Nick and Augustus Doricko, Founder and CEO of Rainmaker, discuss the viability of cloud seeding to (quite literally) make it rain more. Whether for farmers dealing with drought or depleted aquifers or for adaptive purposes such as mitigating wildfires, the potential applications of cloud seeding and making rain more abundant are endless. Nick and Augustus dive deep into the history, theory, and modern current state of cloud seeding while turning an eye to what to expect from Rainmaker in Q2 2024 and beyond. In addition, they discuss:
Timestamps:
00:02:06 - Overview of Rainmaker's Mission
00:03:00 - Public Perception and History of Cloud Seeding
00:04:49 - Breakthrough in Cloud Seeding Validation
00:07:40 - Cost Challenges and Rainmaker's Innovations
00:10:52 - Discussion on Cloud Seeding Materials
00:13:04 - The Confluence of Technologies in Modern Cloud Seeding
00:19:41 - Complexity in Climate and Water Systems
00:22:00 - Public Interest in Complex Climate Solutions
00:23:10 - The Importance of Long-Form Content
00:24:24 - Business Model and Customer Agreements at Rainmaker
00:30:03 - Pricing and Servicing Agreements for Water Production
00:31:57 - Rainmaker's Seeding Operations and Results
00:34:14 - Supply-Side Conversations in Water Resources
00:36:05 - Drone Technology and Altitude in Cloud Seeding
00:38:01 - Potential Synergies with Other Geoengineering Efforts
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Nick:
Welcome to the Keep Cool Show, the podcast in which we cover how cutting-edge climate technologies connect to the world in which we live. I'm your host, Nick Van Osdaal.
Augustus:
There's different modes of cloud seeding that have been experimented with. The three most common are, one, glaciogenic, meaning you emit cloud seeds that freeze water in the cloud and do large enough crystals such that they fall, precipitate either as snow or melt back down into rain. There's hygroscopic, where you introduce a salt that attracts water and then makes the droplets big enough to fall, or some sort of electrostatic or laser-based thing that charges the droplets, makes them big enough and heavy enough to fall. Now, glycogenic seeding, It's far and away the most validated, academically. We've seen phase change from water to ice in the trails of seeding operations. We've mapped that precipitation at the ground. That can't be said of the other two options of seeding. So I'm interested in them. There's no reason to believe that it's commercializable tech yet. The consequence of using glaciogenic seeding, the reason why I say all this is you need sub-zero clouds. That basically means we're only operating between, say, October and March. In the case of the Central Valley, October through March. In the case of, say, Idaho, most regions in Colorado, maybe September through May. And across each of those cases because of the climatology that we do on, say, the farm or municipality beforehand, you can say more likely than not, you're going to see no less than nine instances where you're going to be able to seed and no more than, say, 15. And so in the case of this current farm, we're projecting about 14 per year. Right now we're at six. We started late in the season. So.
Nick:
Augustus, welcome to the Keep Cool podcast. Great to have you. Long time coming. Stoked you're here.
Augustus:
Yeah, dude. Thank you. Appreciate it, man. Glad to be chatting.
Nick:
Yeah. So, you know, it sounds like it's a really interesting kind of inflection point time to be at Rainmaker and trying to make a rain for folks that, you know, I'm sure that some people on Twitter already follow you and have kind of been up to date on some of the goings on. But for folks that have zero point of reference with respect to what Rainmaker is, how would you lay that out for them in 60 to 90 seconds?
Augustus:
weren't proven. They were in:Nick:
Love it. Yeah, I think at the most basic level, a lot of folks would be perhaps surprised to know and learn about the fact that cloud seeding is possible. But something that even like precedes that question for me is, it strikes me as something that's been studied for a while. And it makes sense that people would have long asked themselves the question, like, can we just make it rain more? So I guess my first question is, you know, why until now hasn't this really been on people's minds or been at the fore of research or even just like discourse?
Augustus:
the back of our plane? And in:Nick:
Yeah, I was going to ask about whether that's still what you're using or something different.
Augustus:
g to get that up towards like:Nick:
Reminds me of, you know, when folks think about solar radiation management, different strand of geoengineering entirely, but there's a lot of focus there on the actual particle to use too. You know, people know that sulfur dioxide is very reflective, but it's also very bad for human health and ecosystems and other animals too, especially when kind of lower in the atmosphere. So a lot of teams, I shouldn't say a lot of teams, at least one team in Israel is being very tight lipped about their kind of particle formulation because they're trying to do it in a more environmentally friendly but also maximally effective way. So that'll be interesting if you all engineer kind of new particle that's safer and potentially more effective.
Augustus:
I gotta tell you, so our team is knock out of the park, home run, 10 out of 10. Every day I am blown away by how capable and energetic they are. And one specific shout out to make with respect to engineering new particulate is my aerosol chemist, Caitlin. So she has a PhD in ice nucleation, did her undergrad in chemistry, and then two postdocs also in ice nucleation, right? So did all of these field campaigns studying how primary and secondary ice formation occurs, what air soles are naturally occurring that induce precipitation, all this kind of stuff. But she's not just an academic, although her academic work is spectacular, she also went to the one startup wherein you can use all of your AirSol chemistry expertise and cloud physics knowledge, which was Juul Labs, the vape company. So she, yeah, yeah. So we're certainly nicotine appreciators at large in the company, and Caitlin has some particularly interesting thoughts about all that. But she is doing an has done spectacular work with respect to looking into alternative nucleation agents. And then also more than just alternative ones, like what is the ideal form factor, right? What is the ideal particle size? What is the ideal mode of distribution? She's spectacular.
Nick:
There's echoes of, I have so many conversations where there are fundamentally things afoot, whether in climate or something or energy or unrelated, where there's just like a bunch of different tech confluence that unlock something that's possible today that wasn't even necessarily possible five years ago. Even something like, you know, better monitoring and identification of methane plumes from oil and gas infrastructure, like that's something that's accelerating drastically. as cost curves and kind of satellite related technology come down. And this kind of reminds me of that in that whether it's drone technology or things related to the weather data side, it feels like it's, you know, sort of this beautiful confluence of like, all right, four or five things have gone exponential in the last 10 years. And now we have a shot at actually doing something that wasn't possible or wasn't at least measurable previously. Totally.
Augustus:
And it's fascinating because they are almost totally unrelated fields, right? So what we're building at Rainmaker is a synthesis of at least four, and then within the subdomains of those, many more, at least four radically different, you know, path-critical technologies. And I remember when we were going out for our pre-seed and I was telling investors about all this, one of the most common reactions was like, this is really complicated. And my, yeah, my reaction would be like, yes, yes it is.
Nick:
Yeah, and that's differentiation, you know, and that's important. It's like folks should lean into that stuff.
Augustus:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Because I mean, again, I and many of my friends are at war with SAS, right? But SAS among other things, just because that's like the exemplary one to beat on. is so simple that any slightly more efficient calendar app or something to this effect doesn't require you push the limits of human knowledge forward. And I think that, unfortunately, from the last many decades, particularly because of and within big tech, and less so now with some of the stuff Meta's doing, but largely because of big tech, companies have not been the primary drivers, or at least the drivers of innovation that they ought to be, right?
Nick:
Especially not the companies that are held up in discourse so often.
Augustus:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Research should be conducted by companies, and there's plenty of precedent for it, right? In Standard Oil, they did all sorts of research into different things that they could synthesize out of crude, right? And that's how we ended up getting kerosene, gasoline, et cetera. In U.S. Steel, we innovated many, many times to produce more efficient, stronger alloys. And continuing to do that is something that I'm interested in, just because I'm a curious guy, right, and want to learn new things about how the world works.
Nick:
Yeah, I think, and it's definitely true that we also just need to encourage folks to appreciate the examples of where that does still happen, and encourage folks to bring more of it onshore again. Because, you know, there are very brilliant people across the world, but especially in terms of like the things that I cover in China, like in labs, figuring out how to make more energy dense lithium ion batteries or how to increase the efficiency of everything that goes into a solar panel, like an incremental percent. And that's just not stuff that you hear as much about. And it's stuff that we should be doing in the U.S. and wherever people live, frankly. It's like you even have people that are like people think about like coal power plants is like inefficient outmoded technology. But there's like very sophisticated, deeply knowledgeable PhDs in China that are thinking extremely critical about how to juice like every percentage of efficiency out of coal power plants and stuff like that, too.
Augustus:
So that's so interesting. And I mean, the energy guys that I met in Texas that I used to be friends with, like, I was blown away with what went into NatGas. I don't know, like I was just thinking about like you burn NatGas and you get turbine spinning, right? Way, way more complicated than that. So I'm super impressed with those folks. So I guess an interesting question for you is like, how do you think you re-inspire people locally to think about really deep problems? Yeah, yeah. How do you think about that?
Nick:
Yeah, I mean, it's a very difficult thing. I think that storytelling is a large component of it. And that's something that I obviously try to do. And I try to present folks with examples of interesting conversations that I have or companies that I think are at the minimum, you know, attempting something that's important. It's not always like, immediately evident if it's going to work out. And I try to remind people that that's okay. You know, like, that's like step one is like, take swings, acknowledge that it might not work out exactly as planned and be okay with that, and try to encourage people to be okay with that in their careers too. I think a lot of folks that I grew up around or engaged with Part of it is sort of has a lot to do with work culture, but people have sort of like increasingly conceptualized of the career as a pretty linear thing. And so that's step one of, you know, for people that want to do that, that's fine too. But if you have the itch and the inspiration to take a swing on something novel and you want to surround yourself with folks or just like even stories of other people that took that on and how they're approaching it and thinking about it, I think that's valuable. And the second is also just reframing even climate change is a very complex thing. And as you said earlier, like leaning into complexity as opposed to like consistently trying to decompose it into something that's palatable to the general public or politicians. I think The climate discourse in many ways has often been presented to folks as this is a pretty well-understood thing that's pretty linear. You get more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and you get more warming. And that's not the worst mental model to have, but I think the more that you introduce folks to things like what you're doing, or what other folks are doing, it's like, climate is really composed of thousands, if not millions, of discrete small knobs, to use your language from earlier, that can be adjusted or at least better understood. I get a lot of activation and energy thinking of the full complexity of the climate system and hoping and trying to talk to all the people that are building very specific applications and teams to focus on one small knob instead of just continuously being CO2's going up.
Augustus:
like, you know, the folks at:Nick:
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up too, because it's something that I chafe against as well. It's certainly like, you know, it's probably tautologically true that maybe the TAM for longer form, complex, deeper content isn't as large as it is for short form content, but that's okay. And also if we want to continue to preserve and encourage folks' curiosity and their ability to like rebuild attention span that's kind of being assaulted on all fronts, You have to feed them something, right? Yeah. So the answer is not like give up and acquiesce. It's try to like tinker and produce stuff that some folks do still find compelling.
Augustus:
Agree. And the yield of long form content is like very resonant with me and with Rainmaker particularly because two of my employees, spectacular guys, joined after finding out about what we were doing via a podcast. They reached out, they're like, I'm super compelled by the mission. I want to take part in the vision of making Earth more habitable. And the friends that I've made from either myself podcasting or reaching out to other people that run podcasts, like just connected to David Senra, founder's podcast. Very cool, salute. That is really good stuff. So, heart agree.
Nick:
Yeah, and longer content in a way is more luck surface area, to your point. If folks can tell that you've really spent time thinking about something and deeply digested it, it's more likely that a positive connection will precipitate, pun intended, out of that. I'd love to learn a little bit more about cloud seeding and also talk a little bit about the business. One question I had coming into this, and this is probably some of my noobism as it pertains to weather, rain, all that stuff. Is there an element of, let's say you're able to successfully make it rain more and you're able to track that? Is there an element where you're sort of like pulling forward precipitation that would have happened anyways? Or is it fundamentally not a closed system in that sense?
Augustus:
The age old question, a commonly asked and fielded one. So the answer is that there are many instances where in cloud seeding is purely positive sum. there are some instances where it is net positive, and there are some instances where it is net zero, and you have to decide accordingly where you're going to seed. In our case at Rainmaker, we're exclusively interested in positive-sum seeding. These cases are the following. One, with the marine cloud layer over, say, coastal California or many coastal regions in the world, you have this vapor that comes in and either like, you know, alto-cumulus, strato-cumulus, cloud formations, doesn't precipitate more often than not, deposits some vapor just by being there, and then recedes back into the ocean, is recycled ad infinitum, essentially. By seeding that, you could, in California, give all of the water, like over 30 million acre-feet per year, alone, by tapping into that, which is the entire ecological, agricultural, and urban demand for water. And that's purely positive sum. So there's no question of that marine cloud layer blowing in towards Nevada and having seeded it here, reducing precipitation in, say, Nevada. That's purely positive sum. Then there's another case that is purely positive sum. This is a little bit more of an edge case, and it's one that we're very thoughtful about, which is where you have a cloud that is blowing, say, westerly from the coast to the interior of the country, and it is bound to be burnt off by solar radiation and totally diffuse before it ever precipitates. but maybe in Nevada before it reaches, say, Utah or Colorado, or maybe in Colorado before it reaches the Great Lakes, before it burns off, that is, you could precipitate water out of it that would not have otherwise hit the land. And what we're interested in, right, is increasing precipitation over land because the water cycle is a closed cycle on Earth besides whatever's lost to cosmic rays. So more precipitation over land is really important because that'll eventually trickle into the ocean. Now, the question is, how do you delineate between clouds that are going to precipitate naturally and those that would burn off naturally before precipitating? And so that's the complicated problem. And that's one that we're still investigating here with atmospheric modeling, with radar-based validation of our atmospheric models, that sort of stuff. And so we heavily, heavily, heavily favor exclusive marine cloud layer seeding for now, just because there's no question of ceiling from Peter to PayPal. So these are the two exclusively positive sum cases. Then there's a net positive sum case, meaning say that in some instances you have an easterly wind blowing down from the Sierras bound to precipitate in, say, Sacramento. If you were to see that in the Sierras at the headwaters of the Sacramento River, the American River, then you would get more turns on capital and utility from that water, right? Because one, it's stored rather than immediately running off. Two, what is not used consumptively will run off back into the watershed and percolate down to the aquifer. Those two things make net positive sum seeding valuable in some cases. And then there's the case where, you know, you have a cloud going to one place, it's going to precipitate in say, location A, you seed in location B, we're avoiding those cases altogether.
Nick:
And in terms of the, and of how you're structuring the business, it sounds like you'll certainly have some like agricultural customers with whom you try to work. What does sort of like in your mind, at least the V1 of the modal agreement for that type of customer look like? Is it like, we're going to measure exactly how much net additional water you got on your fields?
Augustus:
So it's um, weather, weather is weather, super dynamic, varies year to year. The thing that makes the most sense for us thus far at least is to do the following. We do a 40-year climatology over the area we plan to seed in and say, this is the distribution of seedable cloud coverage that you get in a 10th percentile, 50th, 90th percentile year. These are the potential yields from seeding that you would expect to see in any one of these years. we're going to take, and this is negotiated, but it's generally, we're gonna take the 50th percentile year, or 40th percentile, just for best case estimation and good faith with our early customers. We're gonna say in your 40th percentile year, you would get X acre feet of water, right? Whether that's 1,000 or 2,000, depends on the size, that sort of stuff. We're going to take that rate of water against the price of water where you are, and what that means is complicated because water law and water pricing is like an absolute labyrinth, truly. And so we're going to take the value of the water that we can produce in a 40th percentile year, we're going to charge you the rate that water goes for, or perhaps less than the rate that water goes for in your basin or municipality, and then do an annual servicing agreement where we say, we're going to cede every opportunity that we can where it makes sense to, so there's no flooding or anything to this effect, and then just charge you over the course of the year that way. Now, that being said, in our first customer's case, they're paying three quarters of a million dollars per month in overdraft penalties to their groundwater sustainability agency. Because they're consuming more groundwater than they're permitted to by the state of California. We price in between the penalty rate of water and the going rate of water from their GSA and are looking to save them about half the cost of penalties that they pay.
Nick:
Makes sense. And for one of these modal first customers, how many times, obviously hard to know, but how many times might you be going up and using the drone to go seed over the course of a year? Is that like a dozen, 40, 100?
Augustus:
Yeah, yeah. So one thing to consider is that there's different modes of cloud seeding that have been experimented with. The three most common are, one, glaciogenic, meaning you emit cloud seeds that freeze water in the cloud and do large enough crystals such that they fall, precipitate either snow or melt back down into rain. There's hygroscopic, where you introduce a salt that attracts water and then makes the droplets big enough to fall. Or some sort of electrostatic or laser-based thing that charges the droplets, makes them big enough and heavy enough to fall. Now, glaciogenic seeding, It's far and away the most validated academically. We've seen phase change from water to ice in the trails of seeding operations. We've mapped that precipitation at the ground. That can't be said of the other two options of seeding. So I'm interested in them. There's no reason to believe that it's commercializable tech yet. The consequence of using glycogenic seeding, the reason why I say all this is you need sub-zero clouds. That basically means we're only operating between, say, October and March. In the case of the Central Valley, October through March. In the case of, say, Idaho, most regions in Colorado, maybe September through May. Across each of those cases because of the climatology that we do on, say, the farm or municipality beforehand, you can say more likely than not, you're going to see no less than nine instances where you're going to be able to seed and no more than, say, 15. And so in the case of this current farm, we're projecting about 14 per year. Right now we're at six, but we started late in the season. Oh, nice. So you've already been doing some work.
Nick:
Yes. Very cool. Yeah. Talk to me about, I mean, to the extent that you can, I guess I'm most interested, not even necessarily in the customer example, but what's coming in the next months or two where you're doing actual deployments, you're gathering data, and how close are you to being able to kind of go to market and be like, look, this is what we're observing and what we've occasioned so far.
Augustus:
we are going to market based on our observations. So I feel super blessed by the work that the team has done to make that possible because we've only been in our lab for two and a half months. We worked for two months before that and the rate at which these people move is extraordinary and even like catalyzes me to work harder and smarter. What I'm really interested in seeing is after our first deployment ends, scheduled to end March 23rd, we might extend it beyond that, is the aggregate volume of water produced based on some stuff I should probably be discreet about. But the aggregate amount of water we produced over the course of this first seeding stint is what I'm really interested in talking about in the summer of 24.
Nick:
Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing those results. Yeah. And as I think about our conversation so far, something else that came up for me is It's really interesting that, you know, on the energy side of things, folks, almost the lion's share of the attention goes to the supply side, right? So it's like, how are we generating energy? The demand side of the energy equation obviously shouldn't get lost, too. There's a lot that can be done in energy efficiency, whether in a building or whatever the downstream use of energy is, just to get more juice out of whatever energy you have. Water conversations, while being fundamentally underserved in their own right at the macro level, strike me as like, almost always on the demand side, right? It's like, what's the water being used for? How do we use it more efficiently? Super important. Like if we think about the Colorado River and all the various downstream basins drying up, like there are obviously important conversations that we had about like, what's the water being used for? If it's like almost exclusively being used to grow alfalfa to feed cows, like maybe there's something better that could be done with that. But I like that we're now also having true supply side conversations about water too, where it's like, hey, what if we could create more water?
Augustus:
Right? I agree so wholeheartedly, because the thing that ends up happening in demand side negotiations about water, where it's totally fixed pie, is you have losers, like you have people that get their allocations cut, right? And, you know, again, maybe there are some instances where alfalfa part of why it's always been a demand side conversation is the vectors on the supply side are reservoirs and desal. And we don't build reservoirs and we don't build desal.
Nick:
Only the Israelis seem to be building desal.
Augustus:
Yeah, exactly. And they're crushing it at that. I wish that we would, I think that we should. Even if we do, that still won't solve our problems anywhere far from the desal plants or certainly not east of the Sierra Mountains, because the infrastructure spend necessary to pump really heavy water that far is exorbitant, like on the order of like 11 figures, but we should have more of that. Now that we're considering alternative water tech, right? Cloud seeding is the one that I obviously am most bullish on, but like if somebody figures out what to do with brine, seriously, whether it's the battery guys or something else, then we should do more brackish groundwater desalination for sure.
Nick:
Yeah, and there's some interesting early stage companies. Onikin Minerals is one that I had on the podcast a long time ago that's doing some interesting work trying to work with Brackish Brine. So yeah, as you said, again, it goes back to this idea of like, there's zero shortage of like decomposable niche problems that are all worth like a small, scrappy, plucky team applying themselves to very industriously. Yeah, Onikin's in LA too, right? Yeah, Lacey Reddix is great. She's the CEO. I haven't checked in with her in a while, but I'd be keen to. I should do that. It's a good, good reminder.
Augustus:
Yeah, I remember when I was just getting into like the water scene, I found them and was pretty excited about what they were up to.
Nick:
Yeah, definitely well worth a conversation on your front too, I'm sure. How high up in the, I should have asked this earlier, but like how high up in the air are we often talking about with respect to like the seeding that y'all are doing, like, just from a pure, like, footage perspective.
Augustus:
e generally between say, like:Nick:
Yeah, yeah. In my head, I was sort of musing of like, there's this whole kind of basket of interesting other geoengineering companies taking off, whether it's, you know, we touched a little bit on aerosol injection, solar radiation management. There's also like marine cloud brightening to reflect more sunlight. And who knows, maybe down the road, I think a lot of that stuff in an ideal case happens a lot higher in the atmosphere. But who knows, maybe there's an interesting way to package some of these solutions together. Just like you do some particle injection for cloud seeding, you do some particle injection for solar radiation management, you can become like the deployment mechanism for some of that, maybe.
Augustus:
Yeah, yeah, perhaps. I mean, you were talking about like the constellation of technologies that have made any of this possible in the last decade or a few years even. One really cool concept is thermal soaring drones. And so you'll have these hot convective updrafts really high, like into the stratosphere even, that can, if you predict them appropriately, can get you in the stratosphere and keep you in the stratosphere for days on a single drone's battery life. Or even, you know, people are shooting for like 365 day uptime. Yeah, which is crazy to do at like 40,000, 60,000 feet. But I think doable. There's some teams, even in El Segundo, that are working on that.
Nick:
Sweet. Yeah. Shout out El Segundo. It's a good cultural movement, at least on the timeline, but certainly also physically. I can imagine happening down there. I'll make sure to put it on my travel list for, at least for Q2.
Augustus:
Yeah, dude. It is worth taking the Hodge to El Segundo, for sure.
Nick:
r customers, key priority for:Augustus:
I recently told on x.com investors to leave us alone. And I appreciate their interest. The other guys running startups here appreciate their interest. We'll raise when it makes sense to. That's not a priority. What really matters right now is earning the trust of the people that we're working with, the customers that we're working with, the farms, ski resorts, municipal entities, just getting really deep relationships with them, with other people that we're looking to work with and support, primarily those that are overseeing the Colorado River watershed. We can do more sustainability work there. So it's the go-to-market there, the relationship development there, and then the team and tech build-out. The people that we have on the team at Rainmaker already, I mentioned, are insane, super, super cracked and super capable. And the bar keeps going up, actually. That being said, you know, if you are an atmospheric scientist or if you're a quant that thinks you're up-to-scratch and capable of learning atmospheric science would totally encourage you to send me an email at augustus at make rain.com because that's a problem space that we're looking at if you're a mechie that's done any work in propulsion probably for either automotive or space where we're hiring for that too right now would would also appreciate inbound there And, uh, yeah, just continuing to build out the, like I said at the top of the call, like 22nd century weather mod stack is what I'm trying to do.
Nick:
Badass. Yeah. Well, God bless and Godspeed. I'm excited to, when there are opportunities for folks to come watch it happen in real time, definitely let me know. I'll try to, I'll try to get my butt out there. Totally. I will let you know. Good stuff, man. Well, I won't keep you much further. Appreciate you joining. And definitely do keep me in touch, John, if there are opportunities to come see it happen in the field. Love to be there. Will do, dude. Peace. Thanks for tuning in. So you don't miss the next episode on another cutting edge climate tech, make sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We'll see you soon.