Episode Details

Here is a link to get more information about The Ocean Age Walk & Talk and join the waitlist.

Episode Intro:

California is in its deepest drought in 1,200 years, and Robert Bergstrom reckons that without the ocean the state would have to depopulate. He spent decades building desalination plants the traditional way: on land, pumping seawater up, pressurising it, and pushing salty brine back out. Now he is sinking the membranes 450 metres down and letting the ocean's own pressure do the work for free. No high-pressure pumps, no marine life caught in the filters, and a far weaker brine.

Robert's bio:

Robert Bergstrom is the founder and CEO of OceanWell, a Californian water technology company building subsea desalination. He has worked on desalination since 1996 and came into water from a career in finance. He founded Seven Seas Water, growing it from two people in a pickup truck into a business that built and operated plants across the US Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands. He retired in 2012, then came back to solve the problem he had spent his career working around.

OceanWell was founded in 2019 with Charlie McGarraugh and Michael Porter. Its pods sit roughly 450 metres below the surface, where natural hydrostatic pressure drives reverse osmosis instead of high-pressure pumps. Each pod is about the size of an upright school bus and can produce up to a million gallons of fresh water a day. The company raised an $11m Series A backed by Kubota, is developing Water Farm 1 in California's Santa Monica Bay with a group of regional water agencies including Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, and has signed an MOU with Eau d'Azur to develop a demonstrator off Nice.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:00:53 - Why the water crisis is getting worse
00:01:56 - Atmospheric thirst and what one degree does
00:04:49 - California's deepest drought in 1,200 years
00:08:15 - Thirty years in water and building Seven Seas Water
00:09:54 - What desalination actually is, from thermal to reverse osmosis
00:13:22 - Brine, marine life, and the cost of pressurising water
00:21:02 - How OceanWell differs: using the ocean's own pressure
00:28:21 - Pods, umbilicals, and what a water farm looks like
00:33:59 - Serving 10% of the Los Angeles area, and who buys the water
00:45:17 - Permitting, and regulations written for older technology
00:58:35 - The Colorado River, water wars, and water exchange

Useful Links & Resources:

The Ocean Age Walk & Talk - Link to join the waitlist

Robert Bergstrom on LinkedIn

OceanWell: Website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

Get in touch with The Ocean Age's host Fed DeGobbi on LinkedIn, X or by emailing directly at fed@oceanage.co

The Ocean Age Podcast is edited by Nebojsa Lešević. Sarah Carpenter and Giulia Leanza are our research assistants.

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