64 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com C o m m u n i t y Top: Looking Glass Airborne Nuclear Command aircraft; Above: USAF rescue helicopter; Left: Ar- temis II liftoff on flight around the moon; Below/ Left: Starbase, Texas, home to SpaceX; Below/ Right: Element3 Resources lithium facility in Mid- land; Bottom: RSE plant in the Czech Republic. AI data centers worldwide, General Olson made securing an independent power grid for his Corpus Christi desal plant a first priority. By the end of the second week, AXE H2O, Inc., had been incorporated in Austin, Texas, with RSE owner Sandor Habsburg-Lothringen, an engineer, inventor, and prominent member of a storied European royal family, joining the company’s board of directors. A month earlier, General Olson represented the Department of War at the ground- breaking of the country’s first new lithium mining project in the U.S. in over 50 years, at the new Element3 Resources facility in Midland, where 3,000 tons per year of lithium is being extracted from billions of gallons of fracking wastewater. The General joined Governor Greg Abbott and Element3 founder and CEO Hood Whitson, who invented the advanced process for capturing critical materials from raw water, in announcing the significance of the project as a new asset in the Texas energy portfolio. When AXE H2O was formed in March, Whitson also joined the board, as Element3 Resources will extract over a ton per day of critical materials including lithium, bromide, magnesium, and strontium, from the new 150 MGD (million-gallons-per-day) desal plant on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The next vital component of the AXE H2O plan was hiring experienced, highly-ca- pable, on-the-ground logistical management of the project, for which retired USAF Major General Matthew Burger filled the role. A long-time colleague of General Olson, Burger once commanded the 70,000 personnel of the Air Force Reserves, was in charge of digital integration at the Pentagon, and was responsible for work- ing with Congress developing the annual Air Force budget. As a helicopter pilot and trainer, General Burger lead the USAF Special Forces 37th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron and the 301st Rescue Squadron—these are the guys we saw rescue the downed F-15 pilot in Iran. General Burger serves as Chief Executive Officer of AXE H2O, utilizing his extensive skill set to assemble all of the resources required to build the world’s most advanced seawater desal plant, in record speed. Thiago Campos started his engineering career in his native Brazil working for a public water system. After being recruited by an American company, Campos advanced his technical knowledge of industrial water use and eventually landed at the BASF/Celanese Ibuprofen manufacturing plant in Bishop, Texas, where he re-engineered the facility into the most efficient and environmentally-responsible plant of its kind in the world—followed by a tour of similar plants across the globe, which Campos also successfully re-tooled. Thiago has emerged as the “secret weapon” of the AXE H2O team, as Chief Technology Officer, applying his impres- sive analytical and AI skills to the development of a novel approach to the entire Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) process, with the goal of achieving maximum efficiency, reliability, and environmental responsibility. As this editor explained to the generals at the start of this process, the number one issue on the minds of the public with regard to desalination is not money or speed—it’s the health of the bay system—full stop. The Coastal Bend is a fishing community, and most of the fishing takes place in the inshore bay system, on boats, on piers, from decks and bulkheads, and while wading along shallow shorelines. The primary opposition to the City of Corpus Christi’s Inner Harbor desalination project comes from every single fisherman you ask, including just about every boat owner you meet—there is no way that we can pump 45 million gallons of hypersaline, as in 85 PPT (parts-per-thousand), effluent wastewater into the bay system each and every day and not expect the result that any 7th grade science student can figure out: there is nowhere for the salt brine to go except into Corpus Christi, Nueces, and Redfish Bays, plus the Upper Laguna Madre. There is no scientific model that shows the extra salt obediently flushing itself offshore via the only two passages into the Gulf, Packery Channel and the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, aka Aransas Pass. Our inner bay system is already hypersaline under existing conditions—decades ago when this editor was a teenage field researcher for famed oceanographer
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