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Richard Helppie
Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. We have a very special returning guest today, Fred Gallagher. If you recall Fred from just a few episodes ago, he's quite an expert on energy, both in the oil and gas field, as well as wind, solar, nuclear. We've talked about kilowatt generation, the demands around the world for energy. Today, we're going to be focusing on hydrogen. It's a great topic and we are honored to have someone that really knows this. The Common Bridge, of course, is at substack.com. Just go to substack.com, enter The Common Bridge; it's on most podcast outlets, including Apple, Amazon, Spotify and Buzzsprout and as well at YouTube TV. Fred's full biography is out on our links so please look into that. Fred, welcome back to The Common Bridge, sure glad to have you.
Fred Gallagher
Thanks, Rich, great fun to do this with you. I really enjoyed the last session and look forward to this one.
Richard Helppie
Yes, it's really a unique background that you've got; so well rounded in energy and your ability to see things from a 360 degree view and such a learned perspective. It's really refreshing; we have advocates [who say] renewables are never going to work, and we have other people that are saying, hey, we just got to stop oil and gas right now. So I'm really happy that you're joining us today.
Fred Gallagher
Been my life's work, actually. When I look at it, my whole career has really been focused on how do we bridge between silos within the energy business. For the longest time [the] petroleum sector thought it was the energy business. When I went back into business school, I realized that the energy business is a lot bigger than just the petroleum business. So that really opened my eyes at that point in time, way back then. I've spent most of my career really trying to bridge between those silos trying to figure out how do we deal with this incredibly complex and diverse industry.
Richard Helppie
And one of the key takeaways that I got from our first session was thinking about where something's combusted. So I quit looking at the gasoline in my tank as energy; it's fuel, but it's not energy until it gets burned. Similarly, that electric power that generates fuel for my hybrid, it's not really fuel until it gets combusted and transmitted; you have a lot to say about transmission as well.
Fred Gallagher
When you think of energy, it's been a fascinating development. I mean, if think back to our days when we would cook over open stoves or open fires - fire and combustion - is sort of intrinsic to the human experience over the last 10-15,000 years at least. Really, when you think about it, most of our processes are combustion processes, because they've been conveniently really well developed. Electricity has taken some time to really develop over time and that it is one of those things...it's fascinating because the use of electricity - when you when you actually take the energy from electricity and you put it into motion, if you will, or use it for mode of force - it's about four times as efficient, as combusting. Essentially, 65-70% of combustion goes off as waste heat. So really, electricity has been a revolutionary change to the way in which we really create and use energy. It's really only been one hundred years plus, a little bit more than one hundred years, that we've been using electricity. So you really get a feel for how new it is. We really need to think about it in terms of how do we actually make more, if you will, zero emissions energy carriers like electricity. That's kind of the subject of what we want to talk about today.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, and I think you've hit on a couple of points that cause me to think. You mentioned open fire; so our prehistoric ancestors cooking over open fires, I don't think there was a prehistoric Democrat or Conservative party or what have you, saying, hey, that's our fire. It was the energy that was needed to enhance the human experience. We've done that with electricity, and that's what The Common Bridge is all about - let's get away from the partisanship and let's talk about the issues of the day and maybe some solutions. Fred, you are talking today about a case for hydrogen. Before we got on the air, you said that the largest de-carbonisation opportunities for the United States are in transportation and industrial heat. What do you mean by that?
Richard Helppie
Well, currently some 80-90% of our energy that we utilize is really from hydrocarbons, like directly from hydrocarbons. As a consequence, transportation - when we talk about cars and trucks, and and trains and vessels, boats - they're all driven by hydrocarbons. What this really boils down to is that it was a very efficient and easy way to get energy from hydrocarbons and then really transport it and essentially put it in that point of use. The liquid hydrocarbons - previously we used coal and wood etc., to [inaudible] our hydrocarbons to produce our energy - but with the advent of liquid hydrocarbons - petroleums - really made it immensely more versatile, that we can use it in all kinds of mobile sources. Which really was the catalyst that created the vehicle, the car, the ability to move great distances with energy that you carried on your back or basically carried in the gas tank.
Richard Helppie
That kind of makes sense then, that with so much of the greenhouse emissions coming at the customer's endpoint - the combustion going out the tailpipe - that this focus on tailpipe emissions is an appropriate policy if I'm understanding what you're telling me.
Fred Gallagher
I think it's very appropriate to be looking at it from point of view of the billions of tailpipes around the world that are emitting carbon or CO2 and other greenhouse gases. But in some ways, we're not looking at it the right way around. We've got billions of these tailpipes out there spewing emissions. The beauty of electricity is that it really has taken the emissions out of those processes that use electricity. Essentially, it's a zero emissions carrier that at the point of use doesn't produce any emissions. I think we need to think about how do we change our current energy delivery system for 80-90% of the energy that we're using, and make it the same way, meaning that we centralize the resolution of carbon; we store it, we sequester it, we utilize it centrally, and we just put pure energy down the pipe or down the the electrical transmission line.
Richard Helppie
That makes a tremendous amount of sense. Now, you're going to have to go in very basic steps here, how hydrogen might fit in to this. I know you've done a great deal of study, and we've talked offline; you're very enthusiastic about this. But for our listeners, our readers and our viewers, how exactly do we use hydrogen to generate that cleaner electricity that's going to power us?
Fred Gallagher
Well, hydrogen itself is not an energy source as such. Hydrogen is part of so many molecules on Earth and it's really the most abundant element on Earth and it really is the base of hydrocarbons. When we say hydrocarbons, it's carbon with a lot of hydrogen attached to it. That hydrogen is really the source of the combustion energy, if you will, associated with with hydrocarbons. What this boils down to is, it's really about separating the carbon from the hydrogen or the hydrogen from the carbon. That's really where we can take hydrocarbons and we can strip the hydrogen from it. This is a typical process that's used in abundance in refining areas because they need hydrogen; they need pure hydrogen to be able to upgrade oils and those sorts of things. Essentially we strip the hydrogen off of natural gas, for instance, and we use that hydrogen directly for either energy or to upgrade petrolium. The carbon then either goes off as CO2 or it can be easily stored or sequestered in underground reservoirs or in various sequestering opportunities. So essentially, what it boils down to is that hydrogen is all around us in water, in hydrocarbons, in nitrogen fertilizers. So it's all around us in terms of where it's located; it's really a matter of how do we make best use of that. One of the key ways it can be used is [it] can create pure hydrogen. So if you take pure hydrogen and you utilize that hydrogen, it essentially carries the energy without the carbon to the end user.
Richard Helppie
So the first compound or material that goes in, from where the hydrogen is going to be stripped off, are these necessarily hydrocarbons? Like, it has to be natural gas, for example, or what other inputs would be used?
Fred Gallagher
I think that's a great question from a point of view of where is hydrogen. It's all around us. Some hydrogen sources are more easily liberated hydrocarbons. Hydrogen is more easily liberated than water, for instance. Water is two hydrogen and one oxygen, that's the basis of water. So you can strip the hydrogen off of the oxygen and that's a source of hydrogen. In fact, you've probably heard of the technique of electrolysis, which is essentially taking water and putting electricity into that water through an electrode, and essentially producing hydrogen and oxygen from that water. But it's a higher energy threshold reaction, meaning that it requires more energy to strip hydrogen from oxygen. And as a consequence, it tends to be something that has a higher energy requirement, and consequently, a higher cost. Now, there are a lot of things that are happening in marketplace today and in technology today that's working to either establish catalysts by which that energy requirement can be brought down, and also new ways in which that can be stripped. For instance, one of the interesting technologies that's happening right now is direct solar energy to hydrogen, and that's taking water and splitting the hydrogen and oxygen, by solar energy, direct solar energy, rather than through an intermediary like electricity. So there are many ways to produce hydrogen. That's the exciting part of this is a basic concept, we need more than one zero emissions energy carrier. So right now we've got electricity. But we need more because electricity, while it's fabulous, is not as versatile as we need. It's not very good for heat, it's not very good for transportation - heavy transportation - largely because it's hard to store. It's not very good for for industrial processes, and production of chemicals, production of fertilizers, all those sorts of things require - at this point in time - hydrocarbons. Electricity doesn't necessarily do a very good job of any of those. As a consequence, we really have this need for the second carrier. What's holding us up is - the purpose of what we're talking about, which is a partisan view - that somehow the color of the hydrogen - in other words, how it's produced - matters. In actual fact, as long as the carbon element is taken care of, we should not care about what the source of the hydrogen is. What we should be most excited about is using hydrogen.
Richard Helppie
Let me let me see if I can...this may be a very basic question and will show either great insight or great ignorance. With that as a basis, it seems if we strip hydrogen off of natural gas, we have a by-product of CO2 that we have to sequester, bury, figure out some way to neutralize, before it goes back into the environment. But if the input material is water, then the by-product is pure oxygen modules, which seems to me that would be helpful. But we can't produce as much hydrogen off of water - net - for the energy expenditure as we can off of natural gas. How close am I coming to understand that, Fred?
Fred Gallagher
I think that's that's a very good way to look at it. I mean, one of the things that we've got is one, a higher energy requirement for hydrogen from water. As we said, technologically some of that may be being solved. We also have, [in] a lot of places, limitations on water. How much freshwater do we have, and how much freshwater do we have available, especially in certain areas of the world. So that becomes a limiting factor. We also have this energy system of production and delivery of hydrocarbons. That if we can think of it as essentially refining that product to its elements - which is hydrogen and carbon - and figuring out we can deal with the carbon by storage, or use, or sequestration of some sort; the hydrogen can come off of that at a much lower cost system. We already have a significant portion of delivery or significant infrastructure to deliver the hydrogen through pipes, etc. Now, there are technological things that will need to be done in order to adapt to hydrogen. But the the ability to use the existing capital stock - meaning the stuff that's already paid for, the stuff that's got years of service still left and has already been paid for versus replacing that with a whole new system - is very powerful. Because the cost can come down rather dramatically of producing hydrogen, and getting our systems and our use of hydrogen online. In other words, creating the market for hydrogen or getting a market for hydrogen, regardless of source, will help us close in on these goals much more quickly than if we try to produce all the hydrogen in the world through electrolysis.
Richard Helppie
It does require freshwater, it can't be saltwater or anything like that.
Fred Gallagher
Well, it can be saltwater, but the saltwater has to be de-ionized. Essentially it has to be purified to be freshwater, otherwise it clogs the whole system; the salts associated with seawater.
Richard Helppie
Probably a topic for another day is the water supply around the globe, particularly in parts of our Southwest right now. Here in the upper Midwest, things seem to be pretty good. We have a lot of it. I'm always plugging the Great Lakes area, can't help it.
Fred Gallagher
[Laughter] I know, you're at home.
Richard Helppie
Indeed I am. So I understand that hydrogen is a multi-purpose energy carrier and that there's going to need to be investment to make this reality spread further and get to be more powerful where it can drive an ocean going freighter, or whether it can drive a factory or not. So how does hydrogen perform against electricity when you're talking about those heavy load applications?
Fred Gallagher
I think it's really about power to weight ratio. I think passenger cars are probably pretty much...an electrical vehicle is an electrical opportunity. It's really largely one of the better uses of electricity now that we've got batteries that can really accommodate the kind of durability and the kind of longevity that we need. I think passenger cars definitely can can move electrically, very quickly. I think that that's a really good way to move. Where the problem comes is where you're trying to move heavy, heavy weights; whether it be transporting all kinds of different things that we transport either from a marine point of view or from trucks moving across the country. This is where hydrogen really shines. One, you probably have a centralized filling facility versus passenger cars where it's distributed all over the place. Electricity does that really well, because we've already got this electrical distribution system. But from a truck point of view, you can have a centralized filling facility. The second point is that you can carry hydrogen, you can carry a lot of hydrogen; it's light. You can carry a lot of hydrogen, it doesn't add significantly to the weight of the material you're trying to transport. That's where electricity is tough because the batteries are heavy, the batteries are essentially deadweight from that point of view, where as hydrogen is not. Hydrogen is not a deadweight. So hydrogen really can fill the heavy transport type field and I think that's one of the great uses of it in the transport sector. The other thing is that it's a base for fertilizers already. So your nitrogen fertilizers are largely hydrogen. What happens is they take natural gas, they remove the hydrogen, and they attach it to nitrogen and you basically make nitrogen fertilizer and that really is the the source of most of our nitrogenous fertilizers today, is that process - and it's huge. You can't do that with electricity, not efficiently, right? So this is a great opportunity for hydrogen. Now a number of fertilizer producers are looking at sequestering the carbon in their process.
Richard Helppie
And when you say sequestering, what does that mean?
Fred Gallagher
There are a couple of different things. I mean, there's storage, which is putting it into the ground. It's not a tank in the ground, but it's a reservoir in the ground. We already have a number of established reservoirs where that can be easily stored. We know the technology, technology well proven that we can store - long term - we can store CO2 underground. The second piece is the idea of sequestering. Sequestering is again finding a way to to take that carbon and put it away more permanently. In certain rock types, CO2 can be sequestered in the rock, meaning that the rock absorbs the CO2. In fact, cement absorbs CO2 very, very productively, and adds to the strength of the cement. When we say sequestered, it's put away permanently. So there's storage, there's permanent sequestration, and then there's end use, like carbon fibers, for instance, for all manner of different different applications that we have, from golf clubs and tennis rackets to airplane wings. Carbon is such a light element and such a strong element it's a great building block for many, many different things. We haven't really explored the full uses of carbon at this point in time because it's been relatively expensive to actually get the carbon fiber that we have. But if we have an abundance of carbon, I think we're going to find a lot more specific uses for carbon than we currently have.
Richard Helppie
Fred, this is very fascinating. And the idea that maybe water is a source and which, I guess, wouldn't have to do anything with the oxygen or the CO2; we'd figure out some way to get that into the green plant system. But big question here for you; if you didn't have investment considerations, what would be the path to go from where we are today to using hydrogen as our chief source of energy? What would we need to do as a world?
Fred Gallagher
It's really about speed at this point in time. It's hard to separate the investment part from what you're asking, which is trying to take that out of it. But I would look at it and say being able to, one, we're trying to get to this net zero emissions goal. How fast can we get there? And the reason why I say how fast can we get there, it's because the faster we get there, the longer the window we have to actually get down the curve. Let's put it that way; the faster we can get down the curve, the longer the period of time that we actually have to come up with lower cost technological solutions and accommodate the normal capital stock turnover that we need to respect. So when I say that I say okay, I think it's already well proven that you can get hydrogen simply, cheaply, and abundantly, from hydrocarbons. We already have the source of the hydrocarbons, we already have the transportation network, and you can either make use of the transportation network to transport hydrogen or you can make use of the transportation network to take the hydrocarbons to the point at which the hydrogen is produced. Or - the other piece of this that is really becoming exciting - the whole idea of blending. A lot of our current furnaces - for instance, furnace in your home, the stove that you cook your dinner on - many natural gas uses lend themselves very well to a combination of natural gas and hydrogen. And the value of that is that if you can get up to 20% hydrogen into the natural gas system, all of a sudden you've reduced the amount of carbon that's actually being emitted on the other end. So there's an opportunity for these intermediate ways to get to our goals quicker or get down the curve quicker on the front end, so that we've got more time to make sure that we get the rest of the puzzle worked out in the most cost effective and efficient fashion.
Richard Helppie
You know something Fred, every time I talk to you, I get optimistic about the future. If you read or listen to what passes for news these days, you'd think it's an intractable problem; we can't possibly get there. It's oh, there are just too many barriers ahead. And you sit down here and you logically lay out a plan; here we could do this, could do that, give me great examples. I used my outdoor grill yesterday with natural gas, and I see now oh, yeah, through that same pipe you could put hydrocarbons through there, and now I'm emitting 20% less gases and such. Fred, this is really fascinating science. I know, we've got to unwrap some of the economics and I understand that you're working on that. But for our listeners, our viewers and our readers, if they were to take away maybe some conclusions about what a hydrogen powered future might look like; pessimistic, optimistic - or maybe better - what might we be thinking about?
Fred Gallagher
The key thing to think about here is that hydrogen is not a substitute for electricity nor is electricity a substitute for hydrogen, but they are both complementary energy carriers. Hydrogen just adds an enormous amount of flexibility to our ability to meet those net zero emissions targets. As a consequence, the future of hydrogen is really how quickly can it penetrate the energy use space, because we've got those billions of tailpipes out there producing emissions. If we can bring that down and be able to reduce the amount of carbon that's being put into the atmosphere, through a hydrogen carrier that can substitute for a lot of the combustion processes we've been talking about, really is a fundamental part of this. Right now, the debate in the conversation is really structured around what color is it? What color is the hydrogen. Unfortunately, as we discussed really early on, it's become kind of a partisan battle, which doesn't make any sense at all. The fact is, hydrogen is this great zero emissions energy carrier that can be burned and it can be used to make electricity. It can be used to make chemical precursors for all the number of products that we use. It really allows for a greater portion of the energy use chain to essentially become zero emissions. Provided that you've properly stored or sequestered or utilized the carbon, the main question is cost, not how it's produced. It's really about how can we make use of all of what we've built in this energy system to the greatest advantage in meeting those goals that we keep talking about. I am an optimist; you said that earlier on. I'm an optimist. I look at it and I say, well, one hundred years ago, a little more than one hundred years ago, we couldn't fly. A little more than one hundred years ago, we didn't even have electricity, we were still in the steam engine era. We didn't have cars. I think it's Bill Gates who said, things look really hard and really long into the future when you're looking forward. But when you look at it in the rearview mirror they happened really fast. This is where we really need to get over ourselves a little bit on this debate as to what is the best way to produce hydrogen. We know hydrogen is a central element of meeting net zero. How we produce it shouldn't matter right now. The critical point is how do we get it into the market? How do we get the market to accept it? How to we get the supply chain for hydrogen built appropriately, and how do we efficiently and cost effectively meet those emissions goals now and in the future. So that's why I love your program, Rich, The Common Bridge, because hopefully, a lot of this kind of discussion starts people thinking about well, okay, how can we do this on a more bipartisan or nonpartisan fashion?
Richard Helppie
Fred, first of all my compliments to you for educating our audience and me, deeply. I think we've just scratched the surface of this. But one of the things I'd say to my listeners, viewers, readers is this; isn't it curious that with these great media systems set up on whatever channel - cable, internet, broadcast, radio, TV and so forth - how come there's not a Fred Gallagher talking about here's how we get to net zero emissions. Instead, how much energy is spent in the partisan wars that do nothing but enrich side A versus side B, and so forth. That's why we're inviting everyone to step out of the echo chambers and step onto The Common Bridge, because I think together we can build a better future if we start dealing with science like Mr. Gallagher brings to us, optimism, and that can-do spirit. With our guest today, with deep gratitude, Fred Gallagher, this is Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
Is Hydrogen the Key to Decarbonization?