 Good morning. I'm Ethan Allen, your host here on Fink Tech Tech Talks. Billion for CEO Jay Fidel usually does this. And with me today on Fink Tech Studio is my co-host Ray Starlet. Ray. Glad to be here with you. Sorry that Jay had to run off to the dentist, I think. So we got tats. But this is a great subject today. I think we've got some really interesting stuff we're going to talk about. True. And we have with us today in the studio Dr. Hans Kronk, who is a leading authority in ocean thermal energy conversion. Yes, and thank you for having me on. I think it's a very appropriate subject right now because we do have an energy crisis and a global one, as a matter of fact. And I'm suggesting there isn't a global solution centered in the tropical ocean. And Hawaii can be the world leader on this and is, in fact, the place where most of the research has been done. And so we're prepared from a technical point of view to go forward. The thing that's holding us up basically is politics and decision-making processes. And so that's where we are. But I wanted to sort of bring out the state of affairs of where we are. Wonderful. So we're talking something pretty big here. This is not just a small, local way to produce energy. This has a lot of implications for solving large-scale world problems, potentially. Yes, and that is the viewpoint that we've had for some time. In fact, the Natural Energy Laboratory on the Big Island of Hawaii was formed specifically to develop this technology. And it was formed more than 30 years ago and has come to the point of putting the technology on the point of commercialism. And that's what I'd like to bring out and indicate that this is the largest energy resource on Earth, larger than all of the fossil fuel together and larger than any other renewable energy resource. In fact, it's the base for the other renewable energy resources. The ocean is the world's largest solar collector. And there it is. It makes all about weather, all hurricanes, all rain, all cyclones here and there, and all common wind comes from the heat of the ocean as it's collected from the sun. And this technology was developed a long time ago. It was first thought of in 1881 in France and was practically built in the 1920s in Cuba by a French engineer. And so it's not that it's unknown. In fact, it's not even very difficult. It's relatively simple. It's a heat engine which takes advantage of the surface warmth in the tropical ocean and allows that heat energy to flow to a cold place. This is generally how heat engines work, they go from one to cold. And the cold is the deeper water in the tropical ocean which is accessible at a relatively small distance of, say, one kilometer. And there you have it. You have a difference in temperature within the technical capability of humans. Whereas the weather engine, so to speak, runs in a difference in temperature between the surface of the water and, you know, a thousand miles away horizontally in the atmosphere. But it works. So could you... I've been excited about this since I first came to Hawaii back in 1980 and actually flew over the, I guess, the very first otek plant here in Hawaii of Kona Airport and saw, at nighttime, a couple of light bulbs burning out there and that was all it was doing. It was showing that it could make, even at nighttime, so you don't need the sun to shine all the time in order for this energy to be produced. That's right, because it takes stored energy. Stored in, correct. And so it's been around, it's been talked about and the money has been put into it at various times. What are the major obstacles of getting it to the point where we've commercialized it and we've recognized its benefits? Well, we're at that point. And we... the problems are political will and the initial project. You can't do a, say, household otek. You have to do it at some scale. So we have now a very active project together with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to supply the power and water for quaggling, both the U.S. military facility there and the population, the local population. So that's where it is. It's poised. It's designed on a preliminary basis and it awaits a power purchase agreement from the army. And it's in front of them and there it is, you know. So how big would this plant be? That one, as it's planned right now, would be 20 megawatts because they don't have a big demand over there. But the basic structure that we're using is big enough to go to 40 megawatts, that particular one. And the first one would supply power to the U.S. base, on the basis of this power purchase agreement and would also supply power to the local population and the freshwater for that. In addition, it would produce a certain amount of hydrogen and this would be done in conjunction with Japanese who are anxious, of course, to develop a hydrogen power production system for Japan. In fact, they already have installed a land-based power station using fuel cells for 100 megawatts. So all they need is the hydrogen. And of course, right now, as an experimental system, they're just using the hydrogen from fossil fuel, but that's not a sustainable approach. So they want hydrogen from renewable sources and they are already talking to the Marshall Islands because, if you recall, the Marshall Islands are a sovereign nation so they can make their own deals, so to speak, with foreign countries. And the Marshall Islands, the main mover and shaker, is the former foreign secretary, Tony Dubroom, who's globally honored already for his stance in backing technologies that would help out his country because they are, of course, subject to the bad effects of global warming with rising sea levels. Primarily they are all on atolls over there. And so he's a very able and smart person who's attended and was a big mover in a Paris meeting. And so this is a project that he is pushing very strongly. And particularly because this produces fresh water as a sort of sideline, that would have great appeal to people in Marshall Islands where fresh water is a chronic issue. And as soon as you make fresh water and you make electricity you can make hydrogen because you stick the electricity in the fresh water and out comes hydrogen on one electrode and oxygen out of the other. And you get oxygen whether you like it or not so you might as well collect that as a product also. So I see the picture you've got here. Can you just hold it up? Yeah, I think there it is. That looks like something that can move around. And is that the sort of your, I guess it is your first effort to try to make a commercial plan? Might this eventually be on land or is it better done on a large like device? We have had, like I said, since the 1920s the French and various people have had such plants and they work because it's very simple. They've been proven to work. And the thing that has failed each time is the cold water pipe. And of course anybody can see that if you put something on land you have to have a longer pipe to get to deep water. But if you're floating out on the ocean then it's a real short distance because you can go straight down. And so you're limited on land because you can only make such a big pipe to go get cold water. This is relatively limited heat engine because you're dealing with a relatively small temperature difference in the ocean. It's big enough to run the world's weather but in human terms it's a small delta T as we say, you know, a definite difference in temperature. So you just need more water. Yeah, so you need a lot of water. So you need a big pipe. And so you have easier access if you're floating. And this plant that we just had on the picture there is a design that my partner, Alfred Yee, and I have come up with. This is a design for 125 megawatts. And it's a set of modules. So our design calls for not one big pipe but several modules, each one of which has their own pipe. And so it's within the technology range that we can handle right now. We're going to explore this further but I'm told that we have to take a brief break at this point. Sorry to interrupt but we'll be right back. You're here on Think Tech Talks. I'm your host Ethan Allen, Ray Starholding, Dr. Honest Croc. Hey, Standard Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30 at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you've got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen and my other favorite is transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Standard Energy Man. Aloha. Hello and aloha. My name is Raya Salter and I am the host of Power of Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy. Be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians or artists, to see how we can come together to make a renewable future. Tuesdays at 1 p.m. I'm back. And here we are. We're back on Think Tech Talks. I'm Ethan Allen, sitting in for Jay Fidel. With me is Ray Starling here in the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum at Dr. Honest Croc. And we are talking about OTEC, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. This is an amazing technology that potentially hits a lot of things. It produces very clean, produces a lot of energy, produces fresh water, produces hydrogen and basically actually counters global warming. So stunning. So tell us more about it. Okay. Well, here's the entire Earth's energy flux. And you can see at the bottom fossil fuels and human energy consumption are 0.005% of that. And fossil fuel is, of course, a buried sunshine in the form of plants that have been fossilized. But I wanted to show this because the entire world energy is rather large and most of it, if you look through there, is to heat production. And almost all of that is in the ocean. And then you get the hydrologic cycle, evaporation, precipitation. And then you get wind, waves, ocean currents, which amounts to 1.9% of that total. And biomass production, which is the entire living sphere, which is 0.1%. So we're saying, hey, go back to that big chunk over there, heat production, that's where the thing is. And we're not going to run out. It's too big. Okay, the next slide, please. Here is where you have enough heat to do this in the surface layer. And that's a tropical zone. So all the areas in yellow and orange, there are places where you can do this as long as you have the depth profile to get to the cold water because there's cold water everywhere and only a thin layer of warm water in the top. So you have the makings of a heat engine over here. So next slide also shows that part of the weather thing. This is where all of the, this shows all the hurricanes are. And you'll notice that there's a strip down the middle of the equator where they have no hurricanes. And so you can put all of the OTEC plants there and not be subject to hurricane problems. And it's the hurricanes that take advantage sort of the exclamation point of all of the power that's in this system. So for instance, one Category 5 hurricane in one day does as much power as all of humankind does in a year. So when you have multiple hurricanes every year and after hurricane passes, you measure the temperature in the surface layer and it's only one degree less than it was before the hurricane. And that's made up very quickly by the sun in the next couple of days. So here's the actual delta T and you get the biggest delta T of 24 degrees in that big patch in the Pacific Ocean. So we want to go there first and the Marshall Islands are there. And so are many of the other islands that we're talking to. So next. So here we have, you saw initially that you can have 125 megawatt plants and these are five of them put together so they can float out there. They can make hydrogen. You can then have a, it's an open end on the bottom there. You can then drive your liquid hydrogen tanker in the middle of that, be in calm water and load it up and go. So this would be then actually, depending on the delta T, either 500 or six, what is it, five, one, two, three, four, five, or 625 megawatts worth of power. Or the next slide, which is another configuration with six and oriented into the wind or the current so that you can have dynamic positioning here. You can have a hydrogen tanker. You can also at the same time have an oxygen tanker. You don't want to mix it too, because it'll blow up. But separately, they're of course very tractable and our technology has us already. We have tankers and we use liquid hydrogen. We use liquid oxygen already. So it's not new technology. So next slide, please. I wanted to show that we have firm technology for the plant. It's made out of concrete. It's designed and built by Al Yee. This particular thing was built more than 30 years ago. It's the most cost-effective way to deal with the floating structures. It's made out of concrete, high-strength concrete. The thing that's built there was built to explore oil in the Arctic Ocean. So it served that purpose for the U.S. so all of the Arctic oil was explored using this platform. And then, after a while, it was rented to the Russians. The Russians are now using it. It is their most attractive constructive oil platform. And this is the key part here. It has never been dry docked. It has no repair requirements. It has paid for itself many times over because it originally cost $75 million and it was rented out for $45 million for a year, for 20 years. So that's a pretty good return. So it's the best technology. So this is what we would use this technology for our platform. So next slide, please. So we have 125 megawatts, 60 megawatts. Whatever size you want to make reasonably large because this technology works best large and small. So next slide, please. And this is the one for the 20 megawatt for Quadjalan. Oh, Quadjalan. Yeah, so off Quadjalan. And this is the top deck. And next slide, please. This is the top deck. Symbolically, next slide. This is inside. This is very simple technology. You basically have two streams of water, the warm water and the cold water. And you use heat exchangers to transfer the heat from the water to a working fluid. And the working fluid goes through a turbine and then gets cooled off by the cold water to be liquid again. And then you discharge it. And that's it. That's the entire technology. So it's technology we know how to do. And of course, that's it. You have to buy a whole lot of heat exchangers and whatnot. So next slide, please. And the technology for making hydrogen is here. You can buy it off the shelf. This happens to be an alkaline electrolysis cell, which makes the hydrogen and the oxygen. And the most efficient fuel cell is this same thing except running backwards. The same electrolysis cell so that you put hydrogen in one end and oxygen in the other end and electricity comes out. And so you just run the same cell backwards and you have it. But of course, you design it for optimizing one or the other. But technically, it's the same thing. So next slide, please. And the heat exchangers, which is the most expensive part of the thing, are off the shelf. Or you can develop new heat exchangers like the Mackay Ocean Engineering is doing in Kona. They're experimenting on heat exchangers. So next slide, please. Other alternatives. That last one was an American design. It's Japanese. It's a little more compact. We haven't decided yet which way to go because we're actually dealing with the Japanese more than the Americans in Quaggulant. So we may go in that direction. So next slide, please. I think that may be all. Okay. So a quick step through this thing. But that didn't cover the other main benefit. And that is that the backing off from our cooking ourselves with global warming with fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are burnt, of course, putting carbon dioxide into the air. And what that does is retard the outflow of energy from the Earth so that in effect you put a blanket over the Earth. The energy is still coming in with no problem, but it goes out a lot slower. So it accumulates. That's global warming. It's accumulation because we're putting a damper on the outflow of energy. So it's accumulated. It's mostly in the ocean. And so if we take the blanket off, it'll reverse. So what this technology does, first of all, is take part of that energy out of the surface of the ocean. So unlike, for instance, photovoltaic or wind, it doesn't take any energy out of the ocean. Or nuclear, for instance. Nuclear puts energy back in the ocean. So you're taking the heat energy and turning it into electricity. It's useful, something. That's a good sales point. And making a benefit out of it. So when people say, oh, nuclear reverses global warming, it does in the sense that it replaces fossil fuel. This takes another step. It not only replaces fossil fuel, it also takes heat out of the reservoir that's heating up too much. So that's two things. In addition, of course, it takes... And there's more. Oh, there is. And for another 1990, it takes the surface layer of water which has absorbed some CO2 from the atmosphere because right now we're putting more in the atmosphere and much of that goes into the ocean and it creates problems there because it causes a lower pH which affects the coral because it dissolves the coral because of the lower pH. So we take some of that and basically take the heat out of it which makes it more dense and we put it back in the ocean and not having changed the carbon dioxide in it but then as we put it back in the ocean, it sinks because it's more dense. So it's a transport to... Not only that, but when the ocean right now, especially the tropical ocean, has been affected by this whole process of heating so that the surface layer is lighter than it was before, less dense because you've heated it up and you heat something up and it becomes less denser. So it's floating in the tropical ocean and it has a certain thickness and the thickness is defined by how much mixing energy there is because the heating is actually only the top few meters and so then it doesn't mix as much so that surface layer is getting thinner. This is addressing all these problems and I wish we could go on length with it and really do a full explanation and indeed I might talk to you about this another moment. Do you have a website that you could refer us to? Yeah, there's a website as part of our company but it doesn't have all of these things. That's just me. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope you'll come back and see Tech Talks on every week. I'm your host Ethan Allen saying goodbye for now.