Day Two, Part Two from the Bloomberg Green Festival

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Well, it spoke earlier with Ryan Speed's managing director of sustainability over the last Airlines about airlines decarbonization journey. Yeah, it's going to be a journey. It's going to be tough. I mean no question that airlines want to get there, sure of that light.

An alternative sustainable aviation fuel.

They need than justine, they need a lot.

Yeah, international air travels share of COO two output is said to climb dramatically as other segments decarbonized. So as you see other parts of the business community use and emit less carbon, the share of airlines carbon is going up, right, It's going to be an estimated twenty two percent by twenty fifty from two percent today if emission aren't cut fast enough. This is according to a Bloomberg Big Take published last song.

That's an incredible ramp up. So how do we get there?

Sustainable aviation fuel that's something you know, you guys talked about EV talls or battery powered electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

Our next guest.

Says he's got a solution, but the only way to get there is with hydrogen valve. Miftakoff is the founder and CEU of zero Avia. It's a company that says it's developing the world's first.

Zero emission engines for commercial aviation. Great to have you back with us, How are you great? Great to be here, Thank you, it's good to have you here.

Remind our worlds since it's been some a little while, of what you are working on.

Yeah.

Absolutely, So we develop new generation of engines for commercial aviation, large aircraft going long distances, taking a lot of passengers. So I think the prime solution for that is hydrogen is fuel and then hydrogen fuel sales and electric power.

Train to bring the aircraft into the new future.

How far can it go?

It can go?

Actually, so we have different programs. Yeah, we start with a smaller aircraft and then go larger and larger. The largest aircraft so that we can readpower will go the same distance as you know, my flight later today goes to London for example. Right, So we believe that within the next twenty years or so, we will have engines or aircraft of that size and being able to go that type of distance.

Do you have to build entirely new aircraft or can you strap a pair of these.

For those distances you would have to modify the aircraft. Generally, you can get to about half the maximum range off the fossil fuel aircraft without modification of the aircraft or with minor modifications. Yeah, and that's our first launch will be like that, and then we work already with the aircraft manufacturers.

You know, Airbus is one of our major investors.

For example, We already work with aircraft manufacturers on what's called clean sheet design, where they design aircraft around our engines.

So why twenty years Well, you.

Know, if you look at the current engines, Yeah, those beautiful things, huge engines off the wings of the aircraft the nineteen sixties. Yeah, and actually even before that, right, So right after the World War Two the first jet engines were developed, So we had almost one hundred years of development, if you will, right, So years is not that huge of a time really, right, but it's what takes to get to technology up to that level.

All right now Mother Earth is calling and saying we're running out of time. My point is, if the technology is there, is it a case of those engines are really expensive, those planes are really expensive, and the cost of that changeover is what's holding things back.

Yeah, that's a significant component.

Yeah, especially in aviation because you know, you look at other motif market, right, and my previous company was in the ev space electric vehicle space, and there you have the lifetime of vehicle is just ten years, and we've been already since Tesla delivered more or less, it's been already been fourteen years, but we're still below ten percent of the fleet right converted. In aviation, it's even worse.

We're not there by twenty one hundred, you know.

So we need to really push from the government side, from the operator side for fleet to replacement very much.

Sooner sounds great. You still need to get the high drogen. Now where do you get the hydrogen?

Yeah, well, and we're here in Washington State, right, which is great because the grid is large and renewable, so we believe in breeding hydrogen production. We actually make all of our fuel for our testing ourselves.

So that uses a lot of electricity.

Yeah, it use a lot of extricity, but you need electricity anyway to electrify, right, So you.

Need energy, you need primary energy.

Now, hydrogen electric approach, the approach that we have is the most efficient way to use that energy. So think about hydrogen in our aircraft. Is eff actually an energy carrier for renewable energy? Is that the batteries are to have a fundamentally too heavy right, theoretically you cannot make them light enough.

Yeah.

For that you can make them lighter today, Yeah, but it's still not going to be sufficient for a large aircraft going long distances. Hydrogen is the best carrier of that energy, so nothing else will really work, right, And sustainable alviation fuel you mentioned, Yeah.

The small portion of that can be made with bio stock.

Bio feedstock, but this can repower less than ten percent off aviation.

Right.

For everything else you would have to go what's called a fuels, electric fuels which start with green hydrogen and then add carbon culture, then adds additional chemical process and all that. So the cost of that is so much higher than utilizing hydrogen and hydrogen electric that we think that you know, we'll have some transition period with biofuels and then hydrogen electric is what will take us to the real future.

What do we need in terms of government policy? You mentioned the government involvement what specifically.

Yeah, so we need and you know we have some blooprints.

The government to lead.

Yeah, yeah, we have some blooprint deliraty from the TV industry. Right.

So a lot of transition was driven by the progressive governments like California for instance, right with the low carbon fuel standards, with emission standards, and then you know there's some examples outside of the US like Norway for instance. Right, great policies to bring ninety percent plus new vehicles being sold are electric. So policies like that for fat eat modernization will be super important. And we are launching our first commercial products within the next two years.

So we are talking to the.

Government saying, hey, you know, the technology is there.

We're now officially in certification with the regulators across the world and it will get here before you know, two years, three years out.

So we need the policies right now.

What what does that what does that route look like?

We're the operators who are taking that plante, So we need buy in from all constituents here.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So we already have over two thousand engines on our order book, which is give or take ten billion dollars worth of future revenues already pre booked. We have announced the production facility actually right here, and the Everts, our first production facility are going to be instead of Washington's straight.

History.

Yeah, and we're taking over Collins aerospace engine production.

So it's like a great story, you know, fossil fuels. Yeah.

Right, so we already have demands, right, So you mentioned the Laska Airlines, right, they are our customer, they are our investor.

We have United American and British Airways.

Amazon, so ecosystem is already supportive.

I mentioned Airbus.

Yeah, we just signed also the world's largest deal with all three major airports in Canada for example of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto plus Airbus and US together to bring them to hydrogen future.

Right.

So the ecosystem is getting around this vision. Now we'll need the governments to really push it, help us push it.

Is that the biggest challenge. It's got thirty seconds left here, is it? Just you need the government buy in to be a bit more aggressive with that.

Yeah, yeah, and in two ways. Right.

So we are now in certification, which means that we're working with government regulators to bring it to the markets, and we need the right level of priority to this project. And then once it's done, actual help in bringing the fleets over.

Ten seconds, you said you're getting on a plane to London tonight. What year will plane be powered by your engines?

It will be powerble.

We will have engines like that by twenty forty.

All right, countdown is on, not sooner.

I told you Mother Earth is called I'm realistic, right, So you know, it's a lot of a lot of startups out there. You know, they say things that they can all deliver and that, yeah, they fall on their faces, you know.

Foul.

Good to check in.

We look forward to next time.

Already about Michtakov, founder and CEO of zero Avia right here at the Green Festival.

In seat well, speaking of changing behavior, that's what our next guest is certainly trying to do. Because back in March, a SpaceX rocket made history. It blasted off carrying a special payload, Methane SAT, a highly specialized satellite that can spot methane leaks from the oil and gas industry. A missions Carrol that other satellites can't see, and with it it ushered in a new era of climate transparency.

That's right, the goal to motivate and enable urgent action to reduce methane emissions.

Now Methane's SAT. We want to talk.

About that because it's this incredible collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund and organizations including aerospace companies. You've got space agencies also around the globe, academic institutions and the nonprofit environmental advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Find.

We got with us the project lead of Methane SAT, the guy who made it happen, Stephen Hamberg, Senior vice president and chief scientist at EDF. He joined this yere on site at the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle. We should know Michael or Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropy is a supporter at EDA. Bloomberg Philanthropy is the philanthropic arm of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg Radio.

Welcome.

First of all, congratulations that mark launch was a very, very big deal.

Absolutely, we couldn't be more excited.

But really now it all begins because getting it into space and making sure it works is the first step, but the real issue is how do we generate the data and make sure it's actionable.

So what's the data that it's found.

Well, so far we've only been really testing. We've downloaded data and it's looking really good. We're really excited because it's really highly precise data. That's what we need to be able to answer the three basic questions.

Okay, so let's answer those three basic questions because I want some content here to take a big step back and understand exactly what methane SAT is measuring here.

Because there's an.

Issue with gases being released that are invisible to the naked eye, absolutely, and that happen all over the world.

Correct, So what we need is a global picture and we need to be able to figure out where are those emissions occurring, how much is being omitted, and how they're changing over time. And we need to do that across the entire sector. And we can do that with methane set because we designed it with such high precision and we are delivering the data as actionable data, meaning we're actually doing the processing to get it all the way to how much is being omitted from where.

Where is this data going to go.

So the data is going to be posted public, anybody can look at it. It's free of charge for any non commercial use. And it will also be of course ingested into systems that allow it to be able to be integrated to whether financial services or whether it's just into regulatory processes. And so we have a whole team because just producing data doesn't you guys know, it doesn't cause change, right, So we have a whole team from producing.

The data all the way through the action.

So there's a whole group that works with us on advocacy, ensuring that the stakeholders are engaged, that people understand how to use the data, because these date have never existed before. We have to get people to understand how to use them.

Are the stakeholders engaged to dents So I'm sure some of them are going to be a little fearful right in terms of what this date is going to show.

Absolutely because it's going to show obviously those who are doing a good job and those who are not. Right, but absolutely so, the oil and gas industry knows that the things are changing. Transparency will be part of the future. And we're seeing also in the financial industry where you're seeing a lot of interest. I spent a lot of time going to many of the major financial institutions talking about this, so we are seeing engagement, but it's still early days.

What are the financial institutions want to know?

They want to know how the data is actionable, right, And part of it is a conversation. So we're asking what do you need to use it to make more informed decisions? And it's not just so we have the financial sector, but we also have regulators.

What do you need to know? So we have multiple.

Different stakeholder groups, including civil society, and we are working with those groups to make sure we understand what type of data will be most effective for them to take the actions they need to take. And that's again something no one's ever done before, creating these diverse products out of a single data stream.

What is the action basic in the sense that we need to make sure we trap the methane that's being released into the atmosphere. Is that at its most fundamental basic level, at the whole point of this.

Right, So there's no need so we know that almost all the emissions that occurring from the production of oil and gas don't have to happen. The technology exists, the emissions can be reduced cost effectively in almost all cases.

And again we're not talking about the burning of fossil fuels as a result of the end user. We're talking about the production.

The production and the transport. Most of it's occurring at the production end, so it's what we refer to as upstream, and that actually the emissions are large enough right now that if you were to as I do. I have a natural gas boiler in my basement, and if I'm burning that natural gas, the impact on the climate over the next twenty years of my doing that half of it roughly comes from the methane loss before I ever burn it, and half from the.

CO two that's being omitted.

Stephen, what do you think in terms of the general public, if they knew that is happening, like in their own homes, how it might change their activity and their actions.

Well, I think the key is to give them options and to make sure that the suppliers of the gas are held accountable, because you don't. It's it's absolutely clear there's a wide difference in these associated emissions, and there's nobody producing oil and gas who has to create these emissions. This is the technology exists. This is why this is not even low hanging fruit. This is fruit on the ground.

Why haven't they done something? You know, this always blows my mind of like doing the right thing. Right, They've got to know that they're emitting this into the air.

Well.

Actually, when we start well, that startine is when.

We started this work.

So when I started working on this fourteen years ago, the companies actually did not know. And as we collected data on the ground, not with satellites, there were surprises at every corner. And even today, most of the oil and gas companies have a very incomplete understanding of how much they're being emitted. So the key is to provide high quality data. We do not have enough high quality data about greenhouse gas emissions across the board.

Is it just the oil and gas companies or are we seeing methane as a byproduct when it comes to the decomposition of trash at landfills.

Absolutely, so we have to think about all of the sources of methane. We focused on oil and gas first because of course it is economically so easy to do. I mean, it's literally no net cost. It just got to get action. But we have to worry about waste and also agricult it's a very large source of which cows, enteric fermentation, waste from animals, also rice production.

But again there are tools we can use.

It's more complicated.

Because we're talking about many more actors and we're talking about a more complex system. But we are working New Zealand, who's a partner in the New Zealand Space Agency. They have a whole program to collect data from nothing SAT on agriculture around the world, and we'll again build that picture so we can start to get some better action.

You mentioned that as a partnership.

What are the partnerships that you already have like in the work so that you anticipate are going to be coming in the future that will really kind of magnify the impact of this.

So we have partnerships with the UN Environment Program, the International Methane Emissions Observatory, we have partnerships, as I said, with New Zealand Space Agencies. We're partnering with philanthropic groups right so the Basos EERF Fund has been an integral part of the funding that to make this possible, because we want to be able to provide this free. We also have partnerships that allow us to get that data out into many people's hands.

Stephen.

As I mentioned, this was a really big deal when the satellite launched back in March. One of the reasons it was is because it has a complex set of instruments that allow it to see what no other satellite has been able to see before. Talk about the tech on board here, like what gives you the power to be able to see this through space?

Well, the real advantage of being here in the United States because we're taking advantage of technologies that at the very cutting edge, so it's itar protected, right. We have all kinds of controls appropriately and so we can provide a sensitivity so we can see very very small differences in concentration with these very highly specialized detectors. And then the kind of technology we have in the ability to

So when do we start to see lots of data.

Well, lots of data will be the beginning of next year, but we start seeing data before will actually be doing we have an aircraft version and we will at the end of the month be actually releasing a comparison of oil and gas methane emissions across the United States that we collected from the air with a very comparable instrument. And then we will be releasing data because one of the things we have to make sure is that we really are confident that the data is solid and that

How do you do that?

How do you make sure because you know they'll benet sayers and possibly people challenging you, and we do.

Want to make sure you get it right.

So how do you make sure that the information that's collected is accurate?

So, of course, and we want people to challenge this because we need to get we're doing something new. You want to make sure you get it right, as you said, So what do you do? There are sensors around the world that actually look up and give you data, and you compare what you're seeing down to what's going up.

So if all goes according to plan, what's the conversation that we're having ten years from now, are we talking about a decline in the methane ambissions that have been released as the result of the imaging technology that you developed.

Go ten years, five, four and two years from now, we will have so much more data than well, basically we've collected more data in the next two years than we've ever.

Collected before we will have.

It's like we're going to put on a sharp pair of really high quality glasses, and greenhouse gas emissions across oil and gas will come into focus in a way we've never had. We need to replicate that across methane sources and other greenhouse gas.

But are those oil companies going to just respond by capping their methane and missus.

That's why it's not just me, it's the whole data to action pipeline. It has to be about bringing the many actors, whether those are financial institutions, governments, investors, policy makers collectively. I'm confident because you're already seeing the industry.

They're not high.

They're making commitments.

At the Conference of the Parties last December, fifty two companies, mainly national oil companies, all committed to minimizing their oil and gas missions. They got ahead of it because they realized this is going to af them. Well, now we will have the data to see. Great, congratulate them they're doing the job, or saying, in fact, you haven't.

Met your commitments, just got about thirty seconds LEFTO.

So what's still challenging though in this mission mission?

Well, I think the challenging is to provide these kinds of high quality data for the first time and make sure they're they're really of that quality. That's challenging the team, but everybody's committed. This is a team effort. We have people from commercial sector, we have people from academia, we have people from government, all leaning in to produce the best, highest quality data and provide the very first sector wide greenhouse gas emissions profile with empirical data for their time.

Will actually know what's happening.

Okay, be honest, did any part If you want to ride with that rocket with that satellite.

I get motion sickness. So no, that's a that's a absolute no.

Listen.

It's one of those things that you need all of like public, private, everybody kind of in the game.

If you will, Stephen, thank you so much. Look forward to as the data starts to come out the next.

Few months on like a cruise.

Thank you for having me, you bet.

Steven Hamburg, Senior vice president, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Bund right here at the Bloomberg Green Festival in