Crystal: [00:00:00] I’m Crystal DiMiceli, and welcome to the Forces for Nature show. Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you, as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for Nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview someone who is working to make the world more sustainable and humane.

Join me in learning from them and get empowered to take action so that you too can become a force for nature.

Welcome to another episode of Forces for Nature EarthX conference series, where I [00:00:45] bring you behind the scenes of my experiences during that week and up close and personal with some of the incredible presenters. One of my favorite things about EarthX is the chance to learn about new technologies and innovative methods that are being used to clean our planet.

One of these things that I was introduced to is bioremediation. I had heard the term before, but I wasn’t too familiar with what it is. Turns out, When it comes to healing our planet, bioremediation offers a fascinating solution. But what exactly is it? Simply put, it’s the process of using living organisms, such as microbes or bacteria, to clean up polluted environments.

In this episode, we dive deep into the subject with [00:01:30] Shane Robertson, from Ergo Feto Bio, and Ruby Montes, from Phoenix Harvest. Shane comes from a family dedicated to innovation in soil and environmental health. And Rudy, as a U. S. Army veteran and former State Department official, he brings a unique perspective to this industry shaped by his time in war zones, where the environmental destruction is just as damaging as the war itself.

You’ll hear another voice on the show too. That’s Richard Harmer, who you might recognize as the host of the podcasts Rockin Rick and What in East Dallas is Going On. Richard and I worked together at EarthX and I thought it would be fun to have him on as a co host and bring his dynamic energy to this conversation.

[00:02:15] Whether it’s restoring contaminated soil or detoxifying water, bioremediation turns to nature itself to tackle some of our most pressing environmental challenges. Let’s learn how billions of microbes and a few dedicated humans are working to heal our planet.

Rudy, Shane, thank you so much for joining me on Forces for Nature. It’s so great to have you.

Rudy: Yes, thank you so much. It’s actually really wonderful to meet you guys. Yeah, thanks for having us. This is awesome.

Crystal: You guys focus on bioremediation using microbes and bacteria. What is bioremediation and how does that all work together?

Cheyne: [00:03:00] Yeah. I mean, first of all, it’s not like we are groundbreakers or crazy scientists. It’s not like we’re doing anything incredible. There’s a lot of great companies that are doing similar work out there and it’s definitely picking up. I think so many people still today have this. inborn or inbred fear of the word bacteria or microbiology.

If you talk to a farmer, he thinks of a disease that’s going to come through and wipe out his crop. If you talk to, uh, an old person, Oh, are we going to introduce some bacteria to your area? They’re thinking, is this going to, you know, It’s a very negative connotation, even trying to get product across borders is very tricky with just with the import export regulations, trying to get product to move across borders.

It [00:03:45] takes a lot of work just to get kind of the infrastructure in place to be able to ship this stuff. Where it all came from a little bit of a history, if that’s what you guys are after. You

Richard: talk about infrastructure, not just the ship it from where it is.

Cheyne: And that’s why it’s important to have good partners on the ground that understand local regulations, local laws.

Richard: Which is where you come in.

Cheyne: That’s

Rudy: right. You know, here in Texas and then with the other states that we’re looking at for the Superfund or Brownsfield sites, we have to look at what the regulations are. Going to the Economic Development Center, when we start touching the ground or even in an area you’ve got wildlife management that’s involved too.

So a lot of things we have to put that in perspective into what we are looking at as a plan. We look at, the biggest thing is, you know, the testing. [00:04:30] What’s the depth of it? What’s the Of the contamination? Yeah, the contamination. Because it could go down a few feet or 20 feet. Yeah, easily. Wow. I mean, it’s just massive sometimes, depending on where it’s at.

And a lot of people think that. By leaving it alone, it’ll go away, but it doesn’t work that way, you know.

Crystal: But what is bioremediation? Like, and how does it differ than what has a different kind of remediation, I guess?

Cheyne: So yeah, I’m happy to kind of jump in on that. I spoke a little bit about it downstairs just now, the whole concept of biomimicry.

Nature has been around a lot longer than us. We are part of nature, yes, but the world was around and thriving for a long time before us. Asteroids hit the earth, all the dinosaurs die. There’s mass extinction events. We’ve got a richer biodiversity than we ever had before. Sure. We’re [00:05:15] going through now the sixth mass extinction, which is terrifying, but the world is able to look after itself.

It’s often we make a mess. We make a big natural disaster. One of the ones that hits close to. Home for you guys is the Exxon Valdez and what they saw is that there were a couple of beaches that they really wanted to clean up, tourism wise, I can’t remember the exact details, and they go in and they’re like, we got this fantastic technology that uses steam and hot water under pressure to get the oil off these beaches.

Unfortunately, they’ve looked back now on the beaches they concentrated the most of their remediation efforts on, not just the beaches, the ecosystems, mangroves, all sorts. The ones that they concentrated the most of their efforts on Those are actually some of the ones that have still not recovered to this day, whereas the beaches that were [00:06:00] smaller, far from a road, no one’s really going to go there, we can just leave the oil there.

Let it sit, let it forget. That’ll break down over a couple of months, and those ecosystems are thriving. You’ve got to remember that those hydrocarbons, oil, it’s been compressed for millions of years, way down low, but what was it before? It was swamps and wetlands and organic matter that’s just been compressed.

So. Yes, it can be a great fuel, but also it’ll break down into a beautiful compost. So that is the key. That is the

Crystal: first time I’ve heard that.

Cheyne: That is the key to bioremediation. So another example that I gave is, is the work we’re doing out in Kuwait where Iraq invaded, they pulled out and kind of in a mindset of spite, they just blew off all the oil wells.

You can still go see those crazy photos where it’s, it’s just [00:06:45] smoke and fire, the whole desert, it’s lit up. It’s crazy. And those areas have never been cleaned up because it’s just oil going on for miles and miles and miles and millions of gallons of oil. And it’s just been hard baked into that sand for 30 plus years.

There’s areas where it’s a couple of meters deep, just oil. And Gosh! Getting in there, that’s obviously a kind of a different situation. So now what we focus on doing is we take the microbes, we were able to, that’s part of the IP that we feels differentiates property. Exactly. Yes. So we bought it over from the university of Bologna.

They’d been working on this for ages and the IP was all around how you can identify which microbes are going to fulfill which role, how you’re able [00:07:30] to capture them and hold them so that they don’t just die off and then able to. Formulate them in a way that’s really useful in the environment,

Richard: but keeping them, uh, natural or organic, 100%.

Cheyne: So fully natural, we don’t engineer anything. So people like to think of us as a biotech company. We, we didn’t create anything. We always say we discovered something and we’re just trying to put it to work in a new way. That’s been there ever since. So

Crystal: these are microbes that already exist that you’ve seen, know how to eat.

Oil or some sort of sewage. Okay.

Richard: All these natural

Cheyne: processes in the

Richard: wild. I got a question for you, Rudy. Yeah. As a, someone who went over there while you were active duty, did you think about any of this when you were looking at the desert? [00:08:15] I mean, I don’t know, Crystal, that’s just, it’s, it’s on, you know what I mean?

Rudy: Yeah. Cause you had the passion for it when you saw it looking at that. But you know, that one thing that ran through when you’re there with your other buddies and stuff like that, I was like, glad I’m not here. You know, I’m actually in a better place, but. You know, we fight our own battles here in the United States.

We’ve got a lot of other contamination going on. So when you started looking at that in the military, you never really thought that, you know, you want to be able to help do the cleanup and that you have partners that are actually out there doing some stuff, you know, in these places, you know, so moving it and transitioning it from what we had messed up versus what we’re getting it back to our better, which what it was a lot more thriving back then, that’s another mission we’ve got to look at.

Interesting.

Crystal: So, I’m [00:09:00] curious about these microbes, sorry to go back to the microbes. No, no, please. She likes microbes. I love talking about them, as I’ll

Cheyne: say. I’m any too happy.

Crystal: And I don’t know enough about microbes, so this might be a silly question, but I imagine that there are certain microbes endemic to certain areas, so what happens if you bring a non endemic microbe to a specific area?

An area. Does it become like an invasive species?

Richard: That’s what I was about to say.

Cheyne: A fantastic question. One that needs to be asked, uh, as I’ve said a number of times over the course of the week, often when humans get involved and we try to fix situations, we make them a lot worse. We’re really good at that.

That’s what I said downstairs. While we’re really good at [00:09:45] creating this pollution, we can’t think that we can have all the answers to just go in there and fix it. So that’s a great question. The, the university of Bologna, they studied this stuff like 20 plus years. I can’t remember the exact details. This was all through seventies, eighties, nineties, and they went, they wanted to find out, they went around the world and they wanted to see in soils and bodies of water that are untouched by humans.

So Great Plains, where there’s no farming or mining, up in the wastelands of Canada, down in Australia in the outback. What are the microbes in soil, if it’s not been touched by human chemicals interaction, what’s living there? What’s, what’s keeping these ecosystems thriving? Because no one’s putting down fertilizer in these rainforests and they’re thriving, they’re beautiful.

You walk in and you can [00:10:30] smell the life. There’s, I don’t know about here, but in Cape Town, you There’s people that do these wellness walks and you pay them to go walk in the forest that’s free. It’s a forest bath. It’s healing and it is. There’s the science behind it. You breathe in those microbes. They’re good for you internally.

So, sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent. I’m

Richard: a

Cheyne: little bit passionate about it. But, um, what they were discovering while they were working on it is that they came across these 42 groups of bacteria, fungi, enzymes. And these ones were constant no matter where they took their soil samples. So in the world.

Rudy: Yeah. So you’re saying there are a lot more of them,

Cheyne: but they broke them down to them. They broke them down to the main ones that spot on. So, I mean, and this goes way back [00:11:15] as, as I’ve said, these guys have been developing for millions, billions of years. They’re not. They didn’t just arrive because we discovered them, they were always there.

So back when we were at Pangaea and all the continents were mushed together, you can imagine how that life would have kind of evened out across the whole landmass as, and then it broke up. Other ones might’ve developed and come in, but you still get the basics. And what we also found is that with these colonies that we put in, once the pollution is gone, there’s, there’s die off.

So what we do, we, we’re not a complete tool for remediation. I like to say we, we kind of set the stage for the nature to take care of itself. We’re an accelerant. We take a super concentrated dose where it might be, you might see this, a dose of bacteria [00:12:00] over a square, a square kilometer of the ocean.

We’re not taking it into, Bottles and we’re dumping it in super concentrated doses if for example if there’s an oil spill on the water We can go in however you want to do it off the boats with the fire hoses with the drone You putting the super concentrated bacteria there It’ll eat up that hydrocarbon as fast as it can because that’s what it wants to do to survive and then it’s gonna die off It’ll die

Speaker 5: off.

Cheyne: Well, cause there’s not enough food to feed all of them. Oh, it’s, it’s a

Richard: natural, it’s resources are depleted.

Cheyne: So I mean, one of the big concerns you, you go and you work with these guys in Saudi and Kuwait and as much as Saudi, they’ve got this 2030 vision, which I love where they’re wanting to take kind of a step back from not that that won’t ever be their main industry, but they want to take a step back from [00:12:45] hydrocarbons and focusing on fuels.

And with the 2030 vision, they want to focus on tourism and technology sector in Saudi Arabia. Thank you. But their focus will always be on the hydrocarbons coming out of their ground. And this was a big concern that what if we put your bacteria here, how do we know it’s not going to start going down through the sand and eating up our oil reserves, everything like that.

Luckily, we, we completely aerobic. So we only operate in aerobic systems. They went through the whole scale test that took years with Saudi universities, the

Speaker 5: need for oxygen. Yeah. I need oxygen. I need

Cheyne: oxygen. Cause that was a big concern. And I mean, everywhere we’ve gone with all these universities, we’ve done lots of tests through Africa, the Middle East, Europe, now moving into Asia a bit more.

And everyone wants to make sure their wildlife is going to be okay. Which is [00:13:30] really important. So we’ve got great, a great scientific base behind us to show that we’re not harmful. We, we’re a beneficial tool for the environment. We, we’re putting back what should always have been there.

Richard: That’s right. That is so fascinating.

You know what? Look at the human body. Like everybody talks about the human biome now and gut bacteria. Spot on. Like, we’re part of the world, we’re part of the universe, so why would the earth be different?

Speaker 5: No, it’s even more so. Right. Yeah.

Richard: I mean, we talked about the Amazon being the lungs of the earth.

Yeah. Right? But why wouldn’t we do that? And everything that, why wouldn’t we think about it like that?

Rudy: Yeah. No, but why it’s not, yeah, exactly. Why are we not thinking about it? You know? A lot of these places, you know, what are they doing? They would excavate and they’ll take it somewhere else. A lot of them look at [00:14:15] the, the oil spills and they’ll lay them out into a field, let them dry over time so they’d be able to do that.

But with us, we’re a lot faster and we’re a lot safer. I mean, it’s just. It’s a force of nature

Crystal: to

Rudy: a point where, you know, we’re bringing it back so it can actually do something.

Crystal: Paint a picture for me of what a project would be and how you would go in and remediate it.

Rudy: Okay. So right now we are really concentrated in a Superfund site in Oklahoma called Tar Creek.

So with Tar Creek, what we do in there, With the tribe that we’re working with and then some of the city officials there that we’re trying to remediate that by doing the testing first, we got to identify what we have out there, knowing that there’s already been testing in the past. It’s already been established, but [00:15:00] everybody tested a different way and then everything changes, you know, they test could be a year or two old.

Well, as climate changes, so does the shifting of earth, so the shifting of contaminants that are moving around. What’s the containment up there? Arsenic, lead, zinc, and mercury. I think in benzene in the groundwater. Yes. In the groundwater and in the sludge and in the chat,

Cheyne: massive chat box, like a hundred.

Yeah. You

Rudy: can see them from about probably four or five miles away. Wait, what? Yeah. If you can see them four or five miles away, you know, you can see them on satellites. If you go to tar Creek, you’ll see it on satellite views and

Richard: tar

Rudy: Creek, 73 million tons of this, but. With what we’re doing and by remediating and actually putting these things [00:15:45] into a product of what we’re trying to do, it’s like it’s almost recycling.

A contaminated area and bringing it back to life for farming, or it could be for constructional materials that we can grow hemp out of. So we once remediated, we follow in with hemp and we start bringing back a more of a job or a community where they can thrive on as far as another industry could be like a cotton.

And also with the Tar Creek as what we’re talking about trying to identify with testing. We start looking and say, well, what do we want to bring to this that the community needs? Well, we’re going to introduce some marine life. We’re going to put some fishes in there after we remediated that contaminated water.

So then we’ll run tests on those fishes and we’re working with the universities out there to actually look and say, okay, is this viable [00:16:30] for the community? Do they have another food source? You know, there’s 80 acres out of that retaining pond that we’re looking at. They want to put buffalo grass and run bison’s back on that thing.

Cheyne: Yeah.

Rudy: So, bringing something back, as people talked about before, that things are getting extinct, you know, these are things that we’re trying to bring back.

Cheyne: I don’t think Rudy gave enough credit to, to this Tar Creek sites. I, I recommend you do go look it up. The first time he told me that, heard about it, they were interested.

I looked it up, one of the first things I saw, America’s Chernobyl, and Chernobyl, I mean what, uninhabitable for 50, 000 years, they said. Animal species are already moving back in and thriving. They are, right? This place, not so much. There’s still people there. It’s crazy. What? Piles of chat. Yeah. There’s, there’s kids that are like sandboarding, you know how you go sandboarding on the [00:17:15] sand dunes down by the coast?

Speaker 6: On that? On

Rudy: that. They go out there and they try to act like it’s a, like a playground and like it’s contamination.

Richard: Have they, but it’s only been one generation, correct? No, it’s been there for, early 1900s. It

Cheyne: ramped up for, yeah, it ramped up for, Production of lead for bullets for World War II.

Rudy: That’s right.

And it wasn’t, yeah, it was a number one lead. It was a number one. It’s what saved World War II. Pritchard Minefield. Okay. So what, what’s the cancer rate

Richard: up there? Is there?

Cheyne: It’s, it’s crazy. There’s so many different metrics. The, one of the big ones they talk about because these streams are still flying through these communities where people are getting water.

You can see it. It comes up orange. Really, really went there and took some photos. Yeah. The kids IQs are dropping rapidly from all this contamination. [00:18:00] Um, the rates of miscarriage, there’s, there’s so many different metrics by which you can see this is horrible. And once that mine had dried up in its usefulness, World War II’s over, lead’s not that valuable of a metal.

We started saying, maybe it’s not so good of you. And all those people that we kicked out so that we could start mining. Let them move back in. Yeah. Yeah. Oh

Richard: my goodness. So, okay. What’s your timetable on the remediation process for a,

Rudy: when you guys, we’re going to do a retaining pond out of that, right?

That’s about a football field, about five foot deep with a remediation solution and what we’re dealing with. I mean, we could be remediated. In a couple of months possibly.

Cheyne: Oh, but that’s, no, no, that’s, that’s for a small trial. That’s for proof of concept. Proof of concept. This is a [00:18:45] football field.

Rudy: It’s just a we, what we want to try to establish is a proof of concept to show the world of how the microbes are able to do this.

And we’re doing it with a football field and another 78 additional acres. Okay, so about 80 acres totals. So what we’re doing is we’re showing what we can do with water. And we’re lining with chat, which is another contaminant, which looks like gravel. And then we have the sludge from the bottom of the water.

Then we got the soil on the outside of the other 78 acres that we’re going to be doing that as well, depending on where the depth of contamination is and where it’s more focused at. So we were able to kind of do this, you know, depending on how they want to move forward and what our plans are, we might be doing five acres at a time, that pond, once we get that, you know, remediated.

We do more [00:19:30] tests on that, that could be fixed maybe six to nine months down the road, you know, it’s actually been done. So we’ll start doing that with universities and kind of show EPA, Economic Development Center, the nine tribes that are up there that are needing help, you know, in the community.

Cheyne: So, I mean, just to add onto that, so this would be the largest project of this scale that we would ever have been doing.

So it’s an exciting opportunity. It’s something that would take decades. Let’s not beat around the bush. As I said, we’re not, we’re not magic in a bottle. We’re nature in a bottle. Things still take time. We can try accelerate them, but things take time. I feel it’s a better solution than what, 350 million over the last 30 years and it hasn’t changed.

Richard: Same old, same old. One, one [00:20:15] small step is still a step. Exactly. And if

Rudy: it doesn’t, And that’s what we’re looking at doing because we did a simple bucket test and a simple bucket test was able to show with this contaminant that we’re actually remediating. Shane showed me the formulation or the solution down there.

We took a test on the lab, an actual accredited lab, and then we ran that test. We did the formulation or the remediation with it. We let it set for an hour and we tested it again. Our lowest score is 88 percent all the way up to 100 percent non detectable and that was just a simple five gallon bucket test.

So you can imagine now. You know, start doing this later on, on a bigger scale, the pilot program that we’re looking at are the 80 acres. It’s just something very small from a 40 square mile contaminated site. [00:21:00]

Cheyne: I need it. I need to add something on there. So when Rudy talks about we’re reducing contaminants from 88 percent to non detectable, our bacteria don’t eat heavy metals.

That’s not a thing. That’s not possible. What we do is we take them out of the water and we take them out of the other organic compounds in there. So what the bacteria do is they go in and they essentially, they eat up all the organic matter that’s binding the heavy metals to sand, soil. Suspending it in the water and that means any of that organic matter that you test, any of the soil that you test or water that you test, those heavy metals aren’t going to be there.

We can siphon them off. There’s a company that develops these wash plants where we can do something like 80 tons an hour. They’re expensive, but if we hopefully got more [00:21:45] opportunities to work at Tile Creek, you’d be putting it through these wash plants. The heavy metals are still there. That’s a key, a key disclaimer.

It’s a solid. We, but we’re able to actually siphon them off and then pass that on to a company that’s specialized in that sort of thing, whether it’s sealing them in concrete, under roads, or anything of that matter. But at least now your water and your soil can be used for agriculture. Sure. After it’s been tested.

We not, we don’t just run it through the machine. That, that’s a doozy. Let’s put it in the ground. Let’s start growing food and letting people eat it. No, no, no. Everything gets tested afterwards. How do you siphon it off? So it’s, that’s, that’s not our company that does these wash plants. It’s, uh, this. Pretty cool dude.

He’s

Rudy: actually

Cheyne: a veteran. Yeah. He’s a veteran. He’s he’s here in Texas. He [00:22:30] X nuclear aircraft carry engineer. So he’s developed this pretty incredible machine that works with our solution to strip all the metals off, let all the organic matter siphon through, and he’s got his technology that, that captures it.

We use a very similar machine. Up in Kuwait, that’s the work that was going on up in, up in Kuwait, where we stripping all the oil out of that sand. That’s the goal. They still want the sand. You just need to get the oil out of there. That oil is not really recoverable. It might be able to be used for tar, bitumen, but they’re not worried about that.

So whether it’s complete remediation, all they want is that sand to be clean. And that’s where we’re getting 80 tons an hour up there, which is pretty an hour. Yes. It’s a big, it’s a big operation. As fast as we can dump it in, it’s going to be cleaning it out. Wow.

Crystal: I mean, there must be. pushback on this [00:23:15] because it sounds like almost magic in a bottle.

There we go. So what are the criticisms of it? And what do you, how do you respond to it? I can take on this

Rudy: one here because of the EPA think it’s magic in a bottle. They, they, they think of it as just another solution. Somebody wants to come up and look at that, but they don’t understand the science behind it.

So their, their assumption is going to be where, well, they’re paying the site to be. but it’s just nothing about relocation. We talked to the, some of the people that are actually doing the supposed to be remediation and they’re pushing it back down the boreholes that’s contaminated. So they’re pushing it back down in the water basin.

And it’s the same type of people that EPA is paying them to try to remediate it, but they’re not doing it the right [00:24:00] way.

Speaker 5: They’re just pushing it around.

Rudy: So,

Richard: yeah, because it seems like to me, you have, Two problems. One of them is the messaging and education problem to them, obviously, right? Because if they don’t understand it, so that’s an uphill battle because we’re talking about science, Crystal, like, like, like you and I, or especially you, you, you’re in this, like, like neck deep into climate change environment and you don’t really.

You can’t even wrap your brain, brain around it. So how are we supposed to, the public is one thing and then we got the politicians and policy EPA. I mean, we need all,

Rudy: we need help from higher echelons, you know, that’s what we’re really looking at and be able to understand it. We can educate them as well, but it’s an uphill battle and that’s where we’re at right now at ground level.

These are the battles that we’re having here in the [00:24:45] United States, but we know, you know, Um, looking at Tar Creek, that’s just one of them we’ve actually started doing and standing by for some military installations that are getting ready to come up. And some of the stuff that Shane and I have been doing, which is where everybody’s talking about climate change and carbon sequestration, Shane, you want to be able to kind of look at the percentage of the yield increase from the crops, looking at some of the testing if that’s okay.

Cheyne: So I’ll circle back to that if that’s okay. Um, what you’re saying just with the whole magic in the bottle and getting people’s heads around it. That’s where we keep trying to emphasize people. It’s, it can be very exciting to think we’re going to fix this with nature and it is, but it’s still a process.

And we keep saying again and again, we haven’t created anything. And that also doesn’t always sit right with the [00:25:30] scientific community who believes we got to make it in labs and it’s going to be super effective. And everything is so incredibly measurable. And what I was saying a little bit earlier is, so often with other remediation projects, and I’m not, I’m just saying this is how things have been done for a long time.

Every time you throw in a chemical to try extract this metal, I mean, with gold, they use all sorts of really nasty, heavy metals in there. Yeah. Um, cyanide’s one of them. Which is great

Richard: for

Cheyne: the human body. Incredible. I’m kidding kids, I’m kidding. And I mean, they are, you throw human solutions at it, you throw in chemicals which work.

When they say, this chemical, if we put in this dosage, we’re going to pull out this much metal, we know that. Great, what’s left over after that? And it’s almost like this big organogram. [00:26:15] Of all these things you got to remember and trucks need to be bringing this from out there and that to here and taking out this contamination to be done somewhere else.

And it can become a really intense process and it can take just as long as making the environment favorable to nature looking after itself. One, sorry, one of the things I highlighted down there to this point is that we are not magic. There’s something like 5 million gallons of oil. That’s been going on forever.

A lot of it off California that just bubbles up from the ocean floor. It’s seepage completely natural. If you had a 5 million gallon, I think Exxon Valdez was like 2 million or something, if you had 5 million dumps on your local beach, imagine the complete outcry, 5 million, 5

Speaker 5: millions over the entire world.

[00:27:00] Exactly. It’s very spread out. It’s definitely

Cheyne: very spread out. But I’m just saying with the volume of it, that’s coming out. It’s not like it’s floating to the surface and becoming a huge issue. Sure. These bacteria have evolved over millions of years. They feed off that. That’s their food source. So we’re not, we’re not doing anything too crazy.

And that’s what we keep trying to say is it might sound amazing. And it truly is when you let nature start taking care of itself. But with what we’re doing in the States, we just need the chance. We just need to Get the chance to do it.

Richard: It seems to me that the scientific community has forgotten one thing, one measurement, and that’s to include a feedback loop into the system, right?

Because if you think about it, oh, it’s great, it’s done, we did it. But then, if you have cyanide, it could be [00:27:45] 20 years to where it affects us, humans, right? Like, so, so where is the feedback loop? How come we’re not measuring that and the impact that it’s actually making, negative or positive?

Cheyne: I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s some incredible talks going on just about the incredible sway, for example, coal mines have at the Chantilly West ballroom.

And is it here at EarthX? Yeah. EarthX. Yeah. At the Hilton, anal at the Hilton, anal in Dallas, . And uh, is it Kentucky? Where you got the beautiful mountains and as you said, these, I believe it’s Kentucky. Don’t my American geography’s not fantastic. But

Crystal: you’re not American. No. You would’ve thought you drive down these East Texas.

Yeah. .

Cheyne: You drive down these main highways and they’ve left the front [00:28:30] facing mountains. The mountains that butt up against the roads. If you take a plane up or go satellite view. You’ll just check all these mountains that have just been crumbled down to dust to mine the other side. Yeah, behind the road.

But it didn’t look like it. No, they want you to see, they leave that. That’s, financially it’s worth it to leave it because then they don’t have to deal with the huge backlash.

Richard: Sure.

Cheyne: And they were talking about how these coal companies were suddenly just like, Okay, no pensions for our workers with black lung, all this, all that.

It’s, it’s scary. So if these companies have a vested interest in doing things their way, and they’ve got the right political clout and connections, they will do things their way and they’ll be punished for it.

Crystal: So to play off the The criticism that I hear of carbon storage on how like, Oh, [00:29:15] it’s gonna, you’re going to pump more oil because you’re capturing that carbon with the bioremediation that you guys have, maybe the chemical companies can turn around and be like, Oh, it’s all right if I pollute it cause I’m just going to throw these microbes on and

Cheyne: you

Crystal: know, nature will come back.

No problem.

Cheyne: I would love that, but it’s an admission of guilt. No one wants to do that. Well, I

Crystal: don’t, but the thing is like, could these companies just not feel like they need to change their ways at all? Because they’re like, Oh, we got the solution, we don’t have to. Yeah.

Rudy: And I’ve seen that here with the railroad commission of Texas, you know, looking at that where.

They don’t really push very hard on some of the stuff because from what these guys are already doing and when they’re fracking or they’re [00:30:00] drilling, they don’t have a lot of, they’d say, oh, we’ll do the test. There’s not a lot of contamination there, but you also have mud pits, you know, they have problems that they’re going through.

And they’re like, oh,

Crystal: it’s not that much. Yeah,

Rudy: exactly. These are the things you need to really kind of pay attention to. People now have been doing where as the burn off, you know, we have the flames out there. They’re looking to see how far does that travel down? So there’s a lot of things that pay attention to when you start talking about what she had mentioned.

Crystal: I don’t want these companies to feel like they don’t have to keep cleaning their methods. Yeah, that’s right. Does that make sense?

Richard: Yeah. With some tricky math, you could easily say, Oh, we’re now we’re net positive. Yeah. Zero. Yeah. [00:30:45] Zero.

Cheyne: Yeah. Yeah. They’re really good at tricky math. They are. Yeah. Somebody here was talking about

Speaker 5: like, Oh, our oil.

Yeah.

Crystal: I don’t know. Anyway, he was like, oh yeah, our oil drilling has become net negative.

Rudy: Wait, what? How does that

Crystal: work?

Rudy: They’re looking at that for Austin airport, okay? They’re looking at being carbon negative net zero. But I mean, there’s a lot of things that you see, you go out there, I mean, you You’re one thing saying that you’re trying to do this, but you’re not really.

Speaker 5: Right. Yeah. What are you leaving out of the equation?

Cheyne: Yeah, right. It’s almost like that whole thing, except maybe reverse engineered. A lot of these companies are taking those small steps, but they’re not taking the giant leap. Which, yeah, that needs to happen, [00:31:30] we’re getting to the tipping point, and you hear that all week, we’re getting to the tipping point with our climate, with the temperature, how much it’s risen, we’re getting to the tipping point, we’ve had incredible conversations, something like, oh, again, I don’t want to be misquoted, but 5 percent of all vertebrates on earth that are left, That’s the, it’s only 5 percent are wild.

The rest are human or tame animals, are cows, et cetera. Only around 5 percent of the vertebrates are wild. We got some wild

Richard: humans out there though, I’d say. In Texas? Everywhere.

Speaker 5: Concentrated in Texas. Yeah.

Cheyne: So, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s. It’s, it’s interesting. We, we are very much at a crossroads, I guess. And I mean, this is my first time coming to EarthX and it’s been great.

So shout out to EarthX. My mind’s been opened in so many directions. [00:32:15] It’s a bit scary when you learn how many more problems are there are than what you originally had in your brain. Cause there’s already a lot you can see going wrong on the earth. You know,

Richard: you said something about the, that giant leap, right?

Yes, sir. But don’t you think that there would be. An economic backlash if they did take that giant leap right because now you could be cutting jobs Oh, yeah, like there’s a whole nother like side of this that

Speaker 5: it doesn’t need to be stepped out

Richard: Our whole world is built around fossil fuels like we would starve

Speaker 5: but it needs to be phased

Richard: Sure.

Cheyne: The giant leap’s a nice idea. And it’s, I guess it’s a nice metaphor, but is it feasible? And I love the idea. [00:33:00] Is it practical? Certainly not at this point. We’ll see what’s going to, what developments are coming out.

Sure. But

Crystal: I think with all the pushing for the idyllic giant leap, it’s actually getting the needle to move.

Speaker 6: Definitely.

Crystal: Because when, when you’re just there like, Oh, we should do it little by little by little can take a little bit longer, I think.

Richard: And it doesn’t feel. It’s like the Law of Diffusion that you and I were talking about yesterday, Crystal.

It’s like if you, if you just start and focus on like that 2%, that difference, right? And then get it up to that, the next, uh, little bit. And then eventually it will reach a tipping point to where we can push forward, but we may not know that tipping point. And what I hope, even at 44, that that tipping point for change isn’t too late before the, [00:33:45] Yeah.

the tipping point of, yeah. The systems in the world. Because it feels like we’re getting pretty close. It does. The systems are like, yeah, they’re starting to teeter. And you feel it. And I think only now are people waking up to this, right? And so that’s why like people like you guys.

Rudy: You know, they’re looking at it.

They’re scrambling. You know, all right. Everybody’s talking about climate change. You see these big corporations that are coming in and they’re scrambling looking to see how they can do it better. You know? So with that, I mean, it’s like, join the fight.

Crystal: Yeah. That’s a good, that’s a good fight. Like, how can I do it better?

I can do it better than you. Yeah. I’m better than you.

Richard: But the bioremediation, I think it’s a very solid start.

Crystal: Sounds like it.

Rudy: Thank you for telling

Richard: us about it.

Rudy: We would love to follow up looking at more of trying to see where we’re [00:34:30] at and. A follow up with maybe another episode looking at where we’re at six months or, you know, 12 months down the line.

Crystal: Yeah, because I really want to see what it looks like on the ground.

Richard: Sure. You know, tell me what Oh, you want to figure it out there, huh?

Crystal: Oh, well, that too. That would be fun.

Richard: Come on.

Crystal: Yeah, we’ll put some weighters on you. Like, see, and, and just, it proves, you know, okay, we thought it would be this way. The bucket test told us it would be like this, and the Our football field test is telling us it looks like this.

So, yeah.

Cheyne: I just want to put out a disclaimer. I’m not a PhD soil scientist, biomechanical engineer. So if anyone listening to this is that, and they’ve got an issue with what I have to say, please give us a call. Our, our founders, our head scientists are incredible people. They love these kinds of discussions.

[00:35:15] So if anyone else out there wants to learn more, we’d be happy. We really enjoy I’m teaching other people about it, so.

Richard: You said it in a manner, like, I barely got out of middle school, I think, I don’t know. Right? But I mean, but I understand it. Like, seriously, Crystal, I understand it in a way that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s nice to know that this stuff is happening and there are good people trying to do good things with.

We say advanced technologies, but this is not an advanced technology. This is something we’re going back to the very

Speaker 5: basics.

Richard: That’s

Rudy: amazing. I love it. And we always look at, you know, it’s like we’ve got a billion employees, you know, they’re all micros. Right. Yeah. That’s a great way to look at it. We’re older than dirt.

Cheyne: It’s true. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. [00:36:00] So we’re having fun. We’re learning a lot. Every time we. We are always interested in taking on new projects, so I mean some of our R& D at the moment is we’re talking to some universities in Japan trying to get some of their radioactive waste because it’s scientifically accepted there’s certain fungi and microbes that feed off radioactive waste.

They’re wanting

Crystal: to like put it in the, in Fukushima. Fukushima, yeah. They already started.

Speaker 5: They are. They’re releasing it into the ocean.

Richard: Yeah, you want to go swimming?

Cheyne: So that’s one of the areas we’re looking at is, what can we do? And again, we’re not trying to make this big claim on how we’re going to fix everything.

But we are interested in looking into any avenue we can. So, yeah. Do

Speaker 5: you have any other questions? I mean, well, I mean,

Richard: honestly, I could keep talking to him, but I, I [00:36:45] guess we’ll get forward with my questions. And thank you for having me, Crystal. What a fascinating conversation.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. This was, this was great.

And I really appreciate what you brought to the table because it’s a different perspective.

Rudy: Yeah, it’s a different point of view. Yeah, exactly. You know, and being here at EarthX, meeting you guys, you know, for 2024 is, is great.

Richard: Yeah.

Rudy: It’s been

Cheyne: good.

Richard: Come back in 2025 and give us an update.

Cheyne: I’m planning on it.

I said, he’s been having such a great time. I’ve been loving it. The people here are just incredible. I mean, I’ve been to a couple of conferences in my life and this is the first time where I didn’t meet a bad person while I was here. And that’s, I think a pretty special thing EarthX has got going for it.

And I’ve already said, I’m, I’m booking my tickets as soon as they come online. Who wouldn’t want to be at this kind of event?

Richard: The goal is the same. And the [00:37:30] fact that there’s not competition, like we think of competition in business or it, we all have to do something.

Crystal: I hate to wrap this up right here, but I lost track of time and the other show needs the podcast room right now.

So I’m sorry we have to end it here, but thank you guys for joining us and thank you for all that you do. You’re making a difference.

Rudy: Thank you so much, God bless. guys, this has been amazing. That was fun. See you guys.

Crystal: Bioremediation reminds us of the incredible potential of nature to help us solve even the most daunting environmental challenges. That said though, it’s important to [00:38:15] recognize that bioremediation Isn’t without its critiques. It requires time, careful planning and monitoring, and it’s not a one size fits all solution.

Challenges like the potential for toxic byproducts, contamination, scalability, and the need for specific environmental conditions reminds us that while nature has incredible tools, The application requires thoughtful stewardship. Still, hearing from Shane and Rudy, it’s clear that these tools hold immense promise when used wisely.

If today’s conversation sparked your curiosity, there’s no better place to dive deeper into topics like this than at EarthX, the world’s largest environmental gathering. [00:39:00] Tickets for their event in April are on sale now at earthx. org. Be sure to grab yours and join the global community working towards a healthier, more sustainable planet.

And before we go, a big thank you to my co host Richard Harmer for bringing his energy and perspective to this episode. Keep an ear out for his new show, the EarthX Pro Planet Podcast, where he’ll explore the people and projects making a difference for our environment. I’ll catch you next time.

Don’t forget to go to forcesfornature. com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? [00:39:45] I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming Forces for Nature, and let me know what actions you have been taking.

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