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