The Moonshot Podcast Season 2, Episode 5: Ocean Fuel, Desert Rain

This episode of The Moonshot Podcast explores two moonshots that investigated very different ways to use water: harvesting it from the air and transforming it into fuel. Astro Teller first chats with Neil Treat and Claudia Truesdell from Project H2E (“Hydration to Everyone”). The H2E team explored whether it would be possible to improve access to safe drinking water by harvesting water from the air. Next he sits down with Kathy Hannun from Foghorn, an X project that found a way to pull carbon and hydrogen out of seawater and combine it to create a new type of carbon-neutral fuel. The team successfully created fuel using this method, however they weren’t able to do so at a cost competitive with gasoline. 0:00 - Intro 00:58 - Meet Neil Treat and Claudia Treusdell from H2E 01:48 - The crisis: Global water insecurity 04:14 - The location of water-stressed communities 06:17 - The "Magic Box": Harvesting water from the air 09:00 - Defining H2E’s "Kill Criteria" 09:25 - Mechanics: How the H2e device functioned 11:24 - Engineering the internal air flow 12:51 - Material science: Selecting the right desiccant 14:29 - The "Mule": Prototyping a moonshot 15:24 - Early H2E prototype evolution 16:59 - Surprising engineering hurdles 18:48 - Sharing H2E’s results with the world 20:12 - Could H2E’s moonshot become a reality today? 22:12 -What the H2E team are up to today 24:01 - Project Foghorn: The fuel from the sea 24:49 - The origins of Foghorn 27:09 - Why Foghorn pursued a carbon-neutral fuel for combustion engines 28:59 - The process: Extracting CO2 from seawater 30:35 - Chemistry: Turning ocean water into methanol 33:01 - Foghorn’s "Kill Criteria" and testing 39:13 - Why the project was wound down 42:21 - Lessons learned 43:18 - Remembering Matt Eisaman 44:33 - Conclusion – Hosted by Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, The Moonshot Podcast goes behind the scenes with creators and inventors trying to find radical solutions and breakthrough technologies to the world’s biggest problems. These are the untold stories of innovation from 16 years of Alphabet’s moonshot factory. The Moonshot Podcast is a Pique Action production for X, The Moonshot Factory, produced in association with Blanchard House. If you want to take your own moonshots, we've developed a certificate course with MasterClass on how to take bold ideas and translate them into real world impact. Check it out here: https://www.masterclass.com/certificates/breakthrough-innovation-strategy-from-bold-idea-to-business-impact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices