Things Michael Says on Podcasts

So, Helen, it's great to be on the show, and I'm delighted to be considered a friend of Everything Electric. It's a bit scary that after all the things that I've tried to do with my life, I'm most famous for hydrogen, the hydrogen ladder, and now the hydrogen souffle. And the hydrogen ladder, I think I was talking about last time I was on the show, which is the things you will do with hydrogen, which is very few, and the things you won't, which is most of the stuff people talk about. The hydrogen souffle is just a little thing that I started to post. It's a hashtag and I posted it on social media just as a way of flagging that the things that I said wouldn't work are indeed starting not to work. And that was a couple of years ago. So as people announced or as things went bankrupt or projects were shelved or reports came out that said that some crazy hydrogen idea wasn't going to happen, I just posted this thing called hydrogen. So it was, I would say things like, today's hydrogen souffle or hashtag hydrogen souffle is brought to you from Denmark where they're not building a pipeline or from Germany where they're dismantling hydrogen charging stations and so on. And I actually have not posted it for quite some time because I don't want to dance on the grave of anybody's great hopes and entrepreneurial efforts and so on. And I think that the world has largely moved on. I think I've made my point. And there will continue to be hydrogen souffles, quite obviously for the next, you know, two, three, four, five years, because there is still money in the system, which is sort of slowly bleeding out. But so we're not quite done, but it's not. I don't think anybody's really still holding the same hopes for hydrogen that they were in 20, well, 2019, 2020, 21, 22. And then 23, it pretty much started to ebb away.

So this is the deflation of a suit. This is a souffle gone wrong. It's all sort of slowly, the gas is hissing out of it.

It's very, it's very memorable. I'm all for describing economic activity in food metaphors. I'm there with that. So, and I mean, it came from this, you've mentioned the hydrogen ladder and this list of, you know, you've had several versions of the hydrogen ladder. So they kind of start at the, is it the bottom is the end where those are definitely not going, hydrogen's not going to be useful. And then as you go up, there are the things where it might actually one day be useful. So the last version of that was in 2023, was it? That's right. Is it going to get an update or is everything, you know, in terms of what technologies may or may not have a future involving hydrogen, is that pretty much the same now as it was in 2023?

So there is another version. I have actually pretty much finalized version 6.0 because 2023, October 2023, when version 5 came out, is already quite some time ago. And things have moved on. Principally what has moved on has been batteries have just become even cheaper. I mean, over that period, they've more than halved in cost. And we've got line of sight on things like sodium chemistries and also possibly the first glimmerings of solid state. And so I would say that the competition to hydrogen has enormously moved on in the last three years. And hydrogen has, if anything, gone in the other direction. There's more people understanding more of the challenges. And also the political cycle has turned. So where there were all these hydrogen ideas that would cost huge amounts in carbon terms, $500 a ton, $1,000 a ton, things like sustainable, not sustainable, but ESAF, sustainable aviation fuel, but made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide capture, which people were very happy to say, oh, it's the only way to do it. And this is the future. Now they understand that it's kind of 10 times too expensive. And so there's less money in the system supporting hydrogen. So those two things have changed. And there is now a new version. I'm going to be honest, I don't know when it'll come out. It's not my day job to produce hydrogen ladders or to do hydrogen analysis. I don't want to say I've moved on, but I don't feel the same sense of urgency to deal with massive misallocation of resources in society. But there is another version. And I would say most of what has happened is that things have moved down. So one example would be long distance trucking. There's other examples around backup for things like uninterruptible power supplies. You look at it now and you think, why did anybody ever think that that was going to be hydrogen? And so that has gone from kind of, I don't know, highly improbable to even more highly improbable. And the row of doom keeps on getting bigger and bigger. One of the big problems producing the ladder is just the visual, which I do on a PowerPoint. There's nothing clever. It gets harder and harder to accommodate all of the really stupid things on the rows of doom of doom down at the bottom. It's just getting bigger and bigger.

Maybe you just need a kind of bucket at the bottom to put them all into different, you know, just falls off the end and into the bucket of doom or the abyss of doom or something like that. It

You know, I haven't forgotten. I'm talking to the first time we met, you said that the ocean is a great big heat pump. It's a thermodynamic system and it's being powered by the energy flows, and that enormously appealed. So you are a really proper thermodynamicist, which is great. Because, you know, fundamentally, when you talk about something like ESAF, right? It is sustainable aviation fuel made from electricity, using electricity from taking water, splitting it, get the hydrogen, take air, separate out the CO2, combine them, then refine them, create the right molecules, et cetera, et cetera. What you're really doing is reversing combustion. You've taken some fuel, you've burnt it, you've got water and CO2, and now you're reversing that. And guess what, thermodynamicist? Burning stuff is an irreversible process. It is, in other words, you have to put in work to reverse it, lots of work. And so, yes, it's just inherently incredibly expensive. But there's more than that. There's also the physical properties of hydrogen. So it's not just that it's really hard to make the hydrogen, or in the case of the fuel, to make the fuel, but well, in the case of hydrogen, it's transporting it, it's storing it, it's distributing it, it's keeping it safe. It's all of the value chain. It's just incredibly expensive. And frustratingly, because I would love if I would love it, it would be so wonderful if it was just kind of cheap and easy. And if you didn't have to put in lots of work and so on. But unfortunately, it's just a horrible, horrible process, horribly expensive process right the way through the value chain.

I kind of find it fascinating in the really big picture, and this is very, very big picture because the universe is something like 74% hydrogen. So if you were to come from some other universe and arrive in our universe and say, how are you going to get things done? You go, oh, there's all this hydrogen. Everything's made of hydrogen, right? Except on Earth, where actually there's not that much hydrogen, and where there is, it's bound up with other things. It becomes very hard to use. So

So to answer your question, I think most of the hydrogen in the universe is in stars, and that probably means it's in a plasma form. So it's not, it's, it's in neither case. It's not, it's, it's, it's the two atoms that make up H2 will be floating around because it's so hot they can't stay bound together. So I'm not absolutely certain of my uh planetary stages, but I'm pretty sure most of the hydrogen in the universe will be inside a star and will therefore be plasma. Well, if we just stick

to the solar system, we know that's true, right? Because the sun weighs a lot more than the earth and it's all hydrogen. Okay, good. So we've got a lot of hydrogen. Fine. I don't know how you can. But it's in the sun.

I mean, that's the point. It's in the sun doing undergoing nuclear fusion in the sun. That's the right place for hydrogen. It's very good at that. I mean, stars are actually very inefficient, but you know, they're very big, so it's fine. So I had a lot of

social media, people saying, I don't understand. And those aren't, that's not, you know, and there are no fusion reactors working on Earth. And I'm like, yes, I know. Look at the footnote. And of course, all of the nuclear bros were most angry at the idea. And in fact, last year, very interestingly, both wind and solar, each individually, overtook nuclear power output. And together, they overtook gas, which I bet not many people know. If you put wind and solar together, there's more electricity produced from them than there is now from natural gas.

Well, it may, I mean, so this is something I'm thinking a lot about at the moment because of my next book, actually, which is not about the ocean, but the planet. But, you know, this sort of planetary cascade of energy, the thing that powers Earth is solar power that comes from the fusion reactor in the sky. But it trickles through the system and where you tap into it is what determines how much of it there is, basically, because of thermodynamics. But so I think these questions of, I think we're going to have to get a lot better at understanding where energy actually is and isn't and where useful energy is, which is obviously what really matters. It's not about how much energy there is. It's about how much useful energy is accessible. And those are different things.

And the clarification here for people who don't think about the physics all the time is that whenever if you get, if you get your energy by combustion, you effectively waste a lot of it as heat. That's why it's inefficient.

Two-thirds of all primary energy is, I mean, it's called waste. Waste is actually not the right word for it. It's also called rejected, because if you want to have, if you want to ride up and down your building in an elevator and you've got a lump of coal, you actually, most of the energy in the coal goes to turning a small amount of it into electricity, which actually powers the elevator. And the rest of it is, you can call it waste or they just, you can call it rejected or used up in the process of turning a bit of the energy into something useful. And it's badly misunderstood by people who really need to know better.

Well, we can have our crusade on understanding Earth as an energy cascade that we can tap into. Helen,

It is. And when I posted the Senke diagram from Lawrence Livermore lab at some point, someone in the European Commission, very senior, that person asked their staff, why has no one told me about this? That person wasn't aware that we have these huge losses, this huge amount of rejected energy. And that's someone who is running an organization that is in charge of regulating the energy system, which to me just says we haven't had enough conversation about this very topic.

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. Energy discussions can seem to be dominated by engineers presenting technical solutions, politicians talking in generalizations, lawyers and consultants having a field day, regulators left doing their best to keep the lights on, and investors refusing to put money to work unless they receive guaranteed returns. Regular listeners will have heard me talking about the importance of systems thinking to break this logjam. Before we build any complex machine, we need to know what it is we actually want it to do. How do we want to run it? And how is it meant to fit together? But what does good energy systems thinking look like? How do you learn it? How do you teach it? How do you communicate it? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know a good energy systems thinker when I meet one. And my guest today is one of the best. He is Professor of Energy Transition Climate Policy at the University of Oxford, where he leads the energy program at the Environmental Change Institute. He also serves as a Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College in Oxford. Please welcome Jan Rosenow to Cleaning Up. Jan, thank you so much for joining us here today.

It is an absolute pleasure, Michael.