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

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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: masterclass.com/certificates/breakthrough-inno…

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