Transcript
Speaker: If you have a heat source and a a cooling, a heat sink essentially, and enough of a temperature difference, you can make ah energy from it. We can take those cold temperatures that are in the Arctic naturally and radiate, if it's a clear sky, we can radiate the heat into space and get an even colder temperature. This is without using any refrigeration cycle. This is just literally radiating infrared heat into space.
Speaker: I remember my father telling me that he he thought that hydrogen was going to be the fuel of the future. Hello and welcome to the Regenerative Design Podcast. I'm your host, Mathieu Maheus, and each episode I interview leading authorities in regenerative practices. People who excel at doing well and doing good.
Speaker: this podcast is dedicated to making our world better and your business more successful.
Speaker: Hello, this is another episode of the regenerative design podcast with your host Mathieu. So today we are interviewing an amazing guest. His name is Jeff Kramer. Jeff is the author of the award -winning book, Infinite Resources. And we will discuss this book in this podcast.
Speaker: He is the president and chief engineer at Big Times Engineering. He's a public speaker, he likes to solve problems, and he's also an inventor. And I think being an inventor is something that really inspires me as well. So I'm very excited to talk to Jeff today. So Jeff, how are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic, Mattiro, about yourself. and I'm doing great, thank you. Thanks for asking.
Speaker: so I first want to get into the story of, like, it sounds like you have achieved so many things already, but I'd love to hear your backstory. Like, where did all of this start?
Speaker: You know it's an and interesting when I think back on it I would have to say it started in elementary school um back in the late 1970s. I remember around grade four i our class received comic books and I was talking about being energy efficient and um using renewable energy. And I also remember watching on TV um a talk about a fellow who had an engine that ran completely on hydrogen. And he was actually drinking the exhaust from the exhaust pipe. And I thought, well, this is pretty brilliant. ah That sounds like a lot better than the the pollution that comes out from me you know normal gasoline vehicles. Just to interrupt, when what year was that around?
Speaker: I think it was probably around 1978 or so. Wow, because it sounds like the hydrogen engine is is more of a newer technology. I knew Mercedes had had already released it in the 80s or 1990s, but you talking about it that it's already you been around for that time is amazing. Yeah, so obviously it was an experimental system. It wasn't commercially successful or anything like that, but it was interesting as a child to see that.
Speaker: and ah to think about it. and And I remember my father telling me that he he thought that hydrogen was going to be the fuel of the future. so well And then I've always been a technically minded person, and I went into engineering. And one of my one of the reasons I went into engineering is because I heard about one of the professors at the University of Calgary, where I was going. I was already enrolled there.
Speaker: i He was an expert in Stirling engines. And a Stirling engine is just a heat engine. It's an external combustion engine. So if you have a heat source and a a cooling, a heat sink essentially, and enough of a temperature difference, you can make ah energy from it. And that's true of you know any significant temperature difference.
Speaker: And so I learned about different thermodynamic cycles, the Stirling cycle, the Carnot cycle, the Brayden cycle, and and so forth. And are he he was also a professor of thermodynamics. And I took a graduate level course with him. I didn't get a graduate degree, but I took one graduate level course. And so that got me down this road. And in the back of my mind, I'm always imagining how energy transforms and and this sort of thing.
Speaker: but Where most of this concept came from, I have a book. It's called Engineers Dreams by Willie Lay. And it was written in the 1950s. And in this book, he talks about all sorts of things, you know things like building a tunnel from England to France and and using the wind to generate power and things that weren't really being done back in the in those days.
Speaker: and also to tap into volcanoes to to generate power. So all of these things, of course, have happened now. And one of the other things he talks about is a technology called ocean thermal energy conversion. And the idea of that is if you go to the tropics, you have warm water, and if you go deep down, you have cold water. And so the idea of ocean thermal energy generation was to use a working fluid a a low boiling temperature working fluid to generate power between the warm surface waters and the cold deep ocean waters. The only thing is the the surface waters are typically around 27 degrees Celsius and the deep ocean water might be at four degrees Celsius. And by the way, that's true around the world, not just in in the tropics. it's all oh All of the oceans are at four degrees at the very bottom.
Speaker: If you go down about a thousand meters, it's about the same all around. world yeah Interesting. And um so if you think about having heat exchangers, so initially you've got 23 degrees temperature difference. you If you lose, you have really efficient heat exchangers and lose five degrees on both sides, then you've only got 13 degrees of temperature difference. And with all the losses, because you have to pump the water up from the deep ocean and stuff,
Speaker: um It was never commercially viable, but it's a very interesting idea. yeah and so Just to for the listeners to understand this, it's pretty amazing, and youve you made it just click for me. The mere fact that you have temperature temperature differences can group generate a lot of energy. Is that correct?
Speaker: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. So like when I was at the University of Calgary, we're talking about Sterling engines. You may have seen Sterling engines that you can put on a ah hot cup of coffee and they spin around. They're like little toys.
Speaker: um The professor who developed that, his his name was J .R. Sampson, he was a visiting professor at the time where I was there. He developed an engine that was able to run on 0 .4 degrees temperature Celsius, the temperature difference. So in other words, it would easily just run on the difference between air temperature and the temperature of your hand.
Speaker: And it was in the Guinness Book of Records, or it was a record -breaking engine as being the lowest temperature differential engine ever built. Of course, with that low of a temperature difference, you can't really extract any power. All of the energy that it creates is used just to operate, the to make it work. yeah So, but this opens a whole new for in my opinion, a whole new area of energy that it's actually very abundant. It's very abundantly available in in our environment. There's so upe which are definite differences everywhere.
Speaker: Yeah, there are clearly temperature differences everywhere. So like you can run, well, i as we mentioned, like the volcanoes and and the geysers and things like this, there are commercial energy plants that are using that. And there are experimental geothermal plants where people just drill into the earth.
Speaker: and run essentially the the same kind of system that I'm talking about using the temperature difference. yeah Yeah, exactly. I heard about this or at least I lived in Munich for some time and I knew that big parts of the city were heated with thermal energy. So they have this huge ah drilling holes into the depth of the earth where there was hot water and they could actually heat big parts of the city and people can have odd showers with it. So that that's pretty interesting as well.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. and And so you're right. Energy is all around us. Not only that, of course, sunlight. So if you if you have a clear sunny day and you have point, you know, solar panels directly at the sun, the energy that's hitting it is about one kilowatt per square meter, which is significant. Of course, most of the time we can. So sorry just to interrupt you, one kilowatt per square meter per and what In what time would that be? Per per second. so it per second yeah so But that is including heat energy and light energy. yeah like um So most most photovoltaic cells are only about 20 % efficient. theyre They're improving that through research.
Speaker: But so that one meter, you'd probably be able to get 200 watts of um energy and the rest would be heat. so You have thermal energy, so you could do like a co -gen on on that as well. yeah But um and anyway, going back to the idea of the book, it's very similar to the energy system that I'm proposing is very similar to that OTEC system that I was describing.
Speaker: But instead of being limited to you know that 23 degree temperature difference, you go to the Arctic, you still can access the deep water at four degrees Celsius.
Speaker: and you have a layer of ice in the winter time and above the ice you have cold atmospheric temperatures and the temperatures there can get ah you know naturally, I think you're typically looking between minus 20 and say minus 60 or something like that in the Arctic and in Antarctica it gets even colder. is it and about How about the ice that's already there? What temperature is that?
Speaker: so If you think of the ice, it's essentially like a blanket. So on the one side, you've got the the ice at the melting point of the ocean water, which is minus 1 .8 degrees Celsius. And on the other side of it, you've got um the cold air temperature. So it's literally a temperature gradient. it's It might be maybe two meters thick. And so the the bottom of the ice would be minus 1 .8 degrees Celsius.
Speaker: and the top of the ice would be whatever the atmospheric pressure is in an equilibrium situation. So the actual ice is not that cold actually, it's not like and at huge minus temperatures. No, if you have multi -year ice or if you're talking about the icebergs on ah are glaciers on on Greenland or or in Antarctica, they can be very cold. Yeah, and that's why they they don't, you know, typically it doesn't melt and in the summertime, just ah the surface and stuff, right?
Speaker: But then the most interesting part is to get to the atmospheric cold and in the winter times ah and in the poles, correct? i Yeah, so this system works best when the air temperature is the coldest outside.
Speaker: yeah And there was a ted ah TED talk given by a fellow from his name is Aswath Raman. And you can look at it. I think the title is something along the lines of, sorry, the cosmic microwave background is about three degrees Kelvin, or I shouldn't say three degrees Kelvin, three Kelvin. And His technology, the the TED Talk is called how we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource. And he talks about what I was just talking about earlier. If you have a hot temperature and a cold temperature, you can run a heat engine off of it. So we can take those cold temperatures that are in the Arctic naturally and radiate, if it's a clear sky, we can radiate the heat into space and get an even colder temperature. And he says that in in ah optimal circumstances,
Speaker: you can reduce the ambient temperature 40 degrees below ambient. This is without using any refrigeration cycle. This is just literally radiating infrared heat into space. Oh, wow. So you'd you'd actually be able to cool down the the the environment of the engine. Exactly. but Oh, my God. so this is that Would that be an effective way of ah like reversing climate change, or is is it very minimal, its impact? I'm just thinking out loud here.
Speaker: the in In the opening chapter of my book, I talk about eight different eight different issues that the world is facing right now. So we've got, of course, the world is heating because we're burning carbon fuels. And so we're accumulating greenhouse gases. The polar ice caps are melting. The ocean currents are weakening because of the the temperature differences and as hot as strong as it used to be. And i am heard just to jump into that one, I heard that if the currents are going to stop or slow down, it might actually result in a new ice age. Is that something that is correct? or
Speaker: Well, Europe is benefiting hugely from from the ocean currents, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the AMOC current. no Basically, what happens is you get warm tropical waters flowing up north, and when you get up to the area around Greenland and Iceland, they the waters evaporate into the cold atmosphere, and the dense cold water goes down into the ocean.
Speaker: But I've read that the amount of energy that's released is on the order of about a million megawatt nuclear power plants, putting that much energy into the atmosphere. And that significantly warms Europe. And so that's why Norway and is is pretty much ice free, even in the wintertime, the fjords and stuff. if Whereas if you look in Canada,
Speaker: um At the same latitude, it's basically a landlocked polar ice cap. oh also interesting the and so That means that the winters, even if you look at London, you know it's at 51 degrees north and the city that I lived in for 35 years in Calgary, it's also at 51 degrees lower ah north.
Speaker: But the temperature is very different. We have a continental climate here and we experienced just a few weeks ago minus 40 degrees Celsius. um It never gets any anything close to that in the UK. So it's a significant heat that you get from that circulation and the evaporation into the atmosphere. And if that circulation was to shut down, of course, that would mean that Europe would cool significantly.
Speaker: Now, if the overall world heats up like they're saying, you know, yeah maybe that might not be such a bad thing for Europe, but I think for most people it would be. Yeah, definitely. So I interrupted you there. So there's the the eight problems that the world are facing. You were at ah number you we going to explain number four, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, so after that, we've got 2 .2 billion people don't have access to fresh water. And then we've still got hundreds of million ah of people who are ah starving or malnourished or stunted. And then the people who in the developed countries have too much food, but we're eating food that isn't nutritious. So we're being obese and being undernourished at the same time. Diabetes, cancer, all the modern diseases.
Speaker: Exactly. um And so then we, I think we talked a little bit about computers. I'm not sure in this, in this round, but um you know, computer systems, the energy that's required to operate computer systems is growing by about, if if I'm correct, it's about 8 % per year. So that's an expense exponential growth rate. And that's 8 % increase in energy consumption just for computing alone.
Speaker: Just for operating and computers and with artificial intelligence and with more robotics. Yes. We're going to see that continue cryptocurrency as well. Like Bitcoin is trying consuming a lot of energy. Yeah. So like just Bitcoin, I read ah an article that said Bitcoin will consume as much energy as the entire country of Italy.
Speaker: by 2025, I think. So I have it in the book anyway. Yeah, I see. But what what is your take on that? Because we're demonizing the use of energy and also like linked to carbon. But do you think we actually have to reduce our energy consumption?
Speaker: No, and and that's the beauty of what I'm talking about in the book. There is more than enough energy for everybody to live ah the lifestyle of a you know wealthy North American or European. So we can give everyone in Africa or Asia that same kind of standard of living. And now we you know we may not be able to do it with physical resources like, I don't know, copper so or, you know,
Speaker: cell phones and stuff but i think we can do cell phones because they're not huge consumers but maybe not everyone is gonna have a car let's say yeah but and certainly the resources to make cars like steel and stuff like this can be more abundant there's plenty of iron ore that hasn't been mined.
Speaker: and one of the beauties of of this technology so um i don't describe the system yet so maybe let's let's spend a little bit of time talking about how we can produce this energy cuz yes yes so i'm gonna jump in there because it sounds like that.
Speaker: The issue that we're facing today is it's we're in a kind of energy crisis, right? So ah there's a high demand. We need to go into a carbon. We have to stop using carbon ah -related energy sources because it's just going to keep our climate becoming more and more extreme, which is is devastating for food production and know and all these related topics.
Speaker: and So how I now interpret it is that it's not really that we shouldn't necessarily reduce the energy consumption. It's more about how the energy is captured and even rather captured than than produced because it's so abundantly available on our planet and our environment that we we have to find new ways to capture it. And that that's where your technology is amazing, I think. So let's let's talk about more about that. How how does it work exactly?
Speaker: Yeah, so I talked how the OTEC system works. So this is essentially the same concept, but instead of working with warm surface temperature water and and cold deep water, you can still access the cold deep water, but in the Arctic, you've got that layer of ice in the winter, and then you've got the cold layer of air above it. And so now you can run at a temperature a thermodynamic cycle that has a higher temperature difference. Yeah, just you're talking about a temperature difference of of how much?
Speaker: It'll vary, but um if you're looking at four degrees Celsius water, and then you're looking at say minus 40 degrees atmospheric temperature, yeah um you're you're looking at, so the if we're using a working fluid like propane,
Speaker: you're looking at about four four and a half atmospheres at the freezing point of ocean water and at the at minus 42 degrees Celsius, you're looking at one atmosphere. So the difference is three and a half atmospheres of of pressure. And that's plenty to operate a thermodynamic cycle on. But we also just talked about computers. and um And so we can, if we're using the electricity that we generate from um ah
Speaker: this cycle, part of it to operate computers, well, then we can use the waste heat from the computer system to run a more efficient cycle. And I'm not saying that you're necessarily going to be able to operate the computers for free, but you'll be able to regenerate some of the power that they're using um because they're able to produce heat at around, let's say, 70 to 90 degrees Celsius.
Speaker: which again makes propane a ah more efficient working fluid. In that system you could even get the the four degrees Celsius of the ocean water up to get an even bigger So basically once the system starts running, it improves itself. is that Is that correct? Yeah, you can think of the ocean water as kick -starting the computers, which makes it a more efficient system. And you can still... like The only limitation that you have on how much energy you can produce is the size of your heat exchangers in the ocean, the size of your pipes and and things to carry the the vapor, the size of your engines, and the size of your condenser and and pressure pumps.
Speaker: So literally, you're you're dealing with an energy source that is as large as the ocean, and your energy sink is as large as the atmosphere, or if you want to take it a step further, it's as large as the space itself. if you're radiant So this is where I get the infinite resources from.
Speaker: So if we built, so again, you you can scale the system. It could be designed small enough for a small community in the Arctic to generate their own electricity, or you can you know generate multiple gigawatts of power from a single plant.
Speaker: But if you built, I did some calculations. If you build about 3 ,000 of these plants, you could produce as much electricity as all of the electricity that's currently produced in the world right now. What? if You say how many units?
Speaker: three thousand three thousand one gigawatt plants i mean that's it would be a significant amount um but if we build about six thousand of them we can pretty much replace fossil fuels so uh or in that range anyways so i'll let somebody else do the calculations of work through the numbers they're going to be inefficiencies of course and and because the energy is being produced in the Arctic you can't just run power lines down to where you're going to use it so you have to convert it to hydrogen so that's going to be a significant loss or some other source so once you got hydrogen you can pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and then you can make ammonia with it so that's a lot easier to transport. Oh and that's something really interesting if we can actually
Speaker: ah sequester nitrogen from the atmosphere that would be great as well because we have too much nitrogen in our atmosphere and it's actually few like it's good for certain plants but it's also good for a lot of molds like mildew, mildew thrives on nitrogen and mildew is not something that is good for agriculture or any type of production so and there's even reasons that mildew would can will continue to be a huge threat to to food production. Yeah, 70 % of the atmosphere is nitrogen, so we're not going to take all the nitrogen out of there. But so one of the things that, you know, you you're obviously living in Belgium, you're seeing all the protests in Holland about the farmers being told they're not allowed to use... Yeah, and in Belgium, definitely as well.
Speaker: So a lot of a lot of that issue is because nitrogen fertilizers are made right now out of natural gas, so they produce a lot of greenhouse gases just to produce them. They they are also greenhouse gas on on the side, but if you take a look at the cost -benefit analysis, like um you and I, having grown up in in wealthy nations,
Speaker: Half of the protein in our body comes from nitrogen that was supplied by fertilizer, artificial fertilizers through the Haber -Bosch process. ye And that's oftentimes, ah is it, yeah, it's it's oftentimes, well, yeah, it's directly harvested from from gas, right? Or did they run gas engines to harvest it from from the atmosphere?
Speaker: Yeah, so the Haber -Bosch process requires hydrogen and nitrogen to be in a very hot vessel and at high pressure to create ammonia. And so they get the heat from natural gas, they get the hydrogen typically from the natural gas as well.
Speaker: And so you end up having a lot of CO2 as a byproduct. But in the system I'm talking about, it can be completely done with renewable energy. It doesn't require any methane or carbon dioxide to be released in that process. So when you have ammonia, it can be used obviously as a fertilizer. But most people don't realize it can also be used as a fuel. And you can essentially run diesel engines with very minor tweaking to run on ammonia.
Speaker: so So large ocean -going ships that are currently running on bunker oil or or diesel can be converted to Raman ammonia. In fact, ammonia is such a good energy source that the the official airspeed record, which was set by NASA in the 1960s and 70s sometime in that range,
Speaker: by the X -15 that was an experimental military or NASA ah program to see how fast they could make an aircraft go and what they did was they put an ammonia rocket with oxygen on the plane and it was able to do like more than Mach 6. So these are like nitro, nitro engines I guess that's that's where the name comes from. Well yeah nitrous oxide is a different thing again from um ah from ammonia, but yeah yeah, it's got the same kind of power. There's a lot of energy in the nitrogen lawn, sir.
Speaker: This podcast is brought to you by the Garden of Your Dreams Masterclass. Are you struggling with finding the right tools and tricks for your garden? Are you lacking the confidence to cultivate the garden you have always wanted? Do you have a backyard with lots of potential, but you get overwhelmed by the lack of knowledge and time to do gardening? Then the Garden of Your Dreams Masterclass is for you.
Speaker: So then in your system, you could actually, because your energy is basically for free, it wouldn't have any green gos greenhouse gases or any carbon ah offsetting. So you you could run those engines.
Speaker: on essentially free energy and have a couple of byproducts such as ammonia to use in other industries. or So it like it sounds too good to be true, Jeff, to be honest. I know. And this is the thing. And and nobody's tapping into this energy source yet. So let's let's take a look at some other stuff. Are you aware of what's called green steel? No.
Speaker: So in Sweden, um they've got an operating plant now. And a normal way of producing steel that they've been doing since, like I don't know, 1700s or so, is they they will use coke, which is a refined coal product, essentially pure carbon. And they will run a furnace. And you'll have like iron ore.
Speaker: ah And the iron ore is basically iron plus oxygen, right? So it's rust, essentially. You you run the you burn the cart the coke in the ah iron and it reacts with the oxygen in the iron ore and produces carbon dioxide. And then a little bit of the carbon gets absorbed by the steel and that's where we get our carbon steels from.
Speaker: and That's how steel is produced today and it produces about 7 % of greenhouse gases globally right now, just the steel making process in all the plants around the world.
Speaker: But this green steel, instead of using um coke to burn off the oxygen, they use hydrogen. So hydrogen goes in and it reacts with the oxygen leaving pure iron. And then you get water as as your byproduct instead of CO2. And then you still have to have a little bit of carbon in there for the carbon steel to for the alloy to to form, but you you use a lot less carbon and you don't have to have any carbon dioxide released in that case. Yeah, I can. so Yeah, it's it's a brilliant process and it's completely doable and several patents have been filed recently on how to do that, but most steel companies, if they aren't already actively pursuing a program of producing green steel are are researching it.
Speaker: And so you can imagine 7 % of carbon emissions could be eliminated if we just completely go to green steel. So where do we get the hydrogen from? Right? Right now, almost all of the industrial hydrogen is being produced by stripping methane of hydrogen. So typically hydrogen is used for ah changing hydrocarbons or making plastics or or different petrochemicals. And so they start the hydrogen from methane molecules and then they'll use it for hydrogenation of
Speaker: you know hydrocarbons of some sort or another after a cracking process and so like in Alberta we have what's called the oil sands and essentially these are long carbon chains maybe 50 carbons long with hydrogen attached to them but nobody wants that that's essentially like tar like asphalt what you would use on your road so What they do is they'll crack them chemically so into smaller chunks and then they add hydrogen to those and then you can produce things like diesel oil or gasoline or or other chemicals that are more useful and and commercially viable. Well, and so then again, the big advantage would be that whatever energy
Speaker: source as you produce, it becomes carbon neutral or even carbon negative. Right, so if we can if we can take the um hydrogen and and basically just split water to produce it instead of using methane,
Speaker: and We can turn it into ammonia and we can use it to make green steel. We can also transport it. and so there's a lot I'm a volunteer with the LinkedIn group, ah the Canadian Hydrogen Working Group. and you know we've We've got 4 ,000 articles. and and's ah Even though it's called the Canadian Hydrogen Working Group, we have members from around the world.
Speaker: And it's incredible the amount of projects that are are being developed. So you're you're seeing wind projects where they're using the wind power to produce hydrogen. And countries like South Korea have said that they're going to have 35 % of their energy um be from hydrogen.
Speaker: I think it's 50 % of their energy by 2035 or something like this. and So the question is, where do we get this hydrogen from? And if we're getting it from burning fossil fuels, which is the main source right now, we're not really seeing a benefit. know unless we get those my neighbor night Yeah, that's so important to like, okay, like we want to step away from fossil fuels. Hydrogen seems to be one of the good options, but then the way it is, the way the hydrogen is produced or harvested is going to be essential. If we use the fossil fuels again to produce it, it makes no sense at all. It has to be from wind or your system would be more efficient even than windmills it sounds like.
Speaker: So now I've talked a bit about um you know the the power side of it and and producing hydrogen and producing ammonia. And now we can run our computer systems more efficiently in the Arctic. yeah What else can we do if we have electricity in the Arctic? So you're involved with some greenhouse technology as I understand, right? yeah So what do you need to operate a greenhouse? You need to have... light. You need to have a warm enough environment so that the plants thrive. You need to have some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is there naturally. You need to have ideally some fertilizer, right? yeah So if we got a generating station out on the polar ice cap, what's to stop us from building something like an insulated shipping container?
Speaker: producing light in there. We have our fertilizer. We can get water from the ocean, and we can use a heat pump to get heat out of the ocean as well. So we have everything we need to grow food in the Arctic. Right now, it costs about six times as much to to buy fresh produce in the Arctic communities in Canada than it does, say, where I live. And that's because they have to fly it in. And so, of course, that's a very expensive process.
Speaker: Well, if they could grow their own food, that would be a significant savings. And especially if they can do it with energy that's essentially free. And you know once you've got that system built, so the yeah you know the shipping container, you don't even need to have sunlight in this in this process. You can grow whatever you want. I i jokingly say in in the book, I say, if you can imagine the drought conditions continuing in California,
Speaker: then it might make more sense to grow avocados on the polar ice cap than it does in California. Yeah, that's crazy. But yeah, it really opens up an entirely different opportunity. And and like I said, this book is about developing the Arctic. So imagine, you know Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. Well, the temperature in Mars is often colder than it is in the Arctic.
Speaker: and um You know, you don't have a breathable atmosphere there. So it's much easier to settle the polar regions than it is to go to Mars.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting. So the best thing I haven't told you about yet though is when you're extracting heat from the ocean, So imagine, again, you have a propane -fired barbecue. If you've ever watched in the summertime, when that propane level is getting low, you'll see a frost ring appear around you. You can burn your fingers. If you touch it, it's really ice cold. Really? Exactly.
Speaker: and And so what's happening there is the propane is absorbing heat through the bottle from the atmosphere. And as it's doing that, it's evaporating. And as it's evaporating, it takes a lot of energy to evaporate from liquid to to gas form. oh So as it evaporates, it cools. So the same thing is going to happen in the ocean. When you're evaporating, you're basically boiling the propane, you're going to form ice.
Speaker: But most people don't know this. I mean, obviously, everybody knows ice floats. But when you take salt water and you freeze it, the water molecules want to form nice little crystal lattices. And they don't let the sodium and the chloride get in between. If if you do it over a long enough period of time, you essentially get drinkable water and when you melt it. So you produce all of this ice, which you can capture and and transport.
Speaker: And then the other side of it, we were talking about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation before. The other side of it, what drives that is the cold brine falling from the ocean surface. Well, when you're producing ice, you're cooling the the ocean water and what's left is a salty cold brine that goes down to the ocean floor. So as you're doing this whole process, you're strengthening those ocean circulations.
Speaker: So it's good for the environment. It produces clean water as its exhausts form producing electricity. I mean, I don't see any environmental downsides to this. So let's take this a step further. So we talked about growing food on the surface of the ice. Think about what happens in the Arctic in the summertime.
Speaker: In the summertime you've got a polar ice cap and you've got sunlight and the the sunlight actually can go through the ice and it gets to the bottom of the ice and what happens there? There's so many nutrients in the cold Arctic waters that algae can form below the ice and you actually get massive algae growing on the bottom of the ice and that algae then gets eaten by copepods and then the copepods get eaten by krill and then the krill get eaten by salmon or arctic char and then that gets eaten by seals and polar bears.
Speaker: um So all you need to drive that system, and remember, the ocean temperature at the interface between the ice and the water is always the same year round. All you need to drive that system is light. We know how to produce light very effectively with LEDs. So you can just literally stick a bunch of LEDs ah you know spaced out in the ice. It'll diffuse naturally. The light will diffuse naturally into the water.
Speaker: and then you can grow these mats of algae and you can have the most abundant um natural food cycle going year -round in the Arctic. And if you do that, all you have to do then is set up some pens, you know put in some hatchery salmon or something, and and you can grow salmon. But here's the advantage. I don't know if you're familiar with like salmon from Norway or the west coast of Canada and stuff. Often they're feeding them agricultural byproducts, like wheat or or something like this. So not a natural diet.
Speaker: in in In Norway, I've seen some documentaries and they say that they ah catch you know fish from the Baltic Sea, which is very polluted. They grind them up into meal and then they feed them to the salmon. So essentially, you're getting the toxic fish fish meal in your in the finished product. Well, in the Arctic, you wouldn't have that because you'd have an entirely natural cycle. without any you know The Arctic and the Antarctic oceans are still, or the Southern Ocean, still the at least polluted oceans in the world. There there is pollution.
Speaker: but it's not to the extent that you have say you know around China or the east coast of the United States or something like this or the Baltic Sea. So you you essentially get a fish that's as healthy as any wild caught salmon let's say.
Speaker: Wow, yeah, that that's amazing as well that you can produce and from your system that's already so powerful. You can start adding, it sounds like, endless ah other systems to it that that generate food and and other byproducts. That's amazing.
Speaker: and so the The other thing that's a problem when you're growing fish in say ah a fjord or an estuary or something like that, generally speaking the water isn't very deep there. And so what happens is you have these pens and you have thousands of fish and they're all pooping and years and years of poop accumulates on the on the ocean floor.
Speaker: And that creates a dead zone, a eutrophication, I think it's called. The water becomes devoid of oxygen. And it makes it actually makes the fish sick, and it makes the local environment sick. Well, if you're in a kilometer of water or more um operating a fish farm, you don't have that same problem. Because even ah if the wastes settle to the ocean floor, it's going to be more spread out for starters.
Speaker: But it's not going to affect the quality of the water at the surface because it's just too far, right? And the currents will take the ah take the stuff away and spread it over a larger distance. So overall, deep ocean fish farming is is a healthier process than um you know doing it in coastal regions.
Speaker: Interesting. Wow, that's incredible. Nice. Well, I think this is your whole system and the book that you came up with or the whole whole invention, basically, is really amazing. like and and And I just want to understand more, like how would you ever come up with this? Because I'm fascinated by inventors. ah I want to invent something that changes the world myself one day. So how how did you start with this?
Speaker: Okay, so I mentioned that book, Engineer's Dreams. yeah So they have a whole chapter talking about how Claude tried to develop this OTEC system, and he wasn't successful. But then some of the um the associates of Claude and the... our I don't know how to pronounce this name, you'd probably know it better. Darso Noval, or...
Speaker: arssonnoval He was a famous French chemist anyways. that d apostography a r s o n v a l ah ofval here ah yeah anyway He was a famous chemist and he had the ah an associate named Dr. Bergeaux.
Speaker: and Bergeau said, well, you can do the same thing, but do it in the Arctic and you got a much better temperature difference. So it's not like I invented this idea. It's been out there, but you know how many people have read this book? Not very many. So this is like when when you talk about invention and stuff, that my thing is I love to watch and learn. So I watch science documentaries. I watch ah any kinds of science programs, listen to but podcasts. I'm interested in everything from astronomy to ecology.
Speaker: And um i just being exposed to so many different ideas gets your mind to make connections. And it's those connections that have led me to to write this book. Because if you think of, you know, I've worked in the oil and gas industry in Alberta for like 15 years or so. that And typically, if you if you imagine like ah an oil drilling platform, they take this platform out there, and it has one purpose.
Speaker: yeah They're going to drill oil, bring it up and transport it to a a ship that they can offload it onto. Well, that's a very expensive platform. And if you aren't taking taking advantage of the other resources around you, then you're not getting the maximum benefit. if youre Even if you're an investor, you're not getting the maximum return on your investment.
Speaker: And so when I was talking about 2 .2 billion people not having access to fresh water, this can go a long way to helping people um get that kind of fresh water because every two weeks you're producing something like 5 million cubic meters of ah fresh water ah with a one gigawatt system and at a minimum. There's actually, it would be more than that most likely. But I do the minimum calculations and You can imagine, so to put that in perspective, 5 million cubic meters is something that's almost a kilometer long and you know a quarter of a kilometer wide by about, what is it, 90 meters or something in height. it's it's a bit It's a lot of I've got the graphic, actually I'll bring it up, I do have the graphic right here, so I'll just take a look at it. no That's amazing, that it's just a fast amount of water that can be produced and then it can be shipped to where it has to go on engines that run on the engine that's that's harvested naturally.
Speaker: Right, and so you can transport the, you can transport the ice and and have the other products you're producing be transported the same way. So in in the book, I talk, I call it a 5 million or 5m Superberg, and it would have 490, 4 ,960 ,000 tons of ice. It would be 942 meters long, 230 meters wide and 64 meters high.
Speaker: And so you imagine this thing going through the Straits of of Gibraltar and it's designed so it can be broken up into chunks and you can send off smaller chunks. So you send some off to you know Morocco and to Algeria and some to France and some to Italy and Sardinia and stuff. And you go all the way through the Mediterranean.
Speaker: You get off, you know, Egypt and and Israel can can get some water. Now Israel's got their own desalination system that seems to be working pretty well. But, you know, you can get the water out there to the Palestinians or whatever. um And ah it's, like I said, it's renewable. You can get that constantly going. What I envision, though, is If you sell that bottled water to, say, the Italians and and and to other wealthy nations, you can say, OK, buy this water, by the way, for a lot less than you're spending right now for your bottled water. And we will give an equivalent amount of water to somebody in Zambia or some other country that doesn't have access to the fresh water. And and um and in that way, it can be self -funding and solving a huge global problem for people around the world.
Speaker: And according to the United Nations, I think 60 % of the population of the world lives within 100 kilometers of the ocean. So you can distribute this pretty much everywhere. Well, that's incredible. Well, Jeff, it sounds like that you have an endless or let's call it a sustainable endless resource of ideas that you you can invent ah related to to what you're doing today. It's incredible.
Speaker: I, of course, would love to have investors who who are interested in in pursuing this. And I also talked briefly in the book about once you've got that kind of energy available, you can also draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And I've got a plan for doing that sustainably.
Speaker: So if anyone wants to invest in any of those ideas, please give me a call. um The information is available on my website. That's infiniteresourcesbook .com. And you can contact me through there as well. Well, yeah, that's amazing. That was going to be my my next my next question, actually. like what what What are your next steps but with the the work you've done so far?
Speaker: and So obviously i'm I'm promoting the book and I'm doing podcasts like this to try to get the word out. I haven't been in contact with ah government officials or or anything like that yet. That's all in the works. so yeah know i'm I'm trying to operate my business, trying to support my family at the same time as as doing this. So I could definitely use some help in all of those areas. um But yeah, there's there's obviously a lot of ideas. oh and and The reason that I wrote this book, um yeah yeah it's you mentioned I'm an inventor. The reason I wrote this book is because I think this idea is just too big for one person to do it myself. So it's not like I'll ever go and and do it. So it's like, who cares if everybody in the world knows it? Am I going to be upset if Google goes and develops it? No, not at all. I hope that they'll hire me as a consultant or something like this. But you know at the end of the day, maybe somebody will be able to point to you know on my gravestone or something and might say,
Speaker: you know this man reduced the carbon footprint of mankind more than any other person or something like this that would be wonderful nice wrap below of that but uh yeah obviously i'd like to be involved in in with it whoever ends up doing it and i think it would be great to have a friendly competition and maybe have four or five companies doing it and see who comes up with the best way of doing it Because once these systems are in place, I think they'll be self -sustaining and self, they'll make a profit. So how can we make profit from this? Obviously, if we're replacing fossil fuels, it needs to be less expensive than fossil fuels to make it practical. So we have to do a lot of it. like Let's just take a look at the bottled water industry that I mentioned. In 2023, the global bottled water sales were approximately $342 billion US.
Speaker: So that would buy a lot of energy platforms. if we can and and And here's the thing, is like you probably get these emails once in a while, so and such and such a bottle company is drawing water from the ground and and destroying this aquifer or something like this, and we should boycott this company because of it, right?
Speaker: Well, this water is not being taken from anybody. you know there There was a ah case in South America, in Bolivia, where you know the the country had high debts, international debt, and the International Monetary Fund said, okay, we'll help you pay off your debt. But in exchange, you have to sell water rights from one of your cities to this international ah company. And so they did that.
Speaker: and it was Bechtel Corporation and a Spanish Corporation and some other a conglomerate of other companies and within a couple of weeks of them taking over they raised the price of the water by 40 percent and of course um the people a lot of poor people can't afford to have a price increase on their water and this sort of thing. And so there were protests and then the military was called in and the 17 -year -old boy got shot and eventually the government fell and eventually um the new government said, we're not going to accept this deal. And they tore up the contract essentially. They gave Bechtel $1 for their company to get the contract back and and it all ended with a lot of acrimony all around.
Speaker: But that's a situation where you're taking water from people who don't have enough water already. The situation I'm talking about is giving water to people from a source that you're not stealing from anyone. No, it's from the ocean. It's so abundant. There's so much water. Exactly. And so I think this is an opportunity to do a lot of good. Yeah, I think so as well. And also for the...
Speaker: the desalination of water because the current desalination systems are extremely unsustainable. In countries like Saudi Arabia, apparently they need something like for for Two liters of water, they use one liter of crude oil to desalinate it, something like that is mind -blowing. I'm not sure if it's that much, but yeah it's cra kind of crazy that they're basically boiling ocean water with by burning fossil fuels and then condensing it. Now, if I'm not mistaken, they they have a they're taking the steam
Speaker: that's produced and then using that to heat the incoming water so the process isn't as inefficient as it sounds but even so we don't need to be producing water with fossil fuels we should be able to do it with natural processes and they are working with solar energy as well down there so yeah that's it i think in all of the systems and this is actually related to to farming and and any industry that's related to energy because food is also energy. it's It's that we don't have to like look at it in what is bad or what is good. We just have to look at it how how it is produced, right? And this seems to be the same now from your interview. I find it very inspiring that I also understood it's exactly the same with but energy. We don't have to like blame certain
Speaker: parts of the energy production system, it's just like we just have to shift how the energy is is produced or or basically captured. So yeah, thank you very much, Jeff, for for this amazing ah information. Is there something else that you would like to share with our audience before we start wrapping things up here?
Speaker: Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. And I've started a Facebook group for the book. But yeah, the the intention is to you know find, I don't know if I'm going to be doing crowdsourcing or working with governments or you know if a billionaire likes this idea or or some other group, maybe all of the above. I'd be happy to work with everyone to bring these ideas to fruition and literally you know i talk about many other ideas in the book that are in in conjunction with this.
Speaker: This is all doable stuff. I'm not, in these cases, I haven't put a lot in the book that is original to me. I've got ideas, of course, in the back of my mind that I haven't put in the book that, you know, if you hire me as a consultant, we can talk about those, but um the the stuff that's in the book is essentially um out there already. It's just nobody's put it together the way that I have necessarily. Well, yeah, I think that's that's very humble of you to say that, but then doing the work and getting it together and actually making it practical. That is a huge accomplish accomplishment. So thank you very much, Jeff, for that. And so we'll put all the links in the show notes that people can find it there. So, yeah, Jeff, thank you very much for being on the show. This was very interesting. And have a lovely day. My pleasure. And thank you for interviewing me and and sharing this with your podcast community.
