← CERAWeek Podcast with Atul Arya
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Sarawik podcast, where the world's energy leaders and innovators share insights on the future of energy, technology and climate. I am Atul Arya, Chief energy strategist at S and P Global. In each episode, we dive into the critical issues and bold ideas shaping our energy future. So let's get started. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Sarah Week podcast. I am Atul Arya, chief energy strategist at SMP Global and today we're going to take a deep dive into one of the most interesting set of technologies in the race to energy transition. So joining me today for that conversation is Kim Hedegaard, Power to X CEO at Topso. Kim, welcome to Sarah Big podcast.
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Thank you very much as well.
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So let's start at a high level. Just tell us a little bit about Topso and for the few people in the audience who don't know about Power to X, what is it?
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So let's start out a little bit by Topso first. Topso is an almost 100 years old company founded on science and understanding, especially surface science. That is basically our legacy and where we come from. So we are a leading global supplier of technology and of solutions for the energy transition. Just to give you a little bit of context on what it means when we say a leading supplier. We deliver. Our technologies are today used for roughly a third of the world's production of low carbon hydrogen and also gray hydrogen. And roughly a third of the world's operating sustainable aviation fuel plants are also using topshield technology. So we are a significant player. In addition to that, we are one of the players that continue to introduce new technologies. And one of the spaces that we've been focusing on for the last couple of years is that PTX space. So to your first question, ato, which is a really good place to start, what is ptx? And I think the simplest way to explain that is to say that is the technology that basically converts electrons into molecules, irrespective of what molecule it is. It is that connector between the electrical space and the chemical space.
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Yeah. And also if I can add those electrons, you're hoping to get them as zero carbon electrons ultimately. Right. So you create zero carbon molecules and then you get to the transition. Is that correct?
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That is correct. So we prefer to work with, if not zero carbon electrons. We prefer to work with low carbon electrons. That's the methodology and that's the space that we prefer to work in where we introduce basically low carbon solutions to the market.
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You said in your answer about surface technology, so can you Say what you mean by surface technologies.
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Yes, absolutely I can. So that's the DNA of the company of Tropso. Yes, that is understanding what happens. So we come out of catalysis, basically. So what happens on the surface of a catalyst? How does molecules interact, how do you split molecules, how do you put them back together? And that knowledge about surface science and surface chemistry, that is the same fundamental understanding that you use in electrolysis. Especially when we start later to talk about high temperature electrolysis. It is a very science heavy field.
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Yeah, exactly. So that's very good that we are talking about this today. So let's talk about sort of green hydrogen and E fuels. They are both important parts of your portfolio. So let's start with green hydrogen. My understanding is that people are slowing down their investments in green hydrogen. Isn't that the case?
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Yes, absolutely. Investments in green hydrogen. Both when we talk about the technology of producing and supplying green hydrogen and when we talk about the projects that are going to consume, produce and consume green hydrogen, we see a slowdown. It's very important to differentiate here between a stop and a slowdown. We still see a continued investment. We see very, very, very large investments, both in US, in the Middle east, in Europe and in Asia. But if you compare to the amount of money that was being funneled into this, if we had had this interview two or three years ago, there is a significant slowdown on the investments. That's sure.
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That's not a bad thing though, isn't it? Because we need to get the technology commercially, you know, viable. So slowing. What do you think? Is that okay, if things just slow down a bit? They're going too fast, too quick, I thought. Right.
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I agree 100% with you answer. I even think we were beyond a hype cycle. If we go two or three years back. I think there were too many unsubstantiated claims. There were too many projects that didn't stick in the real world. We were basically on a trajectory that was unrealistic. What we see right now, it has been that the maturing of both the technologies, but also maturing of projects. So we see now it's the things that actually have a viability, a business case, viability and an industrial viability. Those are the ones that survive today and continue to push forward.
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Let's talk about maturing of one of the most important technologies and projects which you are working on. So you started a commercial operation of solid oxide electrolysis facility in Denmark. So why is this technology so important?
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Fundamentally, the high temperature electrolysis technology Is important for one reason. It is 30% more efficient in converting electrons into molecules. So look at it this way. You get 30% more molecules for the same amount of electricity, or you use 30% electricity to produce the same amount of molecules. That gives you a multitude of opportunities to save investments in the value chain. You can spend 30% less money on building out your renewable energy, your power grid, your substations, your power supplies, all these different things that are in high demand at the moment. Or if you have the electrons readily available, you will get 30% more product. Or you could say a product at one third at lower price, exactly 2/3 of the cost coming out at the other end.
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You mentioned high temperature. Can you say there's something important about that, isn't it?
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The high temperature is critical to understand. So this is not magic or something new that has been invented. It is simple thermodynamics. Basically, how much energy do you need to split water at ambient temperature, which is slightly above ambient temperature, between 30 and 70 degrees, which you do in the classical electrolysis technologies. And the roughly 800 degrees C that we use, that difference, that is that 30% difference in energy consumption.
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So it's easier to split water at that, which is water vapor, I guess, by that time, isn't it into, you know, at that high 800 degree temperature?
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Exactly. It's easier. And by easier you mean to use less energy to split the water? Yes, exactly.
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You know, what are some of the ways you think the cost for this technology will come down? Do you see sort of geographical advantage for the technology because of the cost of energy, which is a big part.
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That's a couple of really, really good questions. And I told there are a couple of things if we look at the cost that needs to happen. So one thing that needs to happen is further development of the technology. We are now in our journey where we offer commercially viable solutions to our customers. But there more than could be done. We can increase the current density, we can reduce the cost of the material. So there's something that needs to happen on the technical side. But as all other things, when you start industrializing it, one of the biggest driver is scale. We have seen that with photovoltaics, we have seen that with wind turbines. Up in scale means down in cost. And that is an incredibly important part of green hydrogen and derivatives. We need to get up in scale to get down in cost.
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And how big is the plant you just started? What's the scale of.
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So the manufacturing facility that we have built here In Denmark is 500 megawatt of electrolyzer components a year.
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So that's a pretty significant scale, isn't it? You must have done some pilots before you started this plant.
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So important to say that this plant doesn't produce hydrogen, it produces components for electrolyzers. It basically produces cells and stacks for. For electrolyzers.
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I see.
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But it is the largest plant of its size globally and the most technically advanced. But yes, of course we have done development on this technology since the early 1980s. So it is a newly industrialized technology, but it is not per se, a new technology.
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What about the geography question? Does certain geographies advantages?
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So not necessarily geographies, but there are a number of, you could say facilities, boundary conditions that make high temperature electrolysis more efficient. One thing, when you operate at these high temperatures, you don't want to cool down and heat up. So let's say an off the grid solar fan wouldn't match a high temperature solution very easily. Unit continuous or almost continuous availability of electrons. So a combined wind or solar farm, or a solar farm connected to the grid, nuclear or hydropower. So it's more those kind of things that defines the viability or the competitiveness of high temperature electrolysis. And then of course also the cost of electrons. When electrons are, you could say, in high demand and price increases and your utilization suddenly becomes more important. So the higher price point you have, the more important efficiency and hence the top story approach to electrolysis, the more important that becomes. So again when we then correlate a little bit with your question on geographies, we see North America, we see Europe, we see Northern Africa, maybe some applications in the Middle East. It's really interesting, but we basically see play for, you could say all the electrolysis technologies that are available out there. Also the ones that we don't offer to the market, we see a play for them and we actually see a synergy between low and high temperature solutions.
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That's very interesting. Around the world you are seeing opportunities, right? What I'm seeing, Kim, is that there are some projects which are going ahead, whereas others are. And we just talked about it, you know, from the hype cycle we have come down. So what is separating a successful project from those which are struggling?
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A couple of things are separating these things. The first and most important thing is that you need project developers that understand and are able to mitigate risk. You need to understand the risk picture in these things. Not only the technical risk, but the risk of having a customer to sell your product to. The risk of the cost of capital the risk of having access to power. There are so many different components of this. So we actually see that the quality of the project developer is extremely important. But if there is one common denominator on projects that continue at the moment, then it is optic. Optic is incredibly important. Of course, that is typically the last piece of the puzzle that the project developers that they miss. Yeah.
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From what I understand, the cost of say hydrogen, green hydrogen are still quite high. So are you seeing people still getting, you know, offtake agreements? What's been your experience?
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But we definitely see people getting offtake agreements, maybe especially where there is, you could say incentives, so political structures to support either the manufacturing or where there are penalties for not decarbonizing your operations. So atul, when you say a high price, I actually become a little happy because that means that people understand still where are we in that journey of driving down the cost of hydrogen? So the most ambitious players at the moment, they are looking around, let's say three to four US dollars per kilogram of hydrogen produced. We see a pathway to taking that towards $2 per kg within the next couple of years.
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Well, that's a huge improvement.
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That is a massive improvement. And something where we believe that even without subsidies, that we can be competitive with hydrogen with a higher carbon intensity.
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Now, just one other question about the projects. Your role as topso role is you are a provider of technology, but you are then working with sort of project developers, EPC companies, and then the off takers. Is that how. Just describe how all of these things come together.
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So if we start there, ansel on what is it that Chopshare delivers? So Chopshot delivers basically three things. We deliver the hardware. So we deliver the electrolyzer, the ammonia loop or the methanol loop. We deliver the hardware to convert electrons into molecules. Then we deliver what we call a service package, which basically means that we believe we are the ones that are best qualified to provide guarantees. In order to provide a guarantee, you need to replace components. So what we try to do is that we take away the risk of the owner. So we say if you provide that many electrons into your electronizer, we guarantee that this many molecules comes out at the other end and everything in between there. We guarantee it and we replace wan tap outs. So that is our delivery into the value chain. But then as you say, then there's typically a project developer in there. We don't do project development ourselves. So there's a project developer. Then there will typically also be an EPC company and then there'll be an offtaker, then there'll be financiers, then there'll be typically maybe a local operator, then there'll be legislators. You typically end up in maybe a conglomerate of, let's say five to ten critical stakeholders in order to make this happen.
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So these are pretty complex projects to put together, isn't it?
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They are both very complex and very capital intensive to put in place. Yes.
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So that's a good segue to my next question. You know, if you look at the power to X overall as a whole, where do you see the fastest sort of near term growth but also the biggest long term impact? Give us sort of two part answer to this.
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Again a super good question and I'm sorry at all if it becomes a little complicated because we see near term growth being driven very, very much by two slightly different things. One is project developers that are so far advanced that they are basically ready to take fid. There are a couple of those that are right now within months of taking FIDs on very large PTX plants. So that's one thing where we see actual near term growth. The other part on near term growth is where we have legislation we could take implementation of RED3 in Europe and the demands that that puts on refiners. We see European refiners move quite significantly right now to meet those requirements within re. So those would be the big pockets. If we then look a little bit further into the future, we see more, you could say clusters centered around sh, shipping fuel. Depending of course on what happens with imo. We see movements in the green steel space with the whole. And one of the drivers here is for example the recent legislation from the EU that European car manufacturers can continue to produce combustion engine vehicles if they offset that CO2 emission, for example, by using green steel. So we see a lot of interest in green steel cropping off now again, a little more actual IMO for shipping and green steel, maybe more when we look towards 2030. And then there's of course sustainable aviation fuel where you already have the legislation in place and where there's already production ongoing.
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What I'm seeing is that when we talk about liquid fuels, SAF and then shipping fuel because the current fuel mix, which is mostly oil based, is so high carbon content, but it also needs high energy density. So having this power to X creates a cleaner fuel with similar or same or in some cases I think even better energy density, isn't it? That makes it a really good alternative, although at a higher cost.
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Today we know that I think at energy density it's very Very, very hard to compete with oil if it has an extremely high energy density. But what we can do for example with molecules or with liquids such as, as ammonia and methanol, which are right now the preferred options in the shipping space, is that we can create a viable option. So something that's liquid that can be used in the current infrastructure where there are engines that are basically ready to be used for these fuels, we provide a viable option at a price point that is competitive, but competitive right now because of legislation, competitive in long term as we discussed earlier because of that industrial ramp up and thereby the breakdown in costs.
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Very interesting. So 10 to 15 years ahead, what do you see as how big a role clean hydrogen and E fuels will play in the overall global energy system?
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So if you look at what we believe is the potential application for low carbon fuels, it touches roughly one third of the 20 to 30% of the global CO2 emission because that's the part of the emissions that you cannot directly electrify, at least at the moment where there is no direct electrification available. So we see in that space, and if we're just talking 5 to 10% of that, we're still talking terawatts of electrolysis that is required and millions of tons of hydrogen. But I think we have to be careful that we don't go back to the hype cycle being caught up in what does this industry look like in 10 or 15 or 30 years. The important thing right now is to stay on path with these first of a kind projects so that we provide confidence to the industry, to the off takers of these molecules, to the financiers and ultimately to the consumers. To you and me, when we pay for having our products shipped around the world, I think that initial confidence, so we don't get ahead of ourselves, we don't want to get back on the hype cycle. We want this transition to be built on facts and understanding of the finances and the technical aspects behind it.
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Just to talk a bit more about the technology and the fuels here. So the way I see it that you know, as you said, oil has such great fuel density and advantages, but at the same time you look at heavy duty transport, in particular ships and even heavier road transport and then of course air transport, there is really not a electric option directly, isn't it? Because if you're going to put some batteries or anything, they're going to add the weight and that's just a. Doesn't really work. So you have to think about some kind of a molecular solution which is Kind of where your thinking has been at topsoil. Tell us how are you thinking about it.
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So we have both, you could say the advantage and the curse. Many of us have a science background and I think one of the first things that you're taught in engineering school is changing energy forms is a bad idea because you will lose energy. So that's also why we say things that can be directly electrified should be, they should be. So electrical cars makes a lot of sense because they can be electrified. And then of course I also know that there are challenges with battery materials and with rare earth materials and all these different things that you also have to take into consideration. But we believe that we need to start focusing on those, as you said, until the heavy transport, where today there is no alternatives. It is either fossil based solutions or it is these low carbon solutions that we are trying to promote. If we have a different solution, if we can cross the Atlantic in 20 years in a battery powered airplane, then I think we should. But today that is not a viable option. So if we want to have alternatives, the only viable alternative today is the PTX solutions. Yes.
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And I should just say, just to conclude on the technology point, I remind my colleagues that you just cannot break the laws of thermodynamics. Right. That's what we are taught in the first year of engineering. You know, they have been proven for decades and centuries.
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No matter how many spreadsheets you build or how many promises you make or how many conferences you go to, I think that's a very wise thing to remember. Breaking the fundamental thermodynamics, that is not going to help.
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Yeah, that's right. So Kim, you are in Europe in one of the sort of, I would say the greenest countries in Europe. But overall, how should the energy industry you're part of rebalance energy security, affordability and sustainability when the world is moving very fast? And it's also very complex, right?
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Yes, definitely. And that's maybe one of the biggest changes that we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months is that complexity that has happened. And the whole discussion around affordability and energy security, we are trying to promote in that context possibility to these things. Unfortunately, one of the discussions that have happened in Europe is European defence. How does European defense make sure that you have the available fuels, you are actually able to combine local production of fuels with defense. Now you have a possibility basically to utilize one of the challenges that Europe is facing with one of so the immediate threat of war with a long term challenge on how do you replace the Dependence on fossil fuels and fossil fuels import in Europe. And then we understand and we acknowledge that the cost component is. That is something that the industry and legislators have to solve together. You cannot rely on the individual consumers to fix that problem. That needs to be a political and industrial decision.
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Having more security of supply through other sources of primary energy. Right. Not just oil and gas or coal is a good thing. And Europe is kind of at the center of that because Europe does not have those fossil fuels. And great. It has some, but not in the volumes it will need going into the future.
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No, no. But the vast majority of the fossil fuels that are being consumed in Europe are imported from outside. And I do believe that fossil fuels will continue to play a major role in the energy mix. Being an engineer by training, the math just doesn't match. If you want to transition everything to renewable energy, you would need vast amounts of nuclear energy to be put into the energy system in a short span of time. The load that that would put on the power grid. And I think we have to understand this is an energy infrastructure that we have built over the last hundred years. It is not something that will fundamentally change in five years. It doesn't work like that. It's a long play. But it's a very, very important thing that we keep on track.
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Yeah, I tell everybody, let's not forget we are in hardware business and not software business. Right. People are spoiled by being so close to software. You can get a version upgrade on your phone in a couple of minutes. Doesn't happen in the world of energy. Right.
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Very, very, very, very much agree.
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Last question. You are coming to Sarawik, what are you going to be looking forward to when you're in Houston?
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Apart from the possibility to meet old colleagues and friends and the remaining part of the value chain? The main thing that will interest me when I go to Sarawik is the dialogue between the different players in the energy space, from refiners to project developers to renewable energy developers. And now also, of course, data centers and hyperscalers. Because I think that has been one of the fundamental pillars of how we have approached it. We need to work together, all of us, the oil majors, the project developers, the renewable energy developers, the PTX suppliers, the consumers of the fuels. We need to listen to each other and we need to collaborate. This doesn't have to be a competition. We can do this holding hands.
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Yeah, absolutely. And of course, meeting people from all over the world. That will be another big thing. Kim, CEO for Power to X at Topso. Thank you very much. For joining us for this Sarah Week Podcast.
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Atul, thank you very much for having me. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
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Thank you for joining us on the Sarah Week Podcast to stay connected with the ideas driving change across energy and technology. Subscribe, share and rate this episode. It helps us get the word out. Let's continue having impactful conversations. I'm Atul Arya. Until the next time, the saraweek Podcast
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with Atul Aria is brought to you by saraweek, the world's premier energy conference. Be part of the conversations moving the world of Energy Forward, March 23 27, 2026 in Houston.
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Discover more@saraweek.com.