PM: How does your wave-powered system work?

Mark Thomas: The Seadog Pump is essentially a mechanical conversion device. What we're doing is taking the energy resonant in the waves by having it flow through our device. When it flows through it, we're able to set up a circumstance where we can convert the wave's potential into mechanic energy. Once it's mechanical energy, we use that energy to pump water. At this point, the system is just a pump that is fueled by the waves.

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Then we take that energy and pump the water to an elevated area--to the shore, or a platform like we're planning to do in the Gulf of Mexico. Once you've got the water captured, you can run it from the capture point and store it on natural cliffs, like those in California or Oregon or on shorelines in the European Union. Now, you've got pumped hydroelectric storage. When we can store seawater at an elevated level, we then have the ability to release it when demand is there--and now you've got electricity to match demand.

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The wind lease from the state of Texas gives us enough space to put in an 18-pump system. This takes up 75 feet by 150 feet. It's a very small piece that is enough to do our demonstration. It's kind of like the movie Kevin Costner did, Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. We have to have an ability to showcase to the world that we've got a solution using waves because waves traditionally have not had much success. There have been 2000 patents filed over the past 100 years and we don't even have a city of 40,000 people running on that highly dense fuel source. To me, that's a failed sector.

PM: Why has wave power failed so far?

MT: There are two simple, basic reasons. Number one is the corrosive nature of the environment. You have saltwater, seawater moving in a very disruptive fashion, so if you try to take an off-the-shelf traditional electronic component, hydraulic component and energy-generation system that you would run on land and put that in the ocean, you're going to have to protect it from the seawater ruining your equipment. Your costs go way up trying to protect it.

Let's assume you canister it somehow to protect it from the nature of the salt interfering with your hydraulics. The next problem is the intermittence of the fuel source. Waves move all over the world at different speeds--the smaller the waves, the more quickly they move; the larger the waves, the slower. There are 4 to 20 seconds difference in movements around the world. In California, I know the number is around 7 to 8 seconds between wave activities. The only time your wave-power machine makes energy is when the wave moves. So if it moves 7 seconds apart, you're shooting energy to shore via cables every 7 seconds. That's highly problematic for a utility. How do they use it? You can't store it. That's an inherent flaw in the process.

Where we break through is we're able to absorb the intermittences in the holding area because we're pumping the water into holding tanks. As you fill the tank, now you've got a full tank and you're able to absorb that intermittence in the tank. It's just gone.

PM: Why not use offshore wind turbines to pump the water?

MT: Offshore wind power's capacity is significantly less. Basically the fuel source you are dealing with for the Seadog is the movement of the ocean. That movement is there 90 percent of the time--when the waves are at a minimum height, an average height or a maximum height. Wind energy is available 20 to 25 percent of the time, normally. So the straight capacity factor differential is where we see the huge advantage for wave power.

Generally, if you look at an acre comparison in the same wave regime, wave power wins. In the Gulf of Mexico, offshore in southern Texas (in the Corpus Christi area) they did a wind lease at the Texas general land office and that lease was for a company that was going to do a 500-megawatt-rated wind farm. That 500 megawatts is their maximum nameplate capacity--that's as large as they could go, if the turbines ran all the time. This farm needed 62.5 square miles of land to generate a net 150 megawatts--the amount you get after you take 30 percent of 500 megawatts, in accordance to what the wind actually produces. And that's given the assumption that the turbines are highly efficient, because the technology is pretty mature. (Wind blades have been around for a long time, so they've got that method pretty well figured out, and there are not a lot of losses, efficiency-wise.) We took that same wave regime and calculated what we'd need if we replaced turbines with the Seadog pump technology: I could make the same energy in about 6 square miles versus 62 square miles. So our density is significantly higher than theirs. This is why wave is the direction we went.

PM: If your focus is on energy, why are you also running a desalination plant?

MT: [Fresh water] is a tangible product. I don't want to make bottled water a revenue stream--for the most part, it's a marketing project. I want to have a tangible, portable product made entirely from wave energy. With seawater filtered with energy from wave power filling corn-based plastic bottles, I have as close as you can get to environmentally friendly bottled water. Then I will take those bottles of water, put a jump drive with them and ship them to decision makers around the world to say, "Look, this is a tangible example that's portable of a successful wave-energy technology. Just look what we made with it." Now, if people want to buy the water--if they think it's a good thing--we'll sell it to them. But it's not our driving force: That's energy.

PM: What kind of desalination technology do you use?

MT: Everyday, off-the-shelf reverse osmosis.

PM: When you scale up your energy, as you plan to, will you also expand your desalination plant?

MT: If the municipal folks want more water we will first need to scale up the electrical generation. Municipalities go through huge amounts of water. Look at California, for example. California is in a water situation--they need fresh water out there. And they're looking at traditional desalination plants. For those, you've got to build new power plants to get the energy and that's all very expensive. If our cost is the same as theirs for the infrastructure, then it would be my depreciation against their fuel cost because we don't need fuel to run our system. The fuel cost at current [natural] gas prices is about $520 per acre foot. Mine is $187 because that's my depreciation over a 40-year life. So the opportunity for municipal water really makes sense in places like California.

What do you think?