:32 energy input, but the mining industry, the transportation, the distribution, all requires that same energy input Ocean thermal is the only way to circumnavigate that energy input requirement, and

6:49 it's the only MCDR that marine carbon dioxide removal technique that produces energy while passively on the back end sequester in carbon and like walk us through for those who maybe haven't connected

7:02 the dots. So you're talking about the algae, like how does that translate? The algae is going to get nutrients, it's going to be that sort of how does that translate to carbon removal? These are

7:11 one, you know, single cellular plants. So think of it like growing trees, except those trees are in the ocean, and they're just single cellular, but there's billions of them. So they eat the

7:24 nutrients, they take up the carbon dioxide, there's an alkalinity chance, it was a little more complicated than that, but they take up at the end of the day, they pull carbon out of the

7:35 atmosphere, they release oxygen, they release oxygen, and then when they die, they, their little shells sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they take that carbon and it sequesters it for 500

7:49 to a thousand years. And, and I think, if I remember my geophysics or geology correctly, like, We talk about oil, right? I think as children, we imagine, like dinosaurs come from oil. No,

7:60 oil comes from algae, right? And it's the sandstone. It's the bodies that have been converted into, what do they call it, sedimentary rock, and then gets processed into oil in the long term,

8:09 which is the OG source of carbon in some ways. It's a whole sun. Yeah, you know, fossil fuels hydrocarbon is just the sun stored in life, right? Something 300 billion years or older, 365

8:25 million years ago, pulled, you know, use the sun to produce some, some, you know, their life, right? All life is made out of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, right, in a very specific

8:42 ratio. And so, and it requires energy to take that and turn it into your cellular structures And so this is Just sort of, and this is a natural process that happens along the coast everywhere,

8:58 right? In California, you have natural upwelling, it's why it's so productive. You know, all along the eastern side of the notion basin, this happens naturally, it happens along the equator,

9:13 naturally where you have, you know, 'cause we're on a spinning globe, I know some people are, that's a controversial statement But we are on a spinning globe and, you know, there's the whole

9:25 toilet thing and it spins in different directions which creates a pressure differential at the equator which causes natural upwelling so you can see it from space. Big algae bloom along the equator.

9:37 This is just sticking an energy generator in the middle of a natural process, right? The sun strikes the earth with 35 billion megawatts solar energy every second. of every day, 40 of that lands

9:56 in the tropical oceans of the world, where you can't build solar panels. I mean, you can try, but it won't be cost effective, yeah. Yeah, good, good luck floating solar panels in, you know,

10:08 on the ocean, possible, but not cost effective. And that, you know, that heat, the Earth takes that heat at the equator and the tropics moves it poleward, north and south, where it, you know,

10:25 it cools, it

10:28 gets saltier and it sinks down below. Then the natural, this is called the Thermohaline Circulation, brings that cold water back to the tropics, creating that temperature difference, that stable

10:43 temperature difference that's available year round. And what is that temperature difference? So it's gonna, of course, depend on location And so this is part of our - Innovation is geographic

10:55 arbitrage. So going to the hottest water on the planet first, as our first market, right? Islands near the equator, where you can have the annual average temperature, 30 degrees Celsius or above.

11:13 What is that in? Or freedom units? I'll do something.

11:18 The audience can figure it out. 95 degrees, I think, maybe. Is it that hot? I would, yeah. I would, yeah. That's 90s, yeah. I feel when I think on a human scale in Fahrenheit, but I

11:31 science and math in Celsius, yes. Yes, but that is, I mean, that is pretty hot. So it's a 30 degree difference, it's kind of, 30 degrees at the, yeah, 25, right? So it depends on how deep

11:44 you wanna go. So there's, of course, an economic incentive to go deeper, Pipes have come down in cost over time. We've actually explored going deeper, but what we really use as the benchmark is

11:58 about 1, 000 meters and we can adjust that up or down depending on the location, the cost of delivery of the pipe. So 30 degrees is, and 25 degrees is actually not a lot of differential. So like,

12:11 I don't think an OCR would work on this. So what do you, what do you do? How do you convert the differential into energy? That's correct. Or useful power So it's not an organic Rankin cycle,

12:20 it's just a regular Rankin cycle. And that's exactly right. The working fluid for various Rankin cycles

12:29 is different depending on your temperature difference. And if we're gonna get, you know, deep into it, it's actually pressure difference, but temperature drives the pressure because PV is equal

12:39 to an RT block. If you remember that, yeah. And so our working fluid is ammonia, right?

12:46 And that just happens to have a boiling point around the temperature. Exactly, at a reasonable pressure, right? So it's a low pressure, low efficiency system. We got to call our friend over at

12:58 Emoji and bring them over here. They were doing an ammonia

13:02 generation fuel cell system. Of course. Ammonia is one of, you know, is a great fuel. I know, I mean, in the ammonia pipelines that run throughout our country, they have to bring it up to

13:14 pressure, and what they do is they do a pressure let down, you know, the ammonia running through the pipelines, it's high pressure, so they do a pressure let down and generate energy to power the

13:27 rest of it to keep the pressure at the ammonia pressure. That's funny. So ammonia turbines are well known at scale industry as, you know, this is,

13:39 kind of gets into the history of OTEC and why now Yeah because you said it's been around for a hundred years. Right, to tell us a little bit about where has it been used and what's the advancement

13:51 that has been made over the past couple of years, I guess? Yeah. So the inception of ocean thermal traces back to the 1850s

14:02 or whenever, whenever Jules Verne published 20, 000 leagues under the sea where the

14:11 how the, the Nautilus is powered He, there's a, it's a throwaway line in the book, right? To, you have to hand wave away, you know, how the Nautilus can travel forever without having to refuel.

14:25 So he said, oh, you run like an electrical line, I forget the exact line, where you run an electrical line up and down and that's what powers the Nautilus. So that inspired a French scientist to

14:40 develop out the core concept of ocean thermal. And the first ocean thermal plant was constructed in the 1930s, right around the same time that Saudi Arabia struck gold, or black gold,

14:58 which ruined the electric car industry, which was starting to pick up at the time. And of course they were lead acid batteries back then, and big hunks of metal, but you know, there were electric

15:14 cars, but the discovery of, and it's still one of the largest discoveries to date. Yeah.

15:24 That put a damper on all alternative forms of generation and energy. So that plant never didn't take off in the 30s then after the gas crisis in the 70s, there was another big push for renewable

15:41 energy.

15:43 famously Carter would a bunch of solar panels on the roof, right? That was the

15:50 big, you know, showpiece for his really, you know, transformative legislation. You know, part of

15:57 that renewable energy push was funding a bunch of OTEC research. So one of our team members who's been doing this for the last 40 years was on the team. He engineered the pipe, deploy, you know,

16:12 did the, you know, the deployment strategy for the pipe, the connection. It was a large, still to this date, the largest ocean thermal plant built. It was a one megawatt World War II oil tanker

16:29 conversion So an old world, you know, an old World War II, a naval oil tanker, they scooped out the guts, put in all, you know, the pumps, the piping, the heat exchangers, stuck a pipe off

16:44 the bottom and got to a megawatt. So this was a successful, what you would call today, a pilot and off of the back of this success, the Carter administration, green lit, a 40 megawatt-o-tech

16:58 ocean thermal plant for the state of Hawaii.

17:03 Well, Carter was not re-elected.

17:09 And oil prices crashed And Reagan comes in, he rips the solar panels off the roof of the White House, but in the background

17:21 cuts all the funding for renewable energy. So all this money went in. You know, they

17:28 gave Dr. Luis Vega, who's our team member, gave him a bunch of money. They did all the engineering and feed studies. They went to all the major US. manufacturers and got, you know, perfect.

17:43 parts really getting the most built in the most efficient system that they could and took too long to do that right so that they sacrificed speed for efficiency what do we say perfection is the enemy

17:58 of good enough that's exactly exactly and Luis every day tells me how it's the biggest regret of his life not just going out and buying a bunch just can we swear on here do you want me to cut it no no

18:12 go for it you know shit off the shelf and throw it in a in a ship and get to first oil yeah yeah and you know that decision set back not just the ocean thermal industry but solar and wind as well and

18:30 solar and wind had to use subsidies right to get to scale ocean thermal on the other hand has almost no funding, no subsidies, but it's the innovation in offshore oil and gas has brought the major

18:50 components for this technology to the point where we can build a 25 megawatt vessel conversion, oil tanker conversion using off-the-shelf components that can cut the cost of energy across small

19:09 island development states by 50 today. Oh, and because it's a ship, you can literally make it here. Yes, you ship it there. You do not have to rely on the infrastructure of where you're

19:23 deploying it. So our target market is Southeast Asia. So we're gonna go to sing the best shipbuilders in the world in Singapore to do this quickly We're going to bring Australian marine operators.

19:40 to for deployment, then we connect to land with a undersea cable, and we connect right to the grid. So it's, I guess I don't talk about that much, but the app, my wife's family are a bunch of

19:57 mariners. And so they actually work in the shipping industry out of Singapore in Hong Kong. And so I'm sure after this we'll have to trade notes on who you should be visiting. Citrium, absolutely,

20:07 any connections to Citrium? We have one, and we are always interested in continuing that talk. Yeah, but anyway, interesting. So yeah, so this would be considered like innovation in the

20:19 maritime industry, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you give us the long march of how it got to today, and I guess the question is always, why is the time now, what was there, besides the fact

20:33 that we have IRA, which is really kicking things in a high year, technology or a moment where it all comes together and you say this is the catalyzing event that makes it possible to make the

20:44 economics work. It is a confluence of macro and, of course, our innovation. Right. So, policy is one, high cost of oil is another, the. And what's your innovation? I guess that's really the

20:60 nut of it, right? And then the component costs have come down in the last 10 years The pipe cost has collapsed by about 75. Heat exchangers keep getting smaller and cheaper. And then our

21:15 innovation is the thermodynamic and electrical coupling of high density compute with the ocean thermal energy cycle. So to expand on that

21:30 a little bit, I've said a couple of times that it's base load energy It's available all day, all day long, and that's true. but there is a head component to it, right? There's a diurnal and a

21:43 seasonal cycle to sea surface temperature. It's warmer in the summer, colder in the winter. So that means that it's really only base load based on the coldest day of the year. So what do you do

21:59 364 days out of the year? Luis, one of the reasons why Luis happens to be my neighbor So I can kick down his door.

22:11 One of the reasons why he started talking with me, ended up becoming my mentor and joining the team full time. One of the reasons he did this is because our innovation solved a problem. He had

22:27 almost purposely ignored in the 100 plus publications he's done over his entire career. How do you monetize that head? This is, you rightly pointed out. that this is a low efficiency heat engine,

22:42 right? And so your economics are tough already. If you're wasting what amounts to, you know, annually 15 of your annual generation, either straight curtailment dumping it or selling it at

23:00 intermittent rates, you cannot make this work economically So how do you monetize that in an economic way? Well, Luis had tried, you know, ammonia production, hydrogen production, methanol

23:18 production and at a certain scale, those can start to make sense. But not to get from the, not to, they won't make sense to move us from the one megawatt to get to 100 megawatts. You have to have

23:32 something in the middle And the economics of hydrogen are already rough. as is then try, you know, adding logistics, supply chain, shipping, transportation on top of that to the middle of the

23:46 ocean and they get even worse. So what has happened in the last 10 years and what we, you know, what our IP is, our core foundational IP is just to monetize that through compute, right? You know,

24:04 depending on location can determine, determines which application, but high density compute applications don't require, you know, the bandwidth like that you would need with a undersea fiber optic

24:18 cable. So things like the AI training component, where, you know, they take a 25 megawatt power plant and they load up a bunch of GPUs, like the newest NVIDIA's, oh man, these things are slick.

24:35 10U rack space, 14 kilowatts in a little box like this big. I mean, these things are putting out heat like a son of a bitch and require, again, that's what drives us 40 of the cost. Every, you

24:54 know, jewel you put into one of these is a jewel you have to remove for the system, otherwise they'll burn up. Yeah Do you harvest any energy from the HVAC to like boost the temperatures? Yeah,

25:08 exactly. Yeah. So that the electrical coupling is how do we modulate the sea surface temperature variations between, you know, the daily. Or also, you know, if we're operating near an island,

25:22 there are coastly bound eddies, there's internal waves, and there's even a fluctuation on a smaller time scale the deep water input, but then. there's the thermodynamic coupling where we're able

25:38 to do waste heat reintegration to actually get more power out of the system. We can dump that heat into the ammonia working fluid to superheat the working fluid to get a drier gas at the turbine

25:55 outlet. So you're cutting down on your wear and tear and you're also boosting for putting the jewels into the system Those are jewels you can pull out of this system. Of course, it's an exponential

26:09 decrease every time you do that, but it becomes measurable and it's more money. Suproximity to data centers is then important. I think you're doing it on - We're doing co-location on a bow. The

26:23 next thing I want to take is there's plenty of room. So where are

26:26 the data centers are offshore?

26:29 Yeah, so we would, for our first location, for our 25 megawatt power plant, it's going to be about seven kilometers offshore. And as a proof of concept for this, rather than going out, finding

26:42 a customer, haggling with Google or Amazon, we're going to demonstrate this with Bitcoin. You're going to

26:50 build with Bitcoin. Proof of work. It has zero customer acquisition cost, requires almost no bandwidth, and doesn't care if it's on or off. It prefers to be on. It is a buyer of last resort.

27:02 It's not the, you know, it's not going to pay the most, right? Google, Amazon,

27:11 you guys, we're more than willing to do that, but you have a customer that exists, will pay you for every, you know, kilowatt you put into the system. And now I have no transport cost.

27:28 A little bit Bitcoin. Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself. So when you do the like magic, I'm gonna, okay, I

27:32 guess we're going to tell a lot. So we're sitting here in digital lock headers, are they run like the good Bitcoin podcast? I'm gonna be embarrassed next week when they're like, Jason, you don't

27:38 understand anything about how it works. But basically what they do is there's a part of Bitcoin is it's a protocol to lock knowledge and information and value. And it's a self-reinforcing protocol

27:51 where you kind of validate all the other data and transactions on the system and are in reward. The system gives you back a portion of the Bitcoin that Bitcoin has intrinsic value. I don't know what

28:02 it is today, 20, 000 per bit, 60, 000. 60, 000. And so you get a certain reward and then that's kind of yours to keep or sell. And so it's kind of a self-regulating system and you use the

28:15 compute to verify all the little bits of data on the blockchain as they call it. And so that's my oversimplified version of how it works. and therefore it's not that someone pays you, it's kind of

28:29 all the other people who participate are paying that people. More like you find it. It already exists, and you have, it's like digital gold. You just have to go find it, and it just happens to

28:38 be hidden in math. But the data centers that run the Bitcoin processing in the formation of Bitcoin are run by Google, Microsoft. Oh, I think they run by anybody. It could be run by anybody. It

28:48 could be run right here on the shelf. Right, like it could be run by anybody So system of the data - I was a stealing electricity from my university to mine, Bitcoin, because I was - I mean, we

28:57 don't want a dentistry like that. We don't want a dentistry like that. That we did that, but yes. Yeah. But the, you know, Bitcoin is really a dung beetle. It goes, you know, where others

29:07 won't go to monetize, you know, unused energy. So things like - But you're creating your own data center, then. Is that what you're saying? No, you can buy these off a shelf, right? You can

29:18 buy a data center. You buy from China It comes

29:22 in a conic box for Bitcoin mining yeah, and that

29:24 But Bitcoin mining is a buyer of last resort. I don't want to have to mind Bitcoin. It just happens to be low bandwidth, meet a couple of requirements that we have on board. Are you ready to lead

29:38 the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth, offering unique resources and expertise for energy and carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexescom and

29:50 start building your Thunderlisset Ideally, we want to move into the AI training where they pay a much higher rate for energy. And of course, with 40 cooling, that decreases that hurdle rate. I

30:05 wanna do global, I'm an environmental scientist. I have a master's degree in marine geology and geochemistry. I wanna do global climate modeling. I wanna do super compute activities. Bitcoin is

30:19 just there as a last resort where I don't, I know that if nothing else works, it will be there to monetize every wasted electron I can produce. And that's all that matters, because again, the low

30:34 efficiency heat engine, if I waste energy that has a measurable impact on our bottom line. So it's really just about how, you know, getting creative, how to monetize every single electron. The

30:52 network, whatever, it's all irrelevant. It's just about, because the energy density is so high, we want to sit our equipment for the ocean thermal side, as low as possible. You have, you know,

31:08 you ballast the vessel offshore to sit as low as possible so that your equipment is, 10 meters below the surface, so you have that additional head, which cuts down on our parasitic, our pumping

31:24 costs, and that leaves the whole deck space essentially open. How do we, you know, how do we generate revenue both on wasted energy and with that deck space open? There's a, you know, bunch of

31:40 crazy ideas to do that. You could host a teleport. You could do, you know, a deep water hydro station, have a bunch of my, you know, University of Hawaii friends who, you know, have their lab

31:52 has vessel mounted analytical labs. You could have them bring those on and, you know, we're dropping CTDCasts, rosettes every day, doing scientific research. There's a dozen different ways, but

32:06 to get that excess energy. And it also allows us to move that, you know, that revenue we generate. out of country directly generate while we may be using the energy in say, you know, Fiji,

32:24 Papua New Guinea, well, that we're actually able to transport that revenue directly back home, sort of

32:32 getting around, you know, 4X markets. So, just I was looking at the time. We're here in Houston. What are you doing here in Houston?

32:42 I came to enjoy the beautiful weather we're having Yeah. It's, we're here as part of the rice clean energy accelerator program. This is class four and we applied a while ago and they accepted us

32:57 and it's been transformative, you know. And how'd you hear about it?

33:02 Mining, mining the internet, you know, we're our team. So, our team is right now, we have a five person team.

33:14 marine geology, geochemistry. Sam Benson, he's our marine operations guru, ran a fleet, shipping fleet out of Australia. He's located in Australia, ran a shipping fleet, has done vessel

33:30 conversions for Royal Australian Navy. We've got Luis, Dr. Luis Vega, who's our ocean thermal energy engineer and guru. He's my neighbor, so he's in Hawaii. We've got, we've got Alexi, he's

33:46 out in the UK. He was, he's a wind energy, offshore wind energy consultant, so doing, you know, feasibility, studies for those mega offshore projects. And then we've got, we've got Curtis,

34:05 who's out again, out of Australia. He's our naval architect. And the thing you'll notice about all of those, all of us is, we're not necessarily in the business industry. So this is something we

34:18 identified as a core weakness and we needed to improve. So we looked for energy accelerators who can help us corporate governance, set up our board, get our cap table in order, the data room,

34:37 make sure we have everything we need 'cause there are so many in a business, there are so many known unknowns and then there's the unknown unknowns. So really whittling down those unknown unknowns.

34:51 So of course, rice, Houston, the tech scene here, the energy scene is incredible. So rice comes up at the top of this list that we make and we can get it immersed in the energy ecosystem here

35:10 It's been incredible. We had, this is our second in-person week. And the whole program is

35:19 at eight or 12 weeks. I think it's eight weeks total and there's three in-person weeks. We, me and Sam came out for the first one. Me and Alexi came out for this one. So we're flying people from

35:34 around the globe and then we're all gonna be here for the final week in September, which coincides with the Houston Energy Tech Venture Forum a week. I forget they changed the name. All these

35:48 things, yeah. All of the above. Yes, that's the answer for today. All of the above. And they've really helped us, you know, there's a whole, and you bury the lead. How much does this cost

35:57 you? Oh, the, how much does the energy cost? No, no, how much does the college, how much does the program cost you? Program is free. It's free, it's awesome. And they give you a stipend

36:07 Night. Mm. Less than. More than. less than free, it's better than free. And then between the, you know, you get assigned a executive in residence, who, who's your executive in residence?

36:20 Nick Tillman. Nick Tillman, he did, you know, Versailles. Subsea, am I, is that remember? Yeah, he's got a robotics company. That's it, yeah. He came, Conoco Phillips, you know, has,

36:34 he comes from the energy industry, we're building energy And then we also have an advisor here,

36:41 Steve Keeby, he was the founder of Atlantia Offshore, they commercialized marginal offshore deep water fields with TLP's, Tension Leg Platforms, and he's here and he got, you know, he built his

37:00 company, what would be now a startup, built out his company, commercialized, demonstrated commercial viability feels offshore, and then, you know, sold it off the company to SBM, at

37:19 SBM, he was the director of their renewable energy, and he got, he found ocean thermal and fell in love. So naturally, he reaches out to the OTEC guru, Luis, this was 20 years ago, and they've

37:35 been calling each other, every company. Energy is a small place, he's kind of the moral of the story. They call each other every couple of years, Luis says, There's these crazy guys who you have

37:46 to talk to who are. So now, you know, we stay with him, and I'm glad that the studio's out here, because he stays in Katie, so it's a lot closer. Nice. So tell us about, I guess, the program

37:58 itself in terms of, like, what do you guys do this week? You said it was the second in-person week. What do you guys, how are they keeping

38:06 really busy, but it's nice because the virtual week started at 430 AM my time. So I get to work on learn how to build a business. And then all day go work on my business. I don't have to skip any

38:22 time there. But this week, the focus has been on narrative. You know, cutting extraneous things like, we don't really tie unless it's long form We don't talk about carbon sequestration because

38:38 it's ancillary, it's a passive thing. Yeah, there's no, it's not directly part of the monetization, right? We make and sell electricity. It's a commodity, it's a well understood. You know,

38:49 the terminal market data centers, it's a massive industry. Gigawatts and gigawatts and gigawatts. And you read the article, Ah, data centers soak up 30 of the world's energyby whatever, right?

39:02 You know, the New York Times headline So we've been working. That was a big focus this week.

39:10 Again, corporate governance, building your board, maintaining Delaware, C, compliance.

39:19 Then of course, there's a huge list of mentors that they give you and

39:27 it's your, it's your, it's all, you make the most of that list as you, you know, see fit. So we've had meetings all over town with a number of different companies. I don't know if I'm supposed

39:43 to say. It's your call if you want to. Yeah.

39:47 You know, legal counsel, so Baker Botts came through and did a talk and, you know, we got some one-on-one time with them, we're gonna engage with them on a couple of issues that we're going

39:60 through and need assistance with, you know, really how to. build an energy business, right? We're a bunch of ocean nerds at the end of the day, and the whole team,

40:16 Chelsea, Carrie, Matt, have all just been so helpful and friendly, and have really helped us co-elect turn from some crazy ID and a bunch of guys with CAD and Aspen Plus doing some great, really

40:35 coalescing that into what is a viable business. Yeah. Yeah. Good.

40:43 Has there anything about Houston that surprised you since you've been here?

40:47 The difficulty of getting in here, the first week was a hurricane barrel.

40:56 So that was fun. I got diverted to Austin and had to drive to Katie in the middle of the hurricane He was cli - you know cat one. So I've lived at the coast and on islands forever. So cat one, I'm

41:11 probably still going about my day as normal, just avoiding, you know, like most of us. Yeah.

41:18 And then this time, I was that on the runway? Was it the crowd strike? Or is that that's all we missed the crowd strike. But this time I sat on the runway for two hours, which put me into Houston

41:32 after the car rental agencies closed. So I had to sit around the airport. What I try, you know, try to start early in my morning, get here, you know, at night, go to sleep, get up for my

41:47 meetings the next morning, try to avoid the red icus. Get into old for it. That's what the model is. So I ended up, but I ended up sleeping at the airport anyway, because the car rentals were

41:58 closed. Yeah. And then, you know, getting ready for a meeting the next day and a chicken. lathe bathroom, which is nice, you landed in Houston. Yeah, at 130 am. On Monday morning, is it

42:12 like barely? Yeah. The moral of the story is just Uber. You don't know where you're going. Houston's huge, it's probably just easy 'cause you're still gonna pay30 for parking when you get there,

42:21 so you might as well Uber, right? That's - Parking's included at the RICA.

42:26 That's good, that's good at least. But I'm taking cruise ships from now on You might get here faster. Yeah! Oh man, I'll tell you a terrible story, which is not a good sales point for, we're

42:38 gonna go with unnamed yellow Hertz rental company. I landed in Houston once at like 11 am. and at 11 pm. and I'm landing and I have a reservation. I'm like, I'm tired and I get there and the one

42:49 goes, oh, we don't have your car. I guess you can't have a car, but wait, we got a Corvette. You can route that one for1, 000 a day and I go, I'm a very poor entrepreneur What am I supposed to

43:01 do with that? I want my50 a day car, please. Yeah, I never runched from them again. So I had that same problem with six. Yeah, yeah, you can get a BMW. How much is that? I think this is a

43:15 sign filled episode that we watched once, but anyways, I'm still upset about it 10 years later. What's the point in the reservation? If you don't hold the reservation? Just frankly, anyways. So

43:26 that's not necessarily - That's not about Houston though That's just, that's I-A-H can be crazy sometimes. So,

43:35 I guess you're still in Houston and getting to know Houston, but I guess aside from that, we like to ask those who come on our episode, if they have a climate impact story that they want us to

43:45 share with us. Yeah, why are you so passionate about the ocean? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, so in another life,

43:54 I was a scuba instructor Working in the floor at a keys. I met my wife there, she was a dolphin trainer. And I witnessed my first coral bleaching.

44:08 And then, you know, I, of course you're taking tourists and then kicking the coral, knocking it over. So then, you know, I meet my wife. We decide after three months of dating to move halfway

44:22 across the planet to Hawaii. And, you know, I'm seeing a lot of the same things that I saw And we both end up going back to graduate school. And I

44:37 realize that the ocean is being impacted and it's being, you know, it's, it's, coral can't move. Coral can't migrate like megafauna. You know, a lot of, you know, large animals can migrate

44:54 further north or up a mountain Coral is an animal, but it's stuck in place. Um, and so I realized I had to do something and of course I'm super passionate about the ocean and It just made sense to

45:13 go into oceanography And

45:18 you know you mentioned the impact is one of the things One of our advisors dr. Girard knee house

45:27 He had done the total energy Tam for ocean thermal You know he's been doing it and refining it every year or every couple of years and Right now the best estimate is about five terawatts can be

45:45 extracted from the ocean before you start cooling the planet itself Which now we're we're going oh so you can cool the planet If

45:57 you take out five terawatts of energy, right? Of course, that's a geoengineering thing, so, you know, it gets touched, but it might be nice to have it in our back pocket.

46:09 Yeah, fascinating, okay, and so how did that lead you to then ocean thermal? Well, Hawaii naturally is the epicenter of ocean thermal research in the world. We're home to the only deep water

46:26 pipe infrastructure in the western world There's another one in Korea, there's another one in Japan, but westerners don't have access. So it's at a location called the Hawaiian Ocean Science

46:38 Technology Park on the big island of Hawaii. And there've been, you know, Luis has built multiple ocean thermal plants there, you know, RD scale, and that's where we're building our, doing our

46:50 technical demonstration, demonstrating that data center integration with the technology showing balancing. you know, as an opportunity to do load curve testing with other, you know, various blue

47:05 economy use cases, grid, you know, you give me a load curve and I'll program it in and show how we can match that load curve providing, you know, the base load and then peak or capacity at the

47:18 same time, right? I can turn off computers a lot faster than you can spin up a combined site or a simple cycle natural gas turbine, right? That's 30 minutes. The only thing faster than turning

47:31 off a computer is a battery. So we can shed megawatts of load in seconds to avoid grid blackouts or some of the grid-based problems that the intermittent's cause. You think you're wind, you're

47:52 solar, or you're wave.

47:58 a ancillary grid services to balance out some of these problems, you know, essentially making it so that you don't have to do grid upgrades to bring on more solar, we can be your grid upgrade while

48:12 also providing you base load and peak or capacity, which is really the holy grail a of power plant, right? You know, coal, you can't turn it off,

48:22 you know, nuclear, you can't really turn it off. Natural gas takes about 30 minutes, which is fantastic, but you don't run them all day. So the ability for a single power plant, a renewable

48:34 energy power plant that has a, you know, is an inertial mass on the grid to be able to provide both base load and peak or capacity is, you know, not lost on a lot of these communities. Yeah, I'm

48:49 curious, like, what does the Hawaiian innovation community look like? I know there's like elemental there, there's obviously the demonstration center Where the cool kids hang out. Well,

48:58 elemental has grown quite large as, and they've sort of migrated away from Hawaii, right? Oh really, I didn't know that, okay. I mean, they're still a presence, but they're not, it's not as

49:11 large as it once was.

49:15 It's small, right? It's far away, like the state is small. The state is small, the innovation community is small, and for good reason, right? The outside of ocean thermal, which nobody else

49:32 is really doing, there's a couple of other companies who are doing it, and

49:37 the army's building won for one of their bases, so that should be announced soon in their public budget, which kind of sounds the starting gun of this race towards

49:52 ocean thermal um You know, what's the one thing that you can do anywhere in the world software? So people try to do software and, but then you say, well, why would I do software in Hawaii when I

50:11 have to fly to San Francisco every day? Why don't we just live in San Francisco or LA or anywhere else that's closer to

50:24 the companies you interact with, your funders, right? With ocean thermal, this is the only pipe. I don't have a choice. So I can at least make an excuse why I go surfing at 2 pm. I can do my,

50:36 you know, bang out this rice stuff by 7 am. Do a full day of work and then go hit the waves in the afternoon.

50:47 But it gives me an excuse to be there. So it's tough because it's the middle of the ocean

50:54 Hawaii is famous for not capitalizing on our strengths. You know, the Polynesian community, the Polynesian culture is the greatest maritime culture in history. These people were sailing the

51:09 Pacific Ocean, actively colonizing every habitable piece of land in this five, 6, 000 mile wide ocean, right? These islands are thousands of miles away and they're like, yeah, there's an island

51:25 over there. We're going, we're calling. There is no maritime culture today. The Hokulea, you know, sails around the world, you know, proving that the Polynesians were the greatest maritime

51:38 culture. There are no captains. There are no, you know, able-bodied seamen coming out of the Hawaiian community. So we squandered that resource,

51:52 you know, I, what I'm trying to do and what, you know, some of the other people at the Hawaiian Ocean Science Technology Park, the Hatch program is there. What they're trying to do, you know,

52:03 the Hatch program is focused on aquaculture, right? The main economic driver of host park is not ocean thermal research. It's algae, macroalgae production,

52:14 right? Blue economy, right? We are the center of the Pacific Ocean, right?

52:25 We have a deep water port, we don't have ship building, but we have dry docks.

52:32 I truly believe that ocean thermal is, and building this out, right? I've tried to convince the state legislature to, if they would just fund an OTEC plan off the budget and require, you know.

52:52 There's a bunch of different companies there who do ocean engineering and who have all touched ocean thermal at one point or another. You get all of them together and we build an ocean thermal plant.

53:03 Now all of the globes, ocean thermal engineering experts are here, we can export that and build a center of excellence. Exactly. So in terms of your company, Ocean Bit, you know, now that

53:18 you're going through the accelerator program at Rice, what's your next big milestone that you're going for? So we are going through our first raise and we're doing that to hit three critical

53:33 milestones. We're building our technical demonstration plant. We've already got approval for that from Host Park. We've got a lease ready to sign, we're shovel ready. We need to go put in long

53:46 lead time orders to get that built in the next six months. So that's your pilot. That is a small-scale demonstration, land-based demonstration, containerize it, get it up and going as fast as

54:03 possible, right? Be under the ammonia handling limits, so nobody, you're not a danger to anybody. Get it, move fast. But don't, we don't wanna break things in the maritime industry. You don't

54:16 wanna spill things either, it's like doubly bad Yeah, another key milestone is we're doing the, you know, starting that fell process for that 25 megawatt plant. Fell stands for it. Front end

54:30 engineering loading. Front end loading. Oh, front end loading, okay. So we're doing, you know, pre-feasibility, feasibility, and one of that meeting I had at 10am was with a company who's

54:41 gonna help us with that.

54:45 So, you know, starting that process, you know, we have to go in-country, we have to do, you know, sampling, et cetera, et cetera, grid study, economic study, and then the third key

54:57 milestone is technical qualification of our vessel refit, right? We're gonna have to reclass this thing. It's already, it's, the hull's already classed, right? So the idea is to take things

55:07 that are off the shelf, already marine certified,

55:12 take the Lego pieces that exist and rearrange them in a new way. So the, you know, we're working with one class society but we may end up working with another one to do, you know, technical

55:27 qualification, first approval and principle, then technical qualification and really work hand-in-hand with them up through final engineering and assembly. So those are the three key milestones

55:42 that we're trying to hit Built in the technical demonstrator. We're doing feasibility work and technical qualification of our power plant design. Okay. A lot of work. Yeah, that works. Sounds

55:55 like a lot of capital. We're not gonna guess, I'm gonna guess it. Guess it. 15 million. Two. Two. I'm terrible at this game. I would not win the prices, right? Well, we've been limping

56:08 along for the last two years on, I don't know if it's a, you would even call it a ramen budget. What's below ramen, Musubi? Spam Musubi.

56:21 We've been eating Spam Musubi for three meals a day. You know, we've gotten to this point on under250, 000 based on a

56:32 bunch of crazy, mission-driven co-founders. Powered by Goodwill and a lot of energy. and banging on people's doors, and annoying them till they talk. And then once they talk to us, they go, oh,

56:48 okay, yeah, you guys may be crazy, but you

56:53 have some serious talent. We've built an incredible team, not just our core team, but our advisors. My graduate advisor is our

57:06 MCDR guru on the team He's ran the CLIVAR program. He's part of that IPCC, the 2009 working group, one team that won the Nobel Prize.

57:21 He's done, I mean, just in a vice chancellor of research at the University of Hawaii. We've got Steve Keeby, who I mentioned from Atlantia Guy Girard, knee house, we've got, you know, data,

57:40 data center, guru, CTO of a publicly traded data center company, advising us on how to build this business. Build data centers. So we've really built this world class team of people who believe

57:58 in this. This is something that not only has to happen, but is happening. The army is building one of these, and we just have to beat them to market And they have a different audience, but go

58:10 ahead. No, I was just going to say, so if anyone's listening, they're really excited about this technology.

58:16 What are you looking for? Yeah, aside from, I guess, money. Like, what is something that people can do to support you in the audience? Reach out. I do read all inbound on our website,

58:30 oceanbitenergycom. I

58:33 read all inbound Holler at me on Twitter or X or whatever it's at Nate Hawaii, really easy-linked in Nathaniel Harmon. Reach out. I found Sam, my co-founder off of a podcast. He listened to my

58:51 dumb ass ramble for three hours, and he goes, This guy's nuts, but he's not wrong. And I have a particular set of skills that make me a nightmare for people now. And so he called me And I picked

59:09 up, and that was a year and a half ago, and now we are on the phone multiple times a day, whether it's business or just shooting the shit. This is how I know you're a little crazy is you still

59:20 pick up phone calls from viewed numbers you don't know. Well, it was an Australian number. Okay, so that makes it better.

59:29 All right, well, we'll definitely put the contact info on the show notes. Thanks for coming with us, and I think I learned more about the ocean, today than I did in my geosystems class, senior

59:41 year of high school, which maybe isn't that much. But no, I really appreciate it. And I think this is great. Yeah, thank you for being on. Thank you guys for having me. I had brought a gift

59:52 for you guys, and then I left it at my, yeah, I brought something from Hawaii for you, but I left it there this morning and didn't have time to run back to Katie to get it. I apologize. I feel

1:00:06 really terrible about that Now, it's a thought that counts, first of all, so thank you. Thank you.