Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #24 "We’ll just use Hydrogen!" with Michael Liebreich

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Bad Idea #24 "We’ll just use Hydrogen!" with Michael Liebreich · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  Probably 252025 years ago there was going to be hydrogen cars,
• 0:03
  hydrogen trucks, hydrogen planes.
• 0:05
  None of these have materialized. So So what?
• 0:06
  What the hell happened? Actually, if you go back even
• 0:09
  longer than you and I have been doing this, Mark, go back to the
• 0:12
  1970s was the first kind of real hydrogen boom.
• 0:17
  So there was a huge wave around the year 2000, Jeremy Rifkin's
• 0:21
  book Hydrogen Economy. And then of course, all of that
• 0:24
  petered out and then it came roaring back around 2017.
• 0:28
  20/20/2020 one was probably the peak of this cycle.
• 0:32
  It's just that hydrogen fundamentally is a really crappy
• 0:36
  fuel. Welcome to saving the world from
• 0:39
  bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus and I've had a
• 0:42
  few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
• 0:45
  time to destroy GMO crops and I also posed nuclear power.
• 0:49
  But then when I looked at the science I found I got it wrong.
• 0:51
  Oops. I've learned the hard way that
• 0:53
  none of us are right all the time.
• 0:55
  So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
• 0:57
  often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
• 1:01
  it right. Hello, and welcome to saving the
• 1:03
  world from bad ideas. I'm here today with Michael
• 1:06
  Lebreich, who's the former Olympic skiing champion for
• 1:11
  Where Is It? I can see this picture in the
• 1:12
  background of your of your video feed here.
• 1:14
  Michael, you've got to give us that first.
• 1:17
  So I was on the British ski team.
• 1:19
  So usually when people hear I was at the Olympics they say did
• 1:22
  you win? And I said, well, I was the
• 1:23
  highest place management consultant, but that is actually
• 1:26
  me over my shoulder advertising cosmetics.
• 1:31
  Well, suntan lotion. Well, that's, that's
• 1:33
  astonishing. I mean, you're the only Olympian
• 1:35
  I think I've probably ever spoken to, let alone the first
• 1:37
  on this podcast. So it's a, it's an inaugural
• 1:39
  moment for us and welcome especially for that.
• 1:41
  But also you're the founder and CEO of Leibrich Associates and
• 1:45
  you're the managing partner of Eco Pragma Capital and probably
• 1:48
  also well known for being the founder of what's now Bloomberg
• 1:51
  NEF, which I think, I think stands for New Energy Finance,
• 1:53
  right? That's right.
• 1:54
  So we were new energy finance, which was all sorts of fun and
• 1:58
  games because we didn't provide finance.
• 2:00
  We provided information to those who are involved in the finance
• 2:03
  world. And then that grew and I sold it
• 2:07
  to Bloomberg. So it's now Bloomberg NEF, but
• 2:10
  it's the team that I, you know, created and trained.
• 2:12
  I haven't been involved there. Rather than writing my my essays
• 2:15
  a couple of times a year for, you know, it's been some time
• 2:18
  now. Well, welcome.
• 2:19
  And also, I think you're probably well known to our
• 2:20
  audience as Co host with Briony Worthington of the amazing
• 2:25
  podcast Cleaning Up, which I highly recommend everyone to
• 2:28
  listen to once they've finished listening to all our podcasts
• 2:30
  here at Saving the World and Bad Ideas.
• 2:33
  And so we have to start with a bad idea.
• 2:35
  And there's no dispute about what we're going to talk about
• 2:37
  today. It's green hydrogen.
• 2:39
  And so the, the bad idea that you're going to debunk on this
• 2:42
  episode is, is, is the whole idea of green hydrogen.
• 2:45
  I'm, I'm really, really keen to get into this because I, you
• 2:48
  know, I, I've, I've been, I'm long enough in the tooth that
• 2:51
  I've been on the climate beat for, you know, enough time to
• 2:54
  remember how long hydrogen's been this huge buzzword.
• 2:57
  You know, people are writing books about the coming hydrogen
• 2:59
  economy. Probably 252025 years ago, there
• 3:02
  was going to be hydrogen cars, hydrogen trucks, hydrogen
• 3:04
  planes. None of these have materialized.
• 3:07
  So, So what? What the hell happened?
• 3:08
  Well, So what we're looking at is actually, if you go back even
• 3:12
  longer than you and I have been doing this, Mark, go back to the
• 3:15
  19, 70s was the first kind of real hydrogen boom.
• 3:22
  At that time, it was out of Japan because you had the oil
• 3:24
  shock. Japan, obviously not having
• 3:27
  fossil resources itself, suffered really badly from that,
• 3:30
  got a shock and decided that hydrogen was going to be the
• 3:34
  answer. And we've seen just these waves
• 3:37
  of hype and excitement ever since about every 20 years.
• 3:41
  So there was a huge wave around the year 2000, Jeremy Rifkin's
• 3:44
  book Hydrogen Economy. And then of course, all of that
• 3:48
  petered out and we had about a decade when people didn't really
• 3:52
  talk about hydrogen very much, and then it came roaring back
• 3:55
  around 19, around 2017. 2020-2021 was probably the peak
• 4:00
  of this cycle. It's just that hydrogen
• 4:03
  fundamentally is a really crappy fuel.
• 4:07
  It's just a very, very bad fuel. And so it doesn't matter how
• 4:11
  much money you throw at it, how hard you try, turning green
• 4:14
  hydrogen into a fuel is just a really, really, I mean, I
• 4:17
  wouldn't even say it's a difficult thing because that
• 4:19
  makes it sound like eventually you could solve it.
• 4:21
  It's just for all sorts of reasons of physics,
• 4:24
  thermodynamics, microeconomics, it's just never really going to
• 4:29
  be a thing. Yeah, I mean, you are fighting
• 4:31
  thermodynamics, aren't you? Because it's a bit like using
• 4:33
  wood ash as a fuel instead of wood.
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  It's like it's the products of combustion rather than the the
• 4:39
  fuel that could actually deliver, deliver free.
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  I mean, you see, The thing is it seems superficially, oh, you
• 4:45
  know, you take water, you put electricity into it and you
• 4:48
  split it into hydrogen and oxygen.
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  What could be better? What could be a more promising
• 4:51
  fuel than that? But of course, it's the result
• 4:53
  of a combustion. So it's a long way
• 4:54
  thermodynamically down the ladder, isn't it?
• 4:56
  Yeah. So I think there's there's a
• 4:57
  couple of, you know, there's two buckets of problems. 1 is to
• 5:01
  produce it, you effectively have to reverse combustion.
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  You have to take, you know, water is, you know, an oxygen
• 5:09
  molecule and two hydrogen molecules that have bonded with
• 5:12
  an enormous release of energy. And you have to do that
• 5:15
  backwards somehow. And so that's one problem,
• 5:18
  that's it's going to be expensive.
• 5:21
  And we can talk about why it's expensive, which is not just the
• 5:24
  electrolyzers. It's actually, you know, it's a
• 5:26
  chemicals plant fed by electricity.
• 5:29
  And so it's going to remain pretty expensive.
• 5:32
  But the second bucket, which I think is equally important, is
• 5:35
  the one that a lot of people miss, which is even once you've
• 5:38
  got the hydrogen, you have to do things like compress it and move
• 5:42
  it around and then store it and then distribute it to wherever
• 5:46
  you actually need it. And then you have to use it.
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  And you've got all these processors which are set up to
• 5:51
  use these perfect fuels, which are essentially fossil fuels or
• 5:56
  electricity. And then you have to re engineer
• 5:58
  them to use this. Very difficult to handle, very
• 6:02
  kind of explosive and likes to combust and likes to escapee a
• 6:06
  tiny molecule. And that just drives your costs
• 6:10
  up, up, up. And so could engineers get this
• 6:13
  stuff to work? Yes.
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  And in a way that's the tragedy because they could get it to
• 6:17
  work. It just ends up that the things
• 6:20
  you need to do to make it work are just too expensive.
• 6:24
  Yes, I mean, I guess it, it works in the lab, right?
• 6:27
  Something I did in high school chemistry was split water using
• 6:30
  electrolysis and you get hydrogen.
• 6:32
  I mean, it's, it's sort of so I think that's probably people's
• 6:34
  level of understanding. You can easily make hydrogen.
• 6:36
  So why can't we use it as a clean?
• 6:37
  Flame and and it's not just that you can make it it's that you
• 6:40
  can also you can move it around, right.
• 6:42
  You can put it in a pipeline, you can put it in a in a, in a,
• 6:47
  a tank. You can compress it.
• 6:48
  You can you can put it in a bus. There are buses in London that
• 6:51
  are burning hydrogen or using hydrogen in a fuel cell.
• 6:54
  Fine, but the problem is the cost of doing those things.
• 6:58
  And in a way, I think that's what contributes to these waves
• 7:01
  of hype is that it's actually, for an engineer, it's
• 7:04
  ferociously exciting stuff to work with, right?
• 7:06
  It's a really nice challenge. How do you run a train on Hydra
• 7:11
  journey? You think, ah, that's marvelous.
• 7:12
  You know, what could be more interesting, certainly more
• 7:15
  interesting than boring old electric train that's been
• 7:17
  around for, you know, 100 years plus.
• 7:19
  So it's very, very interesting for engineers to work on and
• 7:24
  it's very poorly understood. I'm going to say this, I hate,
• 7:26
  hate to say it, but anybody who doesn't have a really strong
• 7:29
  STEM background is not going to understand why things like
• 7:34
  compressing hydrogen to 700 atmospheres is a difficult
• 7:38
  thing. And then containing it, you
• 7:40
  know, in, in, in some without leaking.
• 7:43
  Why is that a difficult thing? It's kind of obvious to people
• 7:46
  who've tried to actually do it in a lab environment or
• 7:49
  whatever. But but then as I say, for those
• 7:51
  people, it's just really exciting.
• 7:52
  Why not try? So you've got this kind of
• 7:55
  perfect it's it's a perfect storm.
• 7:58
  And then you have obviously politicians who love it because
• 8:00
  it gets, it's a get out of jail free card because they don't
• 8:03
  know how to solve climate change.
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  But they can look all kind of wizzy and and progressive by
• 8:07
  talking about hydrogen. And and then there's a whole
• 8:10
  load of sort of incumbents who love to talk about it wink,
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  wink, nudge, nudge. It's never going to happen.
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  But if we talk about it enough, we can keep doing the stuff that
• 8:19
  makes us money. So there's kind of all sorts of
• 8:21
  reasons why this thing has captured everybody's imagination
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  just time and again. Exactly.
• 8:26
  And of course, your new fossil fuel plant is hydrogen ready.
• 8:28
  So that makes it OK to invest in from from a climate perspective.
• 8:31
  Yeah, well, you know what my garage is Ferrari.
• 8:34
  Ferrari ready, you know. At least it's not a Tesla.
• 8:39
  Look, you did you did a talk at I think it was Imperial last
• 8:43
  year where you really went in quite hard on some of these on,
• 8:47
  on the kind of hydrogen dreamers, probably many of whom
• 8:49
  are in the audience. And one of the stats that really
• 8:52
  stood out for me was I think it's like 100 million tons of
• 8:56
  hydrogen per year are produced. And so this is being used in in
• 9:00
  chemicals and all sorts of industrial probably making
• 9:02
  fertilizer as well ammonia but but green hydrogen.
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  So split from water using electrolysis is less than .1% of
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  of that total 100 million tons, right?
• 9:16
  That's right. So 150 years ago, Jules Verne in
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  the book about the magic island, he wrote, you know, one of his
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  characters said, ha, in the future we won't need coal
• 9:27
  because we'll be using, we'll be, we'll be using, I think he
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  said water. But when he meant the OR you
• 9:32
  know meant hydrogen obviously split from water and 150 years
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  later and 50 years after Japan went hydrogen crazy.
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  And you know, all these years after every because 60 countries
• 9:46
  have got hydrogen strategies as of about you know, they, they
• 9:48
  started doing that around 2017, 18/19/20 and still nought .1% of
• 9:54
  hydrogen that we use every day for fertilizers and Petro
• 9:57
  chemicals. Nought .1% is actually
• 10:01
  electrolysis. And by the way, that doesn't
• 10:04
  mean green electrolysis because even those people who are
• 10:07
  electrolysing are very often doing using a bit of green, but
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  then a whole bunch of gas or coal to kind of keep the lights
• 10:13
  on, keep the electrolysis running 24/7, which they need to
• 10:17
  do for economic reasons. Which is quite astonishing.
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  So green hydrogen can't even produce the hydrogen that we
• 10:23
  currently consume for all these other purposes.
• 10:26
  I mean, so how can it possibly? Well, look, I, I, I want to, I
• 10:30
  want to go back a bit because I, I, I don't want to sound like I
• 10:32
  fully agree with you on all of this.
• 10:33
  I think I need to play devil's advocate to at least up to a
• 10:36
  point. Let me put something to you.
• 10:37
  You talk about cost a lot. If we'd been having a
• 10:40
  conversation about solar in the 1970s, you know, it cost $10,000
• 10:44
  a square inch or whatever it was.
• 10:46
  That's not a real figure, but it was it was a lot more expensive
• 10:48
  than it is now. You'd you'd have been saying
• 10:50
  presumably that there'll never be a solar economy.
• 10:53
  And yet here we are a long way towards a really an incredible
• 10:57
  sort of roll out of solar panels because it got that much
• 10:59
  cheaper. Can't have you and do the same.
• 11:01
  So I love that question because it's it's what I think in
• 11:04
  America they call a layup. And and you know, I am the guy
• 11:09
  who actually kind of worked out how cheap solar was going to get
• 11:12
  and founded New Energy Finance. I mean, I didn't.
• 11:15
  Know that by the way that was this wasn't a set up.
• 11:17
  Well, you know, so it was, you know, there were at the time,
• 11:19
  frankly, solar was really minuscule and really expensive.
• 11:23
  And in fact, it was wind that was making most of the running
• 11:26
  in terms of the learning curve, but solar was clearly not far
• 11:29
  behind. And then by about 22,000 and
• 11:31
  nine, 2010, I was all in on the learning curve for batteries.
• 11:35
  So I do learning curves. In fact, my very first job out
• 11:38
  of university, well, my very first job out of university was
• 11:42
  actually being a ski guide and a ski bum.
• 11:44
  But my second job was actually calculating learning curves for
• 11:48
  a consultancy based in London called Braxton Associates.
• 11:51
  And I've done them, I calculated them for things, even for things
• 11:54
  like printed circuit boards and stone quarrying.
• 11:58
  And, you know, everything we do has a learning curve related to
• 12:02
  obviously intellectual property learning and know, know how and
• 12:06
  so on. But also as we invest, we just
• 12:09
  build bigger machines and, you know, we've built more, more
• 12:12
  roads and more equipment and so on so that the costs come down.
• 12:16
  So I, I am, you know, learning curves for me is almost a
• 12:20
  religion, right? This is what happens.
• 12:22
  The problem that you've got with green hydrogen is that if you
• 12:27
  look at the cost base of green hydrogen, only about 10% of it
• 12:31
  relates to the electrolyzer stack, which you could think of
• 12:35
  as being equivalent to, you know, the solar panel or in
• 12:39
  fact, frankly, the flat screen TV that you know, we're looking
• 12:41
  at or the equivalent of a battery.
• 12:44
  Now the the bit that is made in a high volume mass manufacturing
• 12:48
  lecturing plant, that's the electrolyzer stack.
• 12:51
  But for green hydrogen you then have to put that into what is
• 12:54
  effectively A chemicals plant about 3 or 4 times as much.
• 12:59
  Kit is nothing to do with the electrolyzer stack.
• 13:02
  It's things like compressors and tanks and pipes and a substation
• 13:08
  and these little things that you have to have called blast walls
• 13:11
  because, you know, otherwise the whole thing's going to get, you
• 13:14
  know, is at is at risk because it's such a nasty molecule to
• 13:16
  work with. These are big complicated
• 13:19
  chemicals plants, right? And then the next thing you've
• 13:22
  got is that to drive them, unlike with the solar panel, you
• 13:27
  just bang it into a field and there it is.
• 13:28
  It produces electricity. This thing needs electricity in
• 13:32
  order to run, right? So what you end up with is about
• 13:36
  10% of the cost is, is this electrolyzer, about 40% is heavy
• 13:42
  engineering and another 40% is electricity.
• 13:45
  And by the way, as the other things get cheaper, the
• 13:48
  electricity bit gets more and more bigger and bigger
• 13:50
  proportion of the whole. So if you say right, let's say
• 13:55
  green electricity in Europe right now, you'd be very lucky
• 13:59
  to produce it for less than €6 a kilo.
• 14:02
  And to put it in perspective, grey dirty hydrogen that's used
• 14:08
  in a fertilizer plant made out of natural gas, that would cost
• 14:12
  maybe €1.00. So you've got to reduce, if you
• 14:15
  just want no carbon price, nothing, you need to reduce the
• 14:19
  price, the cost rather by a factor of 6.
• 14:22
  If you really think we're just going to make green hydrogen, we
• 14:25
  don't even need a carbon price factor of 6, right?
• 14:29
  Where from? How do you think the electricity
• 14:32
  is going to get 6 times cheaper? Do you think that the compressor
• 14:35
  is going to get 6 times cheaper? Do you think that the substation
• 14:38
  is going to get 6 times cheaper? Of course not.
• 14:40
  Only the electrolyzer stack, frankly could get 10 times
• 14:45
  cheaper, 20 times cheaper, just not going to help you.
• 14:48
  That €6, you could see it coming down to, I don't know, let's say
• 14:52
  €4.00, but can you see it getting down to 1?
• 14:55
  Absolutely not. And even if you have a carbon
• 14:57
  price, it has to get down to about 1 1/2 euros.
• 15:00
  Well, it's just not going to. Just not going to.
• 15:02
  Simple as that. How?
• 15:04
  How cheap can electricity get? Let's say you're covering Saudi,
• 15:06
  half of Saudi Arabian solar panels, some of these hot
• 15:08
  deserts, let's say. Well, so solar before the
• 15:12
  inflation crisis and you know, sort of if you go back to just
• 15:15
  before the Russian invasion of, of Ukraine and so on, solar was
• 15:21
  pushing in Saudi Arabia, they were saying I think it was
• 15:25
  $1011.00 per MW hour, right? And but there was a little bit
• 15:31
  fake because there's all sorts of, you know, cheap finance
• 15:34
  Freeland, blah, blah, blah. So now we've had a bit of
• 15:36
  inflation, but then we'll have more learning.
• 15:38
  So you know, call it, I don't know, 15 or $20 per MW hour,
• 15:42
  absolutely believable. But that's, but you've got a
• 15:45
  problem then, because that's only 8 hours a day, right?
• 15:48
  So then you building this huge plant with all the stuff that I
• 15:52
  talked about, all of the electrical system, all of
• 15:54
  everything, everything except that you're only using it 1/3 of
• 15:57
  the time. So you're kind of caught
• 16:00
  between, there's a, there's a, you're, you're damned if you do,
• 16:05
  damned if you don't. If you go with just the cheap
• 16:07
  solar, you're only operating 8 hours a day.
• 16:10
  But if you then want to operate 24/7, you've then got to add a
• 16:14
  whole load of batteries to the solar.
• 16:17
  And so your electricity cost then has gone all the way back
• 16:20
  up again. And so neither way can you make
• 16:22
  really, really cheap green hydrogen.
• 16:25
  I mean, I don't know anything about chemicals, but do you need
• 16:27
  to operate a plant 24/7 to, you know, to, to, to use the get
• 16:31
  back the capital cost of it? Well, that's not chemistry,
• 16:34
  that's economics, right? So in other words, if you just
• 16:38
  for the same quantity of hydrogen, if you want to make it
• 16:41
  only operating 8 hours a day, you'll need 3 plants.
• 16:44
  And you've got another problem, which is chemistry, which is
• 16:47
  downstream, of course, because you know what you're, what
• 16:51
  you're doing with the hydrogen. First of all, you, of course you
• 16:54
  could, you could put it into a pipeline if there was a
• 16:57
  pipeline. But most people have realized
• 17:00
  that actually what you're going to do is make ammonia.
• 17:02
  And you'll either make ammonia for the local market or you'll
• 17:06
  export it. But you need to make ammonia.
• 17:07
  Well, guess what? An ammonia plant absolutely
• 17:10
  hates operating just 8 hours a day.
• 17:15
  Those are high temperature, high pressure plants and they like to
• 17:18
  operate to operate 24/7. So now what you've got is these
• 17:23
  sort of pulses of hydrogen. If you're only using solar, even
• 17:26
  if you've got the green hydrogen plant, you know, operating
• 17:30
  cheaply 8 hours a day, which by the way, they're much less
• 17:34
  efficient because you have to keep switching them off and on
• 17:36
  and they have to get up to speed and temperature and blah, blah,
• 17:38
  blah, right? But even if you did that, now
• 17:41
  you've got to create buffer storage because for another 16
• 17:45
  hours a day, you've got your fertilizer plant working, but
• 17:48
  you're not producing any hydrogen.
• 17:50
  So now you need lots of storage, you need compression, you're
• 17:53
  going to have to somehow make all that storage safe, et
• 17:56
  cetera, et cetera. So that's one of the things that
• 17:59
  that happened around, you know, 2020-2021 when everybody got so
• 18:03
  super excited about this, they just didn't go through the
• 18:08
  engineering of, OK, you want to build, you want to build an
• 18:12
  ammonia plant in Namibia. Lovely sun, fantastic.
• 18:16
  But how do you turn that into ammonia?
• 18:18
  What are the things that you need to do and how much do they
• 18:21
  cost? And when you do that, you find
• 18:24
  that, you know, right now you're not making any green hydrogen
• 18:28
  anywhere in the world at less than $4.00 per kilo.
• 18:31
  None of the plants on the drawing boards, not even in
• 18:33
  China right now, $4.00. Where's the grey stuff from
• 18:38
  natural gas? I say in, in Europe it's, let's
• 18:41
  say you know, a euro and a half, maybe a couple of EUR, but in
• 18:44
  with a, depending on carbon price and so on.
• 18:47
  But you know, in most places in the Gulf in the US, in China
• 18:52
  even, well, they would use black hydrogen.
• 18:55
  They're making hydrogen for a buck a kilo and the green stuff
• 18:58
  is 4 bucks a kilo. And, you know, I, I could see it
• 19:02
  in the Gulf going down to three maybe, but it's still more
• 19:05
  expensive. It's more expensive.
• 19:07
  And that's a That's just a huge problem.
• 19:09
  That's only a three times differential.
• 19:11
  You said you were talking about a 10 times or 6/6 times, I mean.
• 19:14
  In Europe, in Europe we're talking about €6 plays, you
• 19:17
  know, one 1 1/2 and, and by the way, 6 is already optimistic.
• 19:21
  You know, if you look at the plants that are actually being
• 19:23
  built now in Europe, then they are the, the, the cost and the,
• 19:27
  the, there's some proper analysis by a Dutch organization
• 19:31
  called TNO that got anonymized data from actual projects.
• 19:35
  And it was 6 to €13 per kilo. And if I might, you know, a buck
• 19:42
  a kilo, a euro, a kilo, a buck a kilo is a gargantuan problem
• 19:47
  because this is a commodity. You know, when you're making
• 19:50
  ammonia for fertilizers and, you know, you use the number, we can
• 19:54
  go through the arithmetic. Supposing you just say, right,
• 19:57
  let's take existing use of hydrogen and let's go to green
• 20:02
  hydrogen. We should start there right
• 20:04
  before we start inventing other uses. 100 million tons of of
• 20:10
  hydrogen being used this year. That is 100 billion kilos.
• 20:16
  So if you've got a $1.00 problem, right, you can make it
• 20:19
  for $1.00, but you're going to make it for, well, you haven't
• 20:22
  got a $1.00, but you you've got more like A at least.
• 20:25
  At the moment, a three dollar problem, we'll come back to
• 20:27
  that. But for every dollar of cost
• 20:29
  difference, that's $100 billion per year that somebody has to
• 20:34
  find. It's as simple as that.
• 20:37
  And but it's worse because if you want somebody to build those
• 20:40
  plants, you can't just say, well, fine, here's $100 billion
• 20:44
  go build the plants because they'll say doesn't work like
• 20:47
  that. You need to give me 15 years
• 20:50
  worth of 100 billion, right, which is 1 1/2 trillion dollars,
• 20:55
  1 1/2 trillion dollars for every dollar per kilo of cost problem.
• 21:01
  And as we know, we've got a $3 problem, right?
• 21:04
  So that's a four and a half trillion dollar gap.
• 21:08
  That is the missing money. It's hydrogen's missing
• 21:11
  trillions, which I've written about.
• 21:13
  And so if you gave me 4 1/2 trillion dollars, I could
• 21:17
  replace all the hydrogen we use today for the next 15 years, by
• 21:21
  the way, not, you know, straight after that.
• 21:23
  As soon as the 15 years is up, I'd switch those plants off
• 21:25
  because it's too expensive to run.
• 21:27
  But for 15 years, I would produce you nice, beautiful,
• 21:31
  clean green hydrogen. But if there's No 4 1/2 trillion
• 21:35
  dollars, I'm not getting out of bed.
• 21:38
  Well, I don't know about you but 4 1/2 trillion sounds like real
• 21:40
  money to me. But.
• 21:42
  Well, it adds up, as they say, you know, a trillion here, a
• 21:44
  trillion there. Soon you're talking real money.
• 21:46
  That's where the yeah, exactly. That's where the capital T
• 21:48
  presumably, yes, I mean. TT.
• 21:51
  Yeah. I mean, there are big investment
• 21:53
  decisions being made into hydrogen though.
• 21:55
  I mean there's neon in in Saudi Arabia.
• 21:57
  I think it's was that 4 gigawatts of solar and I can't
• 22:00
  remember exactly how much hydrogen that's meant to
• 22:02
  produce, but that's that's a significant investment.
• 22:05
  I mean, are those are the Saudis entrepreneurs or whoever or the
• 22:09
  king or the NBS, are they all stupid?
• 22:11
  I mean, in putting this money there, no.
• 22:12
  No, no, because they had an off take from Air Products that said
• 22:15
  we'll buy everything you can make.
• 22:17
  Sorry, what's an off? Take an off take.
• 22:18
  OK, So what in when they were putting that together, they
• 22:20
  said, right, we're going to do this gargantuan project.
• 22:22
  It's a huge project and it costs 8 1/2 billion dollars.
• 22:27
  And they said we're prepared to invest it, but we need a buyer,
• 22:30
  we need those 15 years of somebody to buy to off take the
• 22:35
  resulting hydrogen. So our products, we had a very
• 22:39
  visionary CEO signed up and said, yeah, absolutely we're in,
• 22:42
  we'll do it. But you know and you know, lots
• 22:46
  of press releases and they got going building.
• 22:48
  So first of all, I believe that they were targeting $3 per kilo
• 22:55
  hydrogen when they signed all of that.
• 22:57
  And I don't quite know who was going to eat all those, you
• 23:00
  know, those extra dollars. But what happened since then is
• 23:04
  that the costs went up. It's not been fully announced,
• 23:08
  but the costs now, I understand, are more like 4 1/2.
• 23:12
  But also Air Products, basically, the board fired the
• 23:17
  CEO for signing that and other deals because there's nobody to
• 23:21
  buy. Air Products sells industrial
• 23:23
  gases. So they thought, Oh well,
• 23:25
  there'll be lots of people buying this in, you know, those
• 23:27
  Europe's Europeans are kind of crazy and don't know to what
• 23:30
  extent they had done their analysis, but they, they are
• 23:32
  unable to sign up off takers. And so therefore, you know it,
• 23:36
  this has been a for at least for the career of the chap who
• 23:40
  signed it, a catastrophic deal. And here's the thing, for all
• 23:45
  that this is a huge, huge project that cost 8 1/2 billion
• 23:49
  dollars and so on. It would produce one 500th of
• 23:54
  the hydrogen required to meet your challenge of replacing that
• 23:59
  100 million tons per year. It's only 250,000.
• 24:04
  I think that's right. Yeah, you said you said.
• 24:06
  Yeah, point .22. It's .2 exactly so point .22.
• 24:11
  So if it was .2 it would be 1500.
• 24:13
  So it's a bit over one, but you know, So what you're saying is
• 24:17
  you've got these huge projects in the best, sunniest place in
• 24:20
  the in the world with the cheapest capital with probably
• 24:22
  all sorts of freebies thrown at it.
• 24:24
  And, and it's you need 500 more of those projects to even
• 24:30
  replace existing hydrogen demand with green hydrogen.
• 24:34
  And you know that I've never seen, I've been doing this for a
• 24:37
  long time, 20 years plus. I have never seen such a
• 24:40
  mismatch between you know what policy makers and you know, the
• 24:46
  the entire panoply of dreamers and grifters and and, you know,
• 24:51
  just hopeful people and you know, they want so much from
• 24:55
  green hydrogen and what it can deliver is so, so little.
• 25:00
  I mean, let's just stick to the scale issue.
• 25:03
  So you'd need 500 of these four GW projects if you're, if you're
• 25:08
  looking at the solar model just to cover the existing uses of
• 25:11
  hydrogen if you were to expand those uses of hydrogen to to do
• 25:15
  steel. I think you've said do you, do
• 25:18
  you remember the figures off the top of your head?
• 25:20
  Otherwise, I've got them written.
• 25:21
  Down I haven't got them in front of me, but you know, for each
• 25:23
  thing you want to do beyond that, you can basically assume
• 25:27
  that it's kind of five times all of the renewable energy that's
• 25:33
  ever needed. You know it not not for each use
• 25:35
  case. If you put them all together,
• 25:36
  you put kind of shipping and and aviation fuel and steel and a
• 25:41
  bit of long duration storage and then you just kind of make
• 25:44
  really conservative assumptions about how much of that you might
• 25:46
  actually do with hydrogen. And you would need, you know,
• 25:49
  five times all of the wind and solar that's ever been
• 25:53
  installed, which by the way, is now producing just under 20% of
• 25:57
  all electricity. So you're kind of saying, let's
• 25:59
  take all the world's electricity and just use it to make
• 26:03
  hydrogen, you know, for fertilizers and Petro chemicals
• 26:06
  and and then a few of these new use cases.
• 26:09
  So the scale is just. It's unthinkable.
• 26:12
  I mean, no one's told the Europeans this because they've
• 26:14
  just passed a law mandating that green hydrogen has to go into
• 26:18
  aviation fuel, right? Yes, I mean they've, they've
• 26:20
  passed. There's a thing called Red 3
• 26:24
  which actually covers putting hydrogen into not just aviation
• 26:29
  fuel, but also fertilizers and Petro chemicals.
• 26:33
  And then of course part of the Petro chemicals is the hydrogen
• 26:35
  that that could go into aviation fuels.
• 26:38
  The aviation fuels alone is I believe it's kind of it's a, a
• 26:42
  percent or a percent and a half by 20-30.
• 26:44
  And when you do the numbers, it would actually drive up the
• 26:47
  costs of all flights in Europe by about 4% by 2030 because the
• 26:54
  resulting aviation fuel is 12 times as expensive as jet fuel,
• 26:59
  not twice as expensive, not four times, not 5 to not 612 times as
• 27:04
  expensive. And so even if you only put in
• 27:08
  1%, that alone drives up the cost of that fuel by 12%, right?
• 27:16
  Because you've got 1% * 12 + 99% * 1, right?
• 27:22
  And you just do the maths. Just that teeny, teeny little
• 27:24
  bit of hydrogen, Avi aviation fuel, they call it R, FM, Bo,
• 27:29
  renewable fuel of a non biological origin, IE hydrogen
• 27:33
  based and director capture based.
• 27:36
  That would be enough to push up the cost of the fuel by 12 and
• 27:41
  the cost of your holiday flight by 4%.
• 27:44
  These are in percent, right? So and what's amazing is first
• 27:49
  of all, the people working on it, I don't believe understand
• 27:52
  the inflationary impact. I just don't think they
• 27:54
  understand it. And secondly, they don't seem to
• 27:58
  understand the political ramifications of going to every
• 28:02
  family that wants to fly off on a little holiday 2030 that's
• 28:06
  going to cost you 4% more just to do this little tiny, teeny
• 28:10
  thing that has no pathway ever to being viable.
• 28:15
  And that's also an important factor, right?
• 28:17
  It's not like, oh, well, you know, if you did a bit of that,
• 28:19
  then the costs will come down and suddenly we'll all be just
• 28:22
  like solar. It'll be really, really cheap.
• 28:24
  And, you know, Europe will lead the world and we'll be exporting
• 28:27
  this technology. We'll be doing none of that.
• 28:30
  And, and I mean politically, you'd think it leaves the drawer
• 28:34
  open for populist who can just say this, this whole business is
• 28:37
  crap. They'd be right.
• 28:38
  And then they tear down the whole climate edifice right and
• 28:41
  and destroy everything. Yes, I mean, that's one of the
• 28:43
  things that motivates me. And I had to write something
• 28:45
  like just this piece about the pragmatic climate reset is that
• 28:50
  if you really care about climate change, then don't do things
• 28:55
  that are manifestly stupid because you'll get pushed back,
• 28:58
  right? What you've got to do is do all
• 29:00
  the pragmatic sensible things. By the way, there's a huge,
• 29:02
  there's this smorgasbord of things that won't cost 12 times
• 29:05
  as much and it will take a couple of decades.
• 29:08
  So why don't we just do those? But, you know, this hydrogen
• 29:11
  stuff is like a brain worm. It gets into people's heads.
• 29:15
  It gets, by the way, also into people's careers and into their
• 29:17
  political capital. And then they can't just say,
• 29:21
  you know what, actually, we've now run the numbers and that
• 29:24
  that ghastly liebreich chap, he's very annoying, but he's
• 29:27
  kind of right. So let's stop.
• 29:29
  They just find it very difficult to do that.
• 29:31
  And so presumably if, if green hydrogen can't even decarbonize
• 29:35
  hydrogen, I mean simply because of the expense, then there won't
• 29:39
  ever be synfuels made from direct air capture CO2 mixed
• 29:43
  with green hydrogen, right, that that's never going to happen.
• 29:45
  Well. So there will be synfuels
• 29:48
  because there are, you know, or or they could easily be because
• 29:51
  there are very, very rich people with supercars and they want
• 29:55
  their cars to do, you know, to make the right, you know, vroom
• 29:58
  vroom pop pop noises. And you know, I was just
• 30:01
  watching a video yesterday as it happens about there's a a
• 30:06
  Hyundai, I think it's the Ionic N5 drag racing against a
• 30:11
  Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Maserati and a Jaguar.
• 30:16
  And it's basically a race for 2nd place.
• 30:18
  This cheap electric supercar. I mean, it's just a normal, just
• 30:21
  looks like a normal car, frankly, looks like the sort of
• 30:23
  thing that you do, you know, screw run in and it leaves them
• 30:27
  absolutely for standing. But it sounds like a vacuum
• 30:31
  cleaner. And so of course, there are
• 30:33
  people who would say, no, I still want the Lamborghini.
• 30:35
  And I want the I would, I want the, the, the, this, you know,
• 30:37
  the cars are supposed to sound like cars.
• 30:39
  So OK. Well, they are the sort of
• 30:41
  people, frankly, with, you know, brains small enough and wallets
• 30:45
  big enough to buy Synfuels. And, you know, Porsche has got
• 30:48
  its project over in, I think it's in Peru or Chile, where
• 30:52
  it's making a few and it's incredibly expensive.
• 30:55
  So for the average person. And you know, when you get
• 30:57
  German politicians who say, ah, we must have this thing they
• 31:00
  call technology, often hide technology openness.
• 31:04
  Because maybe the way to allow, you know, Howard Frau Schmidt to
• 31:10
  continue to drive their existing car and not have to scrap it
• 31:14
  will be to do SYNC fuels, to do E fuels.
• 31:17
  I can guarantee you if Herr and Frau Schmidt, if you're
• 31:21
  listening, I'm so sorry. Use your car, enjoy it, get it
• 31:25
  to the end of its life, sell it for scrap or sell it into the
• 31:29
  second hand market and buy an electric because you're never
• 31:32
  going to be driving on synfuels, you're never going to be driving
• 31:36
  on E fuels. I'm really sorry you've been
• 31:38
  misled. And the electric thing that that
• 31:40
  goes for everything that was supposedly going to be hydrogen.
• 31:44
  Trucks, for example, were going to be hydrogen because it was
• 31:46
  too expensive. So no, sorry, it was too heavy
• 31:48
  to run a truck with with sufficient batteries, right?
• 31:51
  Well, so trucks, I've got to confess here, I'm going to trade
• 31:53
  my book because I did the analysis five years ago.
• 31:57
  And as a result of that I founded something called Pragma
• 32:01
  Charge, which is a charging provider pan European for big
• 32:07
  rigs, for trucks, 40 ton plus trucks.
• 32:09
  And the the core thought is look, the truck is more
• 32:13
  expensive than diesel, but the fuel and the maintenance is less
• 32:16
  expensive. So as long as you do enough
• 32:19
  kilometres during the course of a year, then the initial cost of
• 32:23
  the truck is sort of irrelevant because it gets amortized over
• 32:25
  all these kilometers. And what matters is fuel and
• 32:28
  maintenance. And so there's a break even
• 32:31
  where you can provide an electric truck, green electric
• 32:35
  truck if you've got green electricity cheaper than diesel
• 32:38
  without subsidies today. And that's what we're doing.
• 32:42
  And of course people said, oh, it couldn't possibly work
• 32:44
  because the batteries are too heavy, because to drive a sort
• 32:47
  of 4-5 hundred mile truck, what you've got is 5 tons of
• 32:52
  batteries. Now obviously eventually that'll
• 32:55
  become 4 tons and three tons because batteries get better and
• 32:58
  better. But nevertheless, take the
• 32:59
  figure of 5 tons. Well, guess what you're doing.
• 33:02
  You're removing the engine, you're removing the gearbox,
• 33:05
  you're removing the differential, you're removing
• 33:08
  the fuel tank, you're removing the exhaust system.
• 33:10
  You're removing most of the stuff that protects the driver
• 33:14
  from being rattled into pieces during the shift driving.
• 33:18
  So it turns out that the battery truck is, you know, a couple of
• 33:22
  tons heavier. But here's another thing though.
• 33:25
  So you, you know, you, you 2 tons is not trivial.
• 33:28
  Two other factors, though. First of all, very few loads
• 33:34
  actually push the weight limit on the truck.
• 33:37
  Think of all those Amazon boxes. They're full of air, right?
• 33:40
  They're not full of mineral water.
• 33:43
  So if you're trucking mineral water or beer hair and Frau
• 33:45
  Schmidt, your beer being trucked around Europe, that truck is
• 33:49
  probably at the maximum weight limit.
• 33:52
  But all the ones with parcels for the post office or furniture
• 33:57
  or, you know, almost like, you name it, food other than really
• 34:00
  densely packed heavy food, those are limited by volume, not by
• 34:05
  weight. And the final thing is when you
• 34:08
  drive a normal truck uphill and by the way, it slows down, which
• 34:14
  means that you're paying your drivers salary whilst they drive
• 34:18
  up the hill at 506070 kmh, being overtaken by our electric trucks
• 34:23
  which can drive at 90 kilometers an hour because they've got
• 34:26
  enough torque to do that. When you get down the other
• 34:29
  side, all the energy you used for the diesel truck actually
• 34:34
  you get back in regenerative braking with the electric truck.
• 34:39
  Now hydrogen has to compete into that matrix where electric
• 34:44
  trucks are going to be cheaper than diesel without subsidies
• 34:47
  now and then you've got a much more expensive truck with much
• 34:52
  higher cost maintenance and the battery is too small to do all
• 34:56
  of that regenerative braking thing.
• 34:58
  And by the way, it's range is not even better because the
• 35:02
  hydrogen is so bulky that that hydrogen truck is full of
• 35:06
  hydrogen tanks. But of course, your engineers
• 35:08
  then say, ah, yes, but you know, Halibreich, our wonderful
• 35:12
  engineers can use liquid hydrogen because we're Daimler.
• 35:16
  And the Swedish ones, I can't do the accent will say, well, we'll
• 35:18
  do hydrogen, liquid hydrogen as well.
• 35:21
  Well, that's great. Now you've got to make the
• 35:23
  liquid hydrogen, which wastes 40% of it more of its energy
• 35:27
  content beyond making the hydrogen.
• 35:30
  And I got bad news for you. You can't drive it through the
• 35:33
  Channel Tunnel because it's off gassing hydrogen all the time.
• 35:38
  As the heat goes into the liquid hydrogen, you're sitting under a
• 35:41
  plume of hydrogen. Try explaining that to the
• 35:44
  shuttle. There's another obstacle, to say
• 35:47
  the least, right? So then, you know, you if you
• 35:50
  can't drive through the tunnel, yes, the so the, the logistics
• 35:53
  of trying to do a liquid hydrogen truck, which might have
• 35:56
  a longer range are absolutely ferocious.
• 35:59
  And actually there's a, a third reason why the electric winds,
• 36:05
  which is that at least in Europe, you've got the working
• 36:07
  time directive. After 4 1/2 hours driving, that
• 36:11
  driver has to stop for 45 minutes and can then drive again
• 36:15
  for 4 1/2 hours and then has to call it a day.
• 36:17
  Well, guess what, if you can charge the truck in 45 minutes
• 36:22
  for as far as that driver has driven for the 1st 4 1/2 hours,
• 36:26
  which is about, you know, 250 miles, 350 kilometers, 400
• 36:30
  kilometers, something like that. If you can then have a rapid
• 36:32
  charger right there, that truck essentially is autonomous, can
• 36:36
  drive anywhere. There's a meta point here, which
• 36:39
  is instead of running around with a hydrogen hammer looking
• 36:43
  for a nail. So, well, maybe there's this use
• 36:45
  case instead of that, you know, this is what drove me to do the
• 36:51
  hydrogen ladder, which you might have come across, which is think
• 36:54
  about each use case and ask how would you, how would you
• 36:58
  decarbonize that? You know, is hydrogen the best
• 37:01
  way to decarbonize it? Because if hydrogen comes second
• 37:05
  in every single use case, it effectively has no market.
• 37:09
  And that's what happens below the sort of rho A, rho B, You
• 37:13
  know, where we rho A is where we use hydrogen already, the 100
• 37:16
  million tons. And rho B is a few things that
• 37:19
  are really difficult to electrify directly.
• 37:21
  But everything you can electrify directly, basically hydrogen
• 37:25
  loses. And so I did want to talk about
• 37:28
  how you can ship hydrogen, right.
• 37:30
  We, we have big, great, big super tankers that take LNG,
• 37:33
  liquefied natural gas around the world, lots of dock in Europe
• 37:36
  and that replaces most of Russian gas, although some of
• 37:40
  the LNG comes from Russia, but that's a different story.
• 37:42
  But anyway, like in terms of the physics of this, you can
• 37:45
  liquefy, I guess that's mostly methane and put it onto, onto
• 37:50
  super tankers and move it. Can't you do the same with when
• 37:53
  you liquefy hydrogen? Well, so this is one of the
• 37:58
  things that in that lecture that you referred to earlier that I
• 38:02
  went into in some detail, because you do get a lot of
• 38:05
  people saying what we did it, we did it with LNG, so we'll do it
• 38:09
  with hydrogen. And that's a bit like saying,
• 38:12
  well, we broke the sound barrier, so we're going to break
• 38:14
  the light barrier too. And these are just physically,
• 38:18
  fundamentally different things. And where it starts is just
• 38:21
  density. So, you know, I've been, I was
• 38:24
  berated, I spoke at the Global Hydrogen Congress, World
• 38:27
  Hydrogen Congress in I think 20/20/23.
• 38:31
  And I tried to explain some of this and people came up to me
• 38:33
  afterwards. One chap I remember very clearly
• 38:36
  who was livid that I said you can't ship liquid hydrogen.
• 38:41
  And I asked him, I said, well, do you know the density of
• 38:44
  hydrogen? And, and it turned out that he
• 38:47
  was a, you know, a politics grad.
• 38:50
  So he said no. And I said, well, it's 71 kilos
• 38:54
  per cubic metre, right? Since you're a politics grad.
• 38:58
  Water, you know, like I said to him, water is 1000 kilos and LNG
• 39:03
  is about 450 and hydrogen is 71. What this means?
• 39:08
  Is I'm I'm a politics grad as well so you need to explain why.
• 39:11
  OK, well, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll use, I'll slow down and use
• 39:14
  short words for you there. But no.
• 39:16
  So what it means is that although hydrogen gets a lot of
• 39:19
  energy density, each kilo carries, you know, three times
• 39:23
  as much energy as LNG, but it's, it's sort of nine times less
• 39:29
  dense, more bulky. So that if you do volumetric
• 39:32
  energy density, not gravimetric, not energy density per kilo, but
• 39:37
  energy density per cubic meter, then you end up with needing
• 39:41
  three ships for every LNG ship. And ships are volume
• 39:46
  constrained. They have to get through things
• 39:47
  like the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal and so on.
• 39:50
  So, and they've got, you know, certain dimensions that you can
• 39:53
  build. So you basically need 3.
• 39:56
  Even if everything else was solved, you'd need 3 hydrogen
• 39:59
  ships for every LNG ship to deliver the same amount of
• 40:03
  energy. But you've got much, far more
• 40:06
  problems because you're going to start with hydrogen and you're
• 40:09
  going to liquefy it. And it turns out that that's an
• 40:12
  absolute bear of a process. It's horrible because hydrogen
• 40:16
  does this weird thing. That when you compress it, it
• 40:20
  gets cold. It has called a negative Jule
• 40:22
  Thompson coefficient. So when you take natural gas,
• 40:26
  what you do is you can compress it and then remove the heat and
• 40:29
  then you can compress it some more and remove the heat with
• 40:31
  hydrogen it. So it goes the other way around.
• 40:33
  You can press it, it gets colder.
• 40:35
  How do you remove the heat? Because when you're trying to
• 40:37
  liquefy, that's what you're trying to do, suck the heat out.
• 40:40
  So you have these really complex processors.
• 40:44
  So Michael, you said, you said isotopes there.
• 40:46
  Did you mean do you mean isotopes like deuterium and
• 40:48
  tritium? Sorry, did I say isotopes?
• 40:50
  I meant isomers. So what happens is get very
• 40:52
  technical that the protons in the hydrogen atom can spin
• 40:57
  either left or right and they can flip.
• 41:01
  And So what happens is if you cool them down, then more of
• 41:05
  them want to be one versus the other.
• 41:07
  And as they change, they give out a teeny tiny bit of energy,
• 41:12
  but it's enough to regasify the hydrogen from the liquid state.
• 41:15
  So there you go. That's, I don't want to say it's
• 41:18
  a chemistry lesson because somebody's going to write in and
• 41:20
  say I'm wrong, but that's the best I can do.
• 41:22
  So this is just a really, really complicated process.
• 41:25
  And by the way, everything has to be made out of the highest
• 41:28
  grade steels or the the right grade steels for hydrogen
• 41:31
  because otherwise they go brittle and just snap.
• 41:34
  And the hydrogen is trying to escape from every screw thread
• 41:37
  you've got is probably got enough of a tiny little gap to
• 41:41
  let the hydrogen out, which doesn't happen with the with the
• 41:43
  methane. So you've got to, but when you
• 41:46
  liquefy, it takes about 40% of the energy of the hydrogen to
• 41:52
  liquefy it. Now that can be improved a bit,
• 41:55
  but you know what, they've been doing this for a long time and
• 41:59
  they haven't managed it. So, you know, maybe you can
• 42:01
  halve that. Theoretically you can't go much
• 42:03
  below that. But what it means is that you're
• 42:05
  probably going to have to start with four or five ships worth of
• 42:08
  hydrogen to get 3 ships full. And then you start sailing and
• 42:14
  the heat comes in because you're sailing across from, you know,
• 42:18
  Saudi Arabia or UAE or wherever, nice and hot.
• 42:21
  And so the sun beats down on your ship and the hydrogen turns
• 42:25
  back to gas. And you can use a little bit of
• 42:28
  it in the engines, but most of it you just have to where you
• 42:32
  can either lose, which is a greenhouse gas, incredibly
• 42:35
  powerful, or indirect, but very powerful.
• 42:38
  Or you can flare. So you can sit, you can steam
• 42:40
  along under an invisible flame of hydrogen.
• 42:43
  And what you end up arriving at the destination with is 2 1/2
• 42:47
  ships worth. You started with five, liquefied
• 42:50
  it, stuck it in the ship, sailed for 20 days or whatever.
• 42:53
  And then you've arrived and you've only got 2 1/2 ships
• 42:56
  worth. And how can I put it?
• 42:59
  This is, of course, engineers are like, Oh my God, this is the
• 43:02
  most interesting thing I could possibly work on, right?
• 43:05
  Because they love this stuff. But anybody with a spreadsheet
• 43:09
  or a pencil and a back of an envelope is going to say not
• 43:13
  going to happen. Yeah.
• 43:14
  I mean, as a politics grad, even I'm beginning to to get the get
• 43:18
  the idea here, but I didn't actually know that Tajung was a
• 43:22
  greenhouse gas. I mean, you said indirect.
• 43:23
  Explain that quickly. So what happens is you, I know
• 43:27
  you've done a lot of work and incredibly good work on methane,
• 43:31
  on, on fugitive methane emissions.
• 43:33
  So methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
• 43:37
  It's something like, I think it's what is it?
• 43:39
  It's 20 * 22 times worse than CO2 per kilo on 100 year basis,
• 43:45
  but 80 times so much worse over the next 20 years because it
• 43:49
  degrades in the atmosphere. So when it, when methane escapes
• 43:53
  natural methane, frankly, from, you know, decaying biomass or
• 43:58
  fugitive methane and coal bed methane and so on, it's a very,
• 44:02
  very bad greenhouse gas. But it does decay in the
• 44:06
  atmosphere. And the way it does that is by
• 44:09
  capturing, I think it's a photon of energy.
• 44:12
  And then that sort of breaks the chapter 4, then kind of goes off
• 44:15
  and becomes Co ultimately CO2 and some water.
• 44:19
  So the hydrogen goes into water. Now by the way, I'm, I may be
• 44:23
  good at this stuff, but I'm not a particularly good atmospheric
• 44:25
  chemist. But what happens is the hydrogen
• 44:28
  scours because there's some other molecules or some, you
• 44:31
  know, ions involved. The hydrogen preferentially
• 44:34
  scours those. So the methane, although
• 44:36
  hydrogen doesn't capture the radiation, it leaves the methane
• 44:41
  in the atmosphere for longer and the methane therefore captures
• 44:45
  more radiation and we get more of a greenhouse effect.
• 44:48
  Hydroxyl radicals, I think they. Are hydroxyl radicals Bingo.
• 44:51
  They did teach you something in politics school.
• 44:54
  I was just pretending to be completely thick.
• 44:56
  Obviously. Listen, we, we've, I think we've
• 44:58
  got through most of the hydrogen stuff I want to talk about.
• 45:00
  I mean, you've mentioned that hydrogen, the hydrogen's only
• 45:02
  going to ever be used in homeopathic amounts, which which
• 45:05
  triggered me because I hate homeopathy, but.
• 45:07
  Can I let me just now, let me, let me just qualify a little,
• 45:10
  right? What I said was the homeopathic,
• 45:12
  that would be the amount that would be shipped as liquid
• 45:14
  hydrogen. You know, you can do it, but
• 45:16
  it's homeopathic. You know, they did one ship from
• 45:19
  Australia to Japan. It only burst into flames once,
• 45:22
  but it did arrive with some hydrogen and so on.
• 45:24
  So and but the there are some use cases where you might see
• 45:30
  green hydrogen, right? And that nowhere enough to make
• 45:34
  it a hydrogen economy or even to seriously dent the 1,000,000 the
• 45:37
  the the 100 million tons. But I just want to be very clear
• 45:41
  because I don't want to be like, I don't want to then be proven
• 45:43
  wrong because there are a couple of edge cases where it works.
• 45:47
  And I'll give you 3 if I might. One is there are places we use
• 45:54
  hydrogen, which are distributed, you know, out in the economy.
• 45:58
  Very, very few. There's the odd lab where we use
• 46:01
  hydrogen, but there's also hydrogen, it turns out is a
• 46:05
  very, very good thermal conductor, but but reduces the
• 46:12
  but, but without creating lots of drag within generators.
• 46:16
  So a really, really good generators, they actually fill
• 46:19
  them with hydrogen with no oxygen because otherwise they go
• 46:23
  bang, which they do occasionally.
• 46:25
  South Africa had one of those. But if you fill them with pure
• 46:28
  hydrogen, then you can run your generator sort of faster with
• 46:32
  lower heat losses and lower turning resistance.
• 46:36
  Now if you wanted to make that right now, you'll deliver that
• 46:40
  via a tube trailer, very expensive and you might make
• 46:43
  that on site. So that's use case 1 is on site
• 46:46
  manufacturer where you really need hydrogen out in the
• 46:49
  economy. Second one and Henrik Stiesdahl,
• 46:53
  the great inventor of the wind turbine or the modern wind
• 46:56
  turbine is doing this in Denmark where you're making bio gas,
• 47:01
  anaerobic digestion. You produce some CO2, which
• 47:05
  right now you either sell to grow tomatoes or for maybe for a
• 47:09
  little bit into Coca-Cola. But fundamentally it's just
• 47:13
  released, well, a small amount of local hydrogen.
• 47:17
  You could then produce a bit more bio gas, a bit more
• 47:21
  biomethane. And it's just possible that he
• 47:24
  can get the economics to work on that.
• 47:27
  And the third use case is in a country or a regional location
• 47:32
  where you've got very cheap renewables and expensive natural
• 47:37
  gas and lots of farmers, you might be able to get the
• 47:42
  economics of green ammonia, green fertilizer to work.
• 47:46
  Now you'll think you're places like China, India, Brazil, cheap
• 47:50
  renewables, expensive gas, therefore expensive fertilizer
• 47:55
  and local demand where you know, you don't have to ship, you
• 47:58
  don't have to do all that complicated stuff shipping
• 47:59
  around the world. So those are the use cases, I
• 48:02
  think where it might, might work.
• 48:03
  But by the way, even in those use cases, you'd be much, much
• 48:09
  better advised if you care about the climate, you'd be much
• 48:12
  better advised to use the electricity directly.
• 48:16
  You'll you'll do much better for the climate.
• 48:18
  The the cleanest kilo of green hydrogen is the kilo you'd never
• 48:22
  make. And and just to be assured
• 48:25
  people, you're not saying this because you're some kind of
• 48:27
  degenerate climate sceptic, right?
• 48:28
  No, no, I'm not at all the opposite.
• 48:30
  The opposite. So if you've got a kWh of green
• 48:34
  electricity and you say, Oh my God, I'm really, really worried
• 48:37
  about the climate and, and, and and so on, what would you do?
• 48:40
  Well, first of all, push coal off the grid, which of course in
• 48:43
  the UK we've done, but elsewhere we've not push coal off the
• 48:47
  grid. Second thing you would do is put
• 48:49
  it in a heat pump. And the third thing you would do
• 48:51
  is put it in an EV and you will do 2 to 9 times more for the
• 48:56
  climate, which means, by the way, that even if you have a
• 48:59
  huge curtailment, even if you can only use half of it, it's
• 49:02
  still better and cheaper to do those things than it is to start
• 49:05
  trying to make green hydrogen. Which is why all this stuff
• 49:08
  about, you know, using surplus electricity, forget it, never
• 49:12
  going to, you're never going to get the economics to work.
• 49:14
  And it would be bad for the climate.
• 49:17
  But of course, we're, you know, obsessed with it.
• 49:19
  We're still I think the government in the UK is doing
• 49:21
  yet another consultation on blending hydrogen into into the
• 49:24
  gas grid. I call that the stupidest idea
• 49:27
  from Stupidville because even if somebody foolish enough to
• 49:30
  invest would do it, it's bad for the climate versus just use it.
• 49:34
  Just dump the electricity locally on people with electric
• 49:38
  cars and heat pumps. Put a big smile on their face.
• 49:42
  Drive the transition forwards at speed with political support,
• 49:46
  and it's it's better for the climate in every possible way.
• 49:50
  Yeah, my, my electricity provider gives me free
• 49:52
  electricity every now and then when they've got a surplus.
• 49:54
  And I rush around, I plug in the cars, I rush around switching
• 49:57
  everything on. I I, I, I love it, even though,
• 49:59
  you know, it's probably only pennies, but it's it's come
• 50:01
  somehow feels good to use curtails electricity.
• 50:03
  Absolutely. But, but that same, well, the,
• 50:06
  the, the problem is that green electricity might be coming from
• 50:08
  wind farms, which when it's really, really windy, are being
• 50:11
  switched off. And our regulatory environment
• 50:16
  is such that we actually pay the wind farm to switch off rather
• 50:19
  than maybe paying you to use it or at least dumping it for free.
• 50:23
  And then of course, So what we do is pay in, in Scotland and
• 50:26
  the north, we pay the wind farm to switch off.
• 50:28
  And then down in the South, we pay somebody else who's probably
• 50:31
  a mate of the person with the wind farm, if not the same
• 50:33
  person, we pay them to generate using gas.
• 50:37
  I mean, it's no completely bonkers and thinking that the
• 50:41
  solution to that is anything to do with green hydrogen is, I'm
• 50:45
  sorry, but as as systems thinking goes, it's really
• 50:48
  pitiful. And so there's not much left of
• 50:50
  your green hydrogen Swiss army knife, not many blades or, or,
• 50:54
  or pruning saws or little scissors or anything that like
• 50:58
  the Swiss army knife metaphor, which I think you've said was,
• 51:00
  was actually quite apartment was originally this idea that green
• 51:03
  hydrogen can slot into all of these different things and
• 51:05
  decarbonize them. And and actually it's the worst
• 51:08
  option in pretty much all of them as far as we can see so
• 51:10
  far. Yeah, so the the the Swiss army
• 51:13
  knife analogy, I actually think I borrowed or stole.
• 51:19
  Did you coin it? No, I didn't coin it.
• 51:21
  I'll be honest. There's a guy called Paul Martin
• 51:23
  who's an exceptionally good chemist and you know, he was
• 51:27
  calling it the Swiss Army knife and it stuck somewhere.
• 51:30
  I thought I invented it, but I went back in time and I looked
• 51:33
  at posts that I'd liked and so on and it's definitely from
• 51:36
  Paul. So Paul, I've given you credit
• 51:38
  many times. I'll do it again on here, but
• 51:41
  but it is the perfect analogy because I never said, oh, it's a
• 51:46
  Swiss Army knife. I never fell for that kind of
• 51:48
  hydrogen economy Swiss army knife sort of hype cycle.
• 51:53
  I maybe for about 3 weeks in 2003.
• 51:56
  But the reason it's such a good analogy is that there's all
• 52:00
  these things you can do with a Swiss army knife.
• 52:03
  You can, you know, prune your apple tree or cut your hair or
• 52:07
  spread butter on your bread or, you know, use those little
• 52:13
  tweezers. You never do any of that, right?
• 52:15
  What you do with the Swiss Army knife?
• 52:17
  If you have a horse, you might get a stone out of its hoof.
• 52:20
  Even that, I doubt. I use mine to open a bottle of
• 52:24
  wine on a camping trip. And that's about it.
• 52:29
  And the reason is there's almost always something cheaper, safer,
• 52:33
  and more convenient. Cheaper, safer, more convenient.
• 52:36
  Just really simple summary of why hydrogen is the Swiss Army
• 52:42
  knife of energy. Because there's almost always
• 52:44
  something cheaper, safer, more convenient.
• 52:46
  Unless it's a feedstock, right? Unless you need it for hydro
• 52:50
  cracking or hydrogenation or fertilizer manufacturer.
• 52:54
  And at that point there's nothing else that does the job.
• 52:58
  But every time you start looking at other use cases, you're going
• 53:01
  to find something that's cheaper, safer, more convenient,
• 53:03
  or, you know, with the maybe the exception of a few things around
• 53:07
  long duration storage or maybe a little bit of, you know, what
• 53:12
  Henrik Steisdahl is doing of, you know, adding it into bio
• 53:16
  gas. But again, that's as a feedstock
• 53:18
  use. So it's Swiss army knife.
• 53:22
  It is the Swiss Army knife of energy.
• 53:24
  But before you give up your career to chase the dream,
• 53:27
  understand that that means that we'll probably almost never use
• 53:30
  it. Yeah, because Swiss Army knives
• 53:32
  are shit. I mean I was trying to take the
• 53:33
  top of a plug the other day and I had I could only find the
• 53:36
  Swiss army knife not the screwdriver and it took it the
• 53:40
  the shit bottle opener shit. Yeah, you've got that.
• 53:43
  You've got the bottle opener with the little with the little
• 53:45
  screwdriver on the end, and then you try and use it and it flips
• 53:47
  shut on your finger. It does, but I'm delighted you
• 53:50
  take bottles of wine camping though.
• 53:52
  I mean that that is really reassuring that you're living
• 53:54
  the good life. Michael, before we move off
• 53:59
  hydrogen altogether, I suppose that we should talk about what
• 54:01
  the alternatives are because all right, you've debunked hydrogen
• 54:03
  like so how are we going to decarbonize steel, aviation,
• 54:08
  shipping, all the things which are the sort of so-called hard
• 54:10
  to abate sectors? Well, so first of all, we've
• 54:13
  talked, you know, we've framed this as green hydrogen.
• 54:15
  We're not going to get off hydrogen and we are going to
• 54:18
  need to do clean hydrogen. And you know just that 100
• 54:22
  million tons per year of hydrogen that we use generates
• 54:27
  about 2 1/2%. I think it's 2.3% a year or two
• 54:30
  ago of all the emissions produced by our human
• 54:33
  activities. And so we need to deal with
• 54:36
  that. What I would say is it's not the
• 54:38
  most urgent of problems. If you look at things like
• 54:41
  domestic heating or land transport, those trucks that we
• 54:44
  talked about, then there are things that you could, you know,
• 54:48
  that that you could move very quickly on that are more
• 54:50
  substantial. And so, but we do need to
• 54:53
  decarbonize the top of the ladder.
• 54:55
  And everything that I've looked at suggests that the way to do
• 54:59
  that is essentially going to be fossil hydrogen with carbon
• 55:03
  capture, which is an absolute. It's been demonized by fans of
• 55:10
  renewables and of course the whole green hydrogen brigade.
• 55:13
  They say it's impossible, but you know, and, and it's not from
• 55:17
  an engineering perspective, let's be absolutely clear.
• 55:20
  You can do this thing called autothermal reforming.
• 55:22
  So you can take natural gas. And when we've tried to do
• 55:26
  carbon capture in the past, what we've tended to do is burn gas
• 55:29
  or coal for that matter, and then try and get the carbon
• 55:32
  dioxide out of the exhaust. And that's really a hard way to
• 55:37
  do carbon capture and the way that they're suggesting doing
• 55:41
  blue hydrogen. So hydrate clean hydrogen from
• 55:46
  from, from methane from natural gas is kind of analogous.
• 55:50
  You use this thing called steam methane reforming and it's just
• 55:53
  very difficult to capture all of the CO2.
• 55:57
  So it's been tried a few times. It's a tough process.
• 56:01
  It tends not to capture enough. It tends to break down and not
• 56:05
  work and so on. But there are other processes
• 56:07
  like auto thermal reforming or you got to love the creativity
• 56:13
  of the hydrogen crowd, you know, turquoise, another colour
• 56:15
  hydrogen, which is using a process like called pyrolysis
• 56:20
  where you take your methane, you take your natural gas, which is
• 56:23
  methane for the chemists among us.
• 56:26
  Chapter 4. And what you do is essentially
• 56:29
  get the carbon out as solids and not ACO 2, which is gas, but a
• 56:34
  solid carbon which you can then bury, you know, you can call it
• 56:39
  reverse coal mining. So there are ways of doing
• 56:43
  hydrogen from fossils that is clean.
• 56:47
  But as society, we would have to make some pretty tough choices
• 56:51
  to do it right. So as soon as you let some
• 56:55
  methane, some natural gas escape, you've got a problem.
• 56:59
  As soon as you don't capture all of the carbon, solid or CO2, if
• 57:04
  you're if you're doing it that way, as soon as you don't
• 57:06
  capture it all, you've got a problem.
• 57:08
  But these are they're engineering problems.
• 57:12
  They will cost money. It's more expensive to do it
• 57:14
  right than not to do it right. But the track, the challenge is
• 57:18
  trivial compared to changing the laws of physics so that green
• 57:22
  hydrogen becomes cheap enough to do, you know, gets down to the
• 57:25
  kind of $2.00 a kilo level that you could do blue hydrogen and
• 57:30
  maybe turquoise hydrogen so we can have clean hydrogen.
• 57:35
  I just think that the vast bulk of it will end up being from
• 57:40
  fossil rather than green. So nuclear any good?
• 57:43
  I mean, there's high temperature nuclear reactors that can
• 57:46
  produce hydrogen, at least on the, you know, least physically,
• 57:50
  economically, I don't know, but you tell me.
• 57:52
  Again, the engineer in me is so excited about yeah, we get to,
• 57:56
  you know, we. So first of all, clearly you can
• 57:58
  make electrolytic hydrogen, go back to those wonderful colours
• 58:01
  that's called pink hydrogen, where you just take nuclear
• 58:03
  power and you make hydrogen. And the problem is, yes, that's
• 58:09
  pink hydrogen. Of course you can do that.
• 58:10
  The problem is you're, you're committing a crime against
• 58:14
  thermodynamics. You're taking electricity, the
• 58:17
  highest value thing that you can do.
• 58:19
  And it's a kind of a wonderful source of electricity.
• 58:22
  If you've bothered to build nuclear and it's coming out, you
• 58:25
  know, I don't need to tell you this because you've had your
• 58:26
  epiphany. You love nuclear, you've got
• 58:28
  24/7 or nearly 24/7 nuclear power.
• 58:32
  What would you do? Waste, you know, a third or 40%
• 58:36
  of it, turning it into a fuel, which wastes another 50% of it
• 58:41
  burning to get back to electricity.
• 58:43
  So you're just, you're just, you're just, you know, you're
• 58:46
  tearing up 10 LB notes or $1010.00 bills, $100 bills,
• 58:49
  frankly. But you're also destroying this
• 58:52
  thing that engineers and physicists talk about on
• 58:55
  chemists called exergy, the ability to do work.
• 58:58
  If you give me one, one Joule, one kWh of energy, then there's
• 59:05
  it's not all equal. You know, high temperature heat
• 59:08
  is worth much more than low temperature heat.
• 59:10
  Electricity is worth much more than a fuel.
• 59:13
  Lasers are worth most of all. You know, 11 kWh of a laser you
• 59:17
  can do really clever things with.
• 59:18
  So what we're doing when we make pink hydrogen is taking very
• 59:23
  high value energy in the form of electricity and just wasting
• 59:29
  most of it. Now you can take high
• 59:32
  temperature heat out of that nuclear reactor and you can use
• 59:36
  it to help the process of making hydrogen.
• 59:40
  You can decompose hydrogen directly or you can use it to
• 59:43
  reduce the amount of electricity you need.
• 59:45
  Fantastic. But you're wasting high quality
• 59:49
  heat. You're destroying exergy.
• 59:53
  You're doing a you're committing a crime against thermodynamics
• 59:55
  by doing that. So I'm afraid I'm I'm.
• 1:00:00
  You know, how can I put it? If I was on whatever it is, you
• 1:00:03
  know, the Dragon's Den, I'd be, you know, out.
• 1:00:08
  Well, you you mentioned Drag Race earlier and that's the the
• 1:00:10
  only drag race I've ever watched is RuPaul.
• 1:00:14
  There isn't. There isn't much discussion of
• 1:00:15
  hydrogen though. It's mostly like dressmaking.
• 1:00:17
  Well, there wasn't much hydrogen used making it either, but a lot
• 1:00:20
  of electricity. That's that's true.
• 1:00:23
  Which is, of course, the highest grade.
• 1:00:25
  So nuclear overall, I mean, your Co host, Briony Worthington is
• 1:00:30
  an even bigger fan than I am. And, you know, do you have
• 1:00:32
  arguments about the viability of nuclear for decarbonizing
• 1:00:36
  electricity production? So we we do have I don't know
• 1:00:38
  arguments is a big word. You know, I, I, I respect my
• 1:00:43
  esteemed Co host on cleaning up much too much.
• 1:00:45
  Have a proper argument. We do have discussions and I
• 1:00:47
  think, look, I, I studied nuclear engineering and I would
• 1:00:51
  love for there to be an easy way of building cheap nuclear power
• 1:00:55
  stations. I'm not that worried about, you
• 1:00:57
  know, I think safety can be managed.
• 1:00:59
  And you know, as well as anybody the statistics of how many
• 1:01:03
  people have actually died even in those, those ghastly
• 1:01:06
  accidents in, you know, even Chernobyl, the worst accident
• 1:01:09
  with the greatest loss of life, it's measured in thousands where
• 1:01:13
  coal and the pollution impacts of coal is killing, you know,
• 1:01:17
  far, far more. And that's without even the
• 1:01:19
  climate impact. So I'm a big fan of nuclear, but
• 1:01:23
  I have just got economic scar tissue from trying to work out
• 1:01:28
  whether you could do it how you would do it cheaply.
• 1:01:31
  And I'm just not seeing it. I'm not seeing it with GW scale
• 1:01:35
  reactors. I'm not seeing it with small
• 1:01:38
  modular reactors. I'm not seeing it even, I hate
• 1:01:41
  to say, you know, we're told, oh, well, they can do it cheaply
• 1:01:44
  in China. They can do it cheaply in Asia.
• 1:01:46
  Well, there are so many places that they are, they can, but
• 1:01:51
  they almost certainly are hiding costs.
• 1:01:54
  And how can I put it, if it was that easy and that cheap, then
• 1:01:57
  why is nuclear in China losing market share to wind and solar?
• 1:02:03
  Because it is, it's, they're growing it as fast as they can.
• 1:02:06
  And the wind and solar is absolutely like that Hyundai N5.
• 1:02:11
  It's just leaving the nuclear build in the dust, actually in
• 1:02:15
  the dust, even in China where they're trying to go as fast as
• 1:02:18
  they can. Wow.
• 1:02:19
  Well, here at Saving the World from Bad Ideas, I think we're
• 1:02:21
  we're pragmatists. I mean, I'm with Deng Xiaoping.
• 1:02:23
  I don't Speaking of China, I don't care whether they're cats,
• 1:02:26
  black or white, as long as it catches mice.
• 1:02:27
  Whether he said that or not, I don't know.
• 1:02:29
  But you come on, tell us, like, what's the pragmatic way You've
• 1:02:32
  talked about a pragmatic climate research.
• 1:02:34
  You'd mentioned that you'd written an essay on this.
• 1:02:36
  What's the pragmatic way through all of this endlessly confusing
• 1:02:39
  morass of competing ideas? As we record this, maybe not as
• 1:02:43
  it comes out, we are halfway through the release of my I, I
• 1:02:47
  wrote a 2 parter called the Pragmatic Climate Reset for
• 1:02:50
  Bloomberg, and it's also gone out.
• 1:02:52
  The first part's already gone out on cleaning up.
• 1:02:54
  And the first, the first part is really to say, look for all that
• 1:02:58
  we want to go incredibly fast with climate action, trying to
• 1:03:02
  go too fast, 1 1/2°, which implies decarbonisation, you
• 1:03:08
  know, reducing emissions by 50% by 2030.
• 1:03:12
  The problem with going too fast is it's almost like to use my
• 1:03:16
  drag racing analogy, we've flooded the engine.
• 1:03:18
  We've got, we've tried to do things too fast.
• 1:03:21
  It's been a good exercise. We've learnt a lot.
• 1:03:23
  We've, you know, we've, we've, we've redlined how fast the
• 1:03:26
  economy can switch. But really we've started to do
• 1:03:29
  some very, very stupid things and we've got political pushback
• 1:03:33
  obviously in the US, but really a across Europe we're seeing
• 1:03:37
  this kind of consensus for rapid action, super rapid action
• 1:03:41
  break. So the first thing is think like
• 1:03:43
  a tortoise, not like a hare. Pragmatically, what we really
• 1:03:47
  need to do is if we're going to, we've got growth in energy
• 1:03:53
  demand is a beautiful thing. I don't mean primary energy
• 1:03:57
  demand is the IEA defines it, which is of course energy
• 1:04:00
  supply. I want, I don't care about that
• 1:04:02
  demand. You know, people travelling more
• 1:04:05
  to see their grandma or having a warmer house or colder beer or
• 1:04:11
  being able to drop their kids off at school, all those things.
• 1:04:14
  That's demand for energy services.
• 1:04:17
  I want to see that grow because that's human progress, right?
• 1:04:19
  More MRI scanners across everywhere, global South
• 1:04:22
  everywhere and so on. So we want to see energy demand,
• 1:04:26
  real demand grow, but the pragmatic approach is to say
• 1:04:31
  what we want to see is clean energy grow faster.
• 1:04:35
  So the first thing is stop demonizing fossil fuels because
• 1:04:39
  so far the clean options can't actually replace them.
• 1:04:42
  They simply can't grow fast enough to replace them.
• 1:04:46
  They will be able to over time, but they can't in the next few
• 1:04:49
  years. So think like a tortoise, not
• 1:04:52
  like a hare, and don't worry about the last five or 10%.
• 1:04:57
  To put this in Auk context, for instance, we've got Clean Power
• 1:05:01
  2030. Well, The thing is, meanwhile,
• 1:05:04
  we don't really have a plan to decarbonize heating, to
• 1:05:08
  decarbonize transportation and to decarbonize most of industry,
• 1:05:13
  which could be done pretty easily and affordably with
• 1:05:16
  existing technologies. So don't worry about the
• 1:05:21
  hydrogen for long duration storage or the CCS retrofitted
• 1:05:27
  to existing power stages. These are really, really
• 1:05:30
  difficult things to do. And yet you got Rachel Reeves,
• 1:05:34
  the Chancellor, allocating 10s of billions of pounds to them
• 1:05:38
  when we don't have a plan for electrification of heating,
• 1:05:41
  transport and most of the simple stuff in industry.
• 1:05:44
  So the pragmatism says, do you know what, this smorgasbord of
• 1:05:49
  relatively affordable things that's right in front of us,
• 1:05:52
  let's just do that and let's do it.
• 1:05:55
  You know, more and more each year, Let's start where we are
• 1:05:59
  and let's grow like that Drag race, right?
• 1:06:01
  You, you come off the line and you accelerate and you're still
• 1:06:04
  accelerating when you hit the finish line, when you finish 1/4
• 1:06:08
  mile, you're still accelerating, right?
• 1:06:10
  And that's the sort of thinking that we need come off the start
• 1:06:14
  line where we are today. Keep accelerating, do the
• 1:06:17
  obvious things that are right in front of our noses.
• 1:06:20
  And in the end, frankly, Mark, by the time we finish our
• 1:06:24
  careers, you and me, if we've decarbonized 90%, maybe 95%,
• 1:06:29
  maybe even only 85% of the economy, I think we will sit
• 1:06:33
  there in whatever year it is, 204520552060, you know, I'll be
• 1:06:39
  97. You'll be younger than me,
• 1:06:41
  better looking too. But we'll be pretty happy.
• 1:06:44
  We'll be pretty happy at that point.
• 1:06:46
  We'll have done a good job. I'll take that.
• 1:06:49
  Exactly. That's pigmatic.
• 1:06:51
  Yeah. I mean someone else I think can
• 1:06:53
  worry about the final five to 10% because they will have
• 1:06:55
  invented new things and they'll be smarter than we are anyways
• 1:06:57
  as. They currently said exactly.
• 1:06:59
  And if you think about, for instance, the climate change
• 1:07:01
  committee's work, you know, where they sort of mark the
• 1:07:03
  homework. So are we on track for 2050 net
• 1:07:06
  0? I, I have to be honest, you
• 1:07:09
  know, there's a part of me that says, do you know what?
• 1:07:10
  I would go for 90%. And if somebody said no, no, no,
• 1:07:14
  it says in the law that you have to do 100.
• 1:07:15
  I say no, I'm still targeting 100%.
• 1:07:18
  But there's 10% that we know will come from stuff that's not
• 1:07:21
  been invented yet. 2050 is 25 years into the future.
• 1:07:25
  I'm not going to put all the policies into place today
• 1:07:29
  without knowing the technologies, the learning
• 1:07:32
  rates, you know, Leibrich will end up being wrong.
• 1:07:35
  Hydrogen is marvellous. The laws of physics did change
• 1:07:38
  after all. And that last 10%, it's going to
• 1:07:40
  fall to something we've never thought of, quantum computing
• 1:07:43
  something, who knows? Who knows?
• 1:07:45
  And, and I don't think we should be holding ourselves to ransom
• 1:07:49
  for that last 10%. I just think it's unwise and it
• 1:07:52
  and it's created a lot of that political pushback that we're
• 1:07:55
  suffering from. Yeah, I guess perhaps this is a
• 1:07:58
  result of climate modelling and the kind of, you know, the focus
• 1:08:01
  on 1.5 because it doesn't mean giving.
• 1:08:03
  Well, obviously we're giving up on 1.5 because it's almost
• 1:08:05
  already in, in hind in the rearview mirror.
• 1:08:08
  But you know, you have to make everything add up with these
• 1:08:11
  scenarios. Don't you have to get down to 0?
• 1:08:12
  You have to go below 0, You've got to do it by 20-70 something
• 1:08:15
  in order to get to 1.7 or, you know, so yeah, there's this kind
• 1:08:19
  of focus on like being able to predict the entire global
• 1:08:21
  economy throughout all the way up to 2100.
• 1:08:24
  And, you know, rather than just saying, hey, things are going to
• 1:08:26
  things, shit's going to get invented, which doesn't yet
• 1:08:28
  exist. Well, absolutely.
• 1:08:30
  And you know, the, the whole scenario sort of community, what
• 1:08:36
  they've got is these models that are very resource intensive to
• 1:08:39
  run. So they run them for 100%, you
• 1:08:41
  know, net zero and they don't allow them to say there's 10% is
• 1:08:45
  just, you know, whatever. And therefore they reach for
• 1:08:49
  whatever technology that exists that they can envisage and that
• 1:08:52
  they've characterized today. And they say, well, it's carbon,
• 1:08:55
  direct air capture, you know, carbon capture and storage.
• 1:08:58
  But we can only do so much with bio cap, biogenic carbon.
• 1:09:01
  So it reaches for direct air capture and it reaches for
• 1:09:05
  things like hydrogen because they don't allow it to turn, you
• 1:09:09
  know, they don't allow the model to turn around and go, well,
• 1:09:11
  look, I'm really sorry, but you know, you told me society would
• 1:09:14
  only ever put up with a $250 carbon price.
• 1:09:17
  And so the last 10%, I'm just going to leave for the moment
• 1:09:20
  and we'll have to come back to it.
• 1:09:21
  The model can't say that. The model has to.
• 1:09:23
  If you say get to 100, the model gets to 100 and you know,
• 1:09:27
  there's other modelers, you know, you also got the whole,
• 1:09:31
  the whole story of RCP 8.5. You know, these extreme climate
• 1:09:34
  scenarios, Why did they happen? Because the models when they
• 1:09:39
  were looking at 2100, they said, well, by that time all the oil
• 1:09:43
  has run out. So what are we going to do in a
• 1:09:46
  in a situation where the where society is wealthy and the oils
• 1:09:50
  run out, we're clearly going to do, you know, what Nazi Germany
• 1:09:55
  did and what South Africa and under apartheid did.
• 1:09:57
  We're going to make our fuel from coal.
• 1:10:00
  And they they used coal as a filler for all of the transport
• 1:10:03
  associated with a wealthy world. They didn't let the model turn
• 1:10:08
  around and say, yeah, but at that point, you know, half all
• 1:10:11
  the coastal areas will be underwater and therefore we
• 1:10:13
  won't be doing any of that. Really.
• 1:10:15
  It's an internally inconsistent scenario.
• 1:10:17
  And actually as Justin Ritchie and Dalla Tobadi in 2017, for
• 1:10:22
  there isn't even enough coal if you wanted to do that, literally
• 1:10:25
  is not enough coal. So the models have drawn us into
• 1:10:29
  these sort of cul de sacs of either absurd scenarios, which
• 1:10:35
  were never realistic, but also into absurd solutions which were
• 1:10:40
  never realistic. And yeah, and and that, how can
• 1:10:43
  I put it that is the opposite of pragmatic.
• 1:10:46
  But if we, you know, if we, if we, if we take this pragmatic
• 1:10:49
  approach, you look at the rates of the deployment of clean
• 1:10:53
  energy, we're probably, I think you've projected going to hit 0
• 1:10:58
  fossil fuels in. Well, this was the very back of
• 1:11:01
  the envelope model, wasn't it? But what's your general, what's
• 1:11:03
  your kind of, you know, give us give us where we get to if you
• 1:11:07
  think like a tortoise. So let me, let me talk you
• 1:11:10
  through my tortoise hair sort of model, which I created using 4
• 1:11:16
  lines of a spreadsheet. And, you know, we've spent 10
• 1:11:20
  years, as I say, I think it was a useful exercise just trying to
• 1:11:23
  figure out how would you get to net zero.
• 1:11:25
  Because before, before Paris mentioned 1 1/2° and the IPCC
• 1:11:31
  said, well, if you want 1 1/2°, you need to get to net 0 by
• 1:11:35
  2050. And then everybody started to,
• 1:11:38
  you know, look at decarbonizing everything.
• 1:11:40
  If it was possible before then, you know, we were aiming for
• 1:11:43
  things like 80% decarbonization, which of course, for most people
• 1:11:46
  is like, well, that's fine because I'm in the 20% my, I can
• 1:11:49
  still fly to New York because that's in the 20%.
• 1:11:51
  I can still make my hydrogen based fertilizer using natural
• 1:11:56
  gas because I'm in the 20% and so on.
• 1:11:58
  When you get a net zero, it shines a light on all of those
• 1:12:01
  things and that's good, right? But what it means is the IPCC
• 1:12:06
  report in 2018, Sr. 15 showed that what you actually need to
• 1:12:11
  do is get 50% off emissions, so 50% off fossil fuels by 2030.
• 1:12:19
  So paraphrasing that we have to walk away from decommission,
• 1:12:24
  destroy strand 50% of our fossil energy infrastructure.
• 1:12:30
  So of course it was never going to happen.
• 1:12:32
  And the other thing is again in that IPCC report the the
• 1:12:36
  marginal carbon price that it came up with published it and
• 1:12:39
  nobody noticed, nobody took any notice.
• 1:12:42
  The marginal carbon price for 20-30 that it came up with was,
• 1:12:46
  was not $225, which was what you'd need if you're going to
• 1:12:51
  head for for two degrees of warming, but $6050, which is the
• 1:12:57
  sort of number you need to do crazy hydrogen stuff, right?
• 1:13:00
  So that's the hair my Fairline model.
• 1:13:04
  All I said was let's say the economy keeps growing at 3.3% as
• 1:13:10
  it has done for a couple of decades.
• 1:13:12
  Let's assume that energy efficiency keeps going at about
• 1:13:15
  1.3% real energy efficiency, so tons of steel for the same
• 1:13:20
  amount of energy input or whatever.
• 1:13:22
  So real efficiency on the demand side.
• 1:13:25
  So that means that human progress continues and demand
• 1:13:30
  for energy services grows at 2% per year.
• 1:13:34
  Now the model that I built, I didn't say how it happens.
• 1:13:37
  I didn't look at policy, I didn't look at any technologies.
• 1:13:40
  I just said what happens if clean energy, not just
• 1:13:45
  renewables, but clean energy. So that is renewables, that is
• 1:13:48
  nuclear, renewables, wind, solar, but also hydro and bio
• 1:13:54
  energy, bio gas, biomass, biofuels, and also the heat that
• 1:14:00
  goes into, you know, when, when you have a heat pump, you're
• 1:14:03
  actually bringing ambient heat into your home, which is very
• 1:14:07
  interesting because that's a it's an arrow that doesn't even
• 1:14:09
  exist in the Lawrence Livermore Sankey diagrams that all energy
• 1:14:13
  wants like you and me love. And so if you add that together,
• 1:14:17
  that's clean energy owned waste, waste to energy is counted as
• 1:14:20
  well. So you take renewables plus
• 1:14:22
  waste plus nuclear plus ambient heat, including bio and
• 1:14:25
  everything. And that is already, by the way,
• 1:14:29
  meeting about just under 1/3 of our needs, right?
• 1:14:32
  So you'll get all of the kind of all the people who fall for the
• 1:14:35
  primary energy fallacy that's love smell, Bjorn Lomborg, Bill
• 1:14:39
  Gates, Tony Blair, Dan Jurgen, Michael Semblest, Mark Mills.
• 1:14:45
  All of these people think that clean energy is only meeting 20%
• 1:14:50
  of global needs because they're obsessed with the production.
• 1:14:54
  What? You know how much energy we pull
• 1:14:55
  out of the ground? But because fossil fuel is
• 1:14:59
  differentially so much less efficient than directly
• 1:15:03
  producing wind and solar, 17% of electricity, but all of it
• 1:15:07
  pretty much is, is exergy and is used and hydro as well.
• 1:15:11
  And you know, so you've got what you're actually doing is the
• 1:15:16
  clean stuff is already meeting just under 1/3 of demand, real
• 1:15:19
  demand. So now let's just grow that.
• 1:15:22
  And the number I used in my model 3% faster than demand.
• 1:15:28
  So it grows at 5% per year. So you've got demand grows.
• 1:15:31
  Let me let me just back up. The economy grows 3.3.
• 1:15:35
  Energy demand grows a little bit less because of energy
• 1:15:38
  efficiency on the demand side grows at 2% per year and clean
• 1:15:42
  energy starting at just under a third, grows at 5% per year.
• 1:15:47
  These are real numbers. Clean energy is is increasing at
• 1:15:49
  5%, is it? How can I put it they are they
• 1:15:52
  are truthy numbers. I mean, the economic growth and
• 1:15:55
  the efficiency are real historic numbers, but but when you start
• 1:15:58
  to project them out into the future, and by the way, the
• 1:16:01
  clean energy growth of 5%, it sounds very low because you
• 1:16:04
  know, and I know you know, solar's going crazy, right?
• 1:16:07
  But you know, this is 5% increased output of not just
• 1:16:13
  wind and solar, but also hydro, which grows much more slowly,
• 1:16:17
  bio which grows much more slowly, nuclear which grows much
• 1:16:21
  more slowly, waste which grows much more slowly.
• 1:16:24
  So the average I've said is 5%. Now going forwards, all I did in
• 1:16:29
  my trivial model was say, well, I suppose it just grows at 5%.
• 1:16:34
  In reality, as wind and solar become a bigger and bigger
• 1:16:39
  relative part of clean electricity, they will dominate
• 1:16:42
  the growth rate more and more. So the growth rate will actually
• 1:16:45
  grow. But then as they mature, it'll
• 1:16:47
  sort of drop away in the out years, right?
• 1:16:50
  But I just made it really simple.
• 1:16:51
  I just said no, no, let's this is a this is not a forecast.
• 1:16:55
  This is an illustration just to show what happens as long as
• 1:17:00
  clean energy grows faster than fossil.
• 1:17:04
  And what happens is the reason that's an important question is
• 1:17:08
  of course, we're doing that right now and we can continue to
• 1:17:12
  do that. And all of our policy could be
• 1:17:14
  aligned to do that to say, look, I don't care what Shell is
• 1:17:16
  doing. I don't care what Exxon's doing.
• 1:17:19
  I don't care what Saudi Aramco or, or how much LNG.
• 1:17:22
  All I need to care about from a policy perspective is keep clean
• 1:17:27
  energy growing 3%. If you can do more, do more
• 1:17:31
  faster than energy demand, real demand.
• 1:17:34
  And what happens is for the next decade, you've got incremental
• 1:17:39
  energy demand, which is not quite met by clean energy.
• 1:17:43
  So 2025 to 2035, energy demand grows, clean energy grows, but
• 1:17:48
  fossil stays about flat. And then 2035 to 2045, because
• 1:17:56
  of the miracle of compounding growth of clean energy that
• 1:18:00
  starts, it just starts to force fossil off the global system.
• 1:18:05
  So the fossil then drops by, I think the number is 8% between
• 1:18:09
  2035 and 2045. And then it gets really
• 1:18:13
  interesting because that compounding continues, the clean
• 1:18:17
  energy continues. Maybe by now it has some, you
• 1:18:20
  know, it's 2045, maybe, who knows, There'll be lots of SMRS,
• 1:18:23
  small modular reactors being built, maybe the first fusion,
• 1:18:26
  who knows. Doesn't matter.
• 1:18:27
  As long as it keeps growing by 3% faster than energy demand,
• 1:18:32
  then by 2055 fossil fuel is absolutely in trouble and by
• 1:18:37
  2065 it's gone. Again, not a forecast, just an
• 1:18:43
  investigation of the it's not even maths, it's arithmetic.
• 1:18:47
  And that is what I call thinking like a tortoise.
• 1:18:49
  Because what you're doing is just saying, I wake up January
• 1:18:53
  the 1st every year and I try and grow clean energy by 3% more
• 1:18:58
  than energy demand by December 31st.
• 1:19:02
  And you know, of course you have to, you know, develop the next
• 1:19:05
  lot of technologies to keep that doing that out into the future.
• 1:19:07
  You need a pipeline of technologies or solutions.
• 1:19:10
  But it's, it's a, it's an incrementalist approach.
• 1:19:14
  And by the way, I just think it's politically so much easier
• 1:19:19
  because instead of waking up January the 1st and saying, I'm
• 1:19:22
  going to demonize Shell, I'm going to stick myself to the
• 1:19:25
  doors, I'm going to throw pies at people.
• 1:19:27
  I believe that was a big part of your history, right?
• 1:19:29
  Instead of that, I'm just going to say where can we get our 3%
• 1:19:33
  faster from this year? Are we on track?
• 1:19:37
  Well, let's prepare. Let's make sure we've got five
• 1:19:40
  years worth of, of those 3 percents kind of lined up.
• 1:19:42
  Is it heat pumps? Is it, is it, is it those trucks
• 1:19:45
  that Michael talked about? What is it that we need to do?
• 1:19:49
  Is it reforming, you know, using zonal pricing so we stop
• 1:19:52
  switching off those wind turbines in Scotland?
• 1:19:55
  What do we need to do? Let's just think about it.
• 1:19:57
  Think about it as barrier busting.
• 1:20:00
  Of a very specific target of just using more clean energy of
• 1:20:04
  all sorts, any sort, we don't care what sort it's the so
• 1:20:07
  that's, that's kind of the pragmatic approach.
• 1:20:10
  If if you're wrong about this, can I throw a pie at you?
• 1:20:13
  Yeah, in 2065. OK, when you're 97 or whatever.
• 1:20:16
  It's kind of 2065. I'll be 102.
• 1:20:19
  OK. Well, you'll have to.
• 1:20:21
  You'll have to catch me first. I'm I'm I'm pretty spry.
• 1:20:24
  You'll still be skiing. I'll still be.
• 1:20:26
  I hope so if I haven't. I mean, I used to joke about,
• 1:20:30
  about my, my preferred way of dying would be to, you know,
• 1:20:33
  fall on a crevasse aged 100. But I'll, I'll shift it back for
• 1:20:36
  you. I'll shift it back.
• 1:20:38
  I'll, I'll do the crevasse thing when I'm 105 and you can pie me
• 1:20:42
  if we're not largely, if not. I mean, look, the reality is,
• 1:20:46
  joking aside, there'll be a tale of very, very difficult to
• 1:20:50
  decarbonize, maybe aviation or shipping.
• 1:20:53
  You mentioned and I ducked the question.
• 1:20:55
  There'll be a tale of very difficult things.
• 1:20:58
  So it won't just die in 2065, but you know, it will.
• 1:21:03
  We should be, to be honest, we should be largely off fossil by
• 1:21:07
  then, and I think we will be. This is not just better
• 1:21:13
  economics than destroying half of our energy, our fossil energy
• 1:21:17
  infrastructure in a few years. It's not just better politics
• 1:21:21
  because you're not going after incumbents and demonizing them.
• 1:21:26
  It I just, I, I think it's also better.
• 1:21:28
  I mean, it's in line with thermodynamics because
• 1:21:30
  fundamentally burning stuff is stupid.
• 1:21:34
  As I said, if you've got that wonderful electricity from a
• 1:21:38
  nuclear power station, you don't make hydrogen that you then have
• 1:21:41
  to burn and then have to lose all that energy, you know, but
• 1:21:45
  we, we, we ought to be not burning stuff for environmental
• 1:21:49
  reasons, economic reasons, and also thermodynamic reasons.
• 1:21:53
  And, and I just think that that that is going to happen.
• 1:21:56
  You know, I've said many times in the past, you know, by 2070,
• 1:21:59
  somewhere between 2070 and 2100, burning things is just not going
• 1:22:05
  to be a thing. Well, I mean, I try to end these
• 1:22:07
  podcasts on a pessimistic note, but this is sounding
• 1:22:10
  distressingly optimistic, Michael.
• 1:22:12
  I could be wrong. In which case I'll pay you look,
• 1:22:17
  thanks. Thank you so much.
• 1:22:18
  I mean, this has been an absolute Tour de force.
• 1:22:20
  I've I've learnt a huge amount and I continue to learn a huge
• 1:22:22
  amount by listening to your own podcast, cleaning up and also
• 1:22:25
  reading your sub stack and all of the other stuff that you
• 1:22:28
  write and speak. So everyone who's listening to
• 1:22:31
  this, do Google Michael Lebreich and well, and of course, keep
• 1:22:36
  up, keep up with your writings. Do you do you have a book in the
• 1:22:38
  offering or anything like that? Do.
• 1:22:39
  You know, I've had a I've only ever written one book.
• 1:22:43
  It's called The Complete Skier and it was actually a how to ski
• 1:22:47
  book in 1992 during the Olympic year.
• 1:22:49
  That's what I did in the evenings.
• 1:22:51
  It was an unbelievable amount of work.
• 1:22:53
  I do not know how you do it, churning out a book every year
• 1:22:56
  or so. So I've had a book in the offing
• 1:22:58
  for 20 years and I've never got round to doing it.
• 1:23:01
  So maybe I need a co-author, who knows?
• 1:23:03
  I'll be happy to help and I look well, if not, I look forward to
• 1:23:06
  seeing it in 20 years. Michael, thanks so much.
• 1:23:09
  It's been wonderful and I hope to speak to you again soon.
• 1:23:12
  Thanks very much, it's been a pleasure.
• 1:23:16
  Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
• 1:23:19
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• 1:23:22
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• 1:23:24
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• 1:23:27
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• 1:23:29
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• 1:23:31
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• 1:23:35
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• 1:23:41
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• 1:23:45
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