Announcing the Western Chemicals $4M Pre-Seed Fundraise! We are now building the WORLD’S FIRST vertically integrated duckweed-to-ethanol plant capable of producing 10,000 gallons of fuel-grade ethanol annually. Wastewater-to-fuel at planetary scale starts NOW!

Drinking to America’s 250 and talking to my reactor via iPhone. Humanity is insane and our capacity for creation is infinite. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but the next 250 is going to be off the charts; let’s go build it!

Duckweed maxxing Thanks for having me @jared_western

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why does duckweed produce 10 to 15 times more ethanol per acre per year than corn? We asked @jared_western, founder and CEO of Western Chemicals. "The great thing about duckweed, and kind of the superpower of duckweed beyond the wastewater cleaning, is just the speed at which it reproduces." "It doubles its mass once every two to three days. Literally within two to three days you have twice the mass that you started with." "In terms of ethanol conversion, it's probably on the order of 10 to 15 times more throughput per year comparative to corn." "So if we're looking at gallons of fuel that we can get out per acre, per year, kind of in our mid-range estimates, we're looking at like 5,000 gallons per acre, per year. Which is quite good." "Comparative to corn, you typically get like 700 or 800 gallons per acre, per year."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: How do you turn wastewater into fuel? We asked @jared_western, founder and CEO of Western Chemicals. "The good news is biology basically does all the work. We just need to create the ideal conditions for the biology to thrive and do its thing." "The duckweed, as it grows on the wastewater, is gonna pull nutrients out of the wastewater to clean it. Primarily nitrogen and phosphorus. It pulls that out of the water, fixes those into proteins, and uses that as fertilizer to fuel the growth process." "Those carbohydrates are exactly what we need to do fuel production processes. It's got our basic building blocks we need to make hydrocarbon fuels." "We harvest the duckweed, do some mechanical processing on it, and then we use a fermentation process to turn those starches first into sugars, and then we put in yeast and basically brew beer and turn the sugar into alcohol." "You do distillation and dehydration to turn it into basically anhydrous ethanol, pure concentration 99.5%. And then it's fuel grade. It's ready to blend in with gasoline."

My third interview with @Isaiah_p_Taylor, Founder of @ValarAtomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor. 0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem 2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10 4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors 7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding 10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers 11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear 16:02 Becoming a nuclear company 18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself 21:55 Obsessing over critical path 24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple 30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed 30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate 35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 38:07 Running through 1-way doors 41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat 46:13 Wartime mode 48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things 51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies 56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper 58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs 1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors 1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale 1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb 1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces 1:20:55 Inevitable time 1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks 1:28:08 Scaling 1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States

Tune in at 2:15 PST to hear about DUCKWEED

Digesters are some of the most powerful machines on the planet. They represent an integral part of the Western Chemicals waste-to-fuel manufacturing chain.

Excited to announce a $30M oversubscribed fund. 🇺🇸 El Segundo is the world's best place to build hardtech and we're the pipeline for founders from across the world coming here to do it. Joining @tbpn later today to share more. If you're at the earliest stages of building hardtech for critical industries reach out now! Link to Axios article in thread.

Doing mass/energy balances at Venice Beach on this Blessed Sunday 😮‍💨🙏

We went through 100 pounds of crawfish in an El Segundo parking lot on a Friday night and honestly that’s the dream.

ok, hear me out

@reynoir_will bringing the louisiana good energy to gundo with the of crawfish boil spread. 🇺🇸🦞💪 @Nominal_io is phenomenal and @jared_western duckweed farms growing fast within the last 3 weeks!

Duckweed and crawfish at the annual Gundo crawfish boil at @jared_western

El Segundo energy on a beautiful Friday evening. Talent everywhere.

Craw fish boil in the gundo. @jared_western

Our team is solving the toughest nat sec problem. If you hold yourself to insanely high standards, seek challenging opportunities, and want to work alongside the best, come join us: lnkd.in/eWQQj79W

The treatment and conversion of wastewater into energy will be crucial to US data center construction. Today, the US produces 12.4 trillion gallons of wastewater annually which runs through 16,000 treatment plants processing roughly 34 billion gallons per day. Training & serving LLMs requires enormous amounts of cooling water at data centers. Hyperscalers already reporting 20% YoY increase in water consumption. cc @jared_western @FounderLaberge

Gundo bonfire and REAL CRAWFISH boil this Friday at 8pm! RSVP at link below or DM for info. Don't miss out...

Please stop trying to sell me things, I am not going to buy them!