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Energy Gang
Does clean hydrogen have a future? Finding a role for hydrogen in a low-carbon energy economy
01:08:53
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- [00:01]
A
The energy industry is changing faster than ever. So to make sure we're helping you stay on top of every development, we'll be adding some extra shows to the schedule over the coming weeks. First up, we'll be at New York Climate Week speaking with leaders in clean energy, finance and policy and partnering with our good friends at NYU for a very special panel discussion with some big names from companies including Nvidia and Amazon. That episode will be out on Friday, September 27th, so mark your diaries now. And we'll also have lots of extra shows throughout the week of September 22, so make sure you're following the show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Energy Gang, a discussion show from Wood mackenzie about the fast changing world of energy. I'm Ed Crookes and on this episode we're going to be talking about hydrogen, sometimes called the Swiss army knife of decarbonization because it has such a wide range of potential uses. But right now it feels as though some of the blades on that knife are turning out to be quite blunt. And that's what we're going to be talking about on this show. To do that, I'm joined by Melissa Lott, who is the partner General Manager for Energy Technologies at Microsoft. Hi, Melissa, welcome back.
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B
Hey, Ed, it's good to see you. Looking forward to this, this chat, this discussion we're going to have.
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A
Absolutely. Great to see you again. As usual, we have to issue that standard corporate disclaimer and any views expressed on this podcast are yours personally, not those of the Microsoft Corporation. Just to get that out of the way.
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B
Exactly. I'm just here to nerd out as a multi decadal energy nerd who really thinks about these things to an interesting degree every day.
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A
Indeed. And we are very, very glad that you are. And we've also invited onto the show. I don't know if you'd be offended if we called you a nerd as well, Austin, but he's certainly.
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B
I think it's a compliment.
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A
Exactly.
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C
I think. Cold. Worse.
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A
Exactly. In this company, it definitely counts as a compliment. I think he's got a very good claim to be counted as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject of the hydrogen business. He is Austin Knight, who is the Vice President of Hydrogen for Chevron New Energies. Hi, Austin. Welcome to the Energy Gang.
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C
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you again, Ed, and I'll take any title you bestow upon me.
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A
Excellent. Well, yeah, as I say, very much meant as a Compliment here. Before we get into the main topic of our discussion today about hydrogen, I think it's always nice when we get people who are new to the show to get them to talk a bit about their careers in energy, how they got interested in the business in the first place, and how they got to the positions they now hold. So, Austin, perhaps could you tell us a bit about your story? How did you first get interested in. In the energy business and what was the career path that led you to the job you've got now?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. I, I started my career and EPC industry and it was doing megaprojects for, for energy. And I've been sort of tangential to the energy industry ever since. I went from EPC into industrial gases and there that was supplying the world's largest energy companies, oil and gas refining, petrochemical facilities, heavy industries. And all of a sudden we saw this mix of energy transition topics affecting everything that was energy intensive. And I had always had this belief, I think it came from being in Houston for so long, that energy was this essential building block that powered our world that everybody's lives was made better from. But that didn't get enough credit where I thought it was deserved for what it does for our world. And I had the opportunity to come to Chevron to lead the hydrogen business just about three years ago and so made that transition from energy being tangential to what I was doing directly into the middle of energy and the future of energy.
- [03:59]
A
Clearly you've been then doing that job at a very kind of hot time for hydrogen. But certainly in the last few months, I think questions have been growing about where the industry is really headed. I suppose probably a good place to start that discussion, though, is to think about the first principles here. Why hydrogen? When you think about hydrogen's role in the energy system, what is it and what could it be? And why are companies like Chevrolet and many, many others seeing an opportunity there?
- [04:36]
C
The why for hydrogen is quite simple, that on a trajectory towards net zero, it is cheaper to achieve net zero by utilizing hydrogen in certain sectors than it is to achieve net zero without utilizing hydrogen at all. And it is the right fit for a number of applications that we can talk about on that lower carbon pathway. And so at Chevron, we start with a belief that the future of energy is lower carbon. The world is headed that direction and we look at what do we bring to the table that can meet those challenges of the future, bring those solutions where we have strengths. We look at our strengths as the capabilities that we have the assets we operate around the world and the customers that we serve that are looking for new products, complementary products to what we supply today. And hydrogen is one of those that fits really well both with what we know how to do and what we think is essential for this lower carbon future.
- [05:38]
B
Ed use the term Swiss army knife. We, I think a lot of us who work in the space use it. Swiss army knives, if I had to have one tool can be really good. Swiss army knife does not replace my favorite at home toolbox. Right. And so Austin, you just hit it there where you said, in some applications, in some spaces, this is not the utopia. Everything is easy from here. You know, we can hook arms and skip down the merry way all the way to net zero fast, but in some applications it is a good tool and you're glad you have it. And it can be very useful to deploy. And this is a different conversation than I feel like we've had at some points in the last couple of decades. I've been working in this where there are these moments where it's like hydrogen everywhere for everything. Oh, wait for nothing. Oh, wait for some things. And I just feel like it's important to highlight that part of the conversation. Yes, hydrogen could be used, you could use a Swiss army knife for a lot of stuff. But it doesn't make a lot of sense if you're trying to, you know, really, I don't know, get underneath the kitchen sink and you're going into that plumbing project. You need to crank that down so you don't have a leak. You probably don't want to do that with the Swiss army knife. You want a proper wrench. So just want to double click on that because I think it's such an important thing to acknowledge in this conversation.
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C
Yeah, I think it's exactly right, Melissa. You know, I, I mentioned to start, this is a more affordable way to achieve those goals in certain sectors than in others. And throughout the years there's there has been a lot of talk of it's either this or that and it's never both. We think there needs to be really an all in conversation of what are all the different solutions at our disposal. And then as chevron we're looking at, okay, so what do we actually bring to that? We're not going to bring every solution to everything, but we do have a lot of skills that we're very proud of and global capabilities that we want to apply where it fits. And that's where we see there is no one size fits all solution here. Even in Hydrogen and where hydrogen applications may fit, you're always going to have alternatives. And it's so easy to just talk about averages or one solution or this versus that. The reality is always much more nuanced.
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A
And as you were saying, Melissa, there has been this sort of series of cycles of hype, tremendous enthusiasm at times, deep despondency at others, kind of hydrogen bubbles inflating and then being punctured. Where are you in terms of that cycle? Do you feel like, I mean, if you think about the world, I would say it feels as though the world is on a bit of a downswing of that cycle. And we'll get into some of the reasons why. I think that probably at the moment. But in terms of your views, Melissa, are you level headed about what hydrogen could really do?
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B
There's so many gas puns that just came up in that, in that series of words, in that question.
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A
I love it.
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B
And I don't know if you meant to do that, but that was fantastic.
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A
Partly intentionally.
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B
That's great. No, but within it I. So here's. I'm actually more optimistic, but not in the way that you might think. So I get optimistic when conversations get practical. I get optimistic when we start saying what is it actually going to take? And in all the different steps of the energy transition, these things are challenging. There's trade offs in everything that we do, there's impacts in everything we do. There's, you know, pathways that were designed to do something differently than what we're trying to do now and we're having to navigate them. And I get optimistic the minute we get real about the practical decisions that have to be made to move something forward. And to me, hydrogen has gone from the hydrogen future, the hydrogen revolution. It's so cool. Details. We'll figure those out to like, okay, how do we do this in these places that make sense to do it? So I'm more optimistic because of that, in the sense of. I'm optimistic that if hydrogen is going to have a significant role in different parts of the energy system in the future, we're on a path that can take us to a practical pathway forward, there as know to achieve that, as opposed to hype and dream and big words and flashy things that aren't substantial behind it, if that makes sense.
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A
Yeah, that is a great point. And just for anyone who hasn't been following the long and tortuous debate about the hydrogen rainbow, that's for instance, say you have different pathways for low carbon hydrogen, get labeled with different colours. So green hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water using renewable power. Blue hydrogen is made from natural gas, where the carbon dioxide from that production process is then captured and stored. You have gold hydrogen, which is naturally occurring. You have what is sometimes called pink or yellow hydrogen, which is produced by electrolysis using nuclear power. And there's quite a few others. Right. There's turquoise.
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B
I lose track, but there's so many colors. Ed, that Julio Friedman, he's not carbon direct, but we were colleagues at Columbia University together for a few years. I've known him for longer than that, but we actually busted out in a song in a podcast we did together about the hydrogen rainbow. This was a few years ago on the big switch.
- [10:44]
C
When I think about the hydrogen rainbow, there's pink and blue and green and yellow, brown and gray and turquoise, too. The only question you should ask is, is it clean for me and you? So we don't want to get bogged down in the colors because the colors become like lingo. It's more important to think, is it clean?
- [11:03]
B
I again, like, I think it's important. We need to know the supply chain. We need to know the process by which hydrogen was made, because that's important in verifying its footprint. But, man, I got a little weary of what color am I referring to? Is it net zero hydrogen or not?
- [11:19]
C
Yeah. And I think the way we have to encourage people to think about it is, what is your purpose for switching to hydrogen? And then what is the carbon intensity of that? Because the colors themselves, it's. It is good shorthand for those of us that are in the industry, and we're talking about the different production pathways, but the reality is, we're doing this. Hydrogen is a lever for reducing carbon footprint, and the carbon intensity of how that hydrogen is produced really matters. And so, you know, if somebody says green or blue or any of these other colors, I say, well, tell me what that means in terms of carbon intensity. You know, the production pathway for blue can result in something very close to zero or something not all close to zero, depending on what is actually being done in that process. And so it is useful shorthand, but it doesn't tell you the thing that really matters most, which, in my opinion, is the carbon intensity, because ultimately, you're replacing something else, because this is the best way to reduce the carbon intensity of an operation.
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B
Well, and I should say, like, within this, from a public policy perspective and the policy discussions about, is your goal net zero? Is your goal net? No fossil fuels? Is your goal net no coal? Like, what. What is the goal. If the goal is about reducing carbon emissions, then I just want to know how emissions intensive that fuel is. If I have other goals which could come up from any number of things. When I lived in New Zealand, for example, nuclear was a non starter for a bunch of very deeply rooted priorities in those communities in that country. No judgment here, just stating that that was their priorities. And so it was one of those. I need to know if nuclear is involved in this because if it is and it is produced in my, in New Zealand, in that country, then it's a non starter. But yeah, it's. What is your goal starting there, what is your goal? And then how does hydrogen maybe or maybe not fit into it? That's, that's how I think about it. So. Right on with you, Austin. I think we're all nodding.
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C
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, and so then I look at where does this best fit fit and what works with the policy, the regulation and the goals of, of where you're located. I did a lot of this when I was living in Germany as well. And same thing, right. You know, it was, it was not one size fits all for every country. It's what works specifically in that location, given what people want and their history with those solutions and the regulation. But regardless, I really like to say there's sort of three main sectors where you would see hydrogen application, where I think it beats the alternatives. And our analysis would show it beats the alternatives. And that's heavy industry for the high heat applications, typically things that are using natural gas today and refining, petrochem, steel manufacturing, other things that have a very high heat requirement. Heavy industry, always on type of processes. Heavy duty transportation in my mind is still where hydrogen is a likely winner. And that drive to net zero. There's going to be competition with batteries and we're going to see over time how these things develop and compete with one another. But that's another area it's difficult to electrify at a large scale. And then finally I think there's some really interesting electricity applications, which in some ways is a little bit counterintuitive. But when I say that, I mean as long duration energy storage, which is a challenge that a lot of people are trying to solve for or just in geographies that are committed to an energy transition and are energy importers. They don't have a lot of sun, they don't have a lot of wind. They also don't have their own gas resources or geology for carbon storage. We're seeing a lot of Interest and hydrogen is the right solution in those sectors.
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A
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. So let's unpack that a bit then, because I do think that's at the heart of having a serious discussion about hydrogen is, as you've been saying, unpacking exactly what uses we're talking about here. I noted just before we get on to the things you did talk about, you didn't mention hydrogen for home heating and cooking and blending hydrogen into the natural gas supply, using it in people's homes generally. Is that because you don't think that's really got much of a long term future?
- [15:50]
C
Yeah, I didn't mention it. It's not an area we're focused on. It's an area that you do hear people talking about. I think there's alternatives to a lot of those that compete very well. And electrifying a lot of that is, is a bit easier. I know people that are pretty serious about doing some hydrogen blending into the gas system. We've in fact tested hydrogen blending up to 60% in some of our operations in California in large gas turbines, because you get an offset of the carbon emissions associated with that. And we've been able to prove that you can do it. So I'm not ruling that out everywhere as a solution. I do think it's more of a stepping stone or a niche application more than something that will be wholesale adopted where you're really going to see the value and the benefits pay off for hydrogen to be the winner.
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A
Melissa, what do you think?
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B
I mean, I think I hear about hydrogen and the numbers support this. But being more discussed, when it comes into the drop in fuel replacement discussion that you're opening up ed around blending going into these big centralized facilities that then supply electricity to end users, that's where I mostly see it. You know, it's one of those, where am I already using a boatload of natural gas and I'm looking for other molecules to put in there. And in a lot of cases, having a gas makes sense in some places. Maybe a liquid or a solid could be introduced in there. All of these things are complicated and have cost implications, et cetera. But the home heating one, there are definitely people in our industry who are still talking about it, but I think it's in the tail. Like it's in the tail of the discussion. It's not in the heart of it. Because for home heating applications, for the most part, all the numbers I'm looking at, it's one of those, okay, if I can't electrify then maybe it just becomes again, a practical discussion. If I can't get that done, then maybe this becomes an option. But otherwise it doesn't make sense. Like we've got other options that make more economic sense. But agree like the industrial one I think is the least controversial, like high heat applications. You, you know, hydrogen is one of those really interesting tools that could be used.
- [18:05]
A
Yeah. So let's come on to that in a moment. Just one more thought that I had about the whole question of domestic use of hydrogen is the safety issue and hydrogen is essentially more flammable than natural gas. Is that a reasonable way to put it, Austin? I mean, you know, in the sense that it will burn in a much wider range of concentrations in air than natural gas does. So that's a big concern. And it has a lot of issues with pipes. It can cause embrittlement and cracks in steel pipes and so on. There's a whole load of reasons why maybe fine for industrial uses, putting hydrogen into everybody's homes is probably going to be a difficult thing to do. And as you say, ultimately, if you were to fix all those safety issues, it would just end up being very, very expensive.
- [18:53]
C
Yeah, what, what I'll say about the safety piece is yeah, you're right. In industry we use hydrogen already. And Chevron and refineries, we use a million tons of hydrogen a year already in refining processes. Right. So the industrial scale, we know how to do it. There's also, I think it's 1600 miles of hydrogen pipelines in service in the US today already. I came from the industrial gas industry. When those pipes are made the right way and managed the right way, it can be done. But a wholesale swap out just to take what is currently being in natural gas service and use and swap it out for hydrogen service is likely to create some of these issues that you mentioned. So people have shown blending as possible up to a certain percent, maybe 20%, maybe, maybe more, maybe less. I think it depends on what's there. But you're correct, just a wholesale swap out. The current infrastructure is not suitable for that. And so all of these safety challenges are real. They're things that that legitimate operators that know how to deal with these types of hazards every day need to get involved with and be really serious and make sure that those applications are done the proper way, the professional way. And we believe we can do it. We've proven to be able to do it. But again, this is not something that just goes everywhere all the time.
- [20:22]
B
And this is just something to just push on to be really clear for those who haven't sat in the hydrogen room for a while, existing infrastructure not being ready for it. I think about this a lot in terms of when we were doing renewable fuel blending. So, you know, putting some biodiesel into diesel, putting ethanol into gasoline. And it was one of those things with how high can you blend before existing systems just can't take it. And so we use this term embrittlement a lot when we talk about hydrogen and any new set of molecules we might put in a pipeline. Is the material that that pipeline is made of able to be in contact with hydrogen or just some crazy chemistry happen and embrittlement, AKA the pipe gets brittle, AKA it breaks, which not good when you want to move gas around. If you've got old cast iron pipes that haven't quite been replaced, which I know we ran into a bunch of in the Northeast when I was living on the east coast, it's a non starter blending. But in other ones, when you got plastic pipes, you can move a certain percentage of hydrogen through them blended in and you don't see those types of issues. And you know, you said it, Austin, like there's testing going on around this about how far you can go with different existing pipe technologies. And then what could you replace existing pipes with in order to, you know, be able to move more of it? Is that a coating on the inside? Is it putting a big sleeve through the middle of a pipe? Is it replacing whole hog the pipe? There's a lot of different things, but you know, that's just one example of what we mean with infrastructure. Not ready for this. It wasn't built for this. And that's the comment I made earlier, like energy transition. We're doing stuff with things that were designed for something else. And there's reasons to use existing infrastructure. I've written a lot about it, but you know, we have to be conscious of it's not often. It's not just a drop in type of thing. You do have to alter some parts of your system.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah. And as you say, in principle, a lot of those problems are fixable, but they just cost money. As Austin was saying, you've got to think about what the alternatives are. And if the alternatives are going to be lower cost, then hydrogen may well not be the most attractive way to go.
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B
Yeah, it's the practical pathway forward. Okay, if we're going to do this, what do we need to do? Whole hog across the whole system to make it work.
- [22:31]
A
Okay, so let's talk about then these Three uses then that are potentially more attractive for hydrogen. First one, Austin, that both you and as we're talking about is industrial applications. And this is essentially to get clear exactly what this is. So this is burning the hydrogen for heat, essentially replacing natural gas in those industries that need very high temperatures for their industrial processes. Is that right?
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C
Yeah. The concept here is that electricity to get to that heat level is a challenge. And then if you're aiming for lower carbon intensity, you would want to do that with renewable electricity. And that profile doesn't really fit with what these heavy industries need. So not only would it be a lot of replacement of say, a furnace to an electrified furnace, you have trouble getting to this, this heat level that would be required. And additionally you need it to be super reliable. And so what we found is then you start looking at, okay, how do I remove the carbon emissions, the CO2 coming out of the different stacks around a facility in the most cost effective way. And in that case, this is where we like the solution of what is referred to as blue hydrogen. And so instead of natural gas coming into one of these facilities, going to many, many different places where it's used, and you have different points of CO2 emissions, you could bring all of that same natural gas into one location, capture the CO2 by producing hydrogen with carbon capture. And if you're in an area with the geology that it fits with, like the US Gulf coast for example, you can store that CO2. You can do this at very high capture rates, 95 to 99% capture rate. You can use RNG or, and renewable electricity and other things to reduce that carbon intensity even further. But what it helps you do is now everywhere that hydrogen goes in that facility, when it's used, it does not result in CO2 emissions. And the alternative, if you look at the, aside from electrification, if you look at where all of those point source emissions are, you could, technically you could capture the CO2 at every location, but it gets, it gets more difficult to capture because they aren't high concentration CO2 streams. And now you end up with all this aggregation need of putting these big pipes everywhere to try to capture all that CO2. And it's a much more cost effective solution than to bring that into one point upstream. And I mentioned blue because it can be integrated more readily at scale today, more quickly. The green pathway, electrolytic with renewable electrons, you know, could, could work as well. It's not yet mature enough at scale to bring those solutions as effectively as the blue would be in the near term.
- [25:44]
B
Yes, around this, Austin, I'll quote a couple of different folks you've had on the show, Ed, so I mentioned Julio Friedman earlier. I'll go back to some of the discussions with him where we talk about the energy transition. And it's like step one of many, many steps, acknowledging it's a transition, it's a process. And so the idea of, okay, blue hydrogen, so we produce it with natural gas and carbon capture or carbon capture, utilization and storage that you, of course, being under development. And there's cost. And I'm going to just, I'm just going to leave that on the field for the moment, cost discussions with all of this. But there is a pathway, you know, that we could see potentially where blue is used in the near term as green becomes more readily available and more cost effective and those types of things. There may be some locations that already have the infrastructure you need to readily start producing blue hydrogen. Now, in some places, green hydrogen already makes sense. And so you do that. But that is not universally true everywhere. And we should go down the cost discussion here in a bit, Ed, as you like on that. But it's a matter of, okay, what first, what second, how does this evolve over time and, you know, acknowledging out loud that we do use hydrogen in processes today, we do manage and use hydrogen. What we're talking about doing is producing it in processes that we don't use as much of in much greater quantities. We're talking about scaling it up massively and rapidly and then applying it in different places that haven't been as reliant on hydrogen in the past.
- [27:14]
A
And what do you think, Melissa, about these electrification alternatives for very high heat? Then there's been a bit of talk and occasionally you'll see people come up with ideas that some of these heat batteries, these things where you get these rocks and heat them to very, very high temperatures using electricity, people say that could be used for industrial processes. There's a few other ideas out there. Do you think those are ultimately going to be deployable at scale? Are those going to be a real rival to hydrogen for this industrial heat type application or not?
- [27:51]
B
So I wish we had an hour to go into thermal energy storage. When I was at the International Energy Agency a dozen years ago and was setting up the energy storage program, we looked a lot at, okay, let's store electricity and let's store heat that then we can use. And I'll say from then until now, when I look at all the numbers, we're talking about getting to low levels of heat, thermal storage makes a ton of sense on its own. But when we're talking about getting up to these really high heats, one of the most interesting things I see is actually where you see these hybrid combinations of things. So if you're going to store heat over long periods of time, you don't have to store it, and you probably don't want to store it at these exceptionally high temperatures just because that's really expensive and challenging. And yes, we can have all kinds of breakthroughs in materials over time, but let's put that aside for the minute. You could see a system where actually you store heat over extended periods of time, you bring it in at a certain several hundred degrees, and then you top it up to these very high temperatures. We're talking about using hydrogen or other fuels. And so I think that as a standalone, I haven't seen, and if anyone listening has seen convincing research about a cost effective near term solution for these extremely high industrial applications with a thermal storage, I would love to see that. I haven't come across the numbers that make me see a scalable solution there, but I have seen some really cool numbers around, around these hybrid solutions when it comes to industrial heat applications, and I think I've talked about one or two of them on the show in the past.
- [29:20]
C
Yeah, I mean, look, as somebody that operates these types of facilities that require high heat, where, you know, we're watching this space and you know, we have a technology venture arm that looks at all this and works with companies on the cutting edge of that type of technology. Yeah, we'll, we'll see where it goes. I don't think any of it is commercially viable yet today. And, and I think it raises, you know, back to this pragmatism, okay, what can you do to get going and then what does that do for you over the longer term? And you know, something Melissa said made a lot of sense. You, you start, in my opinion, on these facilities where you can store large volumes of CO2 and do it safely. This is a core competency of Chevron. You, you do that and you do it in a way that then allows you to justify building at scale, build out the infrastructure, start making progress on your carbon intensity, and then these other solutions will come and they'll phase in over time and they'll be more viable because you've invested in some of that upfront infrastructure and some of these early solutions as they made sense. So I think all these things are going to come together, but not at the same pace, not at the same scale.
- [30:36]
B
And I will say within that, some of these technologies that are coming forward, a number of them were ones that received big grants. When I was at Department of Energy this was like early stage RPE grants and are now at that commercializable we think is like drop in fuel replacements for natural gas essentially, you know, could replace some of those for industrial and power applications and things. But again it's just until we see it working and scaling, it's just one of those and the numbers that are theories becoming reality. I, I'm not going to say I'm convinced it's going to be the thing to save us or something, some dramatic statement like that. I just can't say it. But yeah, what Austin said, there are really cool technologies that are under development. So we'll see.
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A
Right. So that's industrial heat. Second thing you mentioned Austin, is transport, heavy transport, by which you mean road and marine and aviation. Is it.
- [31:34]
C
There's some, there's some debate on where this is going to apply. Right. I personally, I think heavy duty transportation, road transport starts to make the most sense early on. You have some policy enabled geographies that are aiming for, for net zero tailpipe emissions of heavy, heavy transport. California for example, has, has these rules and we look at what is viable and likely to come. This is where I think there is going to be a real battle of technologies. My belief is that when there's a desire to move large quantities of cargo or people very heavy over long distances with high utilization hydrogen is a solution that is viable there. Now this is all still very early. We need the infrastructure to be built out. We need the supply solutions to be affordable and we also need then the trucks to be implemented and manufactured at scale. Batteries are working to solve this challenge as well. I think they're also showing that it is a difficult equation to solve for when you start looking at very heavy loads, long distances, high utilization rates. So I think that's an area. I also think shipping in some applications could, could fit. Now it doesn't always have to be hydrogen directly as hydrogen. We talk a lot about hydrogen derivatives. We talk about ammonia, some people talk about methanol. You know, there's of course significant hydrogen component and E fuels or in sustainable aviation fuel. All of that plays into this Swiss army knife appeal of the hydrogen economy. I think the one that is much further down the horizon would be aviation in my opinion. I'm waiting to see where that goes. I think in the near term sustainable aviation fuel. Other solutions are more of a drop in, probably more likely in the near term.
- [33:35]
A
Yeah. And as you Say some of those E fuels, if you're talking about using low carbon hydrogen to make a synthetic fuel by reacting with carbon dioxide, those things at the moment are still very, very expensive. Right. And just in terms of what the options are for reducing emissions from air transport and in terms of reducing the emissions from transport of all kinds, that looks like a very pricey route to go down, doesn't it?
- [34:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'll say, Ed, for those who want to go deep diving on transport and what options we have around like heavy duty and light, it was part of gosh, season one of the big switch where we dove into it for aviation. I'll summarize what is a 30 minute plus podcast episode. But it's like for short haul flights, you could probably electrif some of that. After a point, physics catches up with you. And physics doesn't care what you wish you could do for long haul flights. It just tells you no. After a point you got to get that whole lift thing. And after a point, batteries are just too much. So what are the options we have in terms of fuel replacement? And to what Austin said, you know, there's the short term and there's the longer term. The hydrogen derivatives discussion is a really interesting one. So you mentioned ammonia and I'm going to push right up to the edge of my own expertise. So disclaimer there where think about agriculture, which I don't think we're going to dive into here in this discussion, but it's like ammonia is a huge market around the world for a big reason, which is ammonia based fertilizers and needing to feed the world. And so it's one of those questions of okay again, where does hydrogen get used? And then because it's being used in one place, what other uses get catalyzed because of that? Because you can imagine if we start using hydrogen for some of these industrial applications and other things, it may provide some local options where hydrogen makes a lot of sense. Now for heavy duty road transport, I think we could spend a lot of time discussing how much we love Tesla's semi and the, what is it, the E Cascadia. I mean there's a long, long list of these things. So Volvo's got theirs, Mercedes has theirs, there's a Nikola, do you say trey on that one? But there's a long list of these electric huge semis and we can talk about that. But I think more to the point is there are some parts of real heavy, heavy duty and the toughest parts to abate when it comes to the transport sector where we've got to figure out drop in fuels. And if nothing else, the H's in hydrogen could be useful in that, whether it's them alone or them mixed with other things.
- [36:01]
A
And when you say drop in fuels, the other option is hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Right. I mean, is that so, Austin, when you're thinking about hydrogen for heavy transportation.
- [36:10]
C
Well, yeah, when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about the hydrogen fuel cells. Exactly. And again, that's this heavy duty applications that I think it can really take hold and scale, but it's in its infancy. This is an ecosystem and I'm watching the west coast and we are active there to see how well this can take root in some of these early applications and then scale from there.
- [36:35]
A
Right. And then the third thing you mentioned was energy storage and, and power. And you as Chevron are involved in this very interesting project, I think in Utah, acs, Advanced Clean Energy Storage, I think it stands for, which is basically taking renewable generation, wind and solar, using that for electrolysis to create hydrogen. Then you're injecting hydrogen into reservoirs, is that right? For it to be stored and then using it to drive a turbine to generate electricity. So the idea being that then when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, you will have, you can still provide power. And so it's a way of kind of smoothing out your renewable energy generation such that you could have continuous 247 power from it. Really exciting idea. I mean, I know it's been criticized by some people. There are issues that many people have raised about it. But do you want to talk a bit about that and what your thinking is on the potential for that project?
- [37:38]
C
Yeah, I think ACEs is a really fantastic example of what early success looks like in this industry where you're looking at a lot of new types of applications. And what is behind the ACEs concept is there has been a commitment mostly in Southern California to move away from coal and move to fully carbon free electricity by a certain date in the future. So as renewables ramp up, you will have more sun generation, more wind generation. It has to be overbuilt because of seasonality and variability in the system. How do you still keep the lights on when you're dependent on those generating sources that are seasonal and that are variable? And the answer for this application is use the excess when it exists and use those electrons to produce hydrogen. Store that hydrogen in geology that is perfect for long term storage of hydrogen as the seasons change. As there is a deficit in the amount of power that's needed to be put to the grid from the sun and wind, we can return that hydrogen back. In this case, it's going to go into a gas turbine that will then generate the electrons, put it back on the grid to support everybody keeping the lights on. This happens to be in a location in Utah that has already all of the electrical infrastructure that connects the entire western US Together. It's building out significant amount of renewables right now. And coal is on the decline already. And so this is at a location where you can reuse a lot of infrastructure that exists for moving electrons around as you retire that coal plant, have this type of solution that is finding another way to monetize and utilize the excess wind and sun when they're. When it would be curtailed otherwise and still get those reliable electrons back on the grid so that people can continue to enjoy the power that they need.
- [39:53]
A
Right. So I think this is a really interesting project. You will hear people criticize it on the grounds that it's inefficient. So I think the kind of the round trip, am I right in saying that it's about 30%. In other words, kind of from going for power to hydrogen and back to power again, you're getting about 30% of the power that you originally generated, Is that right?
- [40:13]
C
I really think that when we think about efficiency, we have to rethink the paradigm of what makes sense in this case, because we're comparing it to other solutions. We already decided in this case, the customers decided want to move away from coal and shut that down. So the question is not are you going to expand renewables and move away from the coal? The question is, then what's the best use to maintain reliability of that grid? And to be very clear, the electrons that are coming into this process are otherwise curtailed electrons, so they're not going anywhere. The generation was already invested in. It's a way then to convert that into something that can easily be stored. The batteries can't do it at the scale that we're talking about for the seasonality that we're talking about. But battery use is complementary here because batteries are smaller today and there are also storage for hours, not necessarily for seasons. And so I don't think this is an either or question either. I think this really is. You need all of this together to solve this challenge.
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, you see, I think I'm 100% in agreement with you on that. I always think about the point someone taught me a long time ago, which is electricity is a Service, not a commodity. You can't think of every electron as having equal value. And as you say, I mean you can obviously just see that in power markets and there are times and places where electricity actually has a negative price and people will pay you to take it away and other times when its price can go to absolutely astronomical highs. So as you say, I think in that context it doesn't really make sense to get fixated on what the round trip efficiency is. But as I said, something some people.
- [42:07]
B
Think about so high level on this, like just to put this all in context for those who don't spend their days, nights and weekends in electricity world, when we look at getting to net zero electricity, which. Oh gosh, Ed, just read a book for a minute cause I'm gonna say something you've heard me say a few times, which is it's the backbone of decarbonization. It's the backbone of getting to net zero. It has to be flexible and strong. If your backbone wasn't both those things, you would have problems through your daily life that you would not enjoy. So within this, the research is very clear that to get to a mix where you have 24, 7, 365 reliable and affordable electricity, you need firm dispatchable power in addition to energy storage, in addition to variable renewables like wind and solar that yes, are very cheap and you do want to use them when you have them. So within that firm power, it's like some regions have said, nuclear is going to be our go to and we're going to pair that up with some different energy storage types, including battery, including thermal storage and some wind and solar. And that's going to be our mix. Other places have said nope, it's not going to be that. We're going to work towards carbon capture and we're going to put that on our natural gas facilities. Hydrogen is another one of those tools that can supply that firm power. It does not replace the value of variable renewables or of to what Austin said, batteries for energy storage and other energy storage technologies. But it gives you that other thing you need. The analogy you've heard me say a bunch of times, Ed, and our listeners have heard is the soccer team analogy. You need different skill sets on the field or you're not going to win the game. You might have some really beautiful moments, but you're not going to win the game. And so within this, I appreciate you talking about the bumps in the road that you will definitely encounter as a first in kind and stepping into that space. But different regions will choose different things. This region has said for a variety of reasons we're going to consider this solution. I imagine that a lot of and we're already seeing a lot of other regions that have heavy industrial bases, that have ports, that have other characteristics in terms of their geology. So advantages or lack thereof going for these hydrogen solutions or going for something different, depending on what they have available to them. And this goes back to the mix of technologies. It's not a one size fits.
- [44:23]
C
All right. I'd say that you have a few elements here that you need to look at whenever you're trying to determine what is the right solution for different areas. And in this case, we have a commitment, we have a very clear commitment from a customer that is going this direction and will ultimately support then the transition and whatever cost of that transition there is. We also have the right mix of the infrastructure in this location where we happen to have the right geology. We have the right existing power lines and everything there as the infrastructure that's going to look different from place to place. And I believe we have all the right partnerships that we need on this. Chevron came into this project as the majority shareholder. Our partner is Mitsubishi Power, who is great with the technology and the equipment and, you know, the supply and the service of that equipment. We've got the Intermountain Power Agency across the road where they are investing in these gas turbines and doing the hydrogen blend and ultimately moving to 100% hydrogen. You have all those elements that fit. Now those same types of elements might work really well for power generation with carbon capture to support data centers and some of their reliability, you know, coupled with other solutions. Solutions. You might have nuclear in certain areas. You know, these types of elements will look a little bit different. But I think once you have the confluence of those things, you can start to implement real pragmatic solutions.
- [46:02]
A
We're all agreed then. This is a very interesting and exciting project. Austin, you just described it as an example of early success and early success story. There are also clearly quite a lot of stories out there that are are not successful early. It feels like every day now I'm getting some new bit of bad news about project delays and cancellations in hydrogen. I get the energy news alerts from the Financial Times every morning when I wake up. There's kind of what's going to be today's hydrogen project getting canceled or delayed. You've had companies including bp, Norse Kidro ending or scaling back work on hydrogen customers. Oslo Mattel has been one big one recently. It was hoped they'd be a big customer for low carbon hydrogen. They've been delaying their investments in plants that would use it. And it just feels like in general, kind of sentiment in the industry has turned more negative just within the past six months or so during the course of this year. Do you think that's fair, Austin? Do you think things are becoming more difficult now in hydrogen?
- [47:11]
C
I think innovation in this space is not going to be for the faint of heart, and it's going to take a lot of resolve as we go through the ups and downs. You know, I also think a lot of the reality is setting in. Some of the reality is policy has been slower in this space than a lot of people would like. And the drive towards these lower carbon solutions and implementing them is highly dependent on that policy and that clarity of understanding of what people are required to do or what they're not allowed to do. A couple years ago, the US Department of Energy, led by Secretary Granholm, asked the National Petroleum Council to do a study on hydrogen. Where does it fit, why does it fit there, and what do we need to do to deploy it on the right way to reach our net zero goals? And I was fortunate enough to lead the committee that did all of the work and analysis to understand where hydrogen fits and why. We did a lot of work with mit. We did complex modeling of the entire energy system because we didn't want to say, we've got this great Swiss army knife, let's apply it everywhere. We wanted to say, when you're really getting to that net zero, how do you optimize that for society? And what we found is hydrogen has an important role to play. It's not everywhere. And when we explain this, Secretary Granholm, one of her first comments was this is really sober because you've seen some exuberance over the past few years around hydrogen and put it everywhere, and this is going to be super affordable over time. You know, the, the reality is it is the right fit for the industries we talked about, but it also is not naturally competitive with higher carbon alternatives. So the lower carbon intensity solutions are going to cost more and require policy, technology advancements, other things to close the gap. They're going to cost more than the higher carbon alternative. And as a society, I believe we have all said, okay, but that's still a better cost than not doing these things because we've seen the impacts that can come from not addressing this challenge and continuing to, to see the climate impacts. But it doesn't mean it is the lowest cost natural alternative without some other intervention. And so what we suggested is let's get policy. Right. Let's get policy around carbon. Right. Carbon pricing, alternatives to carbon pricing, things that create that type of incentive to reduce the carbon intensity of operations. You have to be able to permit and build things. But we also want to ensure that we're investing in new technologies and developments with the hope that there's some breakthroughs on the horizon that we're not yet modeling in our analysis that can help close that gap. And of course, we have to do everything with mindfulness to the communities in which we operate, and that local stakeholder engagement and acceptance really has to be done in the right way.
- [50:31]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Full disclosure. Also, I was on the steering committee also for that report and so had some involvement, although much less than you did, Austin. I don't think I have to agree with every single point that's in the report, but overall, I think it's an enormously impressive piece of work. 1200 pages long. I wouldn't necessarily expect everyone to read every single paragraph, but I think, I think the executive summary is 68 pages. It's just a fantastic overview. And if you do want to dig down into any aspect of what's going on in hydrogen and what the issues are, as Austin was saying, what the challenges are and so on, it's well worth taking a look. We should put a link actually in the show notes here. I think it's just looking at it now. Harnessinghydrogen.npc.org if anyone wants to take a look. Melissa, you've had a quick chart. I don't think you've read every one of these 1200 pages, have you? But what did you think of it within it?
- [51:26]
B
Just putting the scope as y' all stated it. The objective of the study was to define potential pathways leading to deployment of low carbon intensity hydrogen at scale. So one of those things within this is it was looking at really low carbon hydrogen just as a first filter. And then it's the question of what would it take to deploy it at scale? And I think sobering and practical is right. It's like, hey, this isn't easy. And actually no one group can go it alone. And you guys alluded to that, but I'll just say it straight on, like, no one can do it alone. And so if you're going to deploy this at scale, it takes a lot of coordination, a lot of effort. And as someone who's worked in policy for most of their career, it's like, yeah, that, that means clear signals that we want to have this tool in our toolbox. And if we're going to do that, these, these roads need to be a little bit more paved than they are right now. They're a little too bumpy to get to any type of speed without some major issues with, with whatever proverbial vehicle you're going down within it. You know, it's, it's diving into the numbers, diving into the assumption. But I think honestly for me, that umbrella context of the goal was not really diving, I don't think into whether or not it makes sense in all these different applications saying if you wanted at scale for the things that we think from other research have said this makes sense to have, then here's what you need to do. Like here are the existing barriers and it's not like the policies that have already been implemented in the US have already paved the way. Actually, I'd say I don't know anywhere in the world where it is a truly, truly smoothly paved path for hydrogen yet, because this isn't just a policy thing. It's also a technical issue as well. Right now we're doing something we haven't done before at this scale. But it was an interesting report. I saw a lot of my former colleagues, or I guess they're still colleagues, but you know, that I don't work with in my current role on it. And I can't promise to read every single page, but I have already read the executive summary and I'm excited to go into little bits and pieces of it as I go. My one wildcard, which I really am going to dive into and if you guys can comment on it, is effectively like, what happens if you have one or two major demands get bigger than you think, like, how much quicker can we move? Did you guys look at any findings of like an accelerated. Because I saw the two scenarios. But what happens then if you have one or two kind of levers change?
- [53:52]
C
Yeah, we have these two scenarios that you mentioned. And so one is that under the current policies already in place today, we expect that it's going to do enough to probably double the amount of hydrogen in the current system. And it's a US study, so in the US double. But to get to net zero the, in these applications the most optimized way, you probably need to go seven times what we have today. And what we have today is unabated. You need to do something about that carbon associated with what's, what's there today as well. One of the surprises this, that came from this, as we did this modeling and we worked with MIT and all the experts was we had people go in detail into their refineries and into their petrochemical facilities and look at all the different decarbonization levers and pathways that they could imagine. And they came out in that sector with actually quite a bit more hydrogen as the, as the right solution than what they originally thought not. And so you iterate around that and we work to figure it out. We do believe that that is an area where it could potentially be a lot larger than what a lot of other reports were initially showing. But today in the US coming back to the value of carbon question, there's little financial incentive that closes the gap to make that happen quickly. And so those are the types of things that we worked with, we worked with all of the contributors on to really determine how fast could that go and where does it fit, what's the volume. And we feel, we feel pretty good about the results because of the diversity of people we had there. And this was not an oil and gas study. This is a industry wide academia, think tank, NGO study where 100 different organizations came together to get to this result.
- [55:52]
B
Could you give the breakdown of the organizations? Just for people listening though, like, you know, kind of just the overarching.
- [55:58]
C
Yeah, for sure. It was only about 30% oil and gas companies in the end. And that's something a lot of people don't fully realize about the National Petroleum Council, because petroleum's in the name only. About 30% of the participants were actual oil and gas companies. We had a significant amount. I don't know the exact numbers, but it was probably about another 30% were nonprofit universities, NGOs. And then the remainder was split between manufacturing companies, OEMs of major pieces of equipment. We had some consultants, we had Wood McKinsey participate. We had industrial gas companies and power companies all there together, bringing their expertise with what they're seeing from doing real things on the ground today. And we feel like that really rounded out the report very well.
- [56:50]
B
And I asked that question not as anything else than to highlight. This is a complex equation where you have to get everyone in the supply chain, from supply of all of the bits of it to demand into a room together because otherwise you're not going to get to practical answers. And so, um, this one, because I've got two report authors here, I just wanted y' all to highlight who was in the room because if it had just been suppliers, I honestly, when I scanned through the executive summary, I would have had a, you know, my brain would have been like all right. You know, because there's a bias there. That's not. I'm. It's not necessarily. It's not malicious. It's just like a. Hey, I'm a supplier. I think of supply this way, I think of hydrogen this way versus the demand side, where I'm like, all right, where are these molecules going to end up? Am I burning them for heat? Am I turning them into electrons? Am I using them as a feedstock? And so having that diversity in the room is really important if you want practical pathways forward and solutions.
- [57:49]
C
Completely true. And that's something we took very seriously from the get go. And we emphasized a lot that we are here to deal with the hard questions with a diversity of thought that can't be replicated through really any other forum. And I think we got there. I'm really proud of where we ended and how we dealt with those hard issues.
- [58:07]
A
Yeah. And to Melissa's point, my cruel joke about hydrogen has always been it's a solution in search of a problem. That, and it is clear that there's a lot more interest actually in producing hydrogen than there is in using it. If you look at all the numbers, you know, we collect all the data on hydrogen projects, on how many are proceeding and so on, and also on how many contracts have actually been signed for people to, to buy low carbon hydrogen. And there's a big gap still between those two things. Right. So that's clearly one of the things that needs to happen, Right, Austin, that you just need to find ways to persuade more customers that they want to buy what you're selling.
- [58:51]
C
Well, we definitely looked at it objectively, and that's where the MIT work came in, was to not just start with a solution and try to find how many places we could plug it in. It was to look at what really makes sense in the energy system. And now once you isolate that, how do you make that as effective as you could be?
- [59:09]
A
Right. And as you say then. So this was a report that was delivered to Jennifer Granholm, the Energy Secretary in the Biden administration. We're about to have a new Energy secretary as of January in terms of messaging to a new administration, to Congress as well be a new Congress as well next year. What are you going to want to say to people about what the hydrogen industry needs?
- [59:35]
C
First off, I'd say hydrogen is happening. We've got aces. We can show what's real. We are developing actively the high velocity hub on the Gulf coast, integrating natural gas value chains, carbon capture for solutions that customers around the world are demanding. And so to this incoming administration, the US is still very well positioned to continue to expand its energy position and supply in the world. And we have to remember all this is long term. And chevron's been around 145 years. There's a lot of administrations that have come and gone in that timeframe. We know that these solutions are going to play out over decades. And so there will be many more administrations through all those decades. This is not any solution for only one administration, one presidential period, or one Secretary of Energy. These are solutions for the world over the long term.
- [60:37]
B
Yeah, I think the size of the infrastructure, like if the folks listening, if you haven't gone and seen like a big power plant or an industrial facility, these are massive, massive things. They're places I take like students to in my classes as, as often as I can. Because it's like, okay, this gives you some idea of the scale of what we're talking about. And so the infrastructure investments that have to be made even to get to 2 or 3x is already huge. Like it's huge. This is not my backyard garden kind of a project or my garage project. And so a lot of different people and organizations and administrations around the world will be involved at different stages of this, no matter what the final number ends up being. And Ed, it comes back to our favorite topic, which is what's going to happen in the US we'll focus on that because of the report to accelerate the deployment of infrastructure, whatever it is, Pick your favorite it. What are we doing around that? Because the energy transition, the speed of it, the scale of it, how it manifests, the cost, all of it is very much dependent on decisions that we make in that space. I mean, that is a key assumption in any model I've either personally run or read a report about is what assumptions are we making on timelines, on the expense of those processes, on the ability to do those processes in a timely way, et cetera, and thinking beyond.
- [62:06]
A
The US as well, then how much of what you're thinking about is predicated on export markets? You know, when you think about what other governments are doing around the world, in Europe and in Asia, there's a lot of interest in hydrogen. People talk about, for instance, in several Asian countries using hydrogen or hydrogen derivative ammonia to blend into the fuel mix in coal fired power plants in order to produce the amount of coal you have to burn there. Big hopes for rapid expansion of hydrogen demand in Europe. Are those export markets a crucial part of the story?
- [62:43]
C
Yeah, I think about it a lot and definitely what we see is in those markets you mentioned in Europe, there's obviously a lot of carbon policy, so there's a transition here, well underway. We also see energy importing economies looking for exactly these solutions because they're serious about their climate goals, but they're dependent on other solutions to be delivered to them that they don't have readily available yet. And I think that's a great way to start in this market. Japan is very serious about it. Korea has programs in place that they're implementing. We do a lot of work in those countries, lng, trade and supply already. And so we expect this to be something that comes right alongside that. It's very complementary for that same customer base.
- [63:31]
A
But isn't the fundamental problem. And this should probably be my last question because I think I've got places to go to. But I'm still profoundly skeptical about the issue of cost here. And when you look at how much hydrogen costs, there's a very rough rule of thumb where you can can translate hydrogen into the equivalent in natural gas in energy equivalent terms. If you take $5 a kilo for low carbon hydrogen, which is not a crazy price.
- [64:04]
C
Right.
- [64:05]
A
I mean, that might be, you know, about. Right. I mean, disagree with me if you want. Austin, tell me that it all depends. That's a number. It all depends. Exactly. Exactly. But you know, $5 a kilo is definitely a number that people have talked about. It's certainly realistic for some types of low carbon hydrogen production. If you are comparing that to natural gas, that on an energy equivalent basis is about. Well, it's between 35 and $40 per million British thermal units. The price of gas. And I went and looked this up. The price of gas in Europe during 2018-2019. Just thought useful period to look at because it was before the pandemic, before British invasion in Ukraine and so on, was $6 per million British thermal units. So you're talking about an energy source that is six times as expensive as the one they've got at the moment. And this at a time when Europe is already very worried about deindustrialization, losing manufacturing jobs, the impact of higher energy costs possibly playing into that. Is it really long term going to be realistic to expect people to pay these very elevated premiums for hydrogen because it's lower carbon, or is that just going to be impossible or do you really just have to get the price to a much, much lower point for it to actually compete?
- [65:40]
C
I think it's going to be a combination of both. Go back to first of all, you have to value the carbon reduction higher carbon alternatives are less expensive. We know that and we expect that's going to continue to be true over time. And so I hope we have technology progress and breakthroughs that help close that gap. But the reality is, I like to put it in terms of, of cost of carbon abatement is that's the way the markets trade and the way people typically tend to think about it. The Harnessing Hydrogen study started to show that at maybe as low as $75 a ton of CO2, you start to see some adoption, you start to see some applications where maybe that's a fit. But really hydrogen is not the low hanging fruit on your abatement curve. Hydrogen is for those really hard to abate sectors that are going to be more costly in terms of dollar per ton abatement. And so you're going to be in the hundreds of dollars in quite a few cases to get there. And you're going to have a pathway where you're going to start with the low stuff. And maybe you'll see some different incentives around the world supporting closing that gap for certain sectors because that starts to build enough critical mass to get this going. But I like to put it in those terms, you know, what's the cost of abatement? And then is that your best solution? And if so, then, you know, let's get on that pathway. But you know, we've done a good job of showing where we think hydrogen fits relative to the other solutions.
- [67:12]
A
Right. And so really getting back to your earlier point, then it's about this being a long term business. This is a solution, as you say, when probably some of the lower hanging fruit have been picked already. This is how you make sure you do actually get to net zero, which is where the science tells us we ultimately need to be. That's where hydrogen really comes in. Not in terms of making quick reductions in emissions over the next five or ten years.
- [67:39]
B
With the quick. I know this is behind it because we've talked about it with the quick footnote and to be ready in a decade at the scale we want it to be. A lot of stuff has to happen now, but we've talked about before. I just need to put that footnote in because it's so important to this one.
- [67:56]
C
Yeah, it's exactly right. That's why what we're doing right now, we believe are the pragmatic solutions for today that start to get us on that path. But this is the activation stage of all of this. Right? We're not even to expanding those solutions yet we've got to activate it first.
- [68:10]
B
Yeah. And back to the earlier point, it's not a substitution for action in the near term. When we look at climate and where we are in the mathematics, like all the low hanging fruit I think needs to be picked immediately if you want to avoid those climate impacts. That's what the climate science tells us, is that we're at a point where we need to get those emissions down while we're developing the tools we need to get them all the way down to the place that protects human health and the environment. So that's just a important thing that we could discuss over many, many, many shows.
- [68:39]
A
Indeed, as you say, we are lining up already the next 10 years of discussions about hydrogen coming up.
- [68:46]
C
Yes, I will be back.
- [68:47]
A
It will be great to have you back. This has been fantastic talking to you both. Thanks very much, Austin, for coming on.
- [68:51]
C
Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks, Melissa.
- [68:54]
A
Yeah, thanks very much, Melissa.
- [68:55]
C
Sure.
- [68:55]
A
We'll be seeing you again soon.
- [68:57]
B
Absolutely. Austin, we're sending the best to you and your family. I really enjoyed the chat today.
- [69:01]
C
Thank you.
- [69:02]
B
And Ed, it's always great to see you. Always great to chat. And thanks to everyone who follows up after these shows with cool comments on what we talk about. I really appreciate hearing your thoughts.
- [69:10]
A
Absolutely. Thanks very much to our producer, Toby Biggins, Gilchrist, and above all, many thanks to all of you for listening. As Melissa was just saying, we really do value your feedback back. Please do keep that coming and we'll be back soon with all the latest news and views on the energy transition. Until then, goodbye.