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

14:29 - The "Mule": Prototyping a moonshot

15:24 - Early H2E prototype evolution

16:59 - Surprising engineering hurdles

18:48 - Sharing H2E’s results with the world

20:12 - Could H2E’s moonshot become a reality today?

22:12 -What the H2E team are up to today

24:01 - Project Foghorn: The fuel from the sea

24:49 - The origins of Foghorn

27:09 - Why Foghorn pursued a carbon-neutral fuel for combustion engines

28:59 - The process: Extracting CO2 from seawater

30:35 - Chemistry: Turning ocean water into methanol

33:01 - Foghorn’s "Kill Criteria" and testing

39:13 - Why the project was wound down

42:21 - Lessons learned

43:18 - Remembering Matt Eisaman

44:33 - Conclusion

–

Hosted by Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, The Moonshot Podcast goes behind the scenes with creators and inventors trying to find radical solutions and breakthrough technologies to the world’s biggest problems. These are the untold stories of innovation from 16 years of Alphabet’s moonshot factory.

The Moonshot Podcast is a Pique Action production for X, The Moonshot Factory, produced in association with Blanchard House.

If you want to take your own moonshots, we've developed a certificate course with MasterClass on how to take bold ideas and translate them into real world impact. Check it out here: https://www.masterclass.com/certificates/breakthrough-innovation-strategy-from-bold-idea-to-business-impact

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