Rain Maker's Augustus Doricko on China's 38,000-person weather modification army and the race to control global water supply

Summary

Augustus Doricko, CEO of Rain Maker Technology Corporation, argues that China's weather modification program has crossed from a domestic infrastructure story into a geopolitical one, and that the United States is losing ground.

China's scale and exports

The Chinese Meteorological Administration runs a $300 million annual budget for weather modification, employs 38,000 people exclusively on the program, and has two universities offering bachelor's degrees in weather engineering. China is retrofitting its Wing Long 2 drone, the military equivalent of the MQ-9 Reaper, for cloud seeding operations to fill snowpack in Tibet and create a managed water supply for urban, industrial, and agricultural use across the country.

The international dimension is the sharper concern. The CMA has stated it wants to export cloud seeding as soft power. Wing Long 2s have already been sold to Saudi Arabia and Egypt for defense applications, and the same drones can be retrofitted for weather modification. Rain Maker lost a customer meeting in the Middle East when the prospective client cancelled the day before to fly to China to discuss Wing Long 2 procurement. When Rain Maker visits international offices, Doricko says they see stacks of Chinese purchase orders and two-page documents from American companies.

Technical advantages

China is running parallel research tracks using drone-based aerial seeding, ground generators, and acoustic systems with 130-decibel speaker arrays in Tibet to shake water out of clouds. Its most significant technical lead, in Doricko's assessment, is in ice nucleation agents. Nanoparticle-scale titanium dioxide coatings on salt crystals are materially more efficient at triggering precipitation than existing methods. Rain Maker is researching this area but is behind.

The regulatory barrier

Thirty-one states proposed legislation to ban weather modification this year. Almost all dropped the bills, partly due to Rain Maker's lobbying efforts. Florida made weather modification a class two felony carrying a five-year prison sentence. Doricko frames this less as a Florida problem and more as a signal of where Republican political sentiment could go without clear federal policy. Without an explicit federal stance in favor of weather modification, the US cedes the field to China by default.

The case for cloud seeding in the American West

13% of all electricity in California is consumed moving water around the state. The California Department of Natural Resources has planned for 500,000 to 1 million acres of Central Valley farmland to be fallowed in the next five years due to water shortages, even in a year when reservoirs were full and snowpack was strong. Columbia gets 80% of its power from hydroelectric generation and is currently experiencing rolling blackouts during a drought.

Cloud seeding over the Sierras could refill dams, reduce the energy cost of water transport, and add clean base-load capacity without waiting for nuclear plants or solving solar's nighttime gap.

Doricko is skeptical about desalination as a western US solution. Moving ocean-desalted water inland to Nevada, Colorado, or Utah is not economically viable because water is too cheap and too heavy to truck. Cloud seeding produces water where the clouds already are.