What we're going to be doing now is we're going to be talking about waste to energy.
There's a lot of waste in the world.
There's a lot of, you know, landfills, tires, plastics, garbage, waste.
How can we clean up our environment, do something useful with that waste?
I like to get into waste heat, you know, using waste heat from Bitcoin miners in a process to yada, yada, yada.
I've been over it a million times before.
But we're not going to be talking about waste heat today.
Dan, we're going to be talking about turning waste into energy, which is something that I'm pretty excited about.
And what that means for the wider world as we project it into the future.
So tell us who you are, tell us what you do, and then we're going to get into the tire mine.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm Dan Koehler.
I am Chief Mining Officer of Kratos Digital Mining.
And we are a subsidiary of the Trend Discovery entity.
So within Trend Discovery, we have been working with some mad scientists behind the scenes and discovered a way to cleanly, molecularly deconstruct waste tires and plastics and turn them into their base elements and fuels.
So we can take garbage, we can take plastic bottles and tires, and turn it into propane and diesel and industrial rubber that we can get from the tires.
So the reason that this is just world-changing and an incredibly new piece of technology is the amount of tire waste and landfill waste that we have is a huge resource that can be turned into usable products.
A lot of people don't factor that in, they don't think about that.
They just throw away their trash, their garbage is gone, and that's the end of it to them.
What we see is massive stockpiles of electricity.
Because when you get this propane and this diesel out of these products, you can run them through generators with carbon scrubbers and have ultra-clean power created while reducing the waste and the garbage, reducing microplastics, and solving the energy and solving the waste crisis for the world.
Yeah, okay, so we're going to take it back a little bit.
Before we get into the actual process of breaking down these tires, I want to talk about waste recovery.
Bitcoin is this great new technology that has enabled so much, and it's going to continue to enable so much.
Everything from the financial side to the environmental protection side as well, and all kinds of industries in between.
I've talked to people who... we had John up here the other day talking about flaring, gas mitigation.
When you're drilling an oil site, there's this natural gas that is a byproduct of that process, and instead of flaring it, we can reduce carbon emissions, we can reduce the emissions in the air by burning it into a diesel or a gas generator to mine Bitcoin.
It's a great opportunity.
You look at a landfill, these landfills are breaking down, there's methane buildup, that methane is exhausted into the atmosphere, and it's a huge problem.
People are talking about all kinds of CO2 being burned off or put into the atmosphere.
Burning it into a generator and turning it into energy that we can use for Bitcoin mining is a much more useful and prosperous way to do that.
What are some of the other projects that you've seen?
Let's not dive into the tire mine yet, but what are some of the other things that you're seeing that Bitcoin is enabling us to do to clean up our environment?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the modular and mobility factor of being able to consume high volumes of power, such as Bitcoin, allows you to reduce waste at the source.
So you eliminate the need to transport waste.
I've seen mines that are running on farms from cow by-product and chicken by-product.
I've seen people that were experimenting with fuel creation through wood gasification from downed forests and after major storms have come through, and they've got just scrap wood that isn't really usable for anything else, can run it through gasification and monetize it and help with the financial recovery of the storm.
The flare gas is another piece that's important to mention, as well as stranded gas.
Even if you're not necessarily flaring, there are gas wells where companies have poured millions or tens of millions of dollars of infrastructure into establishing this well, and they have to maintain it indefinitely.
And being able to do small-volume consumption of what's left on these stranded resources to cover that cost and create jobs and do so with no off-put and no pollution is phenomenal.
This is what's really interesting to me.
For the longest time, these processes have been around for a long time.
They've been able to create or burn methane from landfill sites.
They've been able to burn flare gas for years, generations.
The problem is that if it's not economically incentivizing the production or the actual infrastructure going into this to burn it, to create the generator, to build the generators, to set the generators up, to actually run the generators, then nobody's going to do it.
As humans, we're only as good as our incentives.
And so at the end of the day, when you can monetize this process through something like Bitcoin, which is an agnostic energy consumer, it changes the economical numbers for all of these different processes.
Absolutely.
And in the instance of flare there, you know, I live in Texas.
I've gone out to West Texas many times.
And at night, just on the horizon, you can see little candlesticks burning out there because everyone's flaring, everyone's burning this excess gas off because that's what they have been instructed to do for decades.
Nowadays, the fact that you can plug in a generator and a modular mine to it, and instead of burning the gas and emitting the burnt emissions off into the atmosphere, you can consume the power created from it in a much cleaner consumption process and pay yourself for it is world changing.
That's a huge, huge improvement for these oil facilities that can start monetizing and paying themselves back for that, reducing the ROI on drilling the wells.
And there's zero downsides to it.
It's the cleanest possible way to keep the well operating and get rid of that dirty gas or that wet gas.
Yeah, and a lot of people don't understand.
They're like, well, what's the difference between burning it in a generator and burning it at a flare?
And the difference is that when it's burned at a flare, you have a significant portion of it, I would say 30% to 40% of the emissions still going into the atmosphere.
Whereas when it's burned inside of a chamber, inside of a diesel generator or a gas generator, you have a lot more of that energy that is consumed.
It's burned properly and more effectively.
So I think you only have like a 3% to a 5% emission into the atmosphere.
Am I correct on that?
I believe so, yes.
And on top of that, one of our entities has some IP around carbon scrubbers that can bolt on to generators as well to reduce the generator output, which is already substantially lower than just burning it by, I believe it was 98.3% on top of that.
So if you take your 3% to 5%, reduce that 98.3%, and you are effectively completely carbon neutral on your consumption of this gas while you are generating the coin to pay for all of this equipment and creating power instead of waste.
Yeah, it's a win-win-win situation at the end of the day.
And my argument to anybody who's an environmentalist, there's nothing wrong with being an environmentalist, but if you are an environmentalist, then you're going to look at Bitcoin in the right light and you're going to say, man, this is the best thing that we've ever had for our environment.
Now, I want to go back to what you're particularly doing, because I think this is really cool.
We've all driven down a freeway.
We've all seen the tire shreds on the side of the road.
We've all gone to Les Schwab or a different tire center to get our tires changed.
What happens to those tires?
I mean, most of the time, we have to pay a fee to dispose of those tires, and there's a lot of rubber waste.
I don't know if anybody's seen the video, but there's an island in the South Pacific where it's just filled with tires, and they just burn them.
And so you see this plume of black smoke just going up into the atmosphere, and you're thinking, well, that can't be good for the environment.
So tell me, how did this idea come about of being able to molecularly break down these tires and pull the gases from them and turn it into Bitcoin?
Great question.
So, origin story time.
Our scientist, he was working in the automotive industry around tires and engine mechanics, things like that, and he and his father were working in the shop, and they had a roof leak.
So, as any good tinkerer, engineer, mechanic would do, they tried to figure out a DIY fix.
So with some of the components they had around and with some old race car tires, they figured, well, you know, it's kind of like tar.
We'll just kind of melt the tire a little bit, patch the roof, everything will be great.
So they started tinkering with some materials and products and all of a sudden they're like, you smell gas?
And they were actually smelling the gases coming out of the tire rubber from the original petroleum used to manufacture the tires and started to discover, huh, maybe we can capture that.
And they've been experimenting for quite a while and got to a point where they developed the system and the proprietary catalyst and the tools and the right process to completely deconstruct these tires, filter out the raw liquid rubber that can then be repurposed and used elsewhere,
and then capture the vaporous gases and condense them down into your diesel and compress them into a propane tank.
And it's a phenomenal process and story that all came about because they were trying to DIY fix a roof leak.
And made this chemistry breakthrough.
That's incredible, actually, to be quite honest with you.
I never thought of breaking down a tire and pulling gas from it.
I mean, it really does make sense because you need the petroleum to go into the rubber creation process.
Now, you say that there's rubber that comes from it.
You get metal shards, you get these gases.
I want to walk us through this process of tires on the road, on our car.
We switch our tires, we get new tires, the old tires go somewhere.
Where do they go?
How do you get the tires?
What process do they go through?
Obviously, don't say anything proprietary.
But what process do they go through to go from tire to Bitcoin?
Yeah, absolutely.
Currently, when you go to your tire shop, you get replacements, you have to pay a fee to dispose of your old ones.
It can be $3 to $4, sometimes $8 a tire, depending on your state and regulations.
So you're paying for that fee for disposal.
So then your tire shop has to take it somewhere else to either an intermediary or a landfill and pay the fee to dispose those.
And then they'll sit in the landfill, the leach toxins and carcinogens into the water supply.
A recent study, I believe it was out from Yale, shows that 78% of microplastics found in the world and in the oceans come from tire waste.
That is mind-blowing.
So our aim is to get the tires out of the landfill.
One of the factors that also comes into play is there's large tire processing centers that will shred them, pull the steel for recycling, and then you get just the rubber shreds.
And that's what a lot of our testing has been done on by buying super sacks of shredded tires and utilizing that in our canisters and fine-tuning the process to get the container up and running.
So as we scale, as we grow, as we build more of our own processing plants, I think that the shredding itself is probably something we'll start to do in-house.
Right now, we are purchasing super sacks, massive, massive canvas bags of tire shreds in the thousands of pounds apiece, and running those through to produce our product.
And as it goes through our process, we get our propane and our diesel out, and then we stockpile the liquid rubber that can then be resold or reused or repurposed for other industrial projects.
Yeah, so I mean, there are so many things that rubber goes into, and instead of having to grow the rubber trees and create new rubber through this toxic process, you can just utilize and profit from what's already there, what already exists.
And that really does just make sense.
So once it goes through, you get these rubber sacks, the big feedstock, it goes up through into the hopper, it mixes with the catalyst, obviously heat is required, so then it breaks down into these gases.
What happens to the gas?
It goes to the generator.
Is there a process that you have to clean that gas, or what do you do to that gas before it goes to the generator?
So our process, as the vaporous gases come out of the canister, we run it through a condenser.
It's basically a radiator, just kind of cool it a little bit, and that's how you separate your condensables to your non-condensables.
So your condensables, that's the liquid, that's the diesel product.
As it comes through there, we pump it into a tank.
It goes through a sulfur scrubber to get that out, and we get a very usable diesel product directly out of there.
The propane, we run through a compressor to put it into a propane tank.
And that you pipe into a generator, you connect to your power supply for your building.
One of the beauties of this solution is it is a perpetual motion machine.
There is a little bit of heat required for the catalyst process, but once you have it up and running, the fuels that it creates are in extreme surplus to the amount of energy required to produce.
So you kickstart it once, and it just perpetually runs itself, and you get additional products that you can sell or consume even more so.
And it's a phenomenal solution to the tire and the waste process.
And same with plastic bottles and things as well.
Same process, same system, slightly different canister.
You don't get the rubber outtake because there's no rubber in there.
You just get the diesel and the propane.
But that's even better because you don't have to have that third supply stock that comes out in some remote or processing areas.
Yeah, so I mean, at the end of the day, what you can do with plastics, which is not something that we've heard before, you can actually break down plastics, recycling them and getting rid of them completely.
Now, what I think is really cool about this, and I want to talk to you about modularity and how this solution scales to other countries, other nations.
What I think is really cool about this solution is that you're cleaning up the environment and you're incentivizing people to clean up the environment because you have a form of energy generation, which can then be turned into Bitcoin, which can then pay people to actually do this cleaning up process.
So I want to talk about Jamaica and the Congo specifically, where this process could be utilized.
But before we do that, let's talk about the modularity of this.
What's the form factor of this entire setup?
How big does it look like?
And how modular can it be?
Yeah, absolutely.
So it really can scale up to your heart's desire.
Our prototype unit, which you've seen in our documentary and things, is about a 2,000-gallon canister.
And that one we're using for the tire infrastructure because the vertical head height really helps with the tires to separate out the rubber down at the bottom for easy pumping.
The plastics don't necessarily need that same level of vertical drop.
So we are in development on and working on a proprietary system to put these inside a shipping container.
So in a 40-foot shipping container, we can have a processing plant at whatever scale we can get it to that can take your inbound feedstock of plastic shards, granules that come through, and they get injected in there, and we siphon off the gas and then run it through the condensers and compressors and get our liquid and our gaseous fuels right there from that form factor.
The beauty of that process is it does make it a point where we can ship it anywhere in the world and operate a recycling plant.
Anywhere that we can get feedstocks.
That means that in the future, I could conceivably see on container ships having these set up, collecting ocean plastics, drying them with the heat from Bitcoin miners, running them through a shredder, putting the shreddings into the unit and perpetually powering themselves,
and depending on the engine of the ship, potentially powering the ship itself.
See, that is something that really excites me.
That's so amazing.
Not only can they provide... let's take Bitcoin out of the equation completely.
Not only can they provide the power that they need to run life support, to run all these necessary functions on the ship itself, but they get that diesel, that clean diesel, that they can use to then fuel themselves.
And most cargo ships, most container ships, are run off of diesel motors.
Yeah, absolutely.
These are all big picture items that we're super excited about.
The sub-entity under Trend Discovery is going to be called Powerlink Digital Partners.
And for those of you out there watching and listening, keep that name in mind.
Google us every couple of months and see where things are at, because we've got some really exciting stuff coming down the line.
And within Powerlink Digital Partners, we're going to be using this technology for so much more than just Bitcoin.
Imagine being able to go into third world countries and power an entire village.
Throw a one megawatt generator down and that amount of power density would cover hundreds and hundreds of homes out there with the usage they currently have.
Build infrastructure, take the rubber runoff and mix it with gravel and sulfur and create your own asphalt to pave roads from the garbage from their landfills.
Clean up the country, power the country, build the infrastructure.
There's zero downsides to it.
It's absolutely incredible.
So let's specifically go into the Congo, as I kind of alluded to earlier.
So I've never been to the Congo, but I've heard stories from you from what it looks like.
So paint this picture of what the Congonese people have to go through on a daily basis with waste products and how this specific solution can help a nation like the Congo.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the Congo and a lot of other African nations, they unfortunately, as their rivers run down from Europe, they get a lot of the discarded garbage from the European nations.
It's pretty brutal.
They have rivers that are hundreds of feet deep filled with garbage and trash and tires.
They have villages and cityscapes that are so spread out that you don't really have roads between them.
It's raw desert and dirt that you're driving through.
So they don't have the infrastructure capabilities to bring modern anything to a lot of these remote areas.
So having the ability to use a resource that is in extreme abundance to them to convert it to power, to use that to create infrastructure and roads, to power their facilities, to bring something like a Starlink out there and have education available, bring the World Wide Web to these remote villages and areas,
all because we have invented a way that they can take the garbage that other people have just said, well, we don't need it.
We'll just throw it on these people to deal with and they'll have to live with it.
They can monetize that.
They can turn that into infrastructure.
They can turn that into power.
They can turn that into the means of education and into the means of further business monetization.
It's going to change the world.
I know everyone out here at CypherCon is seeing a lot of exciting, cool tech stuff, but this talk right here is the most important thing that anyone in this building will have the potential to hear or listen to ever in their lifetime.
Yeah, I mean, look at the world 50 years from now.
Because of processes like this, instead of filling our world with more and more plastics, more and more garbage, we're going to be able to reduce the amount of waste that we leave in this world.
Like, actually, seriously leaving a better world for our children to live in.
And if I look at the Congo, if I look at what this means for the people, this means jobs, this means the average Congonese person can actually pay to feed their family, and 50 years from today, they're going to be able to raise their children in a better place than they live in today.
I mean, I can't imagine walking through the streets, through trash, through garbage, and not wanting to clean that up.
I'm sure they all want to clean it up, but none of them are incentivized to do it.
Therefore, they're wasting their time doing other things where, you know, all of a sudden this process creates the job of, hey, go out, clean up this trash, bring me the plastics, bring me the rubbers, I will pay you for that, and then I'm going to generate power,
which I will then sell back to you at a fraction of the cost of actual power infrastructure.
Absolutely.
It is going to be world-changing for people in these third-world countries.
Like you said, the fact that someone can go out on their own volition and start collecting and cleaning up their community, making an impact, and then they can trade that in to be able to support their families, it really is creating a gig economy where it's no longer...
or where it's never had one before.
Yeah, I mean, not to mention, let's say you have excess power.
What can we do with that excess power?
Well, we can mine Bitcoin with it.
And that provides an entirely different incentive model, economic model, and profitability model for these people who are underserved.
And I made this point yesterday.
I truly believe that we are going to see the prosperity of third-world nations start to compete with the likes of the Western world.
And when these third-world countries have the power infrastructure, when they have the ability to live healthy and happy lives, we are going to see competition of the likes of which we have never seen before.
We are going to see African nations build up cityscapes and a world that, really, it's going to make us Westerners blush.
We're going to be like, oh my gosh, we are not the smartest people in the world.
We are not the most educated people in the world.
There are people out there that are better than us.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if you look at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they have such a sophisticated and modern skyline and buildingscape and things because they were able to tap into resources like oil early on, create and monetize the power, sell the oil, feed the world that oil.
Well, what we can do in a lot of these places like these smaller African countries or the DRC is let them realize that all of this tires and plastics and garbage that the rest of the world has just dropped on them is the next oil boom, essentially.
They may not see it that way.
They may see it as, you know, they're being stepped on.
But they have been given a product that can now be turned into fuels, which is what powers the world.
The most important commodity on earth, aside from Bitcoin, is the ability to create fuels to make power.
And we have just revolutionized that worldwide.
I shared this image yesterday.
So for the people that weren't here, you wouldn't see it.
But there is a direct correlation to the energy consumption of a country and the prosperity of that country.
There are no energy-rich countries that are not also wealthy Western countries.
You look at the Congo.
You look at Jamaica.
You look at, you know, the DRC.
You look at these countries where they have low energy density.
They have low energy output.
Well, they also have low GDP.
They have low economic prosperity.
They have, you know, very, very poor countries.
So there's tons of energy.
There is energy abundance in this world.
It's just how you are able to monetize the process of utilizing that energy.
And this process is a much cheaper version of an energy production plant.
And it's modular.
Anybody can run one.
Any country in the world can run one, no matter where they are.
All they have to be able to do is get that feedstock, those plastics, those wastes.
And I think this, particularly in conjunction with some of the other things that are happening around Bitcoin mining and waste recovery, is really going to lead us into that next, you know, into the 22nd century at the end of the day.
Absolutely.
You know, the modular ability, the setting up and shipping containers type things, that lets you set up local microgrids.
But the other factor is you can also set up large plants at the landfill or at the recovery point and pump that fuel, pump that propane into trucks and bring them out to your generator locations where the microgrids are.
So you get both options.
You can consolidate it.
You can then use the, you know, the tires to create the roads to get to your other locations.
You can use monetization through, you know, Bitcoin and the sale of power to purchase the trucks to get your world built out.
I mean, the ability to think that this technology that, you know, I'm involved in can build highway infrastructure from garbage is still mind-blowing to me.
Like, I get, sorry, I get really giddy when I think about that.
And just sitting in the warehouse with the guys tinkering and learning and exploring all this stuff, and I've been working on this project for a little over a year now, has been incredibly eye-opening.
And I'm excited to be able to share it with the world.
It's the most exciting project in Bitcoin.
It's the most exciting project in the world.
I , you know, I really think that it's important for us, if we're going to be good stewards of this world, to figure out ways to make it a better place to live in.
And that means more infrastructure.
That means more energy usage.
That means cleaner environments.
And what you're doing, I mean, you have all right to be giddy about this, because I'm giddy about this, and I'm not even involved in the project.
So this is something that is very cool, and I think people really need to pay attention when they hear stuff like this, because it means a better world for us all to live in.
And idealistically, that's what we all want.
We all want to live in a better world.
We all want to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water, you know, let our kids play out in the grass and actually not worry about them getting sick or dying because of the pollutants in the air and in the environment.
Absolutely.
And for everyone out there watching, this is the kind of project that you'll be able to tell your grandkids about.
I was in the room at one of the first times that that was publicly announced.
Before the company's even officially launched, I was able to say I was in that room and saw Dan get on stage and have this speech, because it is that monumental of a world-changing project.
Right up there with the advent of nuclear fission and the first airplane.
It is that large-scale, global-changing project that is, like I said, the most important discussion, the most important thing that anyone in this building has ever heard of.
I couldn't agree more.
Tell people how they could get involved with this project.
I know that you're still working on the Reg A, so you can't talk about that right now, so there's not really a way to invest in this.
But at this moment, there will be an opportunity for people here in the future.
Very much so.
What can people do right now to get involved?
On the right now aspect of getting involved, I would say just kind of spread the word.
We have a documentary on YouTube.
It's called Turning Tires into Bitcoin.
And while it is Bitcoin-focused, it's really turning tires into the world's cleanest energy and putting it to that kind of perspective.
That is what is going to be enormous, whether you're monetizing it through Bitcoin or energy sales or establishing municipalities.
That's going to be what cleans up the environment and changes the world and brings the power cost down, the cost of living to the people.
Now, what happens when your power costs down?
Factories cost less to run.
Costs of goods go down.
Inflation gets reduced.
All because of a cascading effect of consuming garbage to become electricity economically and profitably.
Absolutely.
Well, Dan, I appreciate everything that you're doing.
This is a project that I'm really excited about.
I can't wait to hear more.
I can't wait to get involved in more ways.
And, you know, again, I want to highlight this video, this turning tires into Bitcoin video.
It was excellently done by yours, well, ours truly here at Bitcoin Mining World.
I wasn't involved in the video, but we did make that video.
And it's an incredible documentary on what this process actually looks like.
So I highly recommend everybody who's watching this, who's here in this room, go to YouTube, type in turning tires into Bitcoin.
And you're going to be you're going to be pretty amazed at what we can do in the next, you know, 5, 10, 50, even 100 years.
So it's pretty exciting.
Thank you, Dan.
Absolutely.
Thank you.