Is the Future of Fresh Water Under the Sea?

0:00:01 This is an iHeart podcast.
0:00:36 I grew up in Southern California where there is this really striking, you could call it
0:00:38 a juxtaposition, you could call it irony.
0:00:40 It’s this.
0:00:46 You’re sitting there right next to this vast ocean, and yet fresh water, drinking water,
0:00:48 is extremely scarce.
0:00:51 It has to be piped in from hundreds of miles away.
0:00:53 Sometimes still runs short.
0:00:59 So, you know, as you’re staring out from the semi-desert, out across the ocean,
0:01:02 this thought inevitably comes to your mind.
0:01:09 If only we could take the salt out of just a teeny fraction of that ocean water, our
0:01:10 freshwater problems would be solved.
0:01:14 And in fact, we can do that a little bit.
0:01:21 In San Diego County, for example, a desalination plant provides about 10% of the county’s
0:01:21 freshwater.
0:01:27 But desalination is limited because it has some pretty significant problems.
0:01:32 First, when you suck in the seawater, you tend to kill some marine life.
0:01:38 And then you have to push that seawater through a membrane to take the salt out.
0:01:42 And that pushing requires quite a lot of energy, which is expensive.
0:01:47 And then only about half of that seawater, in fact, turns into freshwater.
0:01:54 And what’s left is this really salty brine that goes back into the ocean and can mess up the
0:01:55 local ecosystem.
0:02:01 And on top of all of that, in a lot of places, people just don’t want to put a big industrial
0:02:03 desalination plant right next to the beach.
0:02:10 And so for all of those reasons, people just don’t do desalination that much.
0:02:13 But there is this other idea.
0:02:15 It’s actually been kicking around for decades.
0:02:21 What if you could do desalination at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of meters down, where
0:02:27 the pressure is so great that the weight of the ocean itself would push the seawater through
0:02:29 that membrane to create fresh water?
0:02:31 Such an efficient idea.
0:02:33 I find it just delightful in its cleverness.
0:02:38 It wouldn’t solve all the problems associated with desalination, but it could significantly
0:02:39 reduce them.
0:02:46 If you could get it to work cheaply and at scale, maybe Southern California and other dry coastal
0:02:51 places around the world could start getting a lot more of their fresh water from the sea.
0:03:00 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:03:03 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:03:06 My guest today is Michael Porter.
0:03:09 He’s the chief technology officer of a company called OceanWell.
0:03:11 Michael’s problem is this.
0:03:17 How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the sea and do it cheaply enough to compete
0:03:18 with other sources of fresh water?
0:03:23 As I mentioned before, this idea has actually been around for a long time.
0:03:28 But Michael told me that this is a good moment to be working in the field, in part because of
0:03:31 breakthroughs made by the oil and gas industry.
0:03:37 You know, luckily for us, the timing is right because over the last couple of decades, there
0:03:43 have been major improvements in remote operated vehicles and what I would call electrification
0:03:43 of the seabed.
0:03:50 So in, you know, a few decades ago, the oil and gas industry who drill for oil, you know,
0:03:56 not only on land but also offshore, they have developed a lot of these high-pressure deep
0:03:58 sea technologies in order to drill deeper and deeper.
0:04:03 And so there’s a bunch of platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, where they’re
0:04:04 constantly drilling.
0:04:09 And so we’re leveraging a lot of the knowledge that’s been gained in those offshore industries
0:04:12 and applying that to water, essentially.
0:04:19 So the guy who ends up being your co-founder comes to you some years ago with this idea.
0:04:25 At that time, like, what was the state of undersea desalination?
0:04:36 At that time, there have been a couple of tries here and there that we were aware of, mostly
0:04:42 small, whether you call them startups or just, you know, curious people that have the ability
0:04:44 to try this technology out.
0:04:46 You know, those things were out there.
0:04:54 But there were really no companies other than us and another Norwegian company that were looking
0:04:55 at this seriously.
0:04:59 I read that you built a prototype in your kitchen.
0:05:00 Is that true?
0:05:01 And what was that like?
0:05:01 It’s true.
0:05:06 We came to this impasse where we had to find a space to build.
0:05:11 And the question was, do we do it ourselves or do we work with a contractor?
0:05:16 And so we looked at some contractors and ultimately decided it’s best to do it ourselves because
0:05:17 we’re going to move faster.
0:05:20 It’s likely going to be a lot cheaper and we’re going to learn a lot more.
0:05:23 So we were looking for a place to do this work.
0:05:28 And I just happened to have a house that was partially under construction at the time.
0:05:35 So I decided it would be OK to move all of this equipment into our kitchen and build it in
0:05:35 pieces there.
0:05:42 So for a couple of months, two members of my team and I essentially lived out of this, you
0:05:47 know, under construction house and built this prototype for several months.
0:05:48 What does it look like?
0:05:49 So like, what am I picturing?
0:05:54 I’m picturing like a kitchen or it’s just like a room that’s like framed and with drywall,
0:05:56 but it’s not a kitchen yet.
0:05:57 Like what’s going on in the room?
0:06:02 So we essentially had a working kitchen, but yes, all the drywall was removed.
0:06:02 OK.
0:06:06 And, you know, it was functional, but not aesthetic.
0:06:07 OK.
0:06:08 So you could cook.
0:06:10 Yes, we could cook and we could live there.
0:06:14 And like in the middle of the room or something like where’s the prototype and what’s it look
0:06:14 like?
0:06:15 Yeah.
0:06:15 Yeah.
0:06:21 So the kitchen’s got a, not an island, a peninsula that sticks out.
0:06:21 OK.
0:06:25 And on one side of the peninsula, there was enough space to put half of the machine, which
0:06:27 is about a four foot diameter by six foot tall.
0:06:31 And then on the other side was another four foot by six foot cylinder.
0:06:35 And those two cylinders essentially needed to be stacked on top of each other and married
0:06:39 up before they’re put into the reservoir where we’re testing it.
0:06:40 OK.
0:06:45 So we built it in pieces and then we had to disassemble the thing completely to fit it
0:06:48 through the door because four feet was too wide to fit through the three foot door.
0:06:50 Did you know that was coming?
0:06:51 Yeah, we did.
0:06:52 Was that foreseen?
0:06:52 OK.
0:06:54 It’s funnier if you don’t, right?
0:06:56 And you’re like taking the door off the hinges.
0:06:57 No.
0:06:57 Right.
0:07:01 So like, OK, so you build this thing in your house, you take it out of your house, you put
0:07:02 it back together.
0:07:03 And where do you take it?
0:07:09 So we take it up to North L.A. County to a water district called Las Virginas, a municipal
0:07:09 water district.
0:07:14 They partnered with us to help us on this pilot prototyping path.
0:07:21 And they have a reservoir there, a freshwater drinking reservoir, where we ran this test.
0:07:26 And probably the first question you’re going to ask is, well, it’s freshwater, not seawater.
0:07:27 It crossed my mind.
0:07:28 Yeah.
0:07:30 And how can you test it if it’s freshwater?
0:07:31 I’ll take the bait.
0:07:37 Yeah, so submerged reverse osmosis by itself is just a system to, you know, remove all
0:07:40 the non-water molecules.
0:07:46 And so a freshwater lake, while it is fresh and doesn’t have a lot of salt, it does have
0:07:48 some total dissolved solids or salts.
0:07:55 But it’s basically the theory, if you can do reverse osmosis in 50 feet of freshwater, then
0:07:58 it’ll probably work in 1,500 feet of seawater?
0:07:59 Yeah.
0:08:03 The difference is you need more pressure in the ocean because there’s more salt in the
0:08:03 ocean.
0:08:08 So you put the thing in 50 feet of water and are you piping the water back out?
0:08:08 Yes.
0:08:09 Yeah.
0:08:10 We drop it down there.
0:08:16 We turn on our pumps and the pumps essentially circulate the lake water through our system.
0:08:23 And as the lake water passes through our system, we have another pump that sits behind our membranes
0:08:28 and it creates that low pressure on the freshwater or the permeate side of the membrane.
0:08:32 And that creates that pressure differential for the water to come through the membrane.
0:08:37 And then on the outlet, it creates the pressure high enough that it can boost that water up
0:08:42 to the surface, where we then have a little spigot that it comes out of at the top and then
0:08:43 just discharges back into the lake.
0:08:45 And did it work?
0:08:46 Yeah, it worked.
0:08:52 Actually, just last week, we passed a pretty big milestone of making 150,000 gallons of produced
0:08:56 water, which is equivalent to about three months, more than three months of runtime at
0:08:59 more than one gallon a minute, which is what our system was sized to do.
0:09:04 And that is the theory that we predicted and we successfully passed it.
0:09:07 And so it meets the models that we thought.
0:09:10 And that’s the machine you built in your kitchen?
0:09:10 Yes.
0:09:11 Yes.
0:09:12 That’s great.
0:09:15 So, OK, the technology seems promising, at least.
0:09:18 But for this to work, it has to be super cheap, right?
0:09:21 Because the product you’re selling is just water.
0:09:24 So tell me about the economics of the business.
0:09:28 You know, I like to think about it in three sets of costs.
0:09:30 So you have your CapEx costs.
0:09:31 Building the plant.
0:09:34 For equipment, you know, building the actual physical equipment.
0:09:34 Yeah.
0:09:36 And you have your operational costs.
0:09:38 And I like to separate that from the energy costs.
0:09:41 The energy we know is less.
0:09:43 So we have about a 40% energy savings there.
0:09:50 The capital costs are actually likely to be less or at least on par with what you see onshore.
0:09:54 And that’s because we don’t have to create an artificial pressure environment.
0:10:02 And so what that does is it removes a bunch of big pumps and big heavy piping that they would typically use onshore to create that artificial pressure environment.
0:10:03 That’s the good news part.
0:10:04 That’s the good news.
0:10:05 There’s a bad news part that’s about to come?
0:10:06 There’s a bad news part, yes.
0:10:06 OK.
0:10:15 The bad news part is you can imagine it’s pretty easy to just walk up to a plant onshore and put your hands on a vessel that is leaking and fix it.
0:10:15 Yeah.
0:10:16 All right.
0:10:19 That’s very hard to do when you’re 1,500 feet deep in the ocean.
0:10:27 You have to take a vessel out, which are often expensive, and then you have to either lift the system up or bring an ROV down because it’s too deep for humans to go.
0:10:29 So you can’t send divers down.
0:10:34 And you then have to either maintain in place or pull the system up.
0:10:36 And that is expensive.
0:10:38 It’s not unfounded.
0:10:42 This happens all the time in the oil and gas industry, but it is expensive.
0:10:46 And so that’s the tradeoff that we get there.
0:10:49 So as long as you build a machine that never breaks, you’re golden.
0:10:50 Exactly.
0:11:06 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.
0:11:16 And using all of that data, we can then develop models of our own to predict what that membrane life will ultimately be in the deep ocean.
0:11:26 And I’m really focused on membrane life and filter life because those are the things that will foul up and essentially stop production.
0:11:36 Other things like pumps and structures and all the parts that’s used to build the frame and all the piping, that’s well-established material selection problems.
0:11:39 I mean, that’s the stuff that oil and gas companies use.
0:11:46 It’s the membrane and the filter is what you’re doing differently and therefore is not tested in a kind of industrial setting.
0:11:53 And we are using commercially available membranes and filters, but we’re doing them in a different environment that’s relatively unknown.
0:12:03 The deep ocean beyond 200 meters, which is known as the aphotic zone, that means you have about less than 1% of light that shines through.
0:12:07 It’s relatively unknown and unexplored.
0:12:12 And just like on land, you know, you’ll have regional variability, global variability in the ocean.
0:12:18 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?
0:12:21 What is the seawater like there, the bioactivity?
0:12:22 What are the currents like?
0:12:28 And then we have to design around that site for understanding how long the system will actually work.
0:12:30 Each site will be a little bit different.
0:12:33 And so the focus for us is twofold.
0:12:42 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.
0:12:51 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?
0:12:52 Because your energy costs are lower.
0:12:54 That’s what’s driving the marginal cost.
0:13:04 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.
0:13:15 Because the economics will mean that you don’t have to separate as much fresh water per unit of seawater, which means you don’t have to create such nasty brine.
0:13:17 And that’s how you’re solving the brine problem.
0:13:18 Sort of.
0:13:20 Seems like that’s potentially bad.
0:13:20 Or you tell me.
0:13:22 How do you deal with that?
0:13:24 So there’s two parts to this.
0:13:29 Like you said, we don’t squeeze as much water as possible through these membranes.
0:13:32 And instead, we’re just lightly sipping the water off the membranes.
0:13:41 As a result, our brine is only about 5% to 18% saltier than the surrounding ocean, rather than the two times saltier from an onshore plant.
0:13:43 So that’s a good starting point.
0:13:43 Okay.
0:13:50 The other thing we’re doing is brine, which has more salt in it than seawater, is heavier than seawater.
0:13:52 And so it wants to sink to the bottom.
0:14:05 And what would happen is if you were to discharge it near the seafloor, it would essentially pool up on the seafloor and create something called a brine pool, which is generally toxic to the native biological life in that area.
0:14:18 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 seafloor.
0:14:29 So this brine riser allows us to essentially discharge our brine into the open water column, into natural currents, where it will be rapidly diffused.
0:14:35 And we’ve run some initial modeling on this brine discharge and diffusion.
0:14:44 And our model suggests that it will be much less than 1% above ambient salinity within the first meter of discharge.
0:14:45 So that’s the brine problem.
0:14:48 What about the sucking in marine life problem?
0:14:52 Yeah, the sucking in marine life problem is on the intake side.
0:14:55 The first thing is we’re in a different environment than the surface.
0:15:03 So while there still are organisms down there, microorganisms, macroorganisms, there’s still life down deep.
0:15:06 It’s not the same type of life.
0:15:08 You don’t have all the phytoplankton that live up there that need the light.
0:15:11 And those are Earth’s primary producers.
0:15:15 They, you know, generate a lot of the oxygen that we breathe.
0:15:19 And we generally do not see those down at that depth.
0:15:23 The other organisms that are down there, the big ones are easy.
0:15:28 You just essentially screen off your intake system so the big ones won’t go through the screens.
0:15:31 And then the little stuff that could fit through these screens.
0:15:43 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.
0:15:49 And we’ve got some initial data from our reservoir testing that says this is absolutely possible.
0:15:56 We’ve actually seen little critters get sucked into our system and then we blow them out and they’re still swimming around on the other side.
0:16:11 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.
0:16:15 We’ll be back in just a minute.
0:16:57 So you did this pilot in a freshwater reservoir.
0:16:59 It worked.
0:17:01 What’s next?
0:17:03 You can put one of these in the ocean soon?
0:17:13 Yes, we are currently near the final stages of building a system that’s going to go off the back of the boat and be tested in the ocean.
0:17:24 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.
0:17:36 And we need to know how long this thing can last so that we can make relatively accurate projections of its economics overall, which is what our customers want to see.
0:17:39 Talk to me about where you are with the techno-economics.
0:17:43 Like, presumably there are places where they would take that trade off.
0:17:49 Huntington Beach, you know, wealthy communities where they would say, yeah, we’ll pay a little more for your freshwater if you can put it on the bottom of the ocean.
0:17:53 Even if they don’t care about the environment, just so they don’t have to see it, right?
0:17:54 And maybe they care about the environment, too.
0:17:56 Like, where are you with the techno-economics?
0:18:05 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.
0:18:07 That’s the big unknown.
0:18:08 That’s the big unknown.
0:18:10 That you have to put the thing in the ocean to figure out.
0:18:15 And so we have, you know, one piece to that puzzle figured out.
0:18:25 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 membranes last subsea.
0:18:26 For sure.
0:18:31 Well, and then there’s also all of the other parts of the system, presumably.
0:18:36 And I know, you know, in individual components, they have been under the sea before.
0:18:40 But presumably, I don’t know, things just break, right?
0:18:43 As you said, like, it’s really hard to fix a thing at the bottom of the ocean.
0:18:48 So there’s the life of the membrane, which is, you know, straightforward.
0:18:49 It seems rather straightforward to test.
0:18:57 Like, when you worry or when you think about what might not work, and by not work, I don’t even mean fail.
0:19:02 I just mean might make what you’re doing economically not feasible.
0:19:04 Like, what do you think about?
0:19:06 What might not work besides the membrane?
0:19:08 I mean, a lot of things can break down.
0:19:15 But one of our more expensive components, for instance, is the umbilical, which runs the power from shore to our pumps.
0:19:18 And it’s one power line.
0:19:20 How far is that, by the way?
0:19:21 How far is that?
0:19:23 It’ll very much depend on the location.
0:19:28 For example, the Big Island of Hawaii, you only have to go just under a mile offshore.
0:19:30 In California, it’s about five miles.
0:19:35 Around the Mediterranean, you’ll say anywhere from like three to seven miles.
0:19:43 But generally speaking, I would say anything about less than 10 to 15 miles is where we are most economical.
0:19:49 And you were saying there’s one, essentially, power cord, one wire that you need.
0:19:53 And presumably, that wire needs to not break.
0:19:53 Exactly.
0:19:57 That’s the thing that, for me, gives me the most fear.
0:20:06 You know, what they do when they build these umbilicals is, you know, if you need, say, three lines of copper, they’ll build in six.
0:20:09 So that if one fails, you can just move to the other.
0:20:12 So, you know, there is some redundancy in that system.
0:20:23 Along with others, like the pumps, you know, we’re looking at, you know, what is that tradeoff between having redundant pumps versus the cost of having two versus one or three versus one.
0:20:31 And so these are the things that we need to consider when we’re, you know, scaling up and building a commercially viable system.
0:20:34 It’s an interesting optimization problem.
0:20:37 It’s like a techno-economic optimization problem, right?
0:20:37 It is.
0:20:44 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.
0:20:45 Exactly.
0:21:03 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.
0:21:13 Or I actually used to look at seahorse tails and compare the mechanics of a tail and how it could be potentially used for, you know, a robot arm.
0:21:17 But then I looked at all these different mechanical features.
0:21:25 You know, it’s a multi-dimensional problem with many, many different variables and looking at how nature optimizes these things.
0:21:43 So in many ways, I’m applying those same methods of looking at these multi-dimensional trade-off problems to help us optimize, you know, what that right number of pumps is to make our system redundant and reliable, but not too costly.
0:21:47 Survival of the fittest is survival of the most optimal.
0:21:47 Exactly.
0:21:48 Yes.
0:21:52 And we’re trying to be that fit company.
0:21:58 Yeah, I mean, evolutionary biologists talk about things being costly, right?
0:22:03 When fish that live in caves evolve to not have eyes anymore.
0:22:05 It’s like, it’s costly to have eyes.
0:22:09 And if you live in a dark cave, you’re wasting your energy budget on eyes.
0:22:10 Exactly.
0:22:14 So when are you going to know if it works?
0:22:18 Uh, we’ll know when it works when it’s down there working.
0:22:19 Yeah.
0:22:22 If it works, when’s that going to be?
0:22:27 So we’re targeting 2028 as our first, you know, commercial demonstration.
0:22:28 Okay.
0:22:37 And along that path, we have a handful of varying scale prototypes and varying environments that we’re going to be testing.
0:22:40 And so we’ll be building confidence along the entire path.
0:22:48 If it works, what’ll, you know, what’ll the Pacific coast of the Americas look like?
0:22:53 Or what’ll the world look like in, what number of years, shall we say, 10 years, 15 years?
0:22:54 Sure.
0:23:12 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.
0:23:22 For instance, in California, uh, in Southern California, most of our water comes from the Colorado River and from the North through what’s called the State Water Project.
0:23:27 And those two sources of water are not local.
0:23:30 They both travel really far distances to get to us.
0:23:37 And it takes a lot of water away from the natural ecosystems that exist there on the Colorado River and in Northern California.
0:23:43 And it also takes away from all the residents in places like Arizona and Nevada and Colorado.
0:24:00 And so I would like to see that water stay where it belongs naturally so that all the ecosystems 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.
0:24:18 And so, you know, my goal is 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.
0:24:24 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:25:01 That’s 844-844-IHEART.
0:25:06 I want to do a lightning round now.
0:25:06 Okay.
0:25:08 Where’s your favorite place to surf?
0:25:09 That’s a good question.
0:25:13 I mean, I have many favorites in different locations.
0:25:17 I mean, I’ve been lucky that, you know, I did my master’s out in Hawaii.
0:25:21 And so I’ve got a handful of spots out there that I really liked.
0:25:23 I actually learned to surf in Costa Rica.
0:25:27 That was a very fun experience.
0:25:35 And then, I don’t know, Big Rock out here in La Jolla, where I currently live, is kind of my local favorite right now.
0:25:37 Tell me about One Wave.
0:25:38 One Wave.
0:25:41 I’ll say, oh, the first time I got a barrel.
0:25:44 That’s probably the one that stands out.
0:25:57 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.
0:26:07 And when you get these hurricanes that come through, the ones that don’t hit land but sit right off the coast just pump beautiful waves into the shore.
0:26:12 But yeah, my first barrel was in Hatteras on one of those days.
0:26:15 And, you know, it was well overhead and head high.
0:26:18 That’s how we talk about the height, I guess you know.
0:26:25 And it was one of those things where you see it coming in front of you, and usually I would have just crashed and fallen.
0:26:31 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.
0:26:39 You wrote a paper on the shape of the seahorse tail, because the seahorse’s tail is a square.
0:26:44 And in the paper, you asked, why is the tail of the seahorse that shape?
0:26:44 Why is it square?
0:26:46 And, like, first of all, why is that a question?
0:26:49 Like, would you expect it to be like a triangle, like other fish?
0:26:50 Seahorse is a fish, weirdly?
0:26:51 Sure.
0:26:51 Or what?
0:26:52 Yeah.
0:27:02 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.
0:27:09 And so in that class, we had to give pitches on what we were doing that we thought might turn into a company.
0:27:21 And so I took the seahorse tail as my sort of product, and I was like, I’m going to turn the seahorse tail into a robot arm or a catheter or, you know, something that could, you know, help in the medical field.
0:27:26 And I was giving this pitch on, oh, the seahorse tail would be great for this and that and that and this.
0:27:32 And someone in the audience said, it’s square, you know, your veins are round, so wouldn’t you want it to be round?
0:27:34 And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, you can make it round.
0:27:35 Sure, we could just make it round.
0:27:44 And so I went back to the lab, and I was like, okay, I’m going to print out a round version of a seahorse tail and, you know, satisfy this question.
0:27:48 And then I started playing with the round version, and I was like, this thing’s terrible.
0:27:50 It doesn’t work anything like the square one does.
0:27:52 And that’s where the question came from.
0:27:53 Well, why is it square?
0:28:01 And then we wrote this whole paper with some biologists to sort of explain the evolutionary advantages that a square tail had to a round tail.
0:28:03 What are the advantages of it being square?
0:28:06 Yeah, so there’s two main advantages, I believe.
0:28:12 One is that it resists this twisting or over-twerking the tail itself.
0:28:15 So you’ve got this spinal column that runs through the center.
0:28:16 Okay.
0:28:22 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.
0:28:25 And if it’s round, it’s like more likely to twist?
0:28:33 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.
0:28:39 Another component in front of it, it resists over-twisting that section of the tail.
0:28:40 Okay.
0:28:48 And so as a result, it would, you know, help it not get hurt or essentially even die if it were to, you know, be pulled in one direction or another.
0:28:49 So that’s one advantage.
0:28:55 The other is that these square plates, the way they overlap, they’re like little L shapes.
0:28:57 And so you have four Ls that overlap each other a little bit.
0:29:02 And so those overlapping sections allow them to slide a little bit.
0:29:12 So you can imagine if a predator was to come up like a bird, come up and grab the seahorse, it would crush the tail if it was to grab onto the tail.
0:29:15 And these little plates would allow them to slide.
0:29:24 Because the square and the overlap creates these linear sections of sliding, it allows it to just sort of absorb the impact and bounce back.
0:29:29 But the circular structure, the circles don’t have that sort of linear overlap.
0:29:32 Now you’ve got these two overlapping sections that want to pivot.
0:29:38 And so that pivoting would cause more damage in the tissue that would tear away when it was grabbed.
0:29:43 And so those are the two sort of primary reasons why this tail is square.
0:29:50 And then I say a third would be it also allows more surface contact onto things that it’s grasping.
0:29:55 So it’s better for grabbing, grasping, and it’s better for armor.
0:30:01 Did you ever end up coming up with a commercial application for something built on the model of a seahorse’s tail?
0:30:02 No.
0:30:07 I mean, we had many ideas, but nothing that actually, you know, took off.
0:30:13 And after I left, I’ve casually kept track of what else is going on in the seahorse world.
0:30:19 And there are new groups out there that have been developing robots that mimic the tail.
0:30:21 And they look quite cool.
0:30:32 There’s one funny paper where they even made a life-size human-scale tail and stuck it on the back of a human to see how it changes the balance of a human as they’re running.
0:30:34 Oh, as they’re running.
0:30:35 I thought they were going to put them in water.
0:30:39 I thought it was going to be like a mermaid, some kind of a robot mermaid situation.
0:30:42 There are some interesting academic ideas out there.
0:30:48 Yeah, academics is a lot of fun and often leads to some really cool, groundbreaking knowledge.
0:30:51 Often really silly stuff, too.
0:30:58 You’ve talked a couple of times about sort of comparing academia and industry and working in the private sector.
0:31:06 Like, what’s one thing you would want to tell your colleagues in academia about industry?
0:31:10 What’s one thing you wish professors understood about business or working in business?
0:31:13 Yeah, that’s a good question.
0:31:21 I would say that you have to work within the system that you live.
0:31:28 So, you know, we live in an economic-driven capitalist society for the most part, at least Western culture.
0:31:36 And really nothing gets done without some economic incentive, it seems.
0:31:47 And so, in academics, there’s a lot of alarms raised on climate, environment, mass extinctions, things like this.
0:31:58 But it’s very rarely tied to real economic incentives or real, you know, real things that would move the needle.
0:32:09 And I think there needs to be more emphasis on how the two can work together to make solutions happen.
0:32:17 For instance, with OceanWell, you know, we have identified a commodity, water, that can be sold to make money.
0:32:28 And we are developing a technology that can hopefully put a dent in one area, at least, of planetary health and climate.
0:32:33 And so, I think there needs to be more of that type of thinking in academia.
0:32:39 Just bringing in the whole picture of what human society really is right now.
0:32:49 Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer at OceanWell.
0:32:54 Please email us at problematpushkin.fm.
0:32:57 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:33:01 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:33:06 It was edited by Alexandra Gerriten and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:33:10 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Pop?
0:33:17 This is an iHeart Podcast.