Recent research has raised questions about the global-warming impact of uncombusted hydrogen. When it leaks from storage, pipes and other infrastructure into the atmosphere, new studies suggest hydrogen absorbs more heat than previously understood. And, perhaps more importantly, it extends the atmospheric life of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Proponents argue that hydrogen is a critical climate solution. “Green” hydrogen, for example, is made with zero-carbon electricity, effectively turning things like solar and wind energy into a storable fuel that can replace natural gas in many end uses. But could hydrogen’s warming impacts outweigh its advantages?
That depends on your assumptions about how and where we use it.
In this episode, Shayle talks to Thomas Koch Blank, senior principal at RMI, where he leads the organization’s Breakthrough Technology Program. Shayle and Thomas examine the new research and discuss topics like:
- Where we will use hydrogen and varying risks of leakage in those applications
- Poor applications for hydrogen, like turning “blue” hydrogen derived from steam methane reforming into synfuel
- Estimated leakage rates and the incentives for hydrogen producers to build low-leakage systems
- Hydrogen’s total warming impact, factoring in how much natural gas it could replace
- How natural gas and hydrogen compare kilogram for kilogram or megajoule for megajoule
- The time horizon we should use to evaluate the global warming potential of hydrogen
- Hydrogen leakage measurement, verification, and safety
Recommended Resources:
- Environmental Defense Fund: Emissions of Hydrogen Could Undermine Its Climate Benefits; Warming Effects Are Two to Six Times Higher Than Previously Thought
- RMI: Hydrogen Reality Check #1: Hydrogen Is Not a Significant Warming Risk
- Columbia University’s SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy: Hydrogen Leakage: A Potential Risk for the Hydrogen Economy
Full Transcript:
Shayle Kann
From the studios of Post Script Media and Canary Media, I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
Thomas Koch Blank
So if you look at replacing natural gas with hydrogen, and they have the same leakage, then you get five times less impact from the hydrogen compared to natural gas. But you’re also replacing the natural gas, which has substantial climate impact from the fact that you’re burning the natural gas and it turns into CO2. So unless you capture that effectively, you know, that’s the big ticket here, not necessarily the comparison of the leakage.
Shayle Kann
Hydrogen leakage is nothing to make light of. Light, get it? Periodic Table joke… anybody? I’m Shayle Kann, I invest in revolutionary climate technologies of Energy Impact Partners, welcome. You know what podcasts are great for: nuance. I mean that sincerely. Some topics just require it and are, in my humble opinion, really poorly served by other forms of media, particularly written media. Case in point is today’s topic, which is the potential impact of hydrogen leakage on global warming. Many of you have written in to suggest this as a topic over the past year or so as this issue has started to enter the collective climatetech consciousness, thanks in part to a few new academic studies and some news articles that have come out about them. This has led to some alarming headlines or at least alarming in my circles, such as, quote, “emissions of hydrogen could undermine its climate benefits,” unquote. And predictably, there have been others taking the opposite view, this is a big nothingburger. Having spent a fair bit of time on this myself, in part because I’ve made multiple hydrogen investments myself, I think most folks actually agree on the key point, which is that if a lot of hydrogen leaks in the atmosphere, that could have impacts on global warming, bad impacts on global warming. But how much is a lot and how bad it would be and relative to what and how worried we should actually be about it, and how that impacts the highest and best uses of hydrogen, those things are all in the realm of nuance. And that nuance really matters here because it affects how we should be thinking about hydrogen as a lever for decarbonization. So I will lay my cards on the table at the start, just so you know where I’m coming from. Having read all this research and spoken to a bunch of folks about it, I still think hydrogen has a huge role to play in decarbonizing a variety of industries consider me a hydrogen bull. But I do think that this issue that we’re going to talk about should impact one where we promote hydrogen and to how its regulated, and what we’re paying attention to as we build out hydrogen infrastructure. So with my own view out of the way, let’s help you build your own. And to help us do that is Thomas Koch Blank. Thomas is a Senior Principal at RMI, where he leads their global breakthrough technology program and has been spending a lot of time looking at these questions around hydrogen leakage and what it means for the future of decarbonization and energy. Here’s Thomas. Thomas, welcome!
Thomas Koch Blank
Thanks for having me.
Shayle Kann
Let’s talk about hydrogen leakage. So I think this is an issue that deserves a lengthy conversation with a lot of nuance. But let’s start with a high-level overview of the science. There have been a few papers that have come out recently, both in the US and the UK, that have raised alarm bells to some degree regarding the possibility that hydrogen leakage into the atmosphere could have a negative impact on climate change, have a warming effect on the planet. Can you just walk us through what that mechanism might be? Why would that be true?
Thomas Koch Blank
I will give it my best shot, acknowledging that I am not a scientist on this topic myself. But I’ve done my best to read up on published research and try to understand what it means. But I think the bottom line conclusion is that hydrogen seems to have a higher global warming impact than what we previously thought. I mean, if you go back in the tables that have been developed by the IPCC process and used in all the national inventories for hydrogen leakage, the number has been significantly lower than some of the recent research suggests. And there are a couple of things happening here. And mostly, it’s to my understanding the secondary or indirect effect that has been neglected previously. So basically what happens is that the hydrogen that leaks has itself a global warming potential, which has been considered, but then also, it has an effect of extending the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere, basically causing the methane to stick around longer. And that has obvious effects on the greenhouse -of the global warming, impact of that methane. And then I think that there is also some interaction with ozone layer that has, as a consequence that the hydrogen creates stratospheric water vapor, which has another indirect effect on global warming.
Shayle Kann
So one thing I think is important to clarify here at the beginning, is that we’re talking about hydrogen that is leaked into the atmosphere, as opposed to hydrogen that is burned or consumed in a fuel cell, right? We’re not talking about if you burn hydrogen, for example, or if you consume the fuel cell, whatever you do with it, that doesn’t then leak into the atmosphere, create this indirect effect on methane. So this is hydrogen that leaks as hydrogen gas or as hydrogen directly into the atmosphere, right?
Thomas Koch Blank
That is accurate in that, from that perspective, it is quite analogous to the whole discussion around methane leakages from natural gas supply chains that has indirect effect on or, if you like, undermines the carbon emission reductions that are achieved by switching from coal to gas, for example.
Shayle Kann
So there is one key distinction there, which is that because, because natural gas has carbon in it. If you burn it, it turns into CO2 and you do still have CO2 released into the atmosphere, if you leak it, it’s CH4 and that’s methane and that’s bad. It’s worse. But if you burn it, you still have CO2. With hydrogen, if you burn it, you’re just burning hydrogen, there’s no carbon in there. But if you leak it, it turns out, it looks like there is this indirect effect on methane lifetime in the atmosphere and on the ozone layer. Now this science is – there been multiple papers on this, as you said, what it’s coming up with at the moment is different from what has been assumed in the IPCC and other places historically. So what is your sense of where we are in the science here? How certain are we of this basic principle? How much precision do we have around it? Or are we just at the very beginnings of understanding this?
Thomas Koch Blank
My understanding is that we can credibly say that the global warming potential or impact from hydrogen is higher than we previously thought. I think the exact number is going to move around a bit because we’re learning about this indirect effects.
Shayle Kann
So could you just walk me through then what we think the global warming potential of hydrogen, if it leaks into the atmosphere, might be and maybe contextualize that against things like methane, just so that we have a frame of reference here?
Thomas Koch Blank
Sure. And I think there is a fairly straightforward answer here but it also becomes a little bit contingent on on assumptions or, you know, starting points. So what research has found is that the global warming potential, which has been traditionally considered five kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen leaked. And the recent research indicates that it should rather be 10. Now, I think, here’s where the framing picks up, because that is a well supported conclusion but then, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that, you know, the energy content in hydrogen is much higher than the energy content for methane. So for each kilogram of hydrogen, you’ll have 120 megajoules, but for each kilogram of methane, you will only have fifty. So if you’re trying to replace natural gas with hydrogen, the relevant comparison is not on a per kilogram basis, but on a per megajoule basis. Right. So that needs to be taken into account when you start benchmarking. And the second is, and that’s also I, you know, this is an area where it’s outside of my area of expertise, but it seems to be an area where more research is needed, which is what kind of an equivalency should you use for hydrogen? So basically, as a reference, we talk about 100-year equivalency and 20-year equivalency for translating the global warming impact of a gas to carbon dioxide, right? For methane, or I would say fundamentally, since the establishment of the Kyoto Protocol, we have based most of our inventory and policy on 100-year equivalency. Lately, there has been a strong push to shift towards a 20-year equivalency for methane, because of the near-term impact. I think some of the research on hydrogen is suggesting even shorter timeframes for hydrogen, some of them down to five or even two year equivalency for hydrogen compared to CO2. And, and here, I think more work is needed to understand exactly what makes sense and why.
Shayle Kann
Okay, so just so that we have, one of the takeaways here is that there’s a lot of nuance to these numbers. And it’s important not to just take a single number at face value, because it’s dependent on all these different assumptions. It’s not all perfectly normalized, and so on. So there’s nuance here, that’s just inherent to how we think about this stuff. But just for a frame of reference, let’s say we’re taking a 20 year global warming potential. So nearer term than the 100 years that has been de facto standard historically. But we’re also normalizing hydrogen and methane for their energy content, just where do they stack up against each other from what we know in terms of global warming potential.
Thomas Koch Blank
So first of all, just on a per kilogram of gas comparison, when you look at hydrogen as 100 year equivalents basis, you’re looking at a global warming potential of 10. But if you go similar to methane, when you go on a shorter lifetime, here, you will have a higher number. So for natural gas, it goes from 25 to 80, roughly, from when you compare 100 to 25. And for hydrogen, it goes from 10 to 40. So it increases substantially, but it’s still half of the global warming impact/global warming potential of natural gas per kilogram. But then hydrogen has a higher energy content of roughly 120 mega joules per kilogram and natural gas is around 50. So there is a factor of two and a half again. So the first factor of two and then another factor of two and a half gives you a total factor of five in between.
Shayle Kann
Okay, so in other words, roughly speaking if we’re thinking on a 20-year basis, if you leaked one mega joules worth of hydrogen into the atmosphere at one mega joules worth of natural gas into the atmosphere, we think the natural gas would have roughly a six times greater impact on global warming than the hydrogen would over a 20 year period, adding all my nuances.
Thomas Koch Blank
Exactly. So if you look at replacing natural gas with hydrogen, and they have the same leakage, then you get five times less impact from the hydrogen compared to natural gas, but you’re also replacing the natural gas, which has substantial climate impact from the fact that you’re burning the natural gas and it turns into CO2. So unless you capture that effectively, you know, that’s the big ticket here, not necessarily the comparison of the leakage, even though both are relevant.
Shayle Kann
Okay, and then let’s talk about these studies that have found this because I think the studies themselves have been, at least from what I can tell, well-considered and come up with valuable evidence to add to this line of questioning. Some of the headlines about the studies have been scary. And I think a lot of it comes down to the assumptions in those studies, which are pretty variable. And what that implies in terms of how big a deal would be if we scale up hydrogen within our economy. So can you just talk a little bit at the high level about what are we assuming in these studies and how does that impact what the what the results would be?
Thomas Koch Blank
Well, I think you can look at the transition in a few different ways. And you can either have as a starting point assumption that everything goes wrong, or you can have a starting point assumption that we will, broadly figure things out and I think that starting point makes a difference in whether you’re looking for the unintended consequences that we need to avoid or whether you’re looking for the good solutions that we want to promote. Right. And that has some bearing on what assumptions you make, I think. I haven’t seen all the research that you’re referring to but I think some of the papers I have seen seem to assume very large adoption rates for hydrogen in the economy, for example, which I think many of us who work with hydrogen, a lot would consider to be a big number, which is unlikely as an outcome. But then again, if you do assume such a scenario, and you apply very big global warming potential to those that consumption with a reasonably high leakage rate, then the conclusion gives you the fact base for a big headline, right?
Shayle Kann
Yeah, I think there are at least three vectors that are worth teasing out individually. The first is, how much hydrogen do we just end up using, as you said, right. And some of these studies take this maximal possibility of like, let’s just say we replaced 50% of natural gas in the world today with hydrogen in the future, that obviously results in hydrogen being a huge part of the global energy economy. And indeed, maybe that happens someday, but that that assumes…
Thomas Koch Blank
But even saw one of these papers suggesting or as an endpoint in their estimate, suggesting that 100% of total final energy consumption would be hydrogen, which again, is you know, an even bigger number.
Shayle Kann
Okay. Right. So one question is just how much hydrogen do we use in general, and the more we use, almost inherently, the more is ultimately going to leak. And so depending on how bad that leakage is, from a global warming perspective, that could be a challenge. The second is where we use it, what we use it for, right. And I think this is one thing where, as far as I can tell, everybody who’s engaged in this discussion around this research tends to agree, I think. If you just take as a prior that hydrogen leakage is bad, then you want to leak as little as possible and you want to prioritize the use cases that need hydrogen the most or where hydrogen provides the best possible solution to decarbonization, relative to everything else. And for both of those reasons it seems to me that generally, everybody then takes one step further and says, Okay, probably, if we’re prioritizing use cases for hydrogen, we should, for example, prioritize large industrial use cases over the distribution system over replacing home heating with hydrogen through a hydrogen distribution system, because we’re more likely to have more leakage in that system and because there are credible alternatives there. Whereas heavy industry, fewer credible alternatives, you know, less pipes that could be leaky pipes, less likely to have as much leakage. First of all, do you think that I’m coming up with the right conclusion there? And do you think that that is generally agreed upon or is that still up for debate?
Thomas Koch Blank
That was a long and leading question. But I would argue the same, like with the only slight difference that in in that conclusion, I don’t think the leakage is the dominating criteria. Because, you know, yes, we want to avoid leakage but there are other reasons to prioritize hydrogen use in the sectors where we have not very many other alternatives or where direct electrification is not easily implemented. From fundamental economics and from the fact that I think that in the, in this transition, the renewable energy supply will be one of our biggest system level bottlenecks and we want to get the most out of each electron we get out of our wind turbines and solar farms. So from that perspective, as well, you want to use those directly as much as you can, instead of transforming it to hydrogen and then potentially transforming it again. So I think, for me, the rationale is fundamentally from basic energy efficiency and then secondly, from a business perspective of where you get the most bang for the buck, if you like, and then that happens to correlate quite well with where we’re likely to have less leakage. So that’s what I mean, or, you know, I think we’re, we have very similar conclusions in terms of priorities and implications of the findings of this new research. It hasn’t honestly changed our view much in terms of priorities and how to build up a hydrogen economy. It just happens to strengthen the priorities we have.
Shayle Kann
And then the third vector is just the leakage rate itself how much hydrogen actually does leak, which obviously has a huge impact on the impact of said leakage on warming. Now, I’ve seen in the studies, anything from low leakage rates one or two percent, up to what seemed to be really high leakage rates like 10%. How much do we know about likely hydrogen leakage rates? Should we be concerned about 10% plus leakage and the implications that that would carry? Is this just a call to arms for regulation to do at the front end, what we didn’t do at the front end with with methane? Or how do you think about the leakage rate?
Thomas Koch Blank
So it’s partly true that we don’t know because these systems have not been built out. And it’s also true that if we build them out poorly, we will have a lot of leakage. Now, I guess the big question here is what are the drivers or rationales for industry to build a very tight system, which will have some marginal capital expenditure involved?I think there are a couple of things that are speaking to – sorry, let me put it this way. I think it’s natural here to compare to natural gas systems, because that’s a gas transportation system or distribution system that we have implemented at scale. The natural gas system is arguably leaking quite a bit and there is reason there are reasons to believe that hydrogen will leak more, mostly from fundamentals of the size of the molecule and the properties thereof. But there are also reasons for these systems to be less leaky. And I think one of the reasons that – and I’m stepping out here of foundational science and peer reviewed research, right – but I think one of the rationales that I can relate to having been working in in industry for quite some time is the safety aspects of leaking hydrogen, because the properties of leaking hydrogen is much more dangerous than leaking methane. Partly because it’s, it’s harder to detect. So that’s one reason why systems are likely to be tighter. I think, also there are some, on the margins, some reasons driven by economics of the value of the gas being higher, so it’s likely to be worth investing that marginal capex in making sure you don’t leak your valuable product. But then again, that can arguably make a case for natural gas as well but still, we see a lot of leakages. So I’m not sure I want to bank the future of the planet on vague references to techno-economics here.
Shayle Kann
So, stepping back, I think the core question that comes out of this research is – the one thing we know we don’t want to do is expend all this time and effort and money replacing one fuel, in this case, largely natural gas, which we need to replace predominantly because of its climate impacts, not because we’re running out of it necessarily, with another fuel or another gas, in this case hydrogen, only to discover that it was a wash or close to a wash from a climate perspective because of these indirect impacts that we’re discovering. Can you just summarize your views on that? Is that a real risk? Or should we be thinking about this more as look, we’ve uncovered something we need to keep a watchful eye on as we scale hydrogen up, because we want it to have the maximal benefit, but it’s not really a concern that it could overshadow the benefit by leaking.
Thomas Koch Blank
So to some extent, both, but I’ll say that while high-performing hydrogen is undoubtedly having a net positive impact on climate emissions. And by positive I mean, lower, not higher. There are many ways that we can end up with hydrogen supply chains that are having, you know, marginal or limited impact on the global warming. Leaking is not the major issue in my mind. You know leaking of hydrogen can contribute on the margin but the big issues are things like making sure that we implement diligent regulations on blue hydrogen to make sure that we have high capture rates and still have a natural gas supply chain with limited leakages because the leakage of methane from natural gas will be, you know, order of magnitude higher impact than the leakage of the final hydrogen product, right. And, of course, you know, to take another extreme example, we don’t want to make hydrogen with electrolyzers using coal power or gas power by all means, right, so we want to make sure that we have rigid supply chains in how we make the hydrogen. And then, you know, on the margin, if you include the leakage you will have to have a slightly tighter threshold, still, but it’s, again, it’s not irrelevant, but it’s not the major big ticket item for hydrogen supply chains.
Shayle Kann
Yeah, if I can just summarize what you just said or attempt to summarize, because this has been my primary conclusion as well, which is the most important thing in transitioning to hydrogen, whatever sector we’re talking about, is the embodied emissions of the hydrogen production itself. Because that is a real challenge. Transitioning to hydrogen does not inherently mean it is lower emissions overall, it depends where the hydrogen comes from. As you said, if it’s blue hydrogen comes from from natural gas and steam methane reforming, then there’s questions of upstream leakage of methane and of carbon capture. If it comes from quote unquote, green hydrogen, then it’s a question of where the grid electricity comes from, from the electrolyzer. And that stuff when you add up when you do the math on the global potential global warming impact of having hydrogen whose embodied emissions are high relative to the potential of a realistic leakage rate and that impact on emissions, as you said, the much bigger deal is the emissions in the production of hydrogen. So our focus should be on that. And if we solve that, then in other words, if we have hydrogen that is very low to zero embodied emissions, then even with a reasonable leakage rate it’s not perfect. It’s not, you know, no climate impact, because of the reasons we’ve described. It is however, much, much, much, much better from a climate perspective than just burning natural gas, for example. I think one study said something like 75% better in a in a negative case. And if it’s truly low emissions embodied hydrogen plus low leakage rate, then it can be 90% plus.
Thomas Koch Blank
Right. And I think that’s summarizes it well. I would say two point number one, make sure that the embedded greenhouse gas emissions of the hydrogen is as low as possible, which I think we should. I am in full support of regulations that ensure limited leakages. I also think we should avoid subsidizing or you know, overly supporting use cases which are not the best use of the hydrogen. And I would finally say that we should also keep track of what we do with the hydrogen not only from a use case, but especially when we start getting into the space of synthetic fuels, it becomes a little bit more complicated again, but there are some use cases of hydrogen that are arguably not great or even a step back in just for the sake you know, from from the perspective of the ultimate impact. I mean what might sound like a ridiculous example, which I think unfortunately, there might be some some risk for on the margin is taking blue hydrogen, which is effectively splicing up methane into CO2 and hydrogen, and then you you call that captured CO2 and clean hydrogen and then you recombine it into a synth fuel, which is basically taking those components back and combining them into something which is branded as clean fuel and then you have achieved nothing except spending money and energy on converting molecules back to itself. And I think, you know, those outliers, though, I think, will be called out and managed by the economy and the supply chains over time. There is a balance here to strike as well, I think between trying to not make perfect the enemy of good. That doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting we should let anything go here. Quite the opposite. But I often relate to probably the most robust governance system we have ever implemented in the in humanity, which is our economic reporting system. And we’ve been working on that for 400 years or so plus minus, and we still have fraud, you know, and we will still have fraud 400 years from now, because there will be participants in the economy that have malicious intent, or fraudulent intent. And I think we will have outliers in the supply chains of any climate solution that will try to work the system, and we want to catch those and call them out and weed them out. But that’s quite different from assuming or believing that the whole economy will be a failure.
Shayle Kann
So as we think about building out hydrogen infrastructure for the use cases where we think it does make sense then, how do you think about transportation? You know, are we going to be building out hydrogen pipelines, transmission pipelines, maybe even distribution pipelines, depending on the use cases? And what are the lessons that we need to take to minimize leakage, knowing that that’s something we care about in this context?
Thomas Koch Blank
So again, I think it’s relevant to think about the fundamental priorities here of number one, let’s use the hydrogen where we have the biggest impact, and by a wide margin margin of a factor of two, that means we should use hydrogen for steelmaking. So using the hydrogen molecule for reducing iron ore has twice as much impact compared to the alternative. If you benchmark with using it for transportation applications, and I bucket here, shipping, aviation and trucking, roughly, you get the same impact from using hydrogen in these three sectors, because fundamentally, it’s the same physics, right. You’re replacing an internal combustion engine running on hydrocarbons, moving something through inertia, and, or friction, and you’re replacing it with a fuel cell using hydrogen and you know, you’re doing roughly the same thing, you know. And then you have the thermal application of burning hydrogen for heat, replacing either natural gas or coal or other heat sources, and that has yet another factor of two roughly less impact. So from that perspective we should use hydrogen for steel. Now, secondly, I think, again, what we’re trying to achieve, at least in terms of building an economy or an industry at scale, the increments of demand is also relevant. And you need roughly 100,000 fuel cell buses to equate to a single steel mill. And shipping is somewhere in between, with roughly 30 ships equating to a steel mill, and those ships are all going to call at the same port. So the port is going to be another critical piece of convergence, if you like, of high demand and a single point of delivery, for hydrogen. So when you start unpacking the use cases, you’ll see that there are a couple of them that are high climate impact, less arguably, less green premium, or even a pathway towards cost parity, and they’re stationary. So all those stars are aligning towards where you want to put this and then the big question is really here, where do you then put the electrolyzers? Are you able to co-locate them with this big demand or are you not going to be able to co-locate them? And I will not claim to have the answer here, because there are a lot of moving parts and it’s for us a big area of research in terms of basically what do you move, right? Do you move the electrons from the low-cost renewable opportunities or do you co-locate the electrolyzer with those renewable assets and you move the hydrogen in a pipeline? Or do you compromise on renewable cost and put it close to your demand? And that’s not an easy question, or at least not a question that has general, single answer, it’s going to be depending on the specifics of your supply chain. It’s worth noting, though, that moving molecules in a pipeline is really cheap. That’s what we see in other markets. There is a reason we’re moving molecules to the regional power markets, and then not moving electrons over copper between Europe and North America, for example, it’s because it’s cheaper to move the molecule.
Shayle Kann
You mentioned earlier that hydrogen is sort of difficult to identify, which is one of the reasons that there will be particular incentive to avoid leaky systems anyway for safety reasons. In the natural gas context, obviously, there has been this whole industry built up around natural gas leakage, monitoring and identification. There are sensors, there’s satellite imagery, there’s hyperspectral, there’s all sorts of stuff. Do you think that we’re going to see the same thing pop up in hydrogen world or it will be different given both the nature of the market and the use cases, and also given the different nature of what it takes to identify hydrogen?
Thomas Koch Blank
Good question. So first of all, when I when I said it was difficult to detect, I think I was referring to the opportunity of visually detecting it, because it’s harder to see with your eye. There are other properties of leaking hydrogen that makes it easier to detect. I think the flame temperature is higher, you know, you can detect that with an infrared camera, or other types of detectors and whatnot, right. I think, by the scaling of the industry, you will see scaling of detection equipment, just growing with the industry. There is a lack of statistics I think from the existing hydrogen supply chains. There are several pipelines in operation, for example, and they’re not publicly disclosing their leakage rates or how they detect or measure and that’s a shame that would be helpful for this debate, to be honest, to know what the current systems are operating at. And that could probably address some of the concerns hopefully, or at least give some actual measure data from what the hydrogen supply chains can deliver at. But yeah, and I think we’ll see a lot of activities in that sense. And, and when you get to the software layer of aggregating all these measurements into a digestible format. And I would anticipate to start linking these datasets to other leakage datasets and start overlapping them and linking them to to agents and serve as a basis for both regulators to implement policy and also by all means, new business models that will likely emerge.
Shayle Kann
Thomas, really appreciate the time. This has been, I think, hopefully clarifying. But if not, then we’ll have you back on. We’ll try to do it again. I suspect that won’t be necessary, though. So thank you.
Thomas Koch Blank
Thanks for having me.
Shayle Kann
Thomas Koch Blank is a Senior Principal at RMI, where he leads the global breakthrough technology program. As always, send us your questions. It was actually a bevy of questions from all of you about hydrogen that led to this episode, so keep them coming. Tell us what else we should talk about. You could also leave us a voicemail at 919-808-5832. Some people for whatever reason still leave voicemails. Or you can email us at catalyst at postscriptaudio.com. You can also tag us on twitter if you’d like to find us there. If you liked the show today, go over to Spotify or Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and review.
Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.
Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you’re a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that’s creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst
Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.