Big Digital Energy

0:00 It is Earth Day

0:02 started in 1970. Chuck's out celebrating Earth Day. Oh, is that what he's celebrating? I think so. No wonder I felt a kind of just to go outside. That's why he's at the beach enjoying the water.

0:14 So we got, uh, we got a replacement for Chuck today. We got, we got Bob in here. So I think that we elevated, we upgraded. We'll see. Oh, what are you doing in town? I heard you saying that

0:26 you're from South of Chicago. Yeah. You know, Houston, what are you doing here? So I run a consulting company, helping oil and gas companies. And we got a workshop tomorrow. So how cool coming

0:36 down to see some friends and go talk some stuff. Are you deep dish or are you New York style or Chicago style pizza? Well, I'm being from Chicago. I love my deep dish, but I can only take it like

0:45 once. I'm maybe every six months because it just fouls up everything. Yeah. New York. That's a lot of dough and calories going through this. So good. Yeah. So good. When it's good,

0:56 no one's not good. Right. Why don't you give us a little bit more of your background? Yeah. So I was in the Navy for a while. I was captain of USS Key West, Los Angeles class submarine. They

1:08 didn't give that to me right out of college. I actually had to work my way up to that. So I got an electrical engineering degree. Can't spell geek without double E and that was boring as hell. So

1:17 I said, I got to do something fun. So the recruiter came along and I fell for it and spent the next 20 years in nuclear submarines, five different boats, all four Los Angeles class, one sturgeon

1:29 class submarine. I've been all over the world and that and got a lot of stories I can tell and some stories I can't tell. But say, I have one question about nuclear. Was there ever time? It says,

1:41 do not touch this button that you're like, you wanted to touch it. And when you did, what happened? So there's some buttons that you definitely do not want to touch unless you're serious. And no,

1:52 I did not touch it. That's what allowed me to stay in the Navy. But I wanted to, because you always want to, right? Dude, thanks for your service. I had a cool podcast a couple of years ago and

2:02 was the founder of, I think Redshift, I believe. And anyways, same type of background. Spent a lot of his life on nuclear submarines and I got to learn a lot about the electrolysis process and

2:15 things of that nature, so. The bomb, apparently the bomb. Apparently it's genetic to you. It's genetic? What? Oh, my daughter's on a sub right now Shout out to USS Mississippi. Yeah. Your

2:28 daughter's on a sub right now. Awesome. Is the reactor controls assistant? That's amazing. 24 or five years old, my wife will kill me. She's in her mid 20s, trying to get her to react to him.

2:38 Yeah, you got three right now. What's your daughter's name? Kristi. Kristi. Shout out to Kristi. Lieutenant Junior Grade. That's amazing. When we maybe, I don't know if they can listen to

2:50 podcasts on submarines, but on their research. Not very deep. On their research. That's right We had a team's call is it Friday? I think it was Friday and I think you described it as 18 hours a

3:03 day, seven days a week of getting your butt kicked and pretty much. So when you, when you port and have some days off, it's, it's a different dynamic. I imagine. Dude, are you corporate or

3:15 what? You said we had a team's call. Yeah. Well, that was his.

3:21 I know you work for big oil and gas companies. You have to use Microsoft, but I'm like, man, at least it wasn't Skype Because Microsoft is monitoring this because if they're not, I can. No, we

3:29 should. Yeah, we should get Microsoft to sponsor. So I will be like, we love teams. Let's go. Awesome. Now, have you here? I think nuclear will be in the conversation because we're going to

3:38 be talking about big tech and data centers and. But we're also going to revisit one of last shows, which wasn't last week. We didn't have a show last week. Yeah, we've been slacking. Yeah. I

3:50 think we were celebrating our day a week ago. Yeah. So we're done So one of the stories was around the. letter of intent that

4:02 Diamondback had signed with OCLO and the concept of developing an SMR solution over the next however many years, decades, as oil field power source. And so we touched a little bit in our call on

4:19 Friday about just kind of what's going on in SMRs. And one of the things that I highlighted was the NRC and all the inertia in that process. But I don't know, Bob, you've got some perspective on

4:34 kind of what's going on in the SMR landscape and certainly spend a lot of time in Washington too. Before you get into it, Bob, let me add some additional context onto that. Is, you know, we

4:45 talked about this several, I think like two months ago on BD, we talked about Amazon buying that

4:53 data center that was co-located with a nuclear plant.

4:58 You see that, you see Zuckerberg talking this week on the podcast about the energy needs for high performance computing and when you hear the energy needs from the Silicon Valley tech bros, it's all

5:11 hydro and nuclear, you know, they're pretty bullish on nuclear and much, you know, I love nuclear too, you know, the same over at Occlo and, you know, great people. But I think that that's

5:23 pretty fascinating because I think that we have a lot of cheap net gas that can be used to, but would love to, with the Diamondback deal specifically, you see the combination of net gas producer

5:33 with SMR technology. And so I'd love to learn more about SMRs and anything and everything that you know about SMR and nuclear tech, man, drop it out here. How long do we have? So I mean, we were

5:44 doing SMRs before SMRs were cool, right? Small module reactors were on nuclear submarine since 1954. Yeah. And they were mobile and underwater. But And you say like it's funny, but like it is.

5:55 That's true. Well, it's absolutely true. The 6, 000 reactor years of no accidents. Yeah. So it's a pretty long and extensive experience base. Right. In SMRs. But it's really high density

6:08 stuff. So I mean, can't get into numbers, but we're talking high density fuel, which is not a civilian design. So, you know, the concept of the SMR kind of came out of the Renaissance back in

6:17 pre-Fukushima days when nuclear was kind of coming on. And that's about the time I retired from the Navy, actually, and I joined a nuclear engineering firm. And quite frankly, at that time,

6:28 right after Fukushima, the whole thing got killed because of that event. Totally. And we went natural gas. I ended up building natural gas plants, combined cycle natural gas plants up in the

6:37 Midwest because everything was dead and nuclear. Yeah. I'm glad to see it coming back. And I think AI is what's gonna drive it, really. They've got the, I mean, you know, the overhead cost of

6:49 these, you know, even the SMRs. And what I was saying in their day, Mark, talking to my buddies who are in this field, especially tight with the NRC, and they have pushed these designs through

6:60 to get them licensed so quickly that they didn't take the time to really take advantage of the SMR designs. The inherently safe portion of that. So they really have kind of broadly accepted some of

7:12 the regulatory burden that is on our large commercial nuclear plants, which makes them almost impossible to build today We saw what happened to Vogel and seven years over on, double the cost, and

7:25 we've lost the capability to build cheap nuclear. We got to get that back. I want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I want to dig into that. But the SMR team, the quote unquote team, like

7:35 New Scale and others, they have to push the design through the NRC to get licensed. And they kind of, again, this is broadly speaking, accepted a lot of the regulatory burden of a previous design

7:48 So, you know, I don't think we're gonna gain a lot. from the SMR world until we get through that. Now that AI, I think, can push through that because those are tech, it's tech money, it's big

7:58 money. They have political clout. They need the power, they have political clout, it looks better. That's what I was talking to. That's what I was talking to GPA at Andreessen Horowitz on

8:05 Twitter yesterday. And we're talking about this. And I was like, look, it's like energy needs the political clout of Silicon Valley. And then Silicon Valley needs a deeper understanding of energy

8:15 and specifically, you know, how nuclear and natural gas play into that But I'd like to talk about the, you just made a comment, you know, we can't build, we can't build nuclear anymore. We did,

8:26 but we didn't do it very well. So it's the old regulatory framework overlaid on SMRs that creates the inertia and certainly the cost burden you were talking about. That's what the discussions I'm

8:39 having is, why can't we bring these SMRs to market? Their cost is still high because of the regulatory, not only from a licensing, but also from

8:49 an operations You know, we've got to figure out how to, you know, right size fit for purpose, the regulatory burden. And, you know, I talked to my buddies in this commercial nuclear, it's

8:60 overkill, you know, to the nth degree. I mean, we got scared by Three Mile Island. Was it really that big of an event? Let's go back and be, you know, reasonable about it. Chernobyl, that

9:11 was a bad event. But that was some, some really bad mistakes. So, and then Fukushima was a poor design. I mean, that design, so anyway, all that together says, nuclear is very safe. Yeah.

9:22 But the regulatory burden is still so high. But that's what, you know, there's all this infighting on Twitter between renewables and oil and gas and nuclear and renewables people hate nuclear and

9:33 renewables people hate oil and gas. I think renewables people are the common denominator here. But

9:40 every time people bash nuclear, it takes too long to build. It's not economic. always goes over budget. And I'm, I never get real answers on some of these questions I have, but my gut has always

9:58 been that it's the regulatory burden that costs, that causes them to go over budget or to be on economic. And it's usually the case with a lot of things is that like regulatory hurdles make it to,

10:11 to where we don't have the ability to build. And you're seeing this across all infrastructure in the United States right now, like it's just hard to build anything now And you have at the top of

10:22 that regulatory body, you do have a pretty powerful political orientation among the four commissioners, especially, and I assume that trickles down to

10:36 the NRC. Yeah. Yeah. I also pointed out that only one of the four commissioners who currently sit have any kind of engineering background. It seems, it seems important. There's a strong, I mean,

10:46 I will say the NRC has some some very solid engineering, but there is the political inertia at the top, but in the nuclear industry, you also have input. I don't know if you're familiar with the

10:58 Institute for Nuclear Power Operations, but that came out of Three Mile Island. The industry stood it up to self-regulate. They're a bunch of terrific people, but they add a lot also on top of

11:12 that. It's just a lot of inertia and overhead and administrative burden, and who's willing to take a step forward and say, We're going to peel back the administrative oversight on nuclear, because

11:25 then that person's on in the firing line. What politician's going to do that? What industry leader's going to do that? Maybe it'll be the AI data center folks, because they have the vision. You

11:38 know, Bob, it's funny you would love this if I could find the post, but there was a meme that someone would post it on Twitter. And it's like, why can't we do this? And it was nuclear subs

11:48 photoshopped around the coast of the United States and shared all these nuclear subs powering the United States. And that's like when it hit me as I do. We've been using nuclear technology for a

12:00 long time. And I'd also like to dive into not right here, but sometimes understanding why we aren't using more nuclear powered vessels and boats instead of

12:15 cost. I mean, it is expensive to do it right. How much is one nuclear sub? Right now there are about 23 billion, I think, for the fast attack and the new one for one. Holy shit. Yeah. That's

12:26 crazy. And my numbers may be off by a few percent, but the - Yeah, generally in the boat. A couple hundred million here. That's crazy. And then the Columbia class, the new SSBN ballistic

12:36 missile submarine, I think the last I heard was five to six billion per copy So they're not cheap to build. And they're very expensive, they're very expensive to maintain. Yeah. So that's a

12:47 saying how much it costs. So two questions, two questions there. One is, um, how many homes could one nuclear sub power? Uh, well, I'll just ballpark, you know, a couple hundred megawatts.

13:01 Dang. So there's how many nuclear subs in the fleet. Well, I think we're about 65, 70. I don't know the exact numbers that we're drawn down. Los Angeles is a lot of power That's a lot of power.

13:14 But that power is very expensive power. It's highly enriched uranium. So you wouldn't. It wouldn't be cost effective. Can we pick that up at the Home Depot or think it's it lows on sale right now?

13:22 OK, now the second question is caterpillar technology real for all those hunt for red October fans, which I'm. I have an idea. I've never seen hydrogen magneto hydrodynamic. That's right. It is

13:33 a real phenomenon. It is not you can't get magnets strong enough yet. The Russians have figured it out. I don't I don't know. You know something I don't then. Okay. Wow. I was curious, just

13:46 that figure of how much it costs to build a nuclear sub is insane to me. And so I was curious how much it costs to build the drill ship in oil and gas. And I asked Kalei GPT, how much does it, how

13:59 much does a drill ship cost? And it didn't give me a build cost, but it told me 500, 000 per day is the day rate for our short drill ships. I'd be curious how much it costs from scratch to

14:12 build the ship. Well, we work in the Gulf of Mexico on some of the platforms out there and they just BP just commissioned Argo. And I think the number I was here in the summer round, 15 billion

14:22 for that platform. Okay, that sounds about right, yeah. Steve Water Platform. Yeah, what technology is that? Not a spark. TLP, I guess, yeah, I'm not a designer. How deep is the water?

14:34 That's it. Did you can't come on our show and Mark, he's going to ask you every single email. That's why I need to let you come here with a podcast. Yeah, it's

14:42 deep enough for a sub to go through it. Yeah, we're still under it. So you're your toggle from nuclear engineering to natural building natural gas combined cycle plans.

14:55 Is that where this heads, ultimately, because there's just so much cost and regulatory headwind against SMRs that and we have, you know, that gas is traded at the Waha negative for most of this

15:07 year. I would love that to happen. But what I'm hearing is the money being brought in by AI will probably overpower. They really, you know, this is kind of just rumor rumor mill, but talking to

15:19 my buddies, it's like, they don't, utilities care about the cost. AI people, they don't care about the cost. They make so much money, you know, they're not worried. So I think they'll get

15:29 through the cost side and the regulatory play, if they'll pay for the regulatory side. Again, I think that's our best hope. Pay. Yeah, utilities, I don't know if you guys are Bitcoin guys, I'm

15:39 a Bitcoin guy. And if we could, I gotta throw this in. If we can build these Bitcoin mining centers as part of a pre-built load, then now you've got the capital project plan that you can actually

15:54 turn on and off. I mean, that's the beautiful - I just see, I feel like we just gotta, I feel like he just like teed you up. Yeah, man, like I'm about to go off right now Like I'm just, I'm

16:02 like, this is an alley. Did you read my stuff before you came in here? So you know, we accidentally built one of the biggest Bitcoin mining conferences in the world. And I just went on this big

16:10 rant yesterday 'cause I do these Bitcoin mining deals and Bitcoin mining is base load demand. That's a foreign concept for a lot of people, but it enables new energy systems to be built out. And it

16:24 doesn't matter if you're talking about Bitcoin mining or AI, GPU clusters. It's just high performance computing and they do two different things. when you look at it, I think that this is a

16:36 secular driver for energy demand growth over the next 20, 30 years. I agree. And it's like, okay, how are we going to be able to feed that? And the answer is nuclear and natural gas. And this

16:53 is also why I'm so tired of the, I'm tired of the term energy transition. I'm like, what transition? It's all additives Yeah, we're adding, and we need a lot of energy. Including almost two

17:06 billion people between 2020 and 2050. That's something that you're saying. I don't know if y'all have heard anything about this, but I got put onto this, and actually the founders follow me on

17:15 Twitter. There's a couple of companies that are looking at generating methane from CO2 and doing this in space environments. And I assume they're, two of them are looking at doing it with nuclear

17:29 and solar, and so I don't know They're using the - Just terraform.

17:33 Yeah, Terraform is one of them, yeah. Dienberg has a piece on Terraform. Okay, and it's super interesting. But anyways, I haven't looked deeply into it, but I assume they're using heat to

17:43 disassociate the molecules and then return it to methane. But anyways, when Brian Gitt came on our podcast last year, he works for Aclo, and he wasn't representing Aclo, but he was just on the

17:57 show, and I can't remember if I'm on the show or outside of the show, he told me And he's like, yeah, we really want to use our SMRs and refineries, and downstream. That's like when it opened my

18:08 eyes, it's like, oh shit, there's, yeah, you can use SMRs for heat, and these refineries need heat, and so I'm gonna start to click into mute, and then you saw this deal with Diamondback and

18:20 Aclo, and Diamondback's an investor of ours at DW, and I love Diamondback 'cause they're forward-thinking, and they've made investments, and Verde. And across the world. Yeah, for sure. You

18:32 know, over 80 of industrial energy consumption is in the form of high-grade heat. Yeah. So this is actually an ideal solution for it. But I think what's interesting to me is getting to talk to

18:48 guys like you, Bob, and a couple of others that I know that worked on nuclear submarines is like, that's just another Tuesday, right? We're like, I'm operating nuclear stuff. Like what I mean

18:58 by that is like it's super safe We've been doing it for a long time. A decade. Yeah, and we talk like when general public talks about nuclear, it's, no, it's, oh shit, let's - It's not magic.

19:10 It's not magic. But, you know, the rigor and the procedural compliance, the formality, you really have to build a culture that can execute that day in and day out. And that's what I do with oil

19:21 and gas companies. That's how I help them because it's the same type of process as offshore or in a refinery You just have to decide what risk you're willing to take. and how much you're willing to

19:31 spend to reduce that risk. On a submarine, we're willing to do whatever it takes because we all go down together and the whole program. We used to, we were taught as young officers and enlisted

19:43 sailors on nuclear submarines that we could not have a nuclear disaster 'cause it would take our license away. We would lose our nuclear submarine capability. So, I think the oil and gas industry

19:53 has to embrace that mentality. So it is not magic, but it is rigorous, our discipline, execution, day in and day out. Yeah, and I can say from personal experience, it works to make pretty

20:08 meaningful improvement in day-to-day operations and how you execute things. It's always tough. From an efficiency and safety standpoint. Always stood out to me, the start contrast between land

20:21 operations and offshore operations and oil and gas. I mean, once I went offshore, it's really strict over here. Yeah And we just have that. like really baked into the culture and land rigs are

20:31 like that now, but they weren't when I when I first started one more question for you on nuclear because, you know, talking about the intersection of big tech in nuclear, you have people like Sam

20:40 Altman that are, you know, really pushing fusion and it seems like every six months I see some press release about, you know, breakthrough and nuclear fusion technology. What's your take? What's

20:52 your, what's your, what's your take on fusion? I mean, is it actually ten years away? It's the same as quantum, quantum computing It's always ten years away, right? I

20:60 mean, I'd love it theoretically. Yeah. But, you know, are we going to find the material? Are we going to get breakthrough the material science part? Because that's really the magnets and, you

21:10 know, the build to suspend the plasma. That's the same problem I was studying in college 30 years ago. Yeah. That, you know, is it something we can break through? I think someday we will.

21:20 We'll wake up and we'll have it. That would change a whole lot. But until I actually see the megawatts meter with my own eyes, and know what's going in and what's coming out, 'cause - Yeah, need

21:31 some net, net output - I need a net positive value, but I'm not, and I gotta see it, 'cause there's - Yeah. I think what's interesting in that, though, is what AI is gonna be able to do for us,

21:41 especially in material sciences, and help us discover new things. And so it's kind of interesting to think about, like, it takes all this energy to create AI, and then AI helps us discover new

21:50 forms of energy, so it'll be fun to do. It's accelerating. I think maybe in my lifetime Yeah, but I wouldn't have done it. It's like Caterpillar Drive, though. That was also a thing in 1980.

22:01 Good idea. Yeah, yeah. When I was at Shell, I get this call, and whenever startups call you,

22:09 and it was an SMR tech, fusion tech. And I get a call, and it's not from the CEO, but it's from the guy that's actually raising money. He's like, business development, which is like, Dude,

22:23 you know, I'm like, I'm only investing in like CS.

22:28 Very few people have this opportunity, all Silicon Valley money. He's like, it's named, big name, big name. He's like, we think Shell could be a good investor. I'm like, okay, what is that?

22:37 And he's like, it's, well, I could tell you, but you're gonna have to sign in DA. It's like, okay, what is it again? He's like, well, it's SMR tech. I'm like, what does that stand for?

22:48 And he knew what it stood for, but at least I had to challenge him. I'm like, great. So you've proven the technology. He's like, well, we're almost there I'm like, and what is missing as a

22:57 non-engineer, can you communicate to a non-engineer from non-engineer to non-engineer? And it's like, well, we haven't proven the actual like, fusion has not been figured out exactly yet. I'm

23:09 like, well, what the hell, man? I was pitching this angel group a couple of years ago when I was raising our first round for DW. And there was three startups and we're on the Zoom call 'cause

23:21 it's during COVID. And the guy before me is pitching, I'm sitting there listening to his pitch. And it was a nuclear fusion technology and he was raising250, 000. And I'm like, Dog, I think you

23:32 need to be raising like250 million, and that's still not allowed. So what are you doing here? So - Taking your money is what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, taking the money. And so anyways,

23:44 all fascinating stuff. I think that this is just gonna be a recurring topic moving forward in the future as we continue to talk about high performance computing and energy and the intersection of it

23:55 all And, you know, it's pretty, you know, kind of give you guys like a peek behind the scenes. Like it's pretty cool, you know, as we're building out our AI and training models, like I can sit

24:05 there and look at, you know, how much did a query cost? And, you know, I can see what the pure compute cost is. And that's really an electricity price. And so I love this convergence. It's

24:17 like reaching this point of singularity, where energy, software and hardware are all coming together And it's just, it's cool. to see everyone talking about it. You know, I told David, the GP

24:30 at Andreessen Horowitz, which I don't know if Chuck saw me talking to. If you've been a listener of the show, you know that Chuck has been sending Mark Andreessen, kind of like level of crazy

24:41 ex-girlfriend messages. He's been sliding into Andreessen's DM. Yeah, he descends, he sends Mark Andreessen's messages like their friends. He's like, Hey man, great idea here, we should do

24:49 this. Also, I'm thinking about this. Mark hasn't answered him. But anyways, David, one of the GP's was talking and I had mentioned John Arnold or boy John Arnold from Houston joining Meta's

24:59 Facebook's board because

25:04 Mark Zuckerberg wants to get smarter on energy. And so I thought that was really fucking cool to see that. And so, it'd be cool if we get to the point where we're just building out a shit ton of -

25:14 Seems to be corollations and yeah. Start building out a lot of SMRs and I love that you have, like you went from nuclear technology building these combined cycle net gas plants because. Mark and I

25:26 were just talking before we get on the show and I'm friends with a few companies that are building these large net gas turbines, you know, they're 20 megawatts, the 60 megawatt net gas engines on

25:39 oil and gas leases and their whole premise is, hey, you as an oil and gas company bring out this net gas turbine will produce the electricity for your lease. It'll be cheaper than on-grid

25:49 electricity and also we're going to tie into the substation and participate in our cots and celery programs. We're going to sell electricity into the grid during peak demand. I was telling Mark as I

25:60 used to throw your Bitcoin miners out there and you've got a hosting site. And so now you have all this optionality. You want to put a net gas molecule into the pipeline. Do you want to power up

26:08 your lease with electricity? Do you want to sell under earth cot or do you want to mine Bitcoin and so distributed power? Yeah. And now we'll see what we'll see what Diamondback's doing with SMRs.

26:18 Maybe there's some SMR plays into this too, but I just think that West Texas is a permanent basis. That, that gas is setting a pretty low cost bar. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's very absolutely.

26:29 I'll never forget. Every time people like, so there's the cheapest form of electricity. I'm like, he's sure because I know a lot of guys get negative dollars. Around the rest of the world, you

26:38 can talk about like how energy prices are high. But then you look here in Texas, especially as like, Matt gas just destroys that argument. So, so the late great Steve Chazim was speaking at two

26:49 ph which is hot and hell, this is several years ago, and Oxy had somewhat deviated from what the quote unquote EMP investors wanted to see more and more and more upstream. Well, they had announced

27:02 some plans to expand pet chem in the Gulf Coast and Q and A after the remarks first question and the only question was, you know, fairly, fairly aggressive in terms of kind of why the hell do you

27:17 want to do this? And he said, well,

27:21 we like the fact that the US has got permanently cheap natural gas permanently. And he was

27:30 an executive not prone to hyperbole, but I think many years down the road, it's kind of proving to be right. Pretty smart. By the way, meta tripled its profit because of AI using targeting their

27:44 new algorithms, using AI to target people better. Yeah. Well, that's crazy. I love Zuckerberg is straight up in shark mode right now because, you know, they just released llama 3 And it's like,

27:54 why would Zuck spend billions of dollars on GPUs and chips? I mean, he's controlling the market right now for buying chips and open source their large language model and just give it away for free.

28:07 And I think the reason is because if you like it, open AI, you know, they could potentially become a threat to Facebook. And so he's cutting the legs out from all of the, all of other big tech

28:19 playing the long game. He's like, I'm gonna build the best large language model so that you guys can't monetize.

28:26 And anyways, I think that I'm a huge sucker brick fan, so. I mean, you gotta give credit for like Silicon Valley own sort of electrons. They dominate electrons, but they do not dominate

28:40 molecules. I mean, like the Tesla just recalled as cyber trucks. When you make stuff, like oil and gas, I mean, this is where we, this is our bread and butter. Yeah, did you see that? Did

28:52 you see the Tesla, what was happening with the gas pedal? No. Do they call it a gas pedal? It's probably called something like cyber pedal.

29:03 But, essentially, so yeah, the gas pedal, and it has a cover on it. And it looks like some kind of like steel, probably not a steel, but like some kind of plastic cover. And anyways, the

29:15 cover was becoming unattached and sliding off the gas pedal and wedging, into the dash, and so the accelerator would be 100 down. Yes. And that's a lot of fucking - That's our heavy. That's our

29:29 heavy. Yeah, yeah. What are they twice as heavy as a four to F-150 or something crazy? I don't know. I don't know what their official weight is. Man, I saw a flat black one on I-10 the other

29:38 day, and do they stick out in traffic? Like, I think they're sick. I actually, I love 'em. I want one, but I'm gonna, like everything I let, I always let 'em figure out the bugs before I go

29:49 buy 'em. Dude, when is someone gonna create an SMR-powered car? That's brilliant. Just put it in the front. They're only, they're only23 billion per year. Yeah, I've got this half a billion

29:60 dollar truck with an

30:03 SMR. It'll run for 30 years straight. Yeah. No, no Phillips. Yeah, ever. That's, speaking of EVs, I don't know if you've seen this. I drive by BP's office every day, an energy corridor,

30:16 and they built the new electric vehicle charging station Right in front, huh? Right, so everyone can see? Right off the service road, dude. Of course. Also, I was also going to post, I think

30:27 it's funny, every time I drive by BP, there's a flock of buzzers circling around BP. Because they got that pond, you know, like they have a lot of vegetation, so there's like dead animals, but

30:36 I'm like, This is funny.

30:39 Anyways, but I saw people came up to the office yesterday, and there was a lot of cars there on Sunday at like 2 o'clock, 230. So apparently they opened it, there's people using it, and I guess

30:49 it's just open for the general public, and I thought it was interesting. People there are sitting and charging at 230. That's the last thing I want to be doing on a Sunday is charging off I-10.

30:58 But anyways, well. It's what you have to do with EVs. Have you seen the prices of Tesla's? I've been so tempted by one. 29, 000, I think, for the. Fucking crazy. You go look at a used Model

31:10 3, and I mean, you think he's up with like 40, 000 miles, for like 20 grand. They dumped all their inventory and I'm looking at it. I mean, massive layout, the price has just absolutely

31:21 crashed on used Teslas. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, I mean, cool to have as a, you know, drive it. You use the use or a no-go, right? But see, I'm like, there's something weird about

31:31 buying a used TV to me. Like there's just something weird about it. Yeah, it's like, but I want to buy a used iPhone. I sold my EV at the height where I got lucky. You got lucky. Dude, it's

31:42 like me in Bitcoin, dude I always come in at the low and sell the hot. Awesome. Yeah. It's the way I roll. Can you share? And you had the, I mean, you had the nicest, you had the nicest EV

31:52 out there. It's not like you're driving a leaf. I mean, you're Mr. Porsch.

31:58 Tycan fucking. Very nice. And I'm like, man, I want to go back to it. It does. It was done on you in the garage. The garage. No, my charger, like this is what. The Porsche failed to mention

32:10 that the chargers overheat, and basically an electrical storm melted my charger, 'cause the chargers run hot anyway. Yeah.

32:20 They don't tell you how hot those things actually, they pull a lot of, clearly, pulls a lot of charge, but it's really hot. And I'm not, I mean, that thermal management, it just hasn't been

32:32 figured out on the charging side yet. And you can't charge fast enough, especially down in Texas when it's real hot So anyway, it's your charger melted and went out. And then I had to go, was

32:43 parked in the garage and it was, it was bricked and so you couldn't get it out. And then when the tow truck came to, to charge it, they couldn't access the, There's a little battery to charge the

32:53 big battery. But the thing that frustrated me is I had to drive around town and there's only a few like fast charging spaces. Yeah. And the, that damn company, what's it? Charge point. No, no,

33:05 who's the company that's like doing auto,

33:11 self-driving delivery, not crumbled the cookie company, but it's like, it's a C word. No, I took a video. You know what I'm talking about? I was in the high seat of their night, and there was

33:21 three of them, it was like a gang of them. And one of them was Otto, it was self-driving car. And anyways, they were all running up on the curb, one of them. If you go to the

33:32 one fast charging area in this whole entire neighborhood area in middle of Houston, they're all taken up by Cruz. Cruz, yeah. I'm like, hey, guys, do you think some of us can get in? They're

33:44 like, no, we're charging all of our cars, and we're going to be here for the next few hours. I saw this picture on Twitter. Someone's like, they posted a charge point charger in the cables,

33:53 sort of cut off. And I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen more often, some meth heads cutting off the cables for the copper. It's brilliant. So we got a few more minutes where we spent a lot

34:04 of time talking about nuclear tech. and all good stuff, but real quick, let's burn through any energy news. Mark, I didn't look at your run or show per usual. We got anything that stands out.

34:17 Just in pure coincidence with Earth Day, there's a number of regulatory announcements out. I'll just run through them really quickly. I think it was a couple of weeks ago or a week and a half ago,

34:30 there's an increase in federal royalties to 167 up from 12 and a half. And then a lot of things that go along with federal leasing, including rentals and bonus payments, plus you got to have a

34:45 minimum bid on federal offshore leases. The big one, at least the one I think is connected to a little bit of a political storm last year, was there's going to be significantly more of the NPRA,

35:01 which is 23 million, the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska.

35:08 is going to be off limits to development, to leasing. And

35:14 106 million acres is 23 million in total. It doesn't affect any existing leases. It doesn't affect Willow, the Conoco Phillips project that was at the center of that storm last year. Kind of looks

35:27 like

35:29 maybe a little quid pro quo. We're gonna tie up a lot of the NPRA with outright bans and development restrictions in some other areas that take it to 13 million acres. There's only 200, two and a

35:44 half million of the total 23 that's under lease hold today. And like building nuclear facilities, getting anything done new on the North Slope of Alaska is measured in decades, not years. And so,

35:59 you know, oh, right in the middle of that, There's an Ambler Road, which is about a 211 mile. mining road that the state wants to build to service the Amblor mine, which is perspective for

36:12 copper lead and zinc. And that's really what is conjectured to be at the heart of this ban or this action. And so think about all the other things that we've talked about relative to

36:27 the huge hockey stick in demand for, forget about oil and gas for a minute, but the critical minerals And

36:36 the rhetoric about bringing more of that home and making us less vulnerable to things like Chinese and other

36:49 adversarial relationships in control of a huge part of the renewable supply chain. And then just to top it off, a couple of things, apparently there's an E15 or 15 ethanol.

37:05 waiver for summer driving season. Not surprising given the year that we're in. Interesting. So we've, it was touted as, you know, consumers are gonna save as much as 25 cents a gallon because it

37:16 feels more available. We're just gonna forget about, you know, summer driving emissions standards for a little bit. And then the last one, I saw something that's around the Israeli, Iran back

37:30 and forth over the last few days that there's another 800, 000 barrels of Iranian sanctions on the table. In the middle of which is an executive order option that can push the imposition of those

37:46 sanctions off six months, 180 days, which puts it past election day. So a lot of flurry of things that are in the middle of, I just thought it was somewhat relevant. on Earth Day and this tug of

38:08 war that is anti - and pro-development. Yeah. I also saw an interesting story that happened within the last week that Samsung

38:21 received six and a half billion dollars to build a semiconductor plant in Texas

38:28 So I got six and a half billion from the chips act from the feds chips act past I think two years ago and mandate was to build onshore capacity for semiconductors and so six and a half billion from

38:43 the government for that and then Samsung's expected to put 40 billion into it so it's going to be a massive facility and I thought this is what was cool about it was that they can both the facility

38:56 will do research and development manufacturing but also packaging and so now is it stands any semiconductors that are manufactured. and the United States had to be sent over to Taiwan to be packaged.

39:08 Yep. And so there's a lot of trade and logistics to have to happen. So this facility's gonna be vertically integrated and be able to manufacture and package. Where's that gonna be? It's gonna be

39:19 in central Texas. If you've been following the social media storm on this one, this is great. Is people already pissed in Austin 'cause traffic sucks. You just can't go east and west in Austin

39:32 'cause there's hills and lakes and sheds Yeah. When this was announced, I've been following some, there's people I've fallen Austin that are like, all about traffic and they are pissed. They're

39:41 like, great. All this new investment's just gonna fuck up Austin

39:45 even more. I mean, it's gonna be a shit show. I'm sure you follow what's one handle is, I hate I-35. Evil mopax, you know. Yeah, evil mopax. They're so fun to like, it's just hilarious. I

39:55 love it. So that's the big talk 'cause like, great, more people to come in. So it'll be in specifically Taylor to Texas, which is northeast of Austin. Great barbecue and is expected to create 17,

40:08 000 construction jobs in 4, 500. You know, it's in Taylor, don't you?

40:16 Erkott. That's right. Other headquarters in Taylor, Texas. Interesting. No, I didn't know that. Huh. You might want some stable power. Yeah. Yeah. So they're going straight to the source.

40:27 Yeah. They're going straight as source. Yeah. How many megawatts does a huge manufacturing plant like that take? Probably Oh, shit, Tom. And so anyways, this plays - One SMR. This plays,

40:37 yeah. One nuclear submarine. More than that. I'll pull. Can you get one out? How do you get a new submarine from Boston? Can they actually - Do they survive out of water? How long do they

40:48 survive out of water? No, they never survive out of water. No, they're like a shark. You know, like a - I don't actually don't have any conceptual understanding of how big it is. Football field.

40:56 Fat, so fast attacks. I'm reading the football field. Damn good. That's, for some reason, that's way bigger than I was thinking. I don't know how big I thought they were, but - Ballistic

41:02 missiles, submarines, or. 525 feet, something like that. Jesus Christ, okay. You're big. So, yeah, how do you transport a sun reindeer? Lots of elbow room too, right? You just build it in

41:14 the port and. Two-thirds of it's propulsion plant. But it's, it uses water to cool itself, right? Yeah, I see water, yeah. Okay, so you actually can't survive out of water. Well, you can

41:27 survive for a while. You just have to have some auxiliary cooling. So you can, you know, put a radiator out in front, really big radiator It's like your car. You know what I love about this is

41:37 now with Kalei GPT, this episode will be in there. And so technically someone goes and asks, can a nuclear submarine survive out of water? It's gonna pull off. It's gonna get the answer. We're

41:47 like, oh, I can't. They're going dry dock all the time, right? You ever been there? Captain of a nuclear sub. I've seen those big

41:56 cryogenic trains for these big NGL facilities out in West Texas. They do these. routings and they have these massive caterpillar looking. Yeah. Trailers. Yeah. Yeah, it's, no, I mean, you

42:10 see some pretty big shipping and logistics feats that are accomplished on West Texas moving some infrastructure around. I know our audience is gonna ask, but in wartime,

42:23 and you're fighting another sob. Theoretically, yeah. Theoretically. Right. Or someone's dropping something from the sky, whatever. Yeah When something explodes close to you, is everyone

42:36 worried about the nuclear part of it? No. They're just worried about like the same. Finging your head against the freaking old kid. But if the thing penetrates, we're gonna blow. Oh, you're

42:45 gonna die. Yeah, you're just going to the bottom. It didn't. Yeah. You're dead. It's a couple inches of high yield, 100, 000 pound per square inch steel. So it's pretty good stuff. Yeah. Do

42:56 we source that steel from China, or is it American steel? It's American steel. Okay. I know there is. I was just checking check their subs may be the most base thing in existence. Yeah, run off

43:07 the nuclear Do they've been 19 Americans American steel the original SMR's of nuclear saw highly enriched uranium? I'm fucking I'm fucking excited about nuclear subs. I'm about to go down. You

43:19 should join. Oh, I can hook you up dude I've got their haircut. You're ready. Okay. I got that. I have to shave. Yeah, that's a no-go. That's a no-go. That's why I got out there You probably

43:28 will shave your head on the. No, we're good size, man. I was standing flat-footed looking at the pair of scouts. Chuck would have done it, so it was a straight shot. Dude, tall guys cannot

43:39 survive on the. I had a 6'2 guy and he could only stand straight up in 11 places on my summary. I always knew where he was because he was in one of those spots. Yeah, that's right. I'd find the

43:48 headroom spots. Otherwise you would go It's like me cleaning out my attic yesterday. Not much place to stand up straight. You're not set friendly, Mark. One more item. All right, let's, you

44:01 got one more item. Over the weekend, GALP, which is the Portuguese IOC, announced a

44:10 major discovery off the coast of Namibia. The Mopane 1X. Say that 10 times, Namibia and Namibia. Got it. So a little, little color on Namibia. It's immediately south of Angola, immediately

44:25 north of South Africa and border on the eastern side. It's like the driest place in the world, isn't it? Dryest sub-Saharan country in Africa. I mean, of course, that's what they're known for.

44:35 Three million people and about 11, 000 per capita GDP

44:41 and that ranks them in the 114th out of, I think, 188 countries that show up on the World Bank listing or ranking. But the estimate off of actually, the two discovery wells were about eight

44:57 kilometers apart, which is. play confirming at least in pretty thick sections of light, sweet, no, no CO2, no H2, us, they estimate in place 10 billion barrels, plus, which if you think

45:13 about Guyana and what's happened there over the last decade and offshore on Shorgana, offshore Guyana, and

45:25 the fact that the fact that, you know, is Namibia the renaissance of Deepwater, West Coast African exploration, I don't know, they've had a lot of problems in Angola where some huge discoveries

45:39 were made back in the 90s and early 2000s, but that country's production is on decline. And so geologically, if you look at a map, kind of trends of those big turbidite features is what they

45:52 called them, these massive, hyperocity, hypermeability reservoirs, 10 billion barrels plus whatever the recovery factor is, it's a game changer for a company, a country like Namibia. Yeah, I

46:06 find it entertaining how we keep finding huge world discoveries like that, but peak oil, I'm all right. Peak cheap oil. Peak cheap oil. And I was thinking of some myths that, you know, it's

46:16 always in these places around the world that are like the hardest to get to logistically impossible, but then I was thinking about it. We find oil in actually real pretty places too, like Little

46:28 North of LA, but the thing is, is that you just can't drill there anymore. Yeah, I always used to joke about that. I was like, we don't drill for oil in any pretty places. Every time I was

46:36 traveling, I'm like, these places fucking suck. Although I did work on an oil well right in the middle of Los Angeles on a golf course once, and - So down in Long Beach? Brea. Brea. Yeah. We

46:47 don't talk about that. They don't like to talk about it. You know what's funny though, is my two weeks before I went to go to that job, my stepmom's family was in town

46:58 And I was like, oh, it's crazy. I'm going to work on a oil well there. And I'm like, well, we didn't know I had oil filled. And I look it up. I'm like, that's literally half a mile from our

47:05 house. I get there. Juan, Bray is Spanish for tar. It's an oil town. Like I even get in my hotel and they got like oil derricks paintings and shit on the wall. And then like I go to this golf

47:16 course and on the major intersection in the parking lot, there's a pump jack on the corner. Going up and down on this major intersection, I'm like, none of y'all ever like question what the fuck

47:26 is that thing? I do not know that there's oil field here. And so - It's all over the LA basin. Yeah, no, it's crazy. And like you got fields, it just looks like East New Mexico in some parts of

47:37 California, right? Where you just got little pump jacks everywhere. So I assume Mark that the Portuguese are gonna need to partner with somebody to pull this oil out. Yeah, I think it's decently

47:49 being interested being offered for sale Yeah, we're talking about scale that is gonna require. quite a bit of

48:00 financial bench strength.

48:03 So real quick, how about an ETN recap? Yeah, ETN was great. The theme of the night is funny. All those startups and all the tech companies kind of discovered their own theme organically. And it

48:17 was all about big data, big data. And data aggregation and cleaning. And, you know, it's been a hot talking point for the industry for years But all of them really kind of honed in on that. And

48:31 so who won?

48:35 Shit, I don't even remember who won. It's been

48:39 a week. But no, it was a good time.

48:43 Lots of beer, pizza, good people, typical energy tech night. So we got a crawfish bull coming up this Saturday

48:53 here at the office expecting a couple hundred people So if you want to come to the crawfish. You gotta go to my Twitter or go on our website. It's invite only, you gotta submit an application to it

49:06 or being very selective. So, because I can't have fucking 800 people, we love marketing though, so maybe we're not that selective. But anyways, if y'all enjoyed this episode, I just realized

49:16 that I put a camera in front of my, I have a camera in front of my face over there, so I'm not, there will be no video portion. Why not, dude? You look good. So I blocked myself out, but - I

49:26 gotta think our guests do one of our pleasure. Thank you, Bob. Yeah, I think Bob at least earned a VIP pass to Empower. This was 2025. Yes. Dude, Empower. Next year, you're gonna come

49:38 hanging around a lot of Bitcoin miners who come hang out with us, dudes. So, fascinating to learn about nuclear subs. Thank you for coming on and schooling us up on this. You enjoyed this show.

49:50 If you're in high performance computing and nuclear, share it with a friend This is a pretty interesting show that we had today.