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DeSci Rising ep. 48 ft WaterLab
Recorded: Dec. 22, 2023 Duration: 1:04:01Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello, hello.
Hey, Aaron.
How's it going?
Hey, Renee.
It's going well.
How are you guys doing?
Doing well.
Yeah.
Doing well.
Hey, everyone.
That's great.
This is fantastic.
I think this is going to be a great space.
I've been doing a lot of, like, digging into what Waterdow is doing, and it's actually really, really interesting.
How are you guys doing well?
Yeah.
Ooh, that echo.
So, yeah, that was, I switched that off.
Yeah.
I think you guys are doing something fantastic, and I'm kind of looking forward to digging into the nitty-gritty of what this actually entails.
I think the prospect of a whole new conservation-oriented marketplace, or market in and of itself, I think is fantastic.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
We've been working hard on it.
I've been kind of a water guy for a long time, but I think the Desai space is really interesting, and I think it can, yeah, I think it can open up some new channels.
That's what we're hoping.
Cool.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
So, I'm going to just send out a few tweets to the usual participants, and then we'll kind of kick this off in, like, a minute or two.
Sounds good.
Great.
Great.
Hey, Matt.
Hey, Victor.
Always good to see you.
Columbia, it's good to see you as well.
We're going to have a nice turnout this time.
All right.
I think I have pinged the folks that I wanted to ping, and the space should fill itself up.
So, I guess we can get this kicked off and started.
So, hello, everybody.
My name is Jelani, and welcome to the 48th episode of the Desai Rising series, put on by Desai World, where our goal here is always to essentially provide an opportunity for many of the wonderful projects on our growing development.
Desai World dashboard to just kind of formally introduce themselves, update their progress, highlight their achievements, and just generally engage with both the Desai World and wider Desai community.
Now, the idea behind all this is that at Desai World, we very much believe that more than the tech, more than the funding, it is the community at large leveraging these tools that will really usher in many of the changes that we are all looking for Desai to bring to the various legacy STEM industries.
Now, in today's episode, I think we're with a project that really embodies that ethos.
And so, I have the pleasure of being joined by two amazing guests, them being Aaron Mendel, who is the founder and CEO of Waycomit Water Company, and builder of Water Labs, which is a decentralized Wyoming-based water laboratory for research and development of advanced desalination and regenerative water solutions.
Now, alongside Aaron, we're also joined by Renee Davis, who I'm sure needs no introduction for those of you who are familiar to the space, but I'm going to sing her praises nonetheless.
She is an advisor at WaterDAO, she is the founder of TalentDAO, and as well as just an all-around Desai OG.
And so, with introductions done, thank you both for coming on board.
Welcome, Aaron. Welcome, Renee.
And I'm looking forward to kind of going into a deep dive into your personal stories, but also some of the amazing work that is being done at WaterDAO.
Yeah, thanks so much.
I really appreciate the intro.
I'm super excited to talk with Aaron today.
Aaron, I thought it might be helpful for you to sort of kick us off with what problem you're trying to solve with Water Lab, and what you think is sort of the most innovative solution coming out, or maybe the most exciting thing that could provide some sort of solution.
And then also, I just think, let's just have some time.
Let's just tell your story.
You know, what's your background?
How did you end up in the space?
Why are you here?
What do you care about?
I think that would be, like, a great context and help Jelani and I both know where to take the conversation next.
Yeah, that sounds great.
Thanks for having me on to get a chance to talk about what we're doing a little bit here.
Yeah, so just by way of background, I mean, I'm a water technology guy, so I've spent my entire sort of career in and around advanced water technology,
in particular desalination, which is using technology to make unusable water usable or potable.
And most of my experience is really in starting companies, kind of, you know, zero to one stage.
So very early development, inception, formation funding of early stage water and also energy technology companies.
But at the end of the day, at some point in time, I sort of realized that we really weren't investing at large in the fundamental technology needed to make more water.
And one of the things I think is a really good example, and I don't know if everybody's familiar with it, but I tweeted about this recently.
But in California, the sort of major initiative that's the predominant water solution is something called the Delta Tunnel,
which is a new tunnel under the San Francisco Sacramento Bay Delta to try and bring more water from the Sacramento River.
And basically, at the end of the day, it only serves to sort of delay the water shortages a little bit.
So you can look at the curves that they put out, which I posted.
But basically, it just sort of shifts the water shortage inflection point by, you know, a few years, maybe 10 years.
But it's not really a solution.
The solution to water is we need to actually make more.
We need to make a lot more because water is a pretty fundamental input to the economy, to GDP, to growth.
So, you know, you can't grow with less water.
We actually need to grow with more water.
So now we sort of started Water Lab to try to get back to the basics of really investing in the underlying technology to generate more water.
And the best way to do that is desalination.
So desalination technology is our focus right now, and that may expand to other things.
But really, what we're trying to do is use Desai as a way to open up new avenues, new funding routes,
new ways to scale desalination technology so that it can become much more of a mainstream water solution
rather than just sort of a niche, expensive, kind of, you know, predominantly just a large-scale solution for certain areas.
We really want it to be something where any community, any region, any development, any new city can tap into desalination
as a way to secure water and ensure that, as we grow, we have as much water as we need.
And that really sort of fundamentally comes down to tapping into salt water or brackish groundwater.
We have basically an infinite supply of water that is unusable but can be usable if we use desalination technology.
So we have the oceans, you know, 98% of the planet is salt water.
And if we tap into that, we can do all kinds of things.
We can build new cities.
We can build massive data centers and not worry about the water consumption.
We can do computational mining.
But none of that stuff is going to happen if we're using less water.
And so that's kind of the main purpose, the water lab.
So there's a few things that you kind of lumped there that I think we're going to have the opportunity to kind of tease apart.
The first and foremost is what is fueling this reduction in water?
Is it just overconsumption or lack of regulated overconsumption?
Or is there something in addition to that, like climate change or whatnot?
Yeah, it's not really overconsumption.
Because actually, I mean, the only thing that we really have done is focus on efficiency and using less and being more efficient about the water that we have.
The main issue from my perspective is that water is viewed as largely a sort of a finite pie.
And because people view it as finite, it becomes a zero-sum game, right?
Basically, when people realize that there's only so much to go around, everyone sort of tries to grab a larger slice of the same pie.
And it becomes sort of a race to the bottom where no one really wants to use less because they know if they give it up, they'll never give it back.
And the reality is that they actually need more water over time.
So we've sort of confined ourselves to this paradigm that there's only so much water that can go around.
And that's what we have available.
And I think the, I know that the truth is precisely the opposite.
The truth is that we actually live on the water planet.
The reason that there is life on Earth is because we have an abundance of water.
Water is all around us.
But we've gotten to the point where we have to use technology to make more of that water available, expand the pie, not just focus on the same-sized pie,
and allow people to get out of this zero-sum paradigm where they feel like they just have to, you know, grab what's available.
We need to sort of shift from, you know, scarcity mindset to abundance mindset.
And I guess there's a lagging indicator here with regards to that cultural mindset because I assume that for a while the technology was not in place to allow us to create this potable water at scale.
And I'm assuming based off of what you're saying and obviously the work that's being done at Water Labs is that the technology has come around in such a way to allow us to do that.
Yeah, and no, I mean, that's a good point.
And desalination technology has been around a long time.
There's other countries in the world that have been incredible leaders like Singapore and Israel.
You know, Saudi Arabia has a tremendous amount of desalination.
So technology has been around a long time.
But we're at the point now where we can drive it even further to bring down the cost, to use better sources of energy,
and basically eliminate kind of the final hurdle, which is the environmental impact.
So, like, right now it's nearly impossible to build a desalination plant in places like California that have very strong environmental opposition,
predominantly because desal plants have a very large energy footprint.
You know, that can be a very high carbon footprint, depending on what the fuel source is.
And you have a bunch of brine discharge that has to go somewhere.
So for seawater desalination, it's got to go back in the ocean.
For brackish, you know, inland desalination, it has to be re-injected into the ground.
And so that creates an environmental profile that's not favorable in a lot of places.
So a huge part, you know, a big focus of what Water Lab is doing is to focus on those technologies that can sort of bridge that final mile to making desalination sort of truly sustainable.
And that involves a few things.
One is integrating with better sources of energy.
So right now we're standing up a couple of projects that are direct solar-powered desalination so that the energy supply, you know, desalination is always going to require energy.
But the energy supply can be clean and have, you know, a lean environmental footprint.
And another big part is getting rid of the residual brine.
So we're working on technology for basically driving all of the brine to solid salt, recovering the remaining water.
And then once you have solid salt, you can actually use that to make valuable byproducts.
There's things that have value in the salts, chemicals, metals, things like gypsum that go into building materials.
So there's all kinds of things you can recover instead of just injecting the brine, you know, back out into the ocean or into the environment.
And so that's kind of the, that to me is sort of the final hurdle to making desalination something that can scale to the capacities that are really required to supply a lot more fresh water.
So there's an interesting, I mean, to that last point of dealing with the waste or what we, I guess you would consider waste.
There's an interesting aspect to that where you almost have a, you could potentially have a positive flywheel where these byproducts or these waste products can then get injected into other, either economic or environmental frameworks to then further the reward or further the positive sum returns from that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, and there's, there's all kinds of very positive gains that can come from that.
For example, in California in the southern part of the state, there's a place called the Salton Sea, and the Salton Sea is one of the largest lithium deposits in the world.
But it's all trapped in very high salinity brines that basically requires desalination in order to, to get the lithium concentrated out.
So, you know, lithium is a perfect example of something where you're producing both a tremendous resource for, you know, the electric vehicle and battery industry, and you're also producing additional fresh water from a totally unusable water resource.
So, yeah, there's lots of examples like that.
You know, the chemistry sort of differs, you know, depending on kind of where you are and what you're treating.
But there are many downstream products, and that, that's basically called brine mining.
So, it's, it's mining valuable resources from brine, and there's a whole sort of industry that's sprung up around figuring out what has the most value to extract.
And then, and then on the front end, there's, there's kind of a similar paradigm where you can also take saltwater resources that are a waste and turn it back into fresh water.
So, a good example of that is the oil and gas industry produces an enormous amount of what's called produced water.
And produced water is just salty water that's trapped within oil and gas formations and comes out of the well with the oil and the gas.
So, in parts of Texas, as an example, they often will produce 10 barrels of saltwater or brine with every barrel of oil.
So, enormous waste resource that has to go somewhere, has to go back in the ground, has already used up a lot of energy just in extraction and can become a source of water, not necessarily for drinking.
You wouldn't want to go from something that's had hydrocarbons in it to drinking water, but certainly a source of clean water just for the oil and gas industry or even for other industrial purposes,
which would minimize just the impact on the fresh water in Texas.
That's actually really interesting.
So, my, kind of a follow-up question that I had to that, which I think you touched upon was, you know, we have abundance of bodies of salinated water, of course,
but sometimes our potable water is also contaminated with other kinds of pollutants.
And so, curious if there's also some intent or are there technologies around the bend or in place now that can also salvage this non-salinated but polluted water in the same way?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, basically, most desalination technology uses reverse osmosis on the front end.
And reverse osmosis is a membrane barrier that separates just pure water molecules from any type of impurity.
So, it's extremely good at separating pure fresh water from almost anything.
There's very few things that can penetrate or permeate a reverse osmosis membrane.
So, yeah, it can absolutely be used for things like that.
In fact, we're doing a project right now in Nicaragua, which is where I am at the moment.
Where we're just treating groundwater that just has too many impurities to be usable for farming or for drinking water.
So, it's got a little bit of salt, but salt isn't the main issue.
It's more just treating it so that it's pure for consumption.
Fantastic.
So, WaterBow is essentially targeting or tackling water remediation as well as desalination.
Yeah, I view water remediation as sort of a subset of desalination.
Desalination, basically, broadly speaking, being taking any unusable or impaired source of water and returning it to pure potable quality.
Fantastic.
So, I just want to interject here for the crowd.
This is a pluralistic conversation.
Anybody who has comments, questions, please don't leave them to the end.
Put up your hand.
Come on.
Put them up and I'll bring you up on stage.
We're going to have this conversation all together.
Renee, is there anything you want to hop in here before I kind of shift to the topic of Water.Self?
Yeah, there's just one thing.
And, Aaron, let me know if you covered this quickly and I just missed it.
But I think one thing that's really exciting about Desai and this project in particular is the real-world assets and physical labs on the ground that are being developed.
The Water Lab Twitter showed a picture, tweeted out a few weeks ago, that was basically like a whole water lab being set up outside and, like, heavy equipment and really looked pretty professionalized.
Can you talk a little bit more about these, like, micro labs you're building on the ground and just kind of, like, how that's unique to your project?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
That was actually just the project that I was referring to in Nicaragua.
So, yeah, I mean, a big part of what I'm hoping we can demonstrate with Desai is kind of a new sort of economic layer for accelerating building out real-world assets because that's always, you know, by far and away the hardest part is building physical infrastructure.
That's the part that's the part that's the part that's the part that's the part that's the part that's always the hardest to fund.
It requires taking a lot more risk than, you know, other sort of just, you know, software-based or other technology companies.
So that's the part that really hopefully will benefit largely from Web3 and Desai.
But, yeah, the project that we tweeted out is a picture of a solar-powered desalination facility that is on the Pacific coast in Nicaragua.
And basically what it is is this is a surfing resort that has a very large, it's roughly, they have about one, just under one megawatt of excess solar electricity,
which means that they have a solar plant that during the day generates way more power than they can consume.
They don't have ability to store the electricity because energy storage is very expensive, batteries are extremely expensive.
And so they have a whole bunch of wasted electricity during the day that goes unused.
And simultaneously, because it's a coastal facility, they have some very large groundwater wells that get what's called saltwater intrusion.
So as you pump them over long periods of time, it starts to actually pull in saltwater from the coast.
And the freshwater well becomes basically brackish over time.
So in this particular project, we built a microgrid to take this excess power off the solar plant,
move it over to a location where they have a brackish well that they haven't been able to use.
And they're going to produce about 100 gallons a minute of additional fresh water by powering a small desal plant with this excess solar electricity.
And so it's really sort of a great example of what we're trying to do with WaterLab because it's sustainable, it's powered by solar,
it's bringing water online that otherwise just would not be available, would not exist.
So it's creation of additional fresh water.
And it's got a very attractive sustainability profile because we're doing high recovery.
We're eventually going to try and recover the salts and use them and eliminate the brine.
So it's sort of a showcase project for us that's something that we will basically try and replicate in other parts of the world.
And that basically is decentralized desalination, what we call decentralized desalination, because it's totally off the grid.
There's no reliable power grid in this part of Nicaragua.
There's no reliable water supply.
There's no sort of municipal utility that's supplying water every day.
So this resort and resorts like this are 100% dependent on decentralized infrastructure.
That's really interesting.
And for those of you who are curious, I've thrown up a few of these examples up on the Jumbotron, so you can check them out there.
So kind of to your point of this decentralized infrastructure and the need for these more distributed networks,
why, so why go through a DAO?
Why form a DAO for this endeavor?
Why not just have a traditional Web2-style corporation that then powers this?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I mean, and it's something we've sort of tried to spend a lot of time thinking about.
I think there's still a lot of things that are uncertain about DAOs and things that need to be figured out.
But at the end of the day, one of the things that we're trying very hard to do,
and from my view, it seems like DAOs are kind of a good fit,
is to create a totally open protocol.
Because the only way that decentralized water infrastructure will ultimately scale to the levels that we need
is if we create an open protocol that basically anyone can tap into.
And the analogy that I sort of most often use is renewable energy credits.
And so if you look at the energy industry and what happened in order to scale renewable power generation
to where it is today, which is a very significant increase from the days when solar and wind and geothermal
were very small scale, very expensive, and didn't supply a significant amount of electricity,
a big part of how that scaling process happened was renewable energy credits.
Renewable energy credits were sort of this market mechanism
that allowed renewable power to be kind of valued differently
and also allowed corporations like big tech companies to purchase these RECs,
renewable energy credits, and use it to offset power that they were still getting from the traditional grid.
And so it kind of created this whole new market mechanism value stream for these projects to scale
and then eventually come down in cost.
I mean, there was a time when solar power was, you know,
a hundred times more expensive than the traditional power grid.
Now it's by far the cheapest power you could possibly get, especially in places like California and Texas.
So, you know, the way I, you know, when I look at the water space,
that's a big thing that I think is missing to scale decentralized water infrastructure.
And so we originally set up WaterLab as a DAO in order to basically create a tokenized water credit
that anyone could use.
And so I wanted it to be through an organization where basically anybody can tap into it,
anybody can benefit from it, anybody can participate and build on top of kind of the base water credit protocol
that we set up.
And basically anybody can use it as an additional market incentive to scale up technologies.
And so the kind of the founding principle for the DAO is to create a community of people that would just create the basic architecture
of how a water credit would work, what types of regenerative water facilities qualify,
because we obviously don't want to just give a water credit to anybody that's making water.
We want it to represent, you know, the sources of water that we think are sustainable and scalable long term.
And to basically just serve as a facilitator for either issuing water credits to producers, you know, miners of fresh water,
so they get rewarded, or to facilitate the purchase of water credits by people that want to support sustainable water.
And so, yeah, that was kind of the original intent of the DAO is to allow it to be kind of this decentralized community
that anyone could participate in, and the protocol was sort of totally open sourced.
And has that changed since?
Because you're referring to it in the past tense.
Nope, nope, it hasn't changed.
We're still doing that.
And I think the only thing that's really changed is adding sort of this additional DSI component to find ways to leverage Web3 to fund projects.
So I would say those are kind of the two pillars of WaterLab are this decentralized protocol for water credits
and then using tokenized assets as a way to fund water infrastructure.
Well, that's fantastic.
I actually want to definitely take a veer of the conversation into the specifics behind what kind of tokenization
and how you're going to go about the funding.
But we have Ed here who's come up on stage.
Ed, please feel free to unmute yourself and ask your question, make your comment.
Yeah, thank you, John.
I work in regenerative agriculture, and we're strongly focused on water.
You know, we realize that we can start and we can create hydrological cycling again.
It's been a big issue in agriculture.
We can put structure back in our soil so that we can infiltrate water again so we can hold the water.
We're also restoring carbon in our soil so the carbon can help clean the water.
And if we have good microbial communities in our soil, they can break down a lot of toxins,
and they can also restrict those toxins from being taken up into our crops by having rhizosheath around our roots.
So we see a lot of opportunity and a lot of problems with not paying attention to water, but a lot of opportunities.
We have many farms now that in the United States, I think it was calculated that the average infiltration rate
on industrial farmland was about half an inch an hour.
After a few years of farmers, you know, transitioning to regenerative, we can easily get that up to 10, 20, 30 inches an hour.
Plus, for every percent of organic matter we get back in our soil, we can hold 25,000 gallons of water
so we can greatly reduce the need for irrigation.
We have many pictures from farms now where after a flood event, a heavy rain, the water coming off of our regenerative farms
into a local river is very minimal in amount and quite clean, where coming off of our traditional industrial ag,
it's just roaring off and filled with topsoil and, of course, filled with contaminants.
Plus, we're also not using synthetic fertilizers anymore, which have caused a lot of the algae blooms and stuff.
We've realized that we can create our own organic nitrogen in the soil through the organisms,
through new research that was done on how all plants can actually produce some nitrogen through rhizophagy cycling.
So we're using advanced technology to understand this, but we find that globally, if we're really going to stabilize the water system,
agricultural land is just a great way to do it, plus all the benefits from doing it with producing healthier food
and healthier people and access to water.
So those are a few comments I'll give about what we're working on and land it.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
I mean, I would add that, you know, agriculture and regenerative water go hand in hand.
You know, 80 percent, close to 80 percent of all water use is agriculture.
So, you know, a big part of any regenerative water projects is going to be farming, agricultural, and environmental purposes.
And basically, one of the big trends with water scarcity is what's called desertification.
So, you know, the land becomes desert.
It becomes saltier and saltier over time if you don't have sufficient water influx to the soil.
The soil begins to die.
It doesn't have the microbial communities that you need to have healthy growing.
It just becomes sort of salted out.
And that trend you can see very clearly in the Central Valley of California, which is one of the most productive growing regions in the U.S.
It supplies something like 10 to 15 percent of all food comes from the Central Valley in California.
And basically, land is being taken out of production because of a lack of fresh water at, you know, the tune of hundreds of thousands of acres at a time in the Central Valley.
And it's becoming desert land.
Now, you both have talked or I know, Aaron, you talked about the water credits in relation to things like carbon credits and other forms of renewable energy credits.
Now, one of the questions that came to mind immediately was when it comes to carbon credits, it's very easy or relatively easy to sample carbon because it's ubiquitously found in the atmosphere.
But if we're looking to tackle water issues globally, especially from a credit perspective, water exists in many more discrete and sometimes hard to assess locations.
And so is part of the impetus of forming a DAO to almost also create that network effect or that network ecosystem where participants can be sampling these water aquifers in different geographic regions to kind of give that globalized view of what's happening with the water system?
Yeah. Yeah. So basically, I mean, I call it proof of water because I think the analogy is is is is very similar to proof of work where you're putting energy into the system,
a lot of energy in order to create something that has an extraordinarily high value, which is fresh water.
It's one of the most important resources we have. Right.
So we are trying to basically create a network of these proof of water kind of nodes or projects where we have communities that are monitoring,
creating the water and using these water credits to kind of track the creation of additional water.
And that basically at the end of the day is what we want WaterDAO to do is to serve as this kind of ledger or certification database for where we can create additional water
and track how much water we're creating. And yeah, I mean, basically, it's funny that you mentioned carbon credits.
I actually kind of view the equation a little bit differently.
You can certainly measure carbon in the atmosphere.
What's a little bit trickier to do is to measure carbon offsets.
And this is one of the things that some of the carbon projects have struggled with recently is determining whether or not,
you know, the carbon has actually been removed and how do you sort of, you know, do the accounting on that with with water credits.
I'm hoping it'll behave a lot more like energy credits where because an energy credit represents one unit of energy,
one kilowatt of hour of electricity that's that's physically been generated and put on the grid.
The accounting is very straightforward, very easy to sort of measure and monitor why that energy credit was created and what unit of electricity it's tied to.
And I think the same will be true for the water credits that we've created,
that every water credit will represent one physical unit of water that's been produced that wouldn't have otherwise existed,
is put back in the system.
And it's very easy to, you know, to do the analysis on if you own that water credit, you know, where is the unit of water that you actually produced?
So I'm hoping from sort of an accounting and measuring and monitoring standpoint that we can build a community that basically helps support that
in order to show where the water is coming from and how much has been created.
Now, because this essential marketplace and system doesn't exist, I imagine that you guys are setting the standards.
And so how has that process been?
And what are some of the difficulties in establishing those standards, especially if you're looking to go globally?
Yeah, so it's definitely not an easy thing to set up or stand up a marketplace from scratch.
I think that's one of the biggest challenges we have is that, you know, water credits are not a thing, not an industry.
So it's going to come down to having some key partnerships.
We've got some great partnerships with some other organizations in the water space that are working on other aspects of kind of the ecosystem
that are required in order for water credits to be a thing.
So we have some folks that help corporations analyze water risk and potentially use water credits as a way to address water risk.
So purchasing water credits is a way to supply water to alleviate water risk.
And we've got some other folks that are working on how water credits can be integrated into what's called the volumetric water benefit analysis,
which is kind of the main global standard for water accounting.
But right now, water credits are not a part of that.
So it's definitely it's going to come down to having some key partnerships with organizations that help with other aspects of kind of the the ecosystem.
But, you know, everybody that I've talked to in the water space, all the water experts,
everyone agrees that water credits are needed and that it serves a very specific purpose, kind of market purpose.
It's just a matter of how it how it gets started and how it's set up.
And that's the part we're trying to establish.
And so with regards to with regards to the corporations or the entities that are going to be buying these,
oftentimes that that shift into accepting a new market is is bottom line, like they need it needs to save them money in some way, shape or form.
Do you imagine that that's maybe a sticking point for the adoption of water credits until kind of people either the marketplace has enough liquidity to warrant it
or there's a collective mind shift towards the perceiving the value proposition.
But up until then, if it doesn't help, you know, either reduce costs or provide some monetary benefit, it's going to be an uphill battle.
Yeah, I actually think that that's going to be a big benefit to water credits if they're structured the right way,
because, I mean, if you again, you know, look at the energy space, you know, companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon,
you know, all the big guys that have the wherewithal to really, you know, buy energy directly.
You know, they started by buying renewable energy credits because they, you know, they wanted to do right by the consumer
and make it make it clear that they're offsetting their energy with with good sources.
But at the end of the day, what they then did was actually just go out and and they said, you know,
if the utilities can't supply us with clean electricity, we're just going to go out and develop our own projects.
We're just going to build solar plant, partner with developers, build wind farms,
and we're going to purchase that electricity directly.
And in some cases, you know, they'll kind of wheel that electricity directly to an operating location or a data center.
But in many other instances, all they're doing is reselling that electricity back into the grid
and using it as a financial hedge against their rising cost of utility power.
So, you know, the cost of utility or retail electricity, you know, rises at a certain rate and they have exposure to that.
But if they can go into the market and purchase electricity directly from a generating facility at wholesale costs,
they actually generate a profit and use that to bring down their overall power costs.
The same thing I think is going to be true for water.
Water is also a major a major input for data centers, especially as we move to higher computational requirements.
And there's been a lot of stuff, you know, published on Bitcoin and stuff like that.
But this is only going to make their exposure to the water consumption in the eyes of consumers even more acute.
And so I think I think water credits could follow a very similar path where it can start by just purchasing water credits from a facility.
So Google can say, yeah, you know, we've got this massive data center in, you know, Mesa, Arizona, that's consuming a huge amount of power.
But look at all these water credits that we're purchasing that enabled all of this desalinated water over here to be generated.
And even though we're not using that water directly, this is all additional water that goes to the benefit of, you know, people in the state of Arizona.
So that's kind of, you know, step one is just sort of that distributed value proposition.
But step two is for those water credits to actually represent a physical water contract.
So if at any point in time, you know, Google says, okay, well, we don't need to just retire these water credits.
Why don't we keep them active and actually sell that water back into the grid and generate a profit to offset the rising cost of fresh water that we have with our local utility?
That's a way to actually make money.
And so I think I'm hoping that we can find a way for water credits to kind of follow the same path.
And then the third kind of evolution of that is to actually take physical delivery of the water.
So rather than just, you know, reselling it to whoever is locally available to take the fresh water, actually take physical delivery of it.
Meaning Google would say, okay, well, we have a supply of desalinated water.
We can either move our operations there.
We can create a data center there.
Or we can look for places where the physical water will go directly to the bottom line in our operations.
And that obviously will take more time, but that's kind of where we're trying to go.
That sounds really cool.
Renee, please go ahead.
Yeah, I just wanted to quickly speak to sort of like the Web3 side of things, because one thing I'm excited to support Aaron on is this, like, credits and how they act with the DAO.
And, you know, I can see Desai DAOs purchasing water credits and holding them as like a public good to support this.
And I definitely think there's flywheels where we can have, you know, governance tokens in the future.
There's also a huge opportunity with the IP NFTs that are being launched, where you'll actually be able to purchase intellectual property, you know, and have a tokenized asset.
So there's a lot of cool mechanisms that we've seen already work in Desai that I think we're going to see work with this project as well.
And my hope is that, you know, every Desai project that's able to is holding water credits.
I think it'd be fantastic.
I'd love to see the, not the interoperability, but the interconnectivity that exists, or that is going to exist throughout the ecosystem.
And I think this yields much to Aaron's point of like, you know, waste can actually become something of value, but this compounding effect of interacting with each other, whereby excess can then flow into different projects.
I think that'd be really cool.
And so you make reference to, to IP NFTs I'm assuming Waterdial is going to be leveraging IP NFTs.
Can, can we talk about like how and why, or in what ways you seek to do that?
Yeah.
So we're, we're just getting to the point now we're going to try and kind of launch our first tokenized asset or using an IP NFT.
And basically what we're going to focus on as kind of step one is a project where we're developing basically a specific type of desalination process that operates at low enough temperature to be able to utilize waste heat from computational mining.
So you could think of this being a way to both produce fresh water as well as, you know, computational mining or, or other types of data centers.
So there's a huge amount of energy that goes into computational mining or AI data centers.
And because of that, a lot of heat is generated that has to be cooled or removed to operate the facility.
And so there's a, there's kind of this enormous wasted heat load.
The problem is that most desalination processes or all conventional desalination processes use either electricity, which you can't get from very low temperature heat, or it's, it's very expensive,
or very high quality heat, which is used to basically boil or evaporate salt water.
And so we are working on, and we have basically a pilot plant operating now in Texas that takes very low temperature heat and uses a new solvent-based desalination process to separate fresh water without,
without electricity and without any high temperature heat or steam.
And so this would be kind of the first desal process that could integrate directly with low temperature heat from a Bitcoin mining facility or from an AI data center.
And so we're hoping that this is a really great example of, of IP that can be created to really improve the environmental profile or the water profile of some of these high intensity computing centers.
And so I'm assuming it follows the similar, or not the similar, but the existing IP NFT framework where the DAO itself basically boot crowdsources the funds that then go to, to power or pay for the development of this IP NFT.
Correct. Yeah. So we're basically going to use the IP NFT to raise funds to take it from what's a sort of a proof pilot operating small proof pilot in San Antonio, Texas,
to a full operating demonstration plant that would be integrated with the heat source.
So I think this is actually a really interesting development of the use case of IP NFTs, because as of right now, we've only seen them operate in the biomedical space.
And I think many of us have recognized that the return on investment potential for biomedical IP is very much down the road.
Right. But something like this has a much shorter return potential for return to the DAO.
And so I think this is a really interesting perspective. And I'm curious to see how, what that actually looks like from an economic perspective.
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what we're hoping to show. I mean, obviously this is still very much very new, very sort of experimental,
but I think in order for DAOs to succeed, they have to have, you know, near term kind of ROIs to the, to the members and the participants.
So, yeah, I agree. And I think that's what we're hoping for is something that's not science that's, you know, 10 years out,
but science that if we built a demonstration plan in one to two years could be IP that's licensed to a whole bunch of facilities that want to generate additional water.
I mean, my, I guess, my primary observation about DSI and kind of where it's worked is for things that are really kind of big picture scientific problems.
So not things that are kind of in the weeds, but the kind of things that any day, you know, everyday average, you know, people understand, you know,
hair loss, you know, longevity, drugs, living longer things, you know, hopefully, you know,
water scarcity is also a very big picture problem that I think a lot of people are aware of.
And it doesn't require, you know, you know, a lot of domain knowledge to know why that's a problem and why we need better scientific exploration.
So, yeah, I mean, that's what I'm hoping is that we can create some near term, very easy to understand scientific projects that people will actually want to participate and, you know, take direct ownership of.
That's amazing. And so in terms of the DAO itself, is there a governance token?
And this is going to go a little bit degen now, I guess.
Is there a governance token for Waterdow? Is it purchasable?
How do I or how does anybody who is interested in coming on board and participating gain the right to do so?
Yeah, so we're working on the details of that right now.
It's one of the reasons why we brought Rene on to help kind of figure out, I think, in my view, the space is moving pretty quickly.
So we need to have some good people on board to make sure we do it in the right way.
And the governance, the governance procedures, in my mind, are one of the trickiest, especially when you're deploying capital and dealing with with investments from, you know, from from people.
So, yeah, we're probably a couple of weeks away from sort of putting out some more information on the governance token, the water credit and hopefully launching this IP NFT, which we're doing with Molecule.
Rene, as an advisor, what what kind of advice are you conveying and what what is something you can share with other projects that are potentially interested in following the same route?
Yeah, so I think one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is how we separate the incentives behind purchasing credits and purchasing governance tokens.
I really like the idea of governance tokens being earned rather than purchasable.
So we're exploring a lot of that.
We're definitely going to be looking at things like optimistic governance.
I think most people are going to want to fund these projects and these these like regenerative water initiatives.
So the assumption will be proposals always pass and then there'll be an opportunity for people to push back.
I think that's a really efficient model.
And, yeah, there's a lot of people on this call who's actually sent me like a DM or something saying, hey, like, really want to support this project, really want to advise.
I recognize a lot of the names.
So, Aaron, there's a lot of great Desai Dao people in the space right now.
If you want to support me on this or advise at some capacity or even just form a working group, please send me a DM because I'm also organizing something like that for a couple of projects.
And I love for Water Lab to be to be included in that.
So, yeah, that's a long winded answer to say I'm super bullish on a token for this project because you have a really important problem to solve.
You have real world assets attached and you have a team that's, you know, literally fronting their own cash to prove that this works through several existing high.
And I think that this creates a lot of potential for a token that has a lot of utility and value, right?
And because of that, I think you can really leverage the speculation component of tokenomics and we can get as degen as you want, Jelani.
But I definitely don't want to give away too much while we align here as a team at Water Lab on how we're going to launch this.
So, I think that's, I double click on that.
I think the advent of aligning degeneracy in the crypto space with, you know, real world impact and kind of funneling that energy, that chaotic energy into something of worth, of value is very important.
I think it's something that is needed for the next phase of DeSci, for the evolutionary step and scalability step of DeSci.
You know, persons like yourselves who have been in this space for a very long time, Joshua from our end who has also been in this space for a very long time and thinking about how we can connect DeFi and ReFi and DeSci together.
I think that's going to be fantastic.
So, I'd like to echo what Renee is saying.
If anybody in the audience has an interest, whether it be for WaterDow itself or for any of these other initiatives that she is a part of, please do reach out.
I think we have a great opportunity here to showcase what DeSci is really capable of.
And Aaron, super, super, super thankful and kudos to you for kind of pulling together this project because I think it situates itself in a slightly different narrative of what's traditionally been considered for DeSci.
And I think that's very refreshing and very much needed.
And so, Kev, one of my next questions is, like, what's the ultimate form of WaterDow, in your opinion?
And Renee, I'd love to hear your version of this as well.
But what's that ultimate form look like in the next five to ten years?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I think, ultimately, what I'd like to see is that we create a really kind of a new market and a new mechanism for scaling up these projects.
Because, again, you know, when I look at DeSci, you know, to me, it's really just kind of, you know, normal science.
It's a return to normalcy for scientific exploration.
It's not necessarily just something new.
It's kind of returning to what used to exist as it relates to scientific exploration.
I mean, there is a time, you know, when we kind of dreamed really big and we had these incredible visions for what we could create with science.
And, you know, there's lots of smart people that have analyzed why we don't do that anymore and why that, you know, curve has flattened out.
But, you know, the same organizations that today are responsible for water used to feel that we could transform the entire western United States by building water infrastructure.
And we did that.
You know, we built this, you know, the largest, you know, water distribution aqueduct system, one of the largest in the world.
And we took water from the Colorado River and distributed it throughout the entire western United States to basically give birth to California.
I mean, California would not exist, you know, cities like L.A. would not exist if it wasn't for the water infrastructure that was built.
But we don't do that anymore.
I mean, we're not dreaming big.
We're not thinking big anymore.
And the same organizations that did that now just feel that the only way forward is to use less water.
It's just to cut back, to pay people not to use it, to delay, you know, the inevitable.
And that's not, you know, that's not inspirational.
I don't think that gets the younger generation excited.
So, you know, I think, you know, when I look forward, my hope is that we can create kind of this vibrant community of people that can actually really dream big again as it relates to water and scientific exploration around things like desalination.
I think there's some really great examples of other DSI organizations that are basically doing the same thing.
It's getting people to think that if you believe in something, you can actually just create it and make it real instead of this sort of, you know, top-down, you know, sort of sanitized, you know, scientific approach where you have federal organizations that are kind of saying these are the things that matter and we'll dole out the money in these, you know, narrow fields.
I think we need, I think DSI is much more of a bottom-up approach where you have just individual believers, technologists, innovators, scientists that say these are the things that matter and we're going to stand these projects up from the ground floor.
We're going to not wait for, you know, some slow-moving centralized institution to, you know, send us a grant.
So that's, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's kind of my vision is that we can at least tip to scale enough that, you know, the government and some of these federal institutions realize that we actually need to accelerate, right?
This is, you know, part of the whole, you know, effective acceleration, technology acceleration, you know, movement.
And yeah, I'm hoping we can just sort of play a small part in that as it relates to water.
I think your point of DSI is a corrective force.
Oftentimes we talk about it as, you know, innovation and reinvigoration and all that kind of stuff.
And I think subtly we do think about it in a way as a corrective force, but I've never made it so explicit in my head.
And so I'm definitely going to throw that into my rotation of talking about the value proposition of Web3 in and of itself as a whole for different niches,
but DSI in particular as a corrective movement of bringing science back to what it used to be and what, I guess, first principles of science really are.
Rene, I'd love to hear what you see as the ultimate form of your contribution to WaterDAO and how that may, you know, permeate the rest of the space.
Yeah, what a good question.
I would like to see WaterDAO in this context become the maker DAO of regenerative water.
I would love for people to be able to permissionlessly mint water credits, you know, purchase IP NFTs.
I would love to see the actual solutions and software we build become open source and we start supporting different sub DAOs that are then doing interesting things with water.
And I also think that, you know, it's just a huge opportunity to get a early group of core contributors to help shape that vision.
And I'm super excited to get to be a part of that.
Absolutely.
I'd like to double click on everything that you just said.
And in the realms of thinking big and dreaming, like I think the value that is being generated here off this one project is massive, right?
I see Manuel here, who operates largely in the decentralized space for the D-Space movement or the D-Space niche of Web3.
And I think the advent of being able to generate more effective, sustainable water remediation and desalination has a big piece or is a big narrative piece for space and colonization.
And the potential of humanity beyond just this beautiful ball of water that we exist on.
And I'd love to kind of see the multidisciplinary aspects kind of start to creep up.
And I think the physical science, the implementation of the physical sciences are one of those matches that kind of push that forward.
I'm going to bring Manuel up right now.
Manuel, please go ahead.
Hey, I just want to say hi.
Hey, I really enjoyed the conversation so far.
I'm following WaterDAO, WaterLab for quite a while now.
I think for a couple of weeks, couple of months or so.
So pretty, pretty, pretty exciting stuff that you've been working on.
And actually, a very close friend of mine talked about this whole topic around decentralizing water supply systems.
And I think salty nation systems for years now.
So I'm kind of pre-screened, pre-qualified for also putting some brain capacity towards water labs.
And yeah, actually, it's a very useful topic for in-space applications as well, besides like the obvious energy and life supply and so on.
And so, yeah, definitely a super cool project.
I wanted to hop on stage also to say hi to René.
René, hi.
You want a new friend here.
Yeah, and just keep going.
I think we have 2024, definitely a new hype cycle.
The year of DSI using decentralized science tools for realigning, I would say, the value transfer and the value proposition back from this radical, shark, investor-friendly terms in IP,
especially towards more inventor-friendly terms, why intellectual property was invented in the beginning.
So, yeah, let's kind of rewrite history and make it more democratic and get everyone on board to participate in these big evolvements of society, of science and of humanity overall.
So, just, you know, thank you very much for bringing me up here on stage and, you know, just, yeah, just spreading good vibes here.
Keep it going, guys.
Thanks, Michael.
You definitely will, for sure.
Ed, you got two minutes.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I just wanted to mention quickly that when we move on to a new farm transitioning to regenerative,
there's two tests that we do almost immediately, which is water infiltration tests, which is very simple, takes $5 worth of materials,
and water slake tests, which is aggregate stability in our soil, which holds together, you know, the contaminants and all that sort of thing.
So, and there's a lot of data been collected on that, and we also then do a soil health test, the 0 to 6 and 6 to 12 microbial functioning,
which has a big factor in it all, too.
So, connecting with some of the leading regen farmers that are doing the consulting and stuff, you get a lot of data.
Plus, we're working on desertification, too.
We have a, there's a project in the Chihuahuan Desert, 25,000 acres, that within five years went from deserted land, basically, to waist-high deep.
And it's funny, because the rancher of it, when they ask, where is your ranch, he says, go in the late afternoon to a radar,
and you'll see a little green area over my ranch commonly, because I've got hydrological cycling going again.
And so, we're doing a lot of work and collecting a lot of data, and it'd be wonderful to connect the two.
So, this is exactly why we do what we do.
The opportunity to weave together all these different perspectives, space, regenerative ag, water, DAOs, and DeFi, and DeSci.
I think this is a great example of the power that is at present here in the Web3 space.
And so, as we close out, as we run to the top of the hour and close out the space, Aaron and Rene, I want to give you both the opportunity to just kind of put some last-minute bows on this, last final words, commentaries to the space.
Aaron, go first, please.
Yeah.
No, thanks very much for hosting this.
This has been a great discussion.
And, yeah, we're going to obviously be putting out some more information as we continue to figure out how to stand up WaterDAO and how best to kind of operate and do projects.
But we're definitely looking for partners.
I think there's a lot of great opportunities to partner with other DeFi folks.
And we're definitely looking for other great projects, because we want to do, you know, a bunch of things that kind of represent the kinds of projects that we can scale with DeFi and water credits.
So, you know, definitely reach out either to me or Rene.
And, yeah, I'd love to get in touch with anybody that has an interest in regenerative water.
Amazing.
Rene, please.
Yeah, I just want to say thank you for hosting this space.
And for those who attended, thank you for being here.
I would have a few call to actions.
I've tweeted out both the Water Lab Twitter, the WaterDAO Discord, as well as tagged Aaron in a couple quotes.
So, definitely join the Discord.
Follow us on Twitter.
Follow Aaron.
We are going to be ramping up the community side of things.
And all you early innovators in this space, I definitely want to get you involved.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Guys, you heard her.
Participate, reach out, speak out.
Great group of individuals.
Very friendly.
Very open.
Very open to innovation.
And so, take this opportunity to affect the changes that you want to see.
I think Web3 really is that.
It's for us, by us.
Gives us the opportunity to really be a part of the change that we want to see.
So, with all that being said, thank you again for the speakers, Aaron, Rene, Manuel, Ed.
Thank you for the listeners who are listening now and those who are going to be listening to the recording later on.
I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend.
I hope you have a fantastic holiday season.
Spend time with your family.
Spend time with the people that you love.
Take the opportunity to decompress and think about how we're going to change the world in 2024.
And once you figure that out, plug in with the rest of us.
So, with that being said, guys, take it easy.
Thanks again.
And I hope you guys have a good one.
Bye-bye.
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