This is Dana Perkins and you're listening to Switched on the B and EF podcast. Today we have an interview with a special guest. This was recorded at our B and E F New York Summit back in April, so we're joined by Michael Weber. He is many things, the current Josie Centennial Professor in Energy Resources and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He's authored books on energy and power in addition to multiple
op eds for The New York Times. He served as the chief Science and Technology Officer at UNGIE in France, and he's the Chief Technology Officer of the investment fund Energy Impact Partners, which is backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Microsoft. BNF's chief editor, Ben Vickers sat down with Michael and together they discussed a range of topics, including how Michael was turned from a hydrogen skeptic to a believer, his optimistic views on the energy transition, and
the art of entrepreneurship. If you like this podcast, make sure to subscribe to receive updates on future episodes, and consider giving us a review on Apple podcas casts or Spotify. This episode was recorded at our New York summit, but we also have five other summits which take place around the world. The one coming up next is Munich, and following that is our summit alongside the B twenty in
New Delhi. If you'd like to know more about these summits, their agenda, or even see videos from previous summits, visit us at about dot bn EF dot com, Forward Slash Summit, or just click on the link that we've included in this episode description. As a reminder, B and AF does not provide investment or strategy advice and are a complete disclaimer. Is it the end of the show, and right now we get to hear Ben's conversation with Michael Weber.
Thanks for joining us, my pleasure, Thanks for having me.
Now these sort of podcasts, we're interested in the diversity of people's experience as well. You often if you just come from the business side, it's all out business. You just come from the academic side, it's all that academia. But you're an interesting person to talk with because you span both of those. But just to give a little bit of background energy impact As for those who don't know, it's really really large fund actually sixty seven investments in
the portfolio. Thirty two of those the technology, fourteen in energy, then there are seven in industrials, foreign materials, and foreign communications that's causing according to what we know, So that's a lot of technology thirty two investments. The funds they have includes Deep Decalbonization Frontier Fund, which is invested by companies such as Duke Energy and First Energy, Call and Microsoft as well. So an interesting little world of investment.
And then of course it's the academic side as well. Now you can buy an education with hands on investing. How does that work and in what way is that an advantage other than to the students.
So I'm kind of professor by day and venture capitalist by night. So I get to see the corporate world where action is taken to solve our energy problems, and are also in the world of research and teaching trying to create an ecosystem that has a lot of ideas that hopefully someday will become investable. These different ideas from these students who are innovative and they take the problems of climate change and energy security very seriously. So for me,
it's really fun to be on different aspects. So the energy sector from the real world of getting things done and then the academic world of thinking about getting things done. And it hopefully is useful for the students because it shows in different pathways by which we might scale up solutions. Some of the students want to become investors, are in the investor world, or want to launch own startups and seek investment, so maybe it is a pathway to help
them chase their dreams. And from the investor side, we're always looking for the next innovator, the next great entrepreneur, the next great team to invest in, the next great technology. And so being involved in the world academia, which is not just University Texas because I go visit students the universities helps us cast the net wider to find those great ideas that just need capitalization and then they'll change the world. So hopefully everybody benefits from this.
Okay, so a bit of a scout as well, totally.
Yeah, scouting for talent, scouting for technologies and teams, scouting for ideas from the venture investment side, but then also for the students, trying to help them scout for money, which might be energy by partners, but there are other queen tech funds out there, And this is sort of the thing I've realized in a very optimistic way, is that there are plenty of good ideas. We've got a
lot of good ideas out there. It's just a matter of capitalizing the right ones, and then the markets will take over and we'll all be fine.
Yeah, we can talk about how you do that and what are the so paramises you're maybe having to apply all the criteria using. I love the fact that you describe it as fun as well what you do. It's very fun.
I would say there's a lot of reason to have doom and gloom around climate change that kind of thing. But I'm an optimist. I really think we've got this. I think we're going to solve it. I think we're going to solve it more profitably and quickly than people expect. I think we'll end up looking kind of seamless when we flash forward fifty years and look backwards. I just
very optimistic. And one of the reason I'm optimistic is because I have the honor and privilege of teaching hundreds of students a year and they're great, They've got so many ideas. And then as an investor, we see the startups. They have to present their ideas to us. It's not a great idea, so it's hard to come away unenthused and in the.
End is fun. That's interesting.
I mean that enthusia on the optimism that you get from the younger people as well the generations coming in. That's good to hear and that's what gives a lot of energy to the whole idea of the energy transition. But then you've got these legacy systems right, and that goes for the investment community as much as the for the industrial network. As long as you defer the power grade and so on. Isn't the sort of a clash there that are we going to be able to change?
Not the people.
The people are changing obviously and the mindset is changing, but the infrastructure and the industry.
Resistance we have.
Yeah, there are two reasons for optimism and one reason for pessimism. So the two reasons for optimism as I'm an engineer, and to be an engineer means you have to be a problem solver. To be a problem solver means you have to believe the problem can be solved. You have to be optimistic to solve a problem. And then investors and investors have to be optimistic too. You're essentially investing in the future, so you have to be optimistic that the future will take you to a profitable
are prosperous play. So optimism is at the root of the venture side of me and the engineer aside of me. But the reasons why we might have pessimism.
Is for what you just said.
There's a lot of legacy infrastructure and can we leverage it or do we have to replace it? And if you look at just a natural gas industry, just natural gas pipelines, compressors, tank some power plants in the United States, it is something like eight trillion dollars worth of capital investment.
Maybe it's depreciated like two troyon or something like that, but the United States is one fifth of the world's natural gas infrastructure, so it's like forty trillion dollars is the value of the capital if we had to build it tonight for the gas infrastructure around the world, and then you had an oil and coal and nuclear other things.
So clearly there's many tens of triyans or hundreds of trillions of dollars of stuff in the ground that we built up over the last one hundred and fifty years, and the question for society and the markets and entrepreneurs and finance and policy is do we get to leverage what we've already built or do we.
Have to replace it?
And if we had to replace it, that probably will be more expensive than leveraging what we built, at least that's my view. And so anytime you can have an existing solution or a new solution that leverages existing capabilities
probably gets to market faster. Dropping fuels for pipelines, or hydrogen blends with methane or even using hydrogen to form methane that you'll move through the pipes, or fuels that have the same compatibilities with the materials you might need, or using right of ways for transmission lines or existing coal power plant sites for geothermal or small mondu reactors.
Leveraging is more efficient if you can do it. The risk of what I just said, though, is the incumbents own it might not be on board with that change, or I'm pretty happy with the current system, or would just rather not do it, or something like that. So the inherent legacy mats might slow us down. So if we're looking for a reason to be pessimistic. That's one that this is different than software. Right, Software, if you make a new app, you can scale up and send it around the world tomorrow.
It's by hitting send.
With energy, you've got to do either wires and poles or pipes or something. They're still on the ground and so that builds in a delay and gives an advantage to encompensate.
Yeah.
Yeah, so people are optimistic. I suppose the IRA is coming, so there's some more money in there. But the sort of the volume of capital we're talking about it is absolutely massive.
It's big.
Yeah, and the US government maybe can be a big investor, but should be a tenth or fifth of the market or something.
You really has to be private.
Markets have to take over and so they can just get things nudge, but they can get the ball rolling downhill.
Then it becomes an avalanche. Right.
Yeah, that's the okay, exciting thing, and we've seen that happened many, many times with many technologies, including an energy where the government either by spending or.
Policy as a first mover, then the markets take over.
That's interesting. So that's where the investment fund comes in, right, Yeah. Energy Investment Plan sixty seven or sixty sixty to seventy investments. I think the largest investment I could find was two hundred and fifty million. So these these are small startups. These are things that hopefully going to snow at some point. But let's look up, maybe, what are the criteria, what parameters really do you apply nowadays looking at something that's
going to transform this system so rapidly. What are the most promising things that you're really looking forward?
It's a great question. So overall, there are several different funds within Energy Impact Partners, and some focus more on scaling up ideas that already improved. What's more focused on the business risk aspose of the technology risk. At the Frontier fund, we're focused more on the technical risk, not the business risk, and therefore we'll be earlier stage Series A, maybe Series B sometimes seed projects that are earlier. We have funds focused on activity in Europe, with some focus
on non traditional entrepreneurs. We have a credit fund, we have an infrastructure fund, so we have different stages at capital at different risk profiles. All organize around energy transition, so we're all about energy, making energy better, which could in some cases include things like more robust wires and polls. For transmission systems sometimes it's better cybersecurity systems, and for Frontier Fund it's deep decarbonization, so it's all energy transition.
We have different areas of focus within the different funds and different technology risk sort of appetites. Twohndre and fifty million dollars is a big investment that is not typical. Typical Series A investment might be four to twelve million
dollars for the Frontier Fund. Earlier stage companies where they've got some good intellectual property, maybe they've demonstrated in the lab, they're going to their first pilot scale demonstration, or they've done their first pilot, doing a larger pilot, something like that. So we're looking for upside potential. Must be disruptive, must have the ability to really displace or avoid a lot of CO two emissions, and we're really focused on emissions.
There are a lot of great ideas around sustainability, like Circularity, we won't invest because we're really around energy and climate, not sustainability, even though it's an investable idea and a great company, we often don't do those investments. And there are some companies that have a lot of technical risk, but they're too big already. It's hard for us to If it's already a two billion dollar company, even if they have a lot of technical risk, then we're already
priced out of the market. Or some of the bigger ones, they might not be a fit for us because there's not enough business restaurant, enough upside potential. So they just kind of meet our criteria. In the end, we're investing in teams, not technologies. I really we have to believe in the team, and the team has to be innovative. They have to know how to run a company, like a bad CEO can really tank a company. And so
we really think about the quality of the team. And if we believe the technology, we believe the market space, we believe the pathway, but we don't believe in the team we want to invest.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
So there's the people skills, right does that scout scouting part of your role as well.
In the end, it's the most important determined whether we invest, because even if it's a great team with so so, technology will be tempted and we think, well, we see other technologies really good, maybe this team can.
Look at that.
So what can what should a great team be able to do and be able to prove there's being on board.
So certainly by the time they come to us, they've already proved they have some innovation, they have some idea. Usually they have a patent or some intellectual property portfolio that gives them the ability to move in the markets and protect their ideas. So a lot of it will be innovation is the key to get to us. But then we wonder can they grow and can they scale?
Can they keep the harmony in the team? If they come to us and they have seven people but they're going to grow to forty, Well that's a pretty difficult thing for a company to do, and is that the right management?
Can they do it or not?
And a lot of times they can, And so we just have to look at that. Or they're all technologists of this company, but they need to add HR or legal finance, they need to add other skills. So we'll look a lot at the team and people who've done it before. Of track record is very appealing.
Right, the record is quite bold usiness. Yeah, we have this vision.
I teach entrepreneurship for freshmen at the university, by the way, and they're eighteen year old nineteen year olds coming in, and if you ask them what does an entrepreneur look like, see all the stereotypes come through. They think it's a white male from the Bay Area who wears a hoodie and is twenty one years old at college drop out. And we'll say, okay, name some college dropout successful entrepreneurs, and they'll say Bill Gates and Michael Dell and Steve
Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And I'll say, okay, name four more, and they can't because most entrepreneurs are forty or older. They have experience, they know what they're doing, and they're much more diverse than you think than what TV tells you. And so we're looking for that. It's that we're going to make a big investment in a college drop like
this kind of thing is. It makes for great TV, but it's actually quite rare, and especially in the energy space where it's so complex, we want people with operational experience, so they tend to be older and more experience. But they say that I've been in the power sector for twenty five years and here's the problem I'm trying to solve it. I was an oil and gas I know how to do drilling and now I'm going to apply it to geothermal. We want that experience because energy is
so risky and so complex. You want someone who has intuition built from years of making mistakes out in the field.
Right, Yeah, real will experiences. But you're teaching entrepreneurship, I am. Yeah, I teach that as well.
So it's actually so I teach entrepreneurship, I teach energy, and I teach thermo dynamics, which we call thermo dynamics. It's a it's a weed out class, Franger, it's really hard, enduring class. But so I teach the freshman entrepreneurship, and I've actually told them I'm not sure I can teach entrepreneurship. I'm not sure it can be taught, but I think it can be learned, which is a fascinating thing. I can teach them. I've got you laid on them. Yes, really,
it can be learned. I'm not sure it can be taught, but I'll teach you what I know and the certain things to know about performers and finances and what are the terms of what's total addressable market or TAM or the different things that we use abscribe the entrepreneurial opportunity, and I sort of met up front that this is the only class I've taught for almost a decade. No howur,
I'm not't even sure I can or should be. But the students come out of it really loving the course, and I guess one of the main ideas with the entrepreneurship with the class is anyone could be an entrepreneur, but it's almost up to you whether you are wired that way or want it. And a lot of students leave the course thinking I don't want to be an entrepreneur. That's actually very valuable too.
That's very by the way.
Yeah, right, And so at thirty students maybe ten emerge thinking oh yeah this is for me. Ten emerging and yeah I could do this, and ten are like not for me.
That's fine.
So well, to recognize that early on is pretty pretty usefulvery nice.
Yeah exactly.
But from what you're saying before, it's also about the team. So entrepreneurships is also about networking and having having the team to work with, right or is that something that comes off with.
Yeah, network is important. So can you build the right team, can you identify the right skills, can you manage the team?
Well?
Can you set realistic goals. You want to push the team. You have to hit your milestones. In startups that we love to see are the ones that say here's our plan.
They hit their milestones.
That means their plan is very realistic and that they are able to make progress towards the goal and they're not having to have down rounds or go ask for more money unexpected because things didn't go the way they want it. So you just want people who can you can plan and then execute. But that's hard to plan and execute if you're in an innovative space because you
don't always know how it's going to go. There's a lot of risk, especially for these early stage companies, and you have to build in room for that kind of risk for failing living with that. Yes, yeah, exactly, which is why it's venture investing. It's a different kind of risk profile than say a big one.
Again risk profiles because you've got the Decarbonization Frontier Fund now as a Duke Energy and First Energy in Microsoft are invested in that fund. What sort of investment horizons are aiming form with it?
From what does it? What does it do?
Is it deep decarbonization? And in a way with companies like those coming in Duke Energy, First Engine, Microsoft. Are their criteria for investing in this sort of fund different, Their requirements different from what you normally get.
So our investors don't get to dictate to us where we invest. We do it based on ours, so there's independence on them well to think about what's the future of energy and what are the market opportunities and does it start up meet the criteria for our investments or not.
The frontier font in particular, has a longer horizon. Deep de carversation is going to take a little longer, so what do you have it a longer but like fifteen years instead of eight years, Like we're thinking longer in the future, a longer investment window than a longer harvest which years doesn't sound very much when you're talking about the comonanization that doesn't know, I think that's such little bit.
Typical venture investing will be five to eight years or something, right, So it's longer horizon than typical venture And we see this sort of rising tide lifts all bo like we think the energy sector is where a lot of the investment's going to go for a few decades. There will be a lot of opportunity for prosperity while bringing people secure, cheap, reliable, meaner energy. I think this is very exciting to be
part of that. But the horizons like you just to be practical, you have to get out of the lab. You have to have a pilot, you have to scale up your pilot. You have to get customers, you have to get a track record, then you get more customers. It just takes a while in energy in a way that we're not used to from say software or the seven detector world.
Is this something that do kenergy for example, or these investments in this fund. Is this something they're particularly aware of? Is it something what are they what are there just for the returns or something else?
Getting there are different. We have some pure financial investors they see that we're making better returns or we're going to have an opportunity for better returns. Others and they put their money in. They just want to get their
money out. So there's some it's purely financial. But for others who are in the energy sector, there's value beyond the finances because they need to understand the change that's coming, because they might need to be the early customers or adopters of it and the change might be a threat to their business models, and therefore it's better for them
to evolve and be nimble. I think it's the idea, and so it really sort of thinks about turning the requirements to track innovation from a cost center into a profit center as a way to think about it, Like all these utilities, these major NY companies, they spend money just keeping track of where innovation is. And one way to do that is to try out the technologies yourself
with different pilot programs and that kind of thing. So so there's a real intellectual value to getting a front row seat to what kinds of investments are going on.
So it gives them a little window into some of these things as well. Some of these companies are Yeah, they might have trouble finding the startups, but we see that thands of startups, so we can tell them the space you do. Yeah, yeah, and so, and that's valuable for these companies that wish to innovate right now or
will be adopters of it. And I think this is the ones who want to be nimble and aren't stuck in their nineteen fifties view of what their business model should be and that's that's changed rapidly, Ablows, isn't it so energy in for some pond? Is is it the energy sector basically that you look into the Yeah.
So we are energy oriented. We look at energy transition, different elements of risk profile versus business, risk for technology versus business, but all about energy transition. And then Frontier find more deep decarbonzation within the energy sector. But it's not always around energy production. Sometimes it's a new energy consuming technology that might make fertilizers in a more efficient way but would save a lot of energy at the
massive fertilizer plants. So we invested in a small company called Nitricity, making nitage to based fertilizers at the farm and strib to wigh and so sometimes this on the consumption side, sometimes it's on the production side. And we're also looking at the transportation side, moving electrons or molecules from.
Place to place. How do we move it?
Do we move it in carriers, move by pilpy, move by wire or whatever. So we look all up and down the energy sector, but including the consumers, not just the production.
You're also an author.
I'm an author going to bring your books into this as well. The ones I know of probably many other things you've writen, but you've written something called Power Trip, The Story of Energy, that was published in twenty nineteen and also first for part energy, Water and Human Survival, which is sort of for me, another demonstration of you bridging that gap between the theoretical world and maybe the consumer and the real world of business and investment.
And so one.
Is that gap inevitable basically or is it a gap or is it actually a zone of creativity that you occupied where you're sitting between investment and education.
Well, I feel like I have the privilege to see many different lines of sight with that story. Where do think about it with the different parts of the energy world, the industrial world, the investor world, the academic world. And by having that position where I see these things or anything, I feel like I could tell the stories that maybe we'll capture other people and reach other audiences, and a lot of people will read books. And that book actually
aways turned it into our six part PBS documentaries. Yes, so people, somebodys prefer to watch it on TV. I supposed to read the book, but we've reached through the book and the television series probably ten million people, and so it's a very different way to sort of evangelize around energy. And I'm very pro energy and I'm very
sad about energy. I want other people to share my passion enthusiasm, and so the books your way to make the story as accessible because not everyone wants to be a physicist s or an engineer or a finance person. And so by putting into story form, narrative form, having these anecdotes and these historical nuggets, it's more useful for people. We get more people on board with energy. It's important, it's cross cutting. Energy is changing, and this is very exciting, and so the books are a.
Way to do that.
And I've got other book projects I'm working on and Power Trip the TV series has season two coming out in September actually, so we did six hour long episodes before and now I got six more episodes coming out town and so it's just a way to reach more people. And it's kind of the professor's side of me, the teaching side. I want to teach people about energy. It's a way I do that. That's storytelling. It's really important,
isn't it. I think getting the message out and is a little chalnge we all face because the energy transition is one of the biggest stories around. I mean, what is bigger than the climate change and the anti transitions soon?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it's the defining sort of sectoral growth for the next thirty years, defining challenge for the century.
So I think it is important. It's a big opportunity too. But I wonder if it's becoming harder actually to communicate that narrative around the agency and what's going on. I'm thinking of the controversy around the ESTIE for example, and you know this pushback against some of the innovation has been in the investment world.
Would what do you think about it? Is it becoming harder or is it becoming easy?
Yeah, there's more land minds in the language. We have to watch out for. The audiences will arrive into a room where maybe I'm giving a seminar or something in the different viewpoints before I've ever spoken, and it does seem us more complex. But there's been a divide over climate change for a long time, so I've been at this for a couple of decades. There's been a generational divide where older people tend to care less about climate
change than the younger people. And now we also have a political divide there depending on who you vote for might effect what kind of things you're hearing and whether you care or not. So there's a lot of loaded terminology words that if you say this, people interpret differently depending on how they vote or where they live or where they sit in the room and this kind of thing, right, And so it does feel like it's a lay mind talk about it and ESG is part of it, Climate change is part of it.
Fossil fuels, renewables.
People wear their jerseys for whatever side they're on, and they feel like they have to choose the side of fossil fuels or choose the side of renewables or something.
They become bondstand in some of these ways. Totally.
Yeah, yeah, And it's like a marker what team you're on. And I'm like, no, no, we need energy and we want energy to clean, safe and reliable. Let's figure out the different ways to get there. And so it's a challenge, I would say, for sure, it's a challenge, and it's gotten worse on social media.
In many ways. Social media. Stay clear on social media.
I'm on social media a lot, and I think, I think, I say my most regrettable things on social media. But I reach a different audience that way as well. Yeah, and there's some people who might follow me on Twitter but aren't going to read a book or watch TV
or whatever. So it is a challenge for sure, despite the challenge of getting the language right and reaching these different audiences, for the most part, things are changing anyway, especially this cultural change where because younger people, as they get older, are taking positions of authority, they're serious about it, and as older people who were not serious retire their voice full matter less. So it seems like it's really happening, and it feels like the pace.
Is picking up. Frankly, they just have a different worldview.
Maybe, as I'm witkingly, we've given you circumstances led them to a different world view totally.
So when I think of these suits, I've taught thousands of students in person, and I've taught thousands of people, probably ten thousand people at.
This point online.
So I've taught a lot of students, and they really see it as their Cold War, their multi decade generation defining challenge. That means that peace and prosperity on the line, and they have to win it is a fascinating thing to see in the same solutions will be We need technical innovation, we need collaboration, we need stronger institutions, the same answers for the Cold War, the same answers for climate change. And the students right, and they said, this
is my career. I'm spend thirty forty years doing it. And my mentor when I was undergrad was a Cold warterer. He spent his entire career trying to win the Cold War. It was his career defining thing. And I see that repeating with students. And what's funny if you think of it like the Cold War, maybe even World War two. At some point it doesn't matter what it costs. You think peace and prosperity on the line to win doesn't
matter what a cost. And then what you find out when you win is that was the economically beneficial path anyway. It was good for the economy to win World War Two, it was good for the economy to win the Cold War. It will be good for the economy, and already is good for the economy to tackle climate change.
That's the way they see it. And I like, I'll power to you. We need you so it's really fantastic.
Yeah, that's a really interesting idea that it can give some sort of direction to whole careers. So back to the reality of investment. I suppose I was going to ask you about the technologies that you find most interesting that are coming up over the next few years. But let's take bankability is the point that they need to reach.
What is it the most excites you about? What's the innovations that you're looking at at the moment, but in terms of what actually is not too far out of there but is realizable within the next there are so many exciting First of all, the first excitement is there are so many good ideas, Like that is just like an overwhelming thing.
Like, oh wow, there's a lot of good ideas that you don't get to see if you're not an investor. Because if you're an investor, people want your money. They've all show you their ideas, and so there's more good ideas than I realize, which is a good thing. I guess, Okay, there's a lot of ideas, which ones are going to cap There are very exciting ones that we know will change the world if they work, like fusion everyone vision. Yeah, and we have invested in sapp Energy, We have invested
in fusion. If fusion works, it will change the world. We all know that that's a big one. That's a big one, though, very big one. Yeah, And it's also hard to invest early stage because fusion companies, as they make progress, come worth billions of dollars very quickly, so it's hard for a venture fund.
Then how likely is that to come together?
That it's unlikely a small likelihood, but its impact would be so largely you just have to invest. So in fact, there's been Bolti articles and Bloomberg just like two days ago all about the fusion companies out there that might change.
The world pretty so many of them. Yeah.
So there's a lot more at Tension in Bluemberg and other outlets really covering this.
Which I think is really exciting. So it's become kind of mainstream.
Doesn't mean we'll have a fusion plant next year, so it could be many years, a decade, right, But it's exciting to see private.
Money coming to it, not just goverment money. That's exciting.
I'm excited about energy storage. Energy storage has been this solution for.
Like twenty years.
We've been saying for twenty years if we just had a better battery for a better way to do stories right. And it feels like the markets have answered with lithium ion batteries for our smartphones and electric cards, But there are other chemistries out there that either don't degrade or have longer duration. We have vested in companies like Form Energy, which is a long duration battery. So this is very citing in the energy storage space. Another area of excitement
for me that's really interesting is around hydrogen. And hydrogen's fascinating for me because the hydrogen's come and gone many times, oh many times. I mean if you go back to the eighteen hundreds in Phantom of the Opera and if you read the book or seen the movie. But they the author guests On wrote in nineteen ten about the late eighteen hundreds Paras opera house how they use hydrogen methane blends to change the brightness of the stage lighting.
So we talked today about hydrogen methane blends as innovative and world changing, and in fact, French authors had tackled that by the eighteen eighties, and Jules Verne wrote about in the eighteen seventies with the mysterious islon. We're using hydrogen from water and electrol system run a fuel cell, so hygroen. It's not new, but it's attracting some private capital and there's new ways to go about it. And for me, I was a professional hydrogen skeptic for about ten years.
When you read it.
Thousand and seven in twenty eighteen, I just why were you think? Why it's just so thermodyamically stupid to take electricity, to split water to make electricity, And I just was really critical, like it's not an original resource. It is something you have to extract from other resource. Doesn't make sense. But then twenty eighteen, as I started to work with engine I realized how many different ways there are.
To make and use hydrogen. This is NG Energy in Paris, France.
I was their chief science and technology officer and we had a hydrogen laburnize meaning of the team.
I just kind of have my eyes opened up.
Okay, there's more to hydrogen than using a coal fire power plant to split water to make electricity, and in particular, there are many ways to make hydrogen, so electrolysis, use electricity, split water gets a lot of the headlines. Seam methane reforming actually is where we make a lot of our hydrogen, and actually coal gasifications another one, so cold natural gas or where we make our hydrogen today. Maybe we'll make it from electrolysis in the future, but there are other
ways to make it. There's pyrolysis and photolysis and radiolysis and catalysis and thermolysis. There are all these other paths that are potentially much more efficient because there's a different feedstock. They use degraded waste teat or something. They're not using new energy. And so you start to open your mind beyond the two pathways we see, or the third that's looming, to all the ways you I make hydrogen. It gets pretty exciting. And then you start to think of all
the ways we might use hydrogen. It gets pretty exciting. And then if you think of all the excess really cheap wind and solar electricity might have latrolls, it starts to make sense. Now, I think hydrogen is not going to place bulk energy, but there are things like chemicals and industrial heat and aviation and marinehipping where hydrogen might play a pretty important role.
So that's kind of exciting for us. And we're looking at that as well.
What was interesting We'll saying what you said is that up until twenty eighteen and in some of your eyes were opened by being somewhere and going to a lab and seeing something differently, and you had a career in this obviously the guy you brought it out to make fun of hydrogen and then I went to a corporate lab that was working on it.
And that's where it's good for me as a professor to get into the real world, because the real world says, well, I know you're skeptical, but here's the progress they made in the last forty years. We've been look at this for a while and I just learned a lot and I'm sorry. Good for me to get that education.
That's fascinating. This is a fascinating We could probably go on. We'll have to do another one at some point.
We know the one do and follow on this so much to talk about energy as a rich topic.
Hit to work with, Mike Webb. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much.
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