Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is Joe Whitworth, President and CEO of the Freshwater Trust and you are listening to the Water Values Podcast your go to podcast for all things water. The Water Values Podcast is sponsored by the following market leading companies and organizations by the American Waterworks Association Dedicated to
[00:00:17] Speaker B: the World's Most Important Resource by Black
[00:00:20] Speaker A: and Veatch Building a World of Difference by Advanced Drainage Systems Our Reason is water by 1898 and CO possibilities powered by Experience by Woodard and Curran High Quality Consulting Engineering Science and Operations Services by Entera Innovation and Stewardship for a Sustainable Tomorrow and by Xylem Let's Solve Water this is session 285.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Welcome to the Water Values Podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to water utilities, resources, treatment, reuse and all things water. Now here's your host, Dave McGimpsey.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another session of
[00:01:10] Speaker B: the Water Values Podcast.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: As my daughter Sarah said, my name is Dave McGimpsey and thanks so much for joining me and thank you for your support over the last 12 years. Yes, that's right, the Water Values podcast turns 12 this month.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Gone by quickly.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Well, we have a great show for you today. Self described ocean enthusiast and entrepreneur Alex Fuglasong joins us to talk about deep Sea Desalination and his company Flotion. This episode also reveals a stealth aspect of the water energy nexus, so see if you can identify it during the interview.
Also, we have Reece Tisdale back for another Bluefield on Tap segment, this time on Bluefield's upcoming report on Ag Water and the significant expenditures coming up in the Ag Water area.
But before we get to today's conversations, we say thank you to our awesome sponsors at the top of every show. And boy do we have some great sponsors for you in 2026. The American Waterworks Association, Black and Veatch Advanced Drainage Systems 1898 Co, Woodard Curran, Entera and Xylem. And that, as you well know, is a terrific collection of impactful companies that have affirmatively decided to support water industry thought leadership and education. And I thank you all and I'd like you, the listener, to please do me a favor. If you work for or with any of those sponsors, please thank your boss or thank your contact at that sponsor firm and let them know that you appreciate their leadership in the industry through the sponsorship. That simple little note of thanks goes a long way, believe me.
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Before we head on to the interview with Alex, we've got a Bluefield on Tap segment with Bluefield Research's Reece Tisdale. So take it away, guys.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Orys, welcome to another Bluefield on Tap. How we doing this month?
[00:03:13] Speaker D: Pretty good, Dave. It's now the end of the biggest nor' easter we've seen in a long time here. So in fact I had to drive in today. I've been taking the train recently, but we're on still on snow schedule, so not many trains happening and people are still digging out and the city's a mess. Yeah.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: How much, how much snow did Boston get?
[00:03:35] Speaker D: Well, it's a good question, I think. You know, in my house we definitely got close to 2ft.
The city may have actually, which is unique because it's closer to the ocean than my house, probably a little bit more even. So two, two and a half. So it's a lot for a city.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: So is it fair to say you have snow piled up to the goalpost again, the rim on your bath?
[00:03:58] Speaker D: We definitely do because the old pile has not disappeared. So it's just snow on top of snow. And it's supposed to snow again day after tomorrow.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Oh well, I'll feel good in the walking out in the sunshine here in southern Indiana.
[00:04:12] Speaker D: It's what Colorado could use. They could use a little bit of this right now.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: It's all about the distribution, right? It's all about the distribution.
[00:04:21] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Speaking of which, Bluefield has a new report coming out on ag Water and would love to hear a little more about that.
[00:04:33] Speaker D: Yeah, so this is something that's come up. I mean, as the listeners know who've been on the water values for a while, when I'm on I'm usually talking about industrial or municipal or competitive strategies. But one area we haven't focused a lot on is agriculture and oddly enough, ag water.
And agriculture's water usage makes up about 70% of the US total, let alone the rest of the world. So it's interesting, we've done a recent forecast over just a five year forecast looking at what the size of that market is. It's about $84 billion market in water management.
So it's about 13 and a half billion dollars per year driven by things like smart irrigation, digital on farm, off farm, agriculture, water management. So it's super interesting to unpack that.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Let's, let's go to the west where a lot of that is.
They have prior appropriation. And then how does, how does smart water and all that work in the west where prior appropriation is prevalent? Because there's no incentive for the people who have the senior water rights to
[00:05:50] Speaker A: really use it more efficiently.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Right?
[00:05:53] Speaker D: There's really not. And I think the bigger issue is what we focused a lot on is what are they spending their, what their, what are they spending their money on? And a lot of it is really irrespective of whether they have the actual water or not. But there's a lot of money that goes into labor and, or energy for pumping. So that's where a lot of the spend, actually the lion's share of the spend we're seeing is actually going to, with rising or volatile energy prices, there's labor stress or tightening labor markets. And that's a bigger, more maybe acute issue for some of these farmers or water rights holders and how they're managing the water. That's one aspect. And then the question is where is it being managed? And this is like a key, I'd say we bifurcated the market into two different groups and that is the on farm water management, that is the rights holders. Then there's the irrigation districts. And they, irrigation districts spend a lot more on things like civil infrastructure, canals, piping and distribution. And so I think it's important, at least we deem that it's important. There are two different ways to look at the market and that's how it should be.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: So is there any, is there any difference? Did you look at geographically between east versus West?
[00:07:17] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, huge difference. Right. Obviously when you look at the divide, really when you look at on farm, off farm, the off farm delivery supplies a huge chunk of the Western U.S. right. When you get west of the U.S. that's really where all the irrigation districts are and that's driving larger sort of bigger dollar infrastructure investments in places like California, even Texas, which are also being propped up is not the right word. Accelerated maybe is a better way to put it by things like federal grants. You know, they're more federal dollars going out to the west.
So that's a big difference. The east is a little bit different. Despite you living in the breadbasket, it's a little bit different west of the Mississippi than east.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: So when you're, when you're looking at the ag water sector, like where do you see the bulk of the spend going?
[00:08:14] Speaker D: Well, I think the big part of it is pumping is a big part of it is moving the water around. But I think as far as growth segments, digital technology and I know that can be a little buzzwordy that people may or may not like but digital irrigation or smart irrigation is another way to put it, it's growing twice as fast as the rest of the market.
It's growing at about 13% compound annual growth rate, growth rate over the next five years which is fairly robust particularly for a very mature estab well established water sector. And so what that really is targeting what a number of companies are looking at is actually just being more efficient with the water use, the energy usage to do so as well as the labor. And so while that's happening there's also a lot of M and A happening in that space itself whether it be or be a selling off netafem.
That's one aspect of it. We're seeing pipe companies becoming more involved or deploying new solutions into the space because you know the way I look at it is the pipe companies they are essentially the water mains and what they're doing is adding on capabilities onto their existing footprints to offer sort of ongoing service or irrigation solutions to what they're doing. So it's super interesting to see that unfold and quite honestly it's not like anything else. I mean we've talked a lot about digital in the municipal infrastructure market. Same thing's happening in ag as well.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I am curious how this trend because if you've read the Wall Street Journal lately you've they've had a couple articles about how the family farms are, you know, the kids don't want to get into farming anymore and so that's just going to mean consolidation. There's going to be more industrial scale farms so to speak or these large companies running what used to be family farms.
I would think that those more industrial applications would be more apt to adopt smart meter water conservation measures and have the scale to spend the money. I mean did that play into or did you see any elements of that
[00:10:39] Speaker A: when you did your study?
[00:10:41] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean it's still incredibly fragmented despite you know the discussion. I've seen those articles as well and you're exactly right and that's that was, that's our hypothesis as well. The larger the farm when you know companies then their synergies to be found one across farms but also just in applications whether it be for operating or equipment needs. And so we're see, we will see more of that.
I don't see how it can happen I think the bigger issue, the bigger driver for spend on all of this, though, are just fundamentally commodity prices. Right. The ag markets has seen some ups and downs because of whether it be tariffs, what the Chinese are doing, who they're buying from, that has a more immediate impact on spending, on spend on new types of equipment or technology than probably anything else. But consolidation over the long haul most definitely is going to have an impact.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: All right, well, Reece, always great talking to you. Can't wait to check out this report from Bluefield and we'll talk again soon.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Have a great, have a great March.
[00:11:52] Speaker D: All right, Dave. Yeah. And at the end of March, you know, it's coming. We're.
February is a short month, so we're less than a month away.
[00:11:59] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Amen. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Reece.
[00:12:02] Speaker D: Take care.
[00:12:03] Speaker E: Bye.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: As always, great information from Bluefield Research and Reese Tisdale. Now it's time for the main event, our interview with flotion's Alex Buglasong. Let's get that water flowing.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Well, Alex, welcome to the Water Values podcast. Great to have you on. How you doing today?
[00:12:20] Speaker E: Thank you very much. I'm doing great.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Terrific. So, Alex, for those who may not have the benefit of knowing your background, could you please provide that and tell us how you came to the water sector?
[00:12:34] Speaker E: Sure. So I'm born and raised in Norway.
I've been interested in water from my early days, but my entry into water came through sea water. So I've been sort of an ocean enthusiast, scuba diving since I was 15. I crossed the Atlantic at 19.
And then we had a family business involved in the maritime sector and oil and gas sector, which is a fairly big part of Norwegian export and ecosystem. So studied some marine biology alongside my business degree in Vancouver, Canada. Spent four years there and took up seaplane flying and some other things around the ocean. Still free diving in the winter. So I'm a bit of an ocean nerd. And that sort of took us, it took us to, to, to learn a lot about seawater. And then we, we, we. We started with water treatment basically for oil and gas injection applications. And I, I can explain more about that if you, if you'd like, but that's kind of how we got into that part of the well.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: I am very interested in that and I think that's a great foundation for how you came up with the technology for Flotion. So why don't you give us expand on that discussion of oil and gas in your experience?
[00:13:56] Speaker E: Okay, great. Yeah. So there were kind of two things Going on in parallel. One is that our family business has been involved in oil and gas pumping business and subsea pumping, which is an area where pumps are quite critical and very demanding application, where the clients want equipment in the deep ocean that can last for many, many years without human intervention. So without maintenance, basically. So kind of like nuclear and navy and space, it's not easy to do maintenance. So that's our DNA of the family business was really to make things last really long time without having the cost escalate. So that's kind of one track. And we were all involved in a couple of the small nuclear test reactors in Norway. We were involved in some of the navy submarines as well. So clients really came to us when they had a difficult application and particularly in the maritime side. And then so that's one important part. And flotion that we'll discuss later is inherently a subsea pumping system.
So that's important.
And at the same time, the other, other thing that started happening is that we, we were working with a client in the oil and gas space called Seabox, which were designing subsea water treatment systems for removing salts and sulfates from seawater to inject into oil wells, to increase oil recovery from oil wells without taking up space from a big oil platform. So you wanted to put the whole desalination plant on the seabed. So we ended up being one of their major partners and helping them to develop the system.
And we actually had a Eureka moment back in 2016 where we put our subsea pump and conventional off the shelf reverse osmosis membranes into a hyperbaric chamber simulating 3000 meter water depth or 300 bars of pressure. And we saw that these membranes from off the shelf were exhibiting the same behavior at that depth as they were topside, provided they got a differential pressure.
So the membrane didn't care and the membrane didn't know that it was at depth as long as they had high pressure on both sides of the membrane. So that was a huge sort of discovery really.
And that later led us to shift the whole focus over to non oil and gas water treatment and desalination because of some structural changes in the oil and gas market that led us to sort of be more motivated to do work in non oil and gas and also, you know, helping some solve one of the biggest problems on earth, really. So that's, that's the short version.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Well, that's absolutely fascinating. So let me ask you this.
For pumps to work for years without any maintenance, how, how do those pumps differ from the pumps that need maintenance more frequently. I mean, why don't, why don't we, why don't we build pumps on land that don't need maintenance for years and years and years? What, what, what's.
Can you, can you go into that?
[00:17:09] Speaker E: Sure, yeah. It's a great question. So basically what we had, we had discovered is that there's a lot of good things about pumps. You don't really need to reinvent the principle of the pumping where there's e pump or a positive displacement pump, which you can generally kind of categorize any pump in the world in those two categories.
But the weak link in a pump that is usually what fails fastest is something called the mechanical seal or the sealing element, and it's usually the bearings.
Together they account for something like 80% of pump failures, particularly in the larger sort of industrial pumps. And so we were always sort of super nerds on those areas and trying to put, for lack of a better word, put steroids on those weak links. That's kind of an economical way to get more lifetime out of a pump. So we have to be quite disciplined in what thermal and physical and chemical processes are going on in those areas around the seal and the bearings. So that takes you quite far. And then there's the whole system around the pump that has to do with how you cool the pump, how you pressure control the pressures around the pump, and how you connect the pump to your power supply, etc. Those are sort of. That gives you the last 20%, then you can. Nothing lasts forever.
But that's being disciplined in those three areas takes you a long way. And another sort of quick comment is that you really need to understand, you need to do a lot of experimentation and testing and you get out there in the field. So we spend a lot of time in the field and we developed and sold more than 90 subsea pumps. So that kind of gives you, if you have, if you're humble and you're curious, that takes you quite far as well. And so two specifics is that we created the world's biggest magnetic coupling because that removes the whole seal, a huge kind of a seal that's connect to sort of a wireless connection between the motor shaft and the pump shaft. And then we also work with hydrodynamic bearing so that there's no contact when the pump is spinning around. That's probably too long answer for you, but that's, that's being disciplined in those areas gives us a lot of mileage.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So is it fair to say that those pumps that last Longer cost, more.
[00:19:38] Speaker E: Yeah. And the quick answer is yes, the total cost is actually lower because you're.
The total cost of ownership has to do with your acquisition cost, the power you spend on running the pump and the maintenance cost and so on. So when you look at total cost of ownership, it actually goes down quite a lot.
And then even before you start considering downtime and lost production for your client because then the economics of having a.
Becomes really good in having a long duration pump.
But even before you consider that the total cost of ownership for those who track that, not everyone usually go down, but the acquisition costs go up.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well that's interesting. If the lifetime costs are actually lower, I'm surprised that more on land utilities don't use the types of pumps that you're describing.
[00:20:32] Speaker E: Yeah. And if you have access to sort of a workshop floor where you can do maintenance and pump in some grease in the bearings and you kind of, you have people that does other things as well. And, and the pumps are sort of semi critical. It doesn't always reduce the total cost of ownership. So it depends a little bit on the context and the application and the criticality of the pump. But we are seeing a growth in the market for some of the industrial pumps that they start to embrace some of the features that we have developed for the subsea business. So there is a trend going in the direction you indicate. But there are. And one application is on nuclear. But also if you're pumping something poisonous or toxic or high pressure or flammable, you know that sort of, that becomes very important like ammonia or something else.
So there is a trend towards embracing it. But it's a conservative business and clients and suppliers are doing it their own way and it's quite competitive market. So most clients actually buy pumps on acquisition costs and they don't really calculate the total cost of ownership.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Capex versus opex.
[00:21:46] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Yeah, great. Well, you kind of nibbled around the edges on the founding of Flotion. So why don't you tell us the story about, you know, so you, you tested those membranes in the hyperbaric chamber and found that they, they reacted the same way at depth as they did on land. And so how did, how did you get the idea to, to create Flotion and tell us what Flotion does?
[00:22:15] Speaker E: Basically. Yeah. So first Flotion is a next generation water utility. Really we are really building out a build on operate business model. So selling water as a service but also being a, you know, so that the business model is to design, build and operate desalination plants on the seabed and offering water purchase agreements, water offtake agreements to clients in the municipal sector, in the corporate and industrial sector, as well as in the agricultural sector, water under sort of 15 to 25 year agreements.
So each company that we build together with partners and co owners would typically be structured as a legal entity.
And the technology is really a modular, scalable technology where we are offering sort of desalination plants like a Lego brick in standardized pods or modules, each delivering 5,000 cubic meters of drinking water quality on a daily basis. And you can build that basically to any size you want, usually up to sort of 50,000 cubic meter per day is the intent.
And we can go kind of deeper into that as well. But that's the business that we're in right now where we're switching on the first plant, which is commercial as well as the first of a kind unit to showcase a large system that's going to be switched on in end of Q2 next year.
So right around the corner.
But the, and the founding of Flotion as sort of a spin off from our subsea pumping activities really happened quite recently.
We saw that there was a market for this.
You know, the price of water is always the big elephant in the room, right. So we were a bit sort of hesitant to dive all into a market where they pay a couple of dollars for a cubic meter or less, when you're coming from an industry where they pay US$60 for a barrel and there's several barrels to a cubic meter.
So the whole getting the economics to work was a huge part of sort of creating Flotion and seeing that. Listen, we can leverage the learning curve effects from oil and gas and we can leverage the fact that we have done subsea infrastructure and subsea pumping in Norway as a Nation for 30 years and as a company for 15 years.
We really have an ecosystem we can leverage. We have an explosion of maritime robotics with subsea drones that can survey and they can connect and disconnect cables and pipelines and power systems. So you have this amazing ecosystem that didn't exist before, but that the oil and gas has really invested in. So we can leverage that into water.
So all these things came together and after having done hundreds of calls with potential clients and partners, we saw this can really fly if we take an active role in developing the projects, not just sit there as a supplier.
So that's kind of when we set out. And then we were quite lucky to get our cornerstone investor from the subsea activities, an American called Curtis Huff. Of Freebird Partners.
And we got. So he would support that new pivot and we would then also get in touch with the Norwegian sovereign climate Fund was really supportive and we got in touch through them, through a company called Burnt Island Ventures, which is really one of the most active, if not I think the most active venture capital firm in water.
And through involvement with them, we immediately got access to some fantastic individuals to learn about the dynamics of the market.
And they eventually supported us in two rounds of finance during the last 12 months. So that's been an amazing kind of journey. So one thing I'd really like to add and mention is the partner xylem that we have recently added both to our cap table and as a strategic partner there have been phenomenal in looking at our landscape and discussing strategic ways forward. So that's kind of how the transition happened and why we put the pedal to the metal last year and set up the legal entity Flotion and kind of went from there.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Tom Ferguson is doing a fantastic job at BIV along with Christine Boyle and the rest of the team.
So tell me a little about how the technology works.
We talked about the membrane briefly.
Let's get into how the technology works and then I'd really like to explore the benefits of deep CD cell.
[00:27:35] Speaker E: Sure.
So to the technology, basically we're leveraging some amazing inputs. So we have two kind of three inputs in the ocean which we're leveraging. One is that that we have a hydrostatic pressure of the seawater for free and that can really help us reduce energy. But I can come into the detail on that. And we have access to very stable, high quality seawater. So when we're at minimum 400 meters, which is our sort of target, within 10 kilometers from shore, we can go further away from shore.
But that's really where the sweet spot for the economics is.
Then we got this access to both the pressure and the clean seawater, which is predictable. So that means we can, unlike most diesel plants, we can really standardize the system. There are no algae blooms, storms, rivers, seasonalities, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, et cetera. So you can really. This is really boring down there at depth. So that, that's really. There are the process engineers in our, in our office are one of the, I wouldn't say bored, but they're, they're more likely to be bored than some of the others because it's completely stable conditions physically and chemically. So. So really what we're doing is instead of a conventional plant that really has to deal with 100% seawater, bringing it all the way up to shore, pumping all the seawater up to high pressure. And after having spent maybe half of the plant on pre treatment and four different categories of chemicals, you know, antifloculants, scalants, chlorines and so on, and then coagulants, you want to. And then they're dealing with a recovery factor of say 40% and you're dealing with 60% waste at full pressure that you have to sort of use energy recovery on and then deal with the waste management.
Potentially putting a two kilometer pipe back into the ocean. And then 40% is really your product that you get paid for.
That's inherently quite wasteful. We are really on the seabed doing everything in a small pod where we have already the high pressure of the seawater and we can use the pumping energy on the freshwater side. So we're, imagine that we're just using the pump downstream, the membrane, the high pressure pump. So we're sucking and harvesting fresh water.
So we don't need any energy recovery device. We're simply creating a vacuum or there's a big differential pressure, a big gradient before we get to vacuum. So we can essentially create an under pressure on the freshwater side and then pump that back to shore. Helped by the fact that fresh water is 3 to 4% lighter than seawater, which, which also gives us a benefit which is bigger than the friction losses of pumping it back to shore. So I don't know if this gets sort of too deep, but we're really just harvesting fresh water, leaving the ocean as it is and spending the energy on the freshwater side as opposed to the seawater side and a bunch of pre treatment. And that gives us one of the major benefits which is energy savings.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Energy is obviously a huge impact in decel. What about, what about like the brine stream? You know that's a, that's a big issue for land based D cell. Tell me about the brine stream or the, the waste product or what, whatever have you from, from deep sea D cell.
[00:31:23] Speaker E: Sure. So, so we are, we're using a method called low recovery desalination. So basically when we are creating our brine or we call it a concentrate, it's. Some countries have definitions for brine, but we are usually below that definition.
But we are recovering. Since we are essentially immersed in freely available high quality seawater, we can indulge ourselves in something that the onshore diesel folks do not. They want to minimize waste so they want to maximize recovery. That's the whole game. We can Actually we don't need to care about that. So we, we minimize recovery and that say we're recovering about 20% and then our, our concentrate that comes out is only 20% more saline. And, and you know, brine is an ionic fluid and wants to, and if it's not too condensed, like twice as salty or whatever the onshore average is, it really, it really wants to, to mix to become ambient. If it's really dense, it becomes a plume and it sinks. We don't create a plume at all. We really just mix to ambient within just a few meters from our outlet.
So number one, our outlet down there is further away from where the most bioactive areas are. So there's definitely life in the deep sea, but there's relatively speaking less life than at 10, 20 meters where normal discharges and we don't commingle any chemicals, we don't use any chemicals.
And thirdly, it's this recovery factor that means our discharge is basically mixing to ambient on its way out the nozzle and becoming ambient within a few meters. The background salinity. So very little impact. Anything that you do has an impact, but this has a very, very small impact even in a zero current condition, which is what we are required to use as our foundation for verifying this.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: So because of the quick mixing, my takeaway is that must be better for aquatic life and marine animals and things like that.
[00:33:33] Speaker E: Yeah, definitely.
It's really the fact that you're not creating this dense plume that you know, in some cases can create harm. And there's a lot of discussions on how much harm and depending on where you are and the temperatures and so on. So we don't really need to go into that discussion at all.
And I think there's pretty good evidence that there's very little impact on the marine life. This is also something we're verifying with our systems that we are deploying next year. So but definitely we cannot detect the braw at the brine when we are just a few meters away from our unit.
That's helpful for marine life.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Got it. Are there what other benefits?
I would think that you're not going to take up as much of a footprint on land.
And so that.
[00:34:38] Speaker E: That's right.
We looked at, there's quite a few published projects where they quote the size, the footprint compared to the volume of a conventional diesel plant. And when we compare the averages of all those plants with our footprint, it's basically removing somewhere between 94 and 98% of the land infrastructure in flotion we still need to have a.
So we need basically a small building or a container or something like that for a variable speed drive and a transformer to get the right medium voltage to the pumps. But beyond that we don't really need much. The control room could be embedded in an existing control room or it could be a control room in a different part of the world.
So very little land footprint. And land comes at a cost no matter where you are.
Some places it's really scarce and really expensive.
And then you're removing the land component largely then you get some add on benefits like you're becoming more, you're becoming indifferent to weather events and surface events like algae blooms, storms, flooding.
We have a big island community we're working on right now where flooding, it's happening more and more frequent and that's flooding the boreholes where they are drawing their seawater and you know, and contaminating or clogging the borehole so they, you know, so, so flooding can be an issue, not just prolonged droughts.
And we are basically immune to those, those phenomenon which is quite powerful from a resilience point of view and an uptime point of view.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Yeah, let me ask you this. What about the intake?
I've heard traditional desal may harm aquatic life by sucking in fish and what have you.
What about the intake for flocincy?
[00:36:41] Speaker E: Yeah, so intake is an important part of the system. So there's some design considerations. We are basically a large, there's a limit on the velocity.
The US EPA and other countries have similar limitations on flow rates in centimeters per second. We are a huge part sort of lower than that limit.
So anything that has an ability to swim or move with some kind of appendage should be able to not get sucked in basically. So that's already pretty basic in every detail. Plant we have that with an even larger margin.
So that's quite important from a design consideration. And the, I think in terms of our depth being much, much larger we have seen a fair amount of evidence that there is less, less life being sucked in. Less biology really being at 500 meters some it's, it's, it's still there but less of it. So, so there is an element of you know, plankton that gets sucked in but there's less sort of eggs and larva and things that cannot swim that are down at that depth. So we are really looking at, trying to find numbers to that. I know in California, Hawaii and in Australia there's quite big studies on that.
A lot of other parts of the world don't really do a lot of testing to my experience on this topic, which is called impingement and entrainment. But we're really here, we're looking to document and use technology to stay ahead of the game and, and really try and learn as much as possible.
But relatively speaking we are much less impact than conventional D cell on that side.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Very interesting. So what about how far out to sea do you have to be in order to get to the depths that your system will work?
[00:38:42] Speaker E: Yeah, it's a good question. We've analyzed the world coastlines and islands and quite a lot of depth. So literally speaking we have.
Well, we need minimum 400 meters and the sweet spot is to get to that depth within 10 km in order to make it cost optimized in terms of cabling and pipelines and survey area and so on.
And we have found 94 countries that have both sort of a high water scarcity level as well as that depths within 10 kilometers.
And then I also removed a few countries where there's an active war or some sort of geopolitical situation that means you don't want to be in that area. So that leaves you with 94 countries and there's some clusters around the world like in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and so on. You can find a lot of projects within a sort of relatively speaking short area.
California is one area which is interesting, but it has some, some challenges historically with permitting D cell plants. So we're actively following that region as well.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. So when we started, when you were kind of describing your customers way at the beginning of our conversation, you talked about municipal, private for these, for these first of a kind type systems. My suspicion is that municipal is probably going to be a little bit wary of it. And so the private sector is likely the place where you will have the testing grounds. And your proof of concept and proof that it works. I mean is that how your experience has been?
[00:40:21] Speaker E: Well, it's still early days in kind of deployments, but I think you are right. We are actively engaging with both categories. And the third one being agriculture. They're not used to paying for water as much yet, so that's kind of coming later. The on the municipal versus industrial I think we are. Our first deployment is going to be with a municipal client actually here in. And the big surprise to us was Norway. Where Western coast of Norway. If you look it up, it's one of the places it rains the most in the whole world.
But they still have.
But it's the municipality that deals with the Water and it's the industrial clients there that needs the water. But you're really.
So I guess the, the answer is you need to deal with both.
Is our experience so far where because one single industrial client may not need the whole, the whole part and the, the infrastructure to distribute the water may be not in all cases but may be owned and operated by the municipality. So, so, so the offtake agreement would be with the municipality and they would have on sale agreements with industrial clients. That's kind of how it is at that site.
We're expecting, we're seeing that kind of the dialogues with the corporates are more active and agile and they're probably able to move faster and that sense that's quite attractive to us.
And at the same time they may not need always unless they're hydrogen producers or something. They may not need the premium drinking water quality.
And since we are reverse osmosis technology we're actually delivering quite high quality water which is suitable for drinking water with the minimal amount of post processing.
So it's kind of. The price discussions are usually a little tougher with the corporates unless they're in a specific segment.
Whereas municipalities, they differ a lot in the tariffs and the pricing but they are generally open to pay a higher price in some regions at least.
But it does depend. So we definitely need to deal with both and we have a mix of both in our pipeline going forward.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: That's awesome. Well Alex, you've been absolutely fantastic today. I really appreciate the time you've taken to spend with us.
Before we say goodbye though, do you have a leave behind message you'd like to share with the listeners?
[00:42:58] Speaker E: I think my main message is that subsea desalination is real. It's no longer a science project. So we're a whole bunch of people now, but also with clients and partners that truly believe that the future of freshwater is subsea.
[00:43:13] Speaker B: Great. Well Alex, thank you again.
You're fantastic.
I really look forward to following what Flotion's going to be doing here this year and, and as time moves on.
For those who want to find out more about you and more about Flotion, where can they go to get that information?
[00:43:31] Speaker E: Sure, you can have a look at our website.
We have a LinkedIn page. We've been fortunate that a great journalist called Eric Kobayashi Solomon, he has written a few articles about us in Forbes over the last year.
I think they have three articles on the topic and. And I'm really, really happy and humbled to be on your show. It's great speaking with you. Thanks for the interest.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks so much Alex. And for the listeners we will post the website address and a link on the show notes. So go to the Water Values webpage and you can find all the links you need to get to Flotion.
So Alex again, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you.
[00:44:19] Speaker E: Excellent. Thank you so much. Take care.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: You too. Bye.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: Alex was absolutely amazing. Phenomenal interview from him. So did you catch the stealth aspect of the water energy nexus?
[00:44:31] Speaker E: Yep.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: Deep sea pumps used in the oil and gas industry provided the technological foundation for floshance technology. So pretty cool idea. Alex, way to go.
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[00:45:51] Speaker B: the world and acting like it's.
[00:46:26] Speaker C: You've been listening to the Water Values Podcast. Thank you for spending some of your day with my dad and me.
[00:46:31] Speaker F: Well, thank you for tuning in to the disclaimer. I'm a lawyer licensed in Indiana and Colorado and nothing in this podcast should be taken as providing legal advice or as establishing an attorney client relationship with you or with anyone else. Additionally, nothing in this podcast should be considered a solicitation for professional employment. I'm just a lawyer that finds water issues interesting and that believes greater public education is needed about water issues and that includes enhancing my own education about water issues, because no one knows everything about water.
