#46: Robert Bergstrom (OceanWell Water) – Fresh Water From the Depths of the Ocean

Send us Fan Mail Here is a link to get more information about *The* *Ocean Age Walk & Talk* and join the waitlist. **Episode** **Intro:** California is in its deepest drought in 1,200 years, and Robert Bergstrom reckons that without the ocean the state would have to depopulate. He spent decades building desalination plants the traditional way: on land, pumping seawater up, pressurising it, and pushing salty brine back out. Now he is sinking the membranes 450 metres down and letting the ocean's own pressure do the work for free. No high-pressure pumps, no marine life caught in the filters, and a far weaker brine. **Robert's bio:** Robert Bergstrom is the founder and CEO of OceanWell, a Californian water technology company building subsea desalination. He has worked on desalination since 1996 and came into water from a career in finance. He founded Seven Seas Water, growing it from two people in a pickup truck into a business that built and operated plants across the US Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands. He retired in 2012, then came back to solve the problem he had spent his career working around. OceanWell was founded in 2019 with Charlie McGarraugh and Michael Porter. Its pods sit roughly 450 metres below the surface, where natural hydrostatic pressure drives reverse osmosis instead of high-pressure pumps. Each pod is about the size of an upright school bus and can produce up to a million gallons of fresh water a day. The company raised an $11m Series A backed by Kubota, is developing Water Farm 1 in California's Santa Monica Bay with a group of regional water agencies including Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, and has signed an MOU with Eau d'Azur to develop a demonstrator off Nice. **Timestamps:** 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:53 - Why the water crisis is getting worse 00:01:56 - Atmospheric thirst and what one degree does 00:04:49 - California's deepest drought in 1,200 years 00:08:15 - Thirty years in water and building Seven Seas Water 00:09:54 - What desalination actually is, from thermal to reverse osmosis 00:13:22 - Brine, marine life, and the cost of pressurising water 00:21:02 - How OceanWell differs: using the ocean's own pressure 00:28:21 - Pods, umbilicals, and what a water farm looks like 00:33:59 - Serving 10% of the Los Angeles area, and who buys the water 00:45:17 - Permitting, and regulations written for older technology 00:58:35 - The Colorado River, water wars, and water exchange **Useful Links & Resources:** The Ocean Age Walk & Talk - Link to join the waitlist Robert Bergstrom on LinkedIn OceanWell: Website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Get in touch with The Ocean Age's host Fed DeGobbi on LinkedIn, X or by emailing directly at fed@oceanage.co The Ocean Age Podcast is edited by Nebojsa Lešević. Sarah Carpenter and Giulia Leanza are our research assistants. Please send in your feedback: what do you want to hear more or less of? Any suggestions? Would love to hear what you think!