 Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to our briefing, Green Hydrogen. I'm Dan Bresset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policy makers. And more recently, we've also developed a program that provides technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics in our briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and even podcasts, are always available for free online at www.eesi.org. If you would like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, just take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Two weeks ago, we began our Living with Climate Change Briefing series with the Polar Vortex. Today, our discussion of Green Hydrogen marks the start of our companion briefing series, scaling up innovation to drive down emissions. Through the 4th of July, we will hold a total of eight briefings, four in each series. So as we describe climate impacts like extreme heat, wildfires, and sea level rise that are already affecting more and more communities, we will also cover the development and deployment of key innovations that will help us reduce emissions and eventually decrease the severity of climate impacts. In addition to sources and uses of no and low carbon hydrogen, the topic of today, we will also review the state of direct air capture, the buildout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and offshore wind energy. To learn more on RSVP, visit us online at www.esi.org forward slash briefings. I hope everyone will RSVP for both series, and if you miss one or want to revisit a topic later, you can always watch the archived webcasts on our website. And if you RSVP, that will ensure you receive some renotes and links to briefing materials. No and low carbon hydrogen produced with renewable energy, often called green hydrogen, is something I'm very eager to learn more about today. I remember the first time I heard about hydrogen as a clean energy resource. In January 2003, two years into my time as staff in the Senate, I was staffing my boss, Jim Jeffords, at the State of the Union. That was when President George W. Bush proposed $1.2 billion for research to develop clean hydrogen powered automobiles. He went on to say, with a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom, so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution free. And I remember thinking hydrogen? Like, the element hydrogen? I didn't believe it. Well, and if someone was born on January 23rd, 2003, the night of the State of the Union, and they're 19 years old right now, and they've been driving for a few years. And while there are some impressive hydrogen cars on the road, there aren't too many around, at least not in the DC region. So the vision for widespread hydrogen powered personal mobility presented by President Bush never really came to be. Does that mean that clean hydrogen is stuck in 2003? No, not at all. What is happening now is a push to produce more no and low carbon hydrogen that can be used to decarbonize hard to abate sectors like industry, including refineries and fertilizer production, and heavy duty transportation. Green hydrogen can also be used to clean up the current carbon intensive hydrogen industry, which emits over 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. The potential of no and low carbon hydrogen is significant. Speaking of significant, that brings us to the technology and innovation needed to help hydrogen source from renewable energy, overcome cost, materials and infrastructure challenges. There's a lot of work underway at the Department of Energy and the National Labs and an industry to overcome these formidable barriers. Our panelists today will help us understand the present state of hydrogen production, and with an eye to the future, the research, development, demonstration and deployment needed to help green hydrogen displace high carbon emitting alternatives, therefore allow us to realize critical emissions reductions. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time today for questions, and we will do our best, like we always do, to incorporate your questions into our discussion. If you have a question, you have two options to send it to us. First, you can send us an email, and the email address to use is ask at EESI.org, that's ASK at EESI.org. Or even better, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online. We'll be live tweeting the event, and it would be great to engage with you online that way. Before I turn to our panel, I'm very pleased to say that we have a very special guest joining us today. Representative Don Byer serves Virginia's eighth district in Congress. He is the chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, and also serves on the House Committee on Ways and Means, and on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, where he chairs the space subcommittee. He is a co-chair of the New Democrat Coalition's Climate Change Task Force, and before he was elected to Congress, Representative Byer was the tenant governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1998, an ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein during the Obama administration. Representative Byer, thank you so much for joining us today. Hello, I'm Don Byer. I represent parts of Northern Virginia in the U.S. Congress, and I'm thrilled to welcome you here today for EESI's briefing on green hydrogen. First of all, thank you to EESI for so steadfastly and bravely over the years educating our staffs. I like to kid, with a huge element of truth, that most members of Congress just do what their staffs told them to do, and while we can't be an expert on everything, you can be. And so thank you for taking the time to learn all about green hydrogen. I actually have a bill, one of the subsets of Build Back Better, to stimulate green hydrogen production. Why? Well, I was a car dealer for many decades, and I'm very excited about the electrification of automobility. But that's not going to work for everything. You think about big trucks and vehicles that are driven in 21 hours a day. Think about big plants. It would be great, maybe, if we could electrify everything, but we probably can't. In any case, we want to make sure that we have flexibility and adaptability to do other things. Green hydrogen probably was the greatest promise for a non-carbon-based energy source that's mobile, and that can supplement, complement what we do with electricity, and maybe even someday with fusion. So I'm so glad that you're learning all about it, but the difference could be between green hydrogen and blue or gray hydrogen. So I hope you have learned a great deal today, and thanks to EESI for helping move forward our critical environmental agenda. Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Representative Byer, with that great message, and thanks again to you for making time to join us, but also for your staff who helped make your participation today possible. Thank you very much. We have a little bit of a different format today, and we will have a panel in just a moment, but first we are joined by a second special guest. We are joined by Dr. Sunita Sachapal. She is the director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. In this capacity, she is responsible for the overall strategy and execution of hydrogen and fuel cell activities, including oversight and coordination of about $150 million per year of research and development programs. She has about two and a half decades of experience, including academia, industry, and government. Prior positions within the office included chief engineer, deputy program manager, and hydrogen storage team leader. And she's coordinated hydrogen and fuel cell activities across DOE with other agencies and with international stakeholders. These included 18 countries and the European Commission through the international partnership for hydrogen and fuel cells in the economy. If you saw the news today, you saw a big announcement about a new loan from DOE for a Utah project. There's a lot going on at DOE with hydrogen right now, and we're really, really pleased that Dr. Sachapal was able to join us with the presentation we're about to present. Thanks so much. So first of all, thank you for the kind invitation. It is an honor to be able to present today on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, where I am the director and also responsible for coordinating across the U.S. Department of Energy's hydrogen offices and programs. So what I'd like to do today is really cover three main messages. And the first is the sense of urgency and our climate goals. U.S. energy consumption is shown here, and you can see we still rely very heavily on fossil fuels. And so in terms of energy security, resiliency, and climate, our administration's priorities include a net zero emissions economy by 2050, 50 to 52 percent reduction by 2030, and a completely carbon-free electric grid by 2035. I'd also like to emphasize our environmental and energy and justice priorities, including Justice 40, which where 40 percent of our federal benefits will impact and benefit disadvantaged communities. So those who have historically experienced energy and environmental injustice, these are all very high priorities for the administration and for DOE. And hydrogen is one part of a very comprehensive portfolio. We have a DOE-wide strategic plan you can see online, includes multiple offices across the entire value chain from production through end use, renewables, nuclear, fossil with CCS, and from basic science all the way through deployments. And we have over 400 active projects that we're funding over 200 companies and universities, 15 national labs, and ranging from 100 to 400 million per year. But our top priorities are first low-cost clean hydrogen, low-cost efficient, certainly obviously safe infrastructure delivery and storage, and third enabling end use applications at scale, which is depicted in our H2 at scale initiative here, which really shows the Swiss Army knife perspective of hydrogen. Multiple resources, multiple end uses, that versatility and optionality, the flexibility that you can get by using hydrogen as a fuel, as a feedstock or storage. And we're focused on those hard to decarbonize sectors. So industrial, for instance, steel alone accounts for over 7% global emissions. Heavy duty transportation, especially long haul trucks, for instance, where they're limited alternatives. And then energy storage, especially long duration energy storage. And today we produce over 10 million metric tons of hydrogen in the US, mostly from natural gas. But we see opportunity for significant growth. And if we produced another 10 million more, as an example, that would basically double today's solar and wind. That's what would be required to produce an additional 10 million. And huge opportunity for jobs or revenues. But the key is really cost. And if you look at where we are today in the US, we actually have thousands of fuel-sales niche markets like forklifts, major companies like Amazon, Walmart. In fact, every few seconds, some customers refueling with hydrogen. Backup power, stationary power, over 170 megawatts of PEM electrolyzers. So proton exchange membrane. This is just one snapshot in time. This is moving very quickly. And you can see buses, stations over 12,000 cars. Most regions actually have hydrogen from natural gas. We have over 1,600 miles of pipeline, three caverns, including the world's largest geological cavern in Texas, and a growing ecosystem infrastructure for hydrogen. But the key, again, is cost. And so we launched, our secretary launched in response to President Biden's climate summit last year, the Energy Earthshot Initiative, with hydrogen shot as the first. So similar to the moonshot from John F. Kennedy over half a century ago, these are bold, ambitious targets to galvanize the community and enable meeting our climate goals. So hydrogen shot is this easily articulated target of 111. So that stands for $1 for one kilogram of clean hydrogen in one decade. So today, hydrogen is about $1.50 from natural gas, and but over $5 from electrolysis. And so we had a summit with thousands of participants over 34 countries, Secretary Granholm, Secretary Kerry, Bill Gates, CEOs, members of Congress, and experts from around the world. And this is just one example of feedback. So we asked, what are the greatest barriers to widespread hydrogen in the US? And you can see cost was the largest. But there are many other barriers. So the need for sufficient infrastructure, public awareness and understanding. So again, it's all hands on deck. And we're focusing on cost with hydrogen shots from not just electrolysis, but other pathways, so thermal conversion, advanced pathways. And this just shows you an example of how we are developing our strategies to get those cost reductions. So now I'm very pleased to switch over to the bipartisan infrastructure law that was signed by President Biden in November. And this includes over $60 billion for the Department of Energy, with $9.5 billion specifically for clean hydrogen, including $1 billion for electrolysis, research through demonstrations, half a billion for clean hydrogen manufacturing and recycling R&D, and $8 billion for at least four regional clean hydrogen hubs that would include production all the way through end use. Also aligns with our hydrogen shot goals providing a goal of $2 by 2026 and developing a national hydrogen strategy. So finally are my last and third message today. So second key message was really cost is collaboration and the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion and everything that we do. And since there are probably many experts out there in the audience, I usually like to emphasize and remind ourselves that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no one person can whistle a symphony. It really takes all hands on deck the entire orchestra, so industry, governments, investors, the EJ community, the global community. And so we have a wide and growing number of partnerships. These are just a few examples of international partnerships. For instance, if there are any postdocs, students or early career professionals, a shout out here to the Early Career Network over 34 countries an opportunity to develop the next generation of leaders facilitating international trade, H2 twin cities encouraging partnership among cities, the Glasgow breakthrough and clean energy ministerial mission innovation. Again, a huge number of examples of partnerships and collaborations, leveraging resources and really raising the time so all the ships can go up. So finally, our strategy is first accelerate R&D, our D&D to reduce cost, launch our demos in our hydrogen hubs, a co-locating production through end use, so enabling that localized infrastructure and then achieve those tangible benefits to enable a resilient, sustainable, and equitable clean energy economy. So we have a significant number of resources available. Please save the date for June. We have our annual merit review online. Increase your H2 IQ webinars where we've already showcased and talked about the hydrogen hubs and a request for information, HQ tools, Center for Hydrogen Safety. Again, a tremendous amount of resources available. And with that, thank you so much for all of your leadership and support for hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and have a good rest of the conference. Thank you. Thank you so much for that excellent presentation. Dr. Sachapal, it was really good. A great opportunity for me to remind our audience that all of our resources from today's briefings will be posted online. So you can go back and revisit the presentation. You can review the presentation materials and it'll be a great, I think, ongoing resource. Those were great slides and there's so much good information. Also, just another quick plug. I was browsing around EERE's website the other day sort of in preparation for the briefing today and there is so much amazing information about hydrogen. We're big fans of EERE. You might remember we did an energy efficiency briefing back a couple, I guess in February at this point. It's great stuff, but I was blown away by how many incredible resources there are about clean hydrogen at EERE's website. So I encourage everyone to go check that out. Great stuff. That leads us to our panel today. We have three panelists and it is my privilege to introduce our first presenter. Alexa Thompson is a manager in RMI's US policy and climate aligned industries program where she leads RMI's federal policy engagement on industrial decarbonization. Alexa focuses on the role of policy in scaling technologies including clean hydrogen and carbon capture, as well as using public financing and procurement to provide solutions in the sectors. Before RMI, Alexa was head of strategy for Queen Tech Startup Regen, a developer of solar power and long duration storage technologies. She worked at McKinsey and company in Australia and New Zealand. Alexa, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Hello everyone and Dan, thank you so much for that introduction and to ESI for inviting me to be part of this conversation today on a really important and I think exciting topic. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen which will take just a second and I will ask if you're seeing the right screen or if you're perhaps seeing my presentation mode. We are in presentation mode right now. Okay. How about now? Yep, looks good. Okay, fantastic. Perfect. Well, again, thank you for the opportunity to join this conversation today. What I'm going to try and do over the course of the next 15 minutes or so is cover four quite large topics. The first is just a hydrogen 101. So what is it and why do we need it? Really to make sure that we're all on the same baseline level of knowledge. I'll touch on the costs and how it varies depending on production method and location. I'll cover very briefly the US policy landscape at a federal and state level at the moment on hydrogen and also introduce the green hydrogen catapult, which is a private sector deployment initiative that RMI is involved in. So very simply, what is hydrogen? At its most basic, hydrogen is a gaseous molecule. It is, as Dan said, the lightest and smallest element on the periodic table. And similar to fossil fuels, its combustion or burning produces high temperatures. It is energy dense. And it can also be involved in chemical reactions. And these attributes really differentiate it from electricity, which can't achieve most of these things. Unlike fossil fuels, however, burning hydrogen, when you burn hydrogen, it combines with oxygen and produces simply water. Whereas burning methane gas, CH4 or coal, which is mostly carbon, forms carbon dioxide. The upshot is that this gives hydrogen a special role in our pathway to achieving net zero. Because it is one of the only clean tools in our arsenal for applications that are hard to electrify. That is, for applications that are where high temperatures are needed, where high energy density is required, or where hydrogen might be required as a chemical feedstock. Apologies for the camera adjustment there. To get a little bit more specific, clean hydrogen is likely to be the primary decarbonisation solution, where, first of all, it's replacing hydrogen in existing end-users. So that's applications like fertilizer, refining and chemical production, where hydrogen is used as a chemical feedstock today. And the production of that hydrogen accounts for around 2% of US total emissions. And the second area is around replacing hydrogen, replacing fossil fuels, excuse me, in heavy industry and heavy transport sectors. So sectors like steel making and metals processing and production, maritime shipping, heavy duty trucking, and in the longer-term aviation. And from these four sectors alone, there's another 4% to 6% of US emissions on the table that can be addressed through clean hydrogen. It is also worth pointing out what's not on this page. And that's applications like electric power production and natural gas learning for home and commercial heating. Those applications do actually get a significant amount of airtime in the media, but they're not listed here primarily because direct electrification is preferable for a vast majority of applications in those sectors. Direct electrification uses less energy overall. It doesn't have the same conversion losses associated with hydrogen. And it's also a more complete decarbonisation solution where blending with fossil fuels and hydrogen only gets you part of the way there. So while hydrogen is often talked about as a Swiss army, I think it's important to start out by saying that hydrogen should really only be used in certain sectors. I actually think the IEA's net zero emission scenario illustrates this rather nicely. It shows that hydrogen is vital in net zero, but that it plays a fairly limited role. It will account for around 10% of final energy consumption in a net zero scenario according to the IEA. There's one more topic I'd like to touch on in the 101 section, which is how hydrogen is produced. So many of you will be familiar with the different colours of hydrogen, which is really shorthand for the method of production. While this briefing we're going to focus mostly on green hydrogen, it's also important to understand grey, which is how most hydrogen is produced today, and blue hydrogen methods. So I'll quickly explain all three. With grey hydrogen takes natural gas or methane, it's chemical symbol as CH4, and basically strips that carbon atom off. So you're left with hydrogen and carbon, which becomes, of course, CO2 when combusted. I'm skipping ahead here. Let me go back just a minute. As a benchmark or a baseline, grey hydrogen produces around 10 to 12 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen produced. Blue hydrogen is effectively the same process, but it adds carbon capture, so that carbon dioxide is not released into the atmosphere. You can see that the range of emissions intensity is rather large for blue hydrogen. We estimate it's around 2 to 9 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen. And that's really because the term blue hydrogen doesn't specify the capture rate that must be achieved in order for something to be called blue hydrogen. We know that today, operating carbon capture projects have typically achieved, on average, a capture rate of less than 50%. So emissions intensity claims by blue hydrogen projects really do need to be scrutinized and monitored fairly closely. And finally, of course, with both gas based pathways, upstream methane leakage is a really important component of the emissions that can contribute substantially to their emissions intensity. And on the right, we of course have green hydrogen, which is where renewable energy is used to power and electrolyze them, which splits plain water into its separate components, hydrogen and oxygen, and produces no operational emissions. It is worth noting that the electrolyzer process is highly energy intensive. And so using a different source of electricity really changes the equation on emissions intensity. For example, an electrolyzer connected to the average US grid will actually produce around 20 kilograms of CO2 that's actually double unavated steam methane reforming. So we must be really careful about the source of electricity when we're talking about electrolytic hydrogen. So we know that green and blue are often put in the same bucket of clean hydrogen, even though the emissions we can see really rain widely between the two. And from a policy perspective, that's important because it means that we need to get the definitions and the incentives right in the outset to incentivize really the lowest cost, the lowest emissions form of production that's forms of production. And green hydrogen is really the only form of hydrogen production that's fully compatible with the net zero emission energy future. Happily, it also green hydrogen also will be had a long time output outlook to be the lowest cost form of production, which is a nice segue into the next section on cost. So I'm going to zoom through this. But just to give you some basic heuristics on the costs of different forms of hydrogen. Today, gray hydrogen in the United States costs around $1 to $1.50 a kilogram. Blue, where we add carbon capture adds around 70% to the cost of gray. And as Sunita touched on, green hydrogen is around that five kilogram mark today. So there is a fairly big range that we see from anywhere between $3 to $7 a kilogram. What we're headed towards is $2 a kilogram, $2 a kilogram, we hope, by mid decade and $1 a kilogram by 2030. And it's at this $2 point where which is really seen as an inflection point where many end uses become economic and $1 of course where it competes with or out competes gray hydrogen. I think it's notable that whilst $1.50 is about the benchmark for gray hydrogen in the United States, because it is made from natural gas, its prices really skyrocketed from the recent energy shocks caused by Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. For example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported last week that the cost of gray hydrogen in Europe has reached $6.70 a kilogram. It's unlike, though it's unlikely that that price increase will be permanent, it does suggest that energy security and resiliency is another reason to favor green hydrogen production over blue. So why the range and can we believe the cost decline for green? Let me try and answer both of those questions very briefly. Today, the cost of green hydrogen is heavily dependent on the capital costs of both the electrolyzer and renewable energy. And both are expected to drop substantially, making those steep cost declines quite realistic. For example, the electrolyzers cost around $700 a kilowatt today and are expected to drop to $200 a kilowatt in a few short years. There is a ton of innovation going on in this front and I know that Brian will touch on that in a later presentation. The cost of renewable energy will also continue to fall. And there is a synergistic factor here. As electrolyzer costs decline, operators can afford to move from a higher utilization profile, which is necessary, frankly, to make a return on the electrolyzer, to a more variable or lower utilization profile, which will allow operators to tap the lowest cost sources of renewable generation. Having said all of that, because different locations have different renewable energy resources, and also have different cost of storage, the cost of green hydrogen production will vary and will continue to vary based on location. So to give you some sense of that, today we already see prices for green hydrogen production in West Texas, for example, at around that $3 per kilogram mark, rising to $550-ish if you were to produce in California. In the future, while prices drop across the board and really converge on that $2 per kilogram target in the near term, location-based price differences will remain. Okay, I'm going to switch gears a little bit here and jump to the US policy landscape. I'm sure that many of you will be familiar with the bipartisan infrastructure law, and Sunita already touched on it in her presentation. Bipartisan infrastructure law provides $9.5 billion towards clean hydrogen project deployment, of which $8 billion goes towards at least four clean hydrogen hubs, and $1.5 billion to research and development. Beyond dollars, it also includes critical precedent-setting measures, like directing DOE to develop a clean hydrogen definition and a national clean hydrogen strategy. The bipartisan infrastructure law will provide funding for the first wave of infrastructure development, which is critically important. But it's also important to know that $8 billion is really a drop in the ocean compared to a market that could potentially be as large as $100 billion a year by 2030. And to really realize that market and see real market growth, we will need to see commercial viability of green hydrogen, of green hydrogen. That's where the production tax credit contained in reconciliation, which is an up to $3 a kilogram subsidy for clean hydrogen, will play a critical role in achieving unlocking supply and demand and really building a durable market this decade. And it won't rely on just a few, select a few customers who are willing to pay that green premium. So we do see this as a critical mechanism to unlock that market growth. And finally, there are several proposed packages in Congress at the moment that would support specific end-use sectors. For example, senators Coonman-Cornin have supported bills that would provide grant and loan funding to the heavy duty trucking applications, maritime shipping applications, and hydrogen distribution and storage. And I'm aware that, for example, Senator Klobuchar has announced her support for green fertilizer, of which green hydrogen is a key input. So what's needed next? More federal and state policy really is needed for the hydrogen economy to scale successfully. And in particular, states do have an important role to play in many of the following categories, whether it's prioritizing end-uses, integrating planning, permitting, project permitting, safety and handling regulations and standards and certifications that verify emissions and allow consumers to buy low carbon products with components. This is a very cursory look at the state landscape, but states are increasingly leaning into hydrogen policy. It is early days though. Starting at the bottom, what is clear is that states' interests in building a are highly interested in building local hydrogen economies. Around half of US states have publicly announced their interest in developing a hydrogen hub and receiving funding from DOE's hydrogen hub programs. And several of these states have already developing formal policies and strategies. That includes states like California, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, New York. Washington actually recently passed legislation supporting clean hydrogen. And California indirectly is a frontrunner with its zero emissions vehicle targets, which actually cover the heavy duty end of the spectrum, which is a spot where we could see hydrogen being used in heavy duty truck applications. What we've observed when we've engaged with some of these states is that the level of sophistication in their policy drafting is relatively low in terms of directing hydrogen to where it should be used and regulating those production emissions. So that means that the precedent that is set at a federal policy level will be vitally important for influencing national hydrogen outcomes in a positive direction. Finally, and I realize I'm maybe at time or even over, I will touch very briefly on the green hydrogen catapult just to give a sense of what some of the private sector activity in this landscape looks like at the moment. The green hydrogen catapult is a private sector coalition currently it has 12 members and that represent the world's biggest green hydrogen program project developers. And IRI is playing a convening role in this initiative. In short, its mission is to mobilize 80 gigawatts of green hydrogen production capacity by mid-26 and really simultaneously drive costs down to well below $2 a kilogram for green hydrogen. The green hydrogen catapult is taking a systems approach knowing that it can't only focus on product development but also must engage with demand aggregation, policy development and unlocking finance to get to the targets that it set for itself. And specifically for 2022 the focus will be on developing viable hydrogen hubs and by aggregating demand as well as sector-based analysis and coordination with a focus on steel maritime shipping and fertilizer. And finally on policy engagement to make sure that the local settings are right to support a hydrogen economy. If any of this work could be of further interest to you please do feel free to reach out and engage further. I know I've only touched on it briefly here. I've covered a lot of ground in this in this short presentation and I'm really looking forward to the Q&A at the end of this session. But in conclusion I'd say that hydrogen is a really powerful decarbonization tool but we do need to get the basics right to enable the US hydrogen economy to scale successfully. That is in a manner that is climate aligned, that is equitable and inclusive to communities and that is commercially viable and sustainable over the long term. Thanks very much. Dan back to you. Thanks Alexa. That was a really great presentation. I think now our audience is going to go out and buy a bunch of electrolyzers and try to make your hydrogen that was so informative. And great slides. Great reminder once again our presenter slides will be available online as well as an archive of the webcast. If you'd like to go back and visit Alexa's presentation or our presentations from our next two panelists. Let me also just take a quick second to remind our audience that there's an opportunity to submit questions for our discussion. You can send us an email. An email address to use is AskASK at ESI.org or you can follow us on Twitter and send us a question that way. It is my privilege to introduce our second panelist of the day. Rachel Fockery leads the hydrogen and energy innovation portfolio at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She engages with international and domestic stakeholders in designing policy and regulatory frameworks to leverage hydrogen technologies potential to support deep decarbonization goals and to internalize the guardrails necessary to mitigate its risks. Rachel also works on advancing strong federal policy to promote energy innovation and improve technology-based climate solutions. On a part-time basis she is seconded to the UN high-level climate champions where she leads the organization's global green hydrogen strategy. Rachel has expertise in deep decarbonization modeling, policy analysis and design, and analyzing and advocating for federal and state decarbonization policies and regulations. Rachel, it's great to see you today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much and thanks again for the invite and for ESI to convene this really important conversation. It's always absolutely compelling to join those discussions with fellow experts like Alexa and Brian and Sonita and others. So thanks again and I really look forward to your questions. I'm really happy that Alexa went first because she laid the foundations so solidly and so comprehensively that I'm now able to kind of focus more on the policy piece of things which is now that we know what hydrogen is, what are some of the shortcomings but also benefits. How can we scale this up, right? How can we realize the potential and unlock the potential in a manner that is climate-aligned, no regrets, and really supports our deep decarbonization goals in an affordable and efficient manner. So this is really kind of the top line here is how do we do this right. And I think this dovetails really well with how Alexa ended her presentation, which is about getting the basics right. So this is pulled from a preliminary modeling analysis that NRDC is doing, looking at how we can achieve net zero in the U.S. by 2050. And as you can see, hydrogen growth is quite dramatic and we see most of it kind of being directed to those really hard to electrify sectors that Alexa mentioned, which are maritime shipping, aviation, steel, and so on. But what I would really like to point out here, excuse me, is that the scale really starts in 2030 onwards. This is where we start to see a really kind of significant growth in the deployment of low and zero carbon hydrogen, such that we can use this decade to really lay solid and climate-line foundations via policy. And this is what we should be aiming towards. So how do we do that? I think the really easy overarching principle that I like to kind of frame everything according to is that this is not about hydrogen, that hydrogen scale-up should not be for hydrogen's sake, but instead deployment should be done with a view to support the most affordable, efficient, and community-safe transition to a clean economy. And this is easier said than done, because as Alexa alluded to, there are some shortcomings and risks and pitfalls linked to hydrogen that require very strong guardrails and safeguards. I will not go over them in depth. I think Alexa did a great job already, but just a quick refresh as to the categories of these risks that we have to be very sensitive to. One, you have to produce hydrogen from something. It doesn't occur naturally. And the production process is quite energy-intensive. You need a lot of energy to produce hydrogen, which means that absent regulations and policies production can emit a lot of greenhouse gases. You may have heard of the Cornell Stanford study that found that absence, climate regulations, blue hydrogen could be worse than fossil fuels. Similarly, as Alexa alluded to, in the case of electrolysis-based hydrogen, using your kind of average grid power that is fossil-heavy in lieu of renewable energy could produce a hydrogen source that is even more polluting and emitting than today's gas-based hydrogen. On the end-use side, hydrogen use is generally inefficient, especially when you have alternatives like direct electrification. Again, Alexa covered this quite well. Just quickly, why is it inefficient? Because one, as I mentioned, you have to produce it from something and you have energy losses there, but then on the end-use side of things, hydrogen equipment and appliances tend to be less efficient than electric appliances. So a hydrogen fuel cell car will be less efficient than a battery electric car. Generally, a hydrogen boiler will be much less efficient than an electric heat pump, such that as a whole, a hydrogen pathway requires quite a lot of energy and is quite inefficient when you have alternatives. This has become kind of a data point that is a great soundbite to illustrate this. We would need about five times more renewable electricity to heat a home with hydrogen than to heat that same home with a heat pump. Just imagine how much pressure on the energy system you were put by indiscriminately deploying hydrogen in applications that could be better served by direct electrification. This would significantly complicate the task of decarbonizing our economy. And by extension, the indiscriminate deployment of hydrogen can significantly increase costs for consumers. The European Consumer Organization, DUC, did a pretty comprehensive study evaluating the annual costs of heating a home with hydrogen versus a heat pump across various countries in Europe to make sure that the climate differences are being captured, the housing stock differences are being captured, and they found that overwhelmingly, a heat pump is significantly cheaper than a hydrogen boiler. So the last thing we should be doing here is increasing the cost of the energy transition unnecessarily. And then the third category of risks or pitfalls is really something that's been gaining a lot of attention in the past couple of months and so, and that's around hydrogen leakage, which is now estimated to have potentially very negative climate consequences if not mitigated. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas, which means that when it's emitted into the atmosphere or leaked, it doesn't itself warm the atmosphere, but instead it increases the amount and concentration of other greenhouse gases like methane and water vapor and ozone, and thereby contributes to global warming. Now, this is not new, we've always known this, but a new research by the Environmental Defense Fund, which is being peer reviewed, but also very recently, I think as a couple of weeks ago, the UK government produced also a study both finding that the leakage, the climate forcing impacts or climate warming impacts of leakage are actually more accentuated than previously thought. And hydrogen is a very, very small molecule, which means that it can leak very easily, excuse me, into the atmosphere. And this is further complicated by the fact that we don't really know how to measure hydrogen leakage to the granularity that we need, because currently the way we measure leakage is just for kind of these big leaks that may cause some safety concerns, as opposed to the smaller leaks, which may be quote unquote safe, but have some very negative consequences. So all this to say that this is a real problem for which we don't have good solutions to from a technological standpoint. So we have to be quite cautious and careful and kind of factor it into how we approach hydrogen. Great. So where do they go from here? Because as we've noted already, we know this resource, excuse me, could be important to meet climate goals, especially for those really hard to electrify sectors. So we need to scale it up. We need to get economies of scale on this decade, cost reductions, build experience with it and so on. But we have all of these pitfalls and risks that require quite a bit of caution. So how do we proceed forward with policy? And I think that the principle here is that we have to find this pretty narrow path forward that would enable us to scale it in a climate-aligned and no regret manner. So how do we do that? I won't cover everything, but I do want to break it down into three or four themes that I think are critical. The first one relates to production. So as I mentioned, hydrogen production could be highly emitting. So we need to have strict guardrails and standards to make sure that emissions are climate-aligned and minimize to the extent possible. So what do we need? We need first a rigorous methodology to account for greenhouse gas emissions that arise both at the site of hydrogen production, but also upstream of production. As Alexa was noting earlier in the case, for instance, of blue hydrogen, upstream methane leaks and emissions could have very strong bearing on how clean hydrogen actually is. And I know this sounds easy, this accounting step, but it's actually quite hard and complicated. So we need very strict and rigorous methodologies to do that. The second piece that is really needed here is verification mechanisms. Because sure, we can account on paper how much our emissions are, but if we don't have strict measurements and reporting and verification protocols, then it could be all greenwashed. I'm thinking methane leakage is a really good category here. Methane leakage has been notoriously difficult to measure so far. So we need, say, the EPA to come up with some very rigorous regulations around methane leakage and measurements to make sure that, say, in the case of blue hydrogen, whatever, you know, clean methane leakage level is actually correct and accurate. And then the third step is around setting a limit on these emissions. So, great, we have an accurate accounting of those emissions. Next step is we need a very low limit to make sure that we're only deploying the lowest emitting and the most climate-aligned resources. So do you want to touch on the policy levers? Because those are familiar in many ways, and Alexa covered this to some extent, but the DOE and the EPA are directed by the infrastructure law to develop a clean hydrogen standard, which we expect by as early as next month. This is a great vehicle to get those principles right, to set a rigorous limit and a rigorous methodology for estimating emissions. And states are also passing their own standards, or at least contemplating passing their own standards. So states have a very important role to play as well in identifying rigorous standards. The second piece relates to end-use. And because hydrogen is in many ways inefficient, because its indiscriminate use could be actually detrimental to the energy system and the transition, we have to be very targeted in how we deploy it. So very kind of broad brush incentives, just focus on production may not be commensurate with how we should approach it. So instead of kind of these very broad strokes, incentives on the supply side, we should be focusing on the demand side of things, on creating targeted demand centers. There are no regrets anywhere we know hydrogen will play a major role. And I would know that this is kind of the global orientation of the hydrogen policy landscape, I would say, the strong push for a more kind of demand creation oriented approach. So how do we do that? I think it's critical to first start with a very rigorous evaluation of hydrogen's highest value applications. Those are the most aligned with the most efficient pathway to net zero by 2050, because again, the framing always has to go back to this holistic, economy-wide decarbonization picture. And this will naturally lead to a two-pronged approach for scaling up hydrogen in the most no regrets and beneficial manner. And Alexa noted this, like fully agree with this kind of two-step approach, which is start by targeting those existing hydrogen users. The finalized fertilizer plans use very large amounts of highly polluting hydrogen today, such that if we were to replace at least a portion of that hydrogen with low carbon or green hydrogen, that would give us enormous scale and cost reductions in a very no regrets manner, because they're already using hydrogen. So you're not creating some ill-conceived, inefficient new demand centers just to scale up this resource. The second category relates to new hydrogen demand centers. We should be focusing on those really hard to electrify applications where we know hydrogen is projected to be a major climate solution. Steel and maritime shipping are two of those categories which we think are not necessarily commercial yet, in terms of using hydrogen, but they're quite close. They're quite high on the technology readiness scale and need to nudge from policies and further investment of course to commercialize. And we should be focusing on those. So what are the policy levers that we have? The DOE hydrogen hub is an excellent vehicle to doing that. You can be very selective with the sort of hubs that you support. And we strongly press DOE to look for those hub applications where it can, where, you know, those kind of existing users or those new high value applications where hydrogen could be targeted, as opposed to say inefficient applications like buildings, for instance, where we know hydrogen will probably not be a competitive or beneficial solution. Another lever is public procurement standards. So the federal government is one of the largest purchasers of steel for public infrastructure projects. The federal government in, for instance, sets a procurement standard to purchase a small portion or a modest portion, however, is appropriate of say hydrogen based steel. And we know President Biden is committed to the buy clean initiative. So this could be another great vehicle to kind of start nudging the steel sector towards hydrogen. A third level is around minimum quotas for clean hydrogen in either existing users or existing hydrogen uses and hard to date applications. So for example, requiring that a minimum share of ammonia, the green ammonia by 2030, or a minimum share of say maritime fuel oil be based on hydrogen based fuels by 2030. These are pretty familiar tools and are being considered by a number of countries, including the European Commission or actually entities, Germany, Spain and India. And then touching kind of Dan mentioned this, but the RD and the elements here should be really present because those really high value applications for hydrogen like steel and shipping and possibly aviation, those are still not commercial. And they vary on the technology readiness level. So we really need more RD and D to advance those technologies, especially since we don't have too much time to kind of commercialize them in 2030 onwards. And technology RD and D has long lead time. So we really need DOE to prioritize those really hard to electrify applications where hydrogen could play a key role, as opposed to having a more kind of broad hydrogen portfolio focusing on a bunch of, you know, different hydrogen applications. We really need strategic prioritization from DOE in this decade on those really hard to debate sectors and hydrogen use. Hydrogen transport infrastructure and by this want to focus on pipelines. I think the overarching principle that I would like folks to leave with today as it relates to pipelines is that we need more caution and we need more kind of reflection. Why? Because one pipelines are long live, right? Pipelines are 30 to 40 years kind of in terms of their lifetime, their capital intensive. So once you build them, you're kind of stuck with them for a while. And you have to be pretty sure that you need them. And this is not necessarily commensurate with the reality that there's still a lot of uncertainties as it relates to the hydrogen market. We're still not quite clear as to the future landscape of hydrogen, the locations of the users of the consumers, the producers. And until we have better clarity, building long live infrastructure may not be very sensible. And similarly, the cost of building new pipelines, the cost of repurposing gas pipelines to hydrogen, which I know is a favorite of a lot of people remain very uncertain. We don't have a blueprint for doing this at large scale. So we still have also a lot of cost on certain keys. The second piece that should give pause is again around leakage. As I mentioned, the climate consequences of hydrogen leakage remain under investigation. And we know that hydrogen leakage risks are generally high during transport because hydrogen can leak easily from infrastructure. So until we develop the proper tools to measure leakage via centers and others, until we have a better clarity around the types of materials to use in pipes to minimize leakage, we should be again very cautious about investing in infrastructure that could be ultimately climate damaging. So from a policy standpoint, what does this mean? One, the easiest and most of the safest approach is to forego white-spot infrastructure altogether, at least in the near term, until we have better clarity related to these challenges. So let's start by advancing hydrogen in clusters or hubs where users and producers are in close proximity and a lot of transport infrastructure is not needed. And of course, a GOE hubs program lends itself to this concept. The second piece is that we need GOE and academia to really give us and produce more scientific and transparent assessments of the future hydrogen landscape and the need or lack thereof of pipelines because we still don't know the extent to which we will need hydrogen pipelines. For instance, the National Academy of Sciences have come out to say that the hydrogen landscape will probably be more of a regional play because you can produce hydrogen widely across varied regions. It's not like oil and gas where it's hyper-concentrated and you need a bunch of pipelines. You can actually produce it dispersely and kind of in multiple locations. So pipelines and large pipelines may not be as needed as we fear radically sometimes here. And then finally, we do want to touch on hydrogen leakage. We need very strong and concerted national but also global RGNZ concerning leakage detection and repair technologies but also we need to develop leakage measurement verification and reporting protocols before we launch into widespread transport infrastructure. And then I want to end with a very critically important point around labor and environmental justice to make sure that we are building a hydrogen market that is truly beneficial for society. We need to prioritize labor and equity from the very start and we basically can do that best by launching or engaging in robust and proactive outreach to those groups from the very start. Especially important since equity considerations both health and labor really permeate the hydrogen space. Some production and use patterns for hydrogen can produce very high levels of air pollution. In particular when it's burned hydrogen can actually produce even more air pollution than natural gas if it's not mitigated so this needs to be given a lot of attention. And some hydrogen applications may have some safety concerns and those require further assessment and solution development. So briefly on sort of the policy lever or policy angle the way to do that is as I mentioned starting with a very proactive and meaningful engagement with EJ and labor communities. It's layering in high labor standards across the hydrogen value chain by creating good union jobs and investing in training programs. In many ways this is a new thing. Sure we've used hydrogen for a long time in our industry but we're envisioning a whole new role such that the workforce piece requires kind of development and training and we can focus those programs on those communities that will bear the brunt of a transition away from the fossil industry so this can kind of offer a really interesting economic revitalization angle. And then finally an important thing from a health standpoint when you can make sure that we have very rigorous and very strict health and safety standards for all hydrogen use cases and production pathways. So with that thanks so much and back to you then. Thanks Rachel that was a great presentation and just a quick reminder slides and everything will be available online. We will have a third panelist in just a moment and that means we are close to our Q&A we have a couple questions coming in we'd love to get more if you have a question for our panelists you can send us an email ask ask at esi.org or follow us on twitter at ESI online. Our third panelist is Dr. Brian Pivovar. Brian is Senior Research Fellow and Group Manager in the Chemistry and Nanosciences Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado where he oversees NREL's electrolysis and fuel cell and materials research and development. He is director for the hydrogen for next generation electrolyzers of water or H2 new consortium focused on addressing components materials integration and manufacturing R&D to enable manufacturable electrolyzers that meet required cost durability and performance targets simultaneously to reach that two dollars per kilogram hydrogen talked about today. He's co-authored over 160 papers with 13,000 citations in the general area fuel cells and electrolysis. Brian I'm really looking forward to your presentation I don't envy your position having to go after Alexa and Rachel today but I'm really looking forward to what you have to say in learning about your great work at NREL. Thank you so much for this opportunity and everything you guys are doing in this space. Are you seeing my screen appropriately? It looks nice. Thanks. I'm going to talk to you about some of the work that's going on within the Department of Energy. I'll kind of come back to at some level to some of the things that Sinida Satyapal talked about in her talk. At NREL we talk about the 2010s as being the decade of wind and solar and the 2020s being the decade of hydrogen. I clearly believe that that's the direction we're going. Sinida presented this hydrogen at scale bubble chart and the premise of this is to take the energy sources that are available to us and how hydrogen can act as a parallel infrastructure to electricity and natural gas and do a lot of the hardest sectors to decarbonize and transportation on industry on the right. There's a couple specific attributes of hydrogen in this that I wanted to draw attention to. One is its ability to operate cross-sectorally and temporally. A lot of this comes from increasing variable renewable energy penetration and the need to move the energy not both just in time but space and across different sectors. Hydrogen has this unique attribute for its clean efficient end use. In particular its unique ability to be electrochemically converted efficiently rather than having to be combusted. This results in a lot of benefits. There's economic factors that have been hit on a lot today. There's been some enhanced energy security benefits that have also been alluded to. The environmental benefits are also large. The focus today has really been on greenhouse gases but local criteria pollutants are also a major issue especially because of how much it's difficult to decarbonize cities and do things in transportation and in industry where people have to live. The last one I wanted to add was water. Even though green hydrogen needs water for electrolysis, the amount of water it needs is not that high and currently the energy system consumes about 40% of the water because of the way large thermal loads go and so you get a lot of water back moving from today's fossil based energy system towards something that was more like the hydrogen and scale vision. The last piece of this is that getting all of these benefits in a single energy system significantly enhances the value proposition. I think that I bring up the local air quality because I think of other places in the world like China and India being willing to potentially go along with things like the Paris agreement or COP agreements and a lot of it will be driven by local air quality and the tie of local air quality to basically also helping solve the greenhouse gas problem is a big piece of this. The Department of Energy's hydrogen and scale vision is something that's needed put out. She had a couple bullets on this but really it comes down to we need to make move and store and use hydrogen more efficiently. The National Lab system has been involved in a lot of early stage research to help evolve and de-risk the technologies and the National Labs are ideal places to do a lot of this because of our ability to interact with each other and then across industry and academia to move these things forward. There's a couple of pictures on here that kind of illustrate these areas but I'll talk about each one kind of briefly. I'm going to go in kind of the reverse order. I'm going to start with the use case. This piece of the bubble chart on the left talks about transportation and where hydrogen goes into transportation. It can be used directly as a fuel. Dual cell is the cleanest and most efficient way to do this but you can also combust it. You can use CO2 to upgrade it into synthetic fuels and it's already used today in large amounts to upgrade things like crude oil and biomass. Things like ammonia with nitrogen making green ammonia and then doing metals production something about 6% of all greenhouse gas emissions can be done more cleanly with hydrogen. There's these different places where this hydrogen fits in. The transportation in the industry are really the strongest economic sectors and also the hardest to make clean and decarbonize. There's a lot of places within that are difficult or impossible or at least impractical to fuel fully electrify. The figure on the upper right basically talks about work that we've done at NREL to talk about what sectors and what demand hydrogen would have at different price points. You can see that there is a prioritization for things like ammonia refining in biofuels before you get to metals and then things like seasonal energy storage and other electric goal options or heating that are much lower in value. So on this end use side the R&D needs are still significant. Fuel cells have gone from something that's been a research project to things that are actually viable for on-road transportation at this point in time but there's this large focus now on the heavy duty market. So the million mile fuel cell truck consortium is one of the things that we have going on. There's also work that needs to be done to focus on green ammonia or green steel types of aspects and then even using hydrogen and burden or in turbines is another potential area. Wanted to move on to moving and storing and so energy transmission infrastructures are big issues and here we have basically the plots that show kind of the electricity grid and then the natural gas grid. These are the way that we move energy across the country and they represent you know trillion dollar types of investments. There's 1600 miles of hydrogen pipeline so we have some experience in this as well as the salt cavern storage for bulk storage of this but really right now current hydrogen prices are dominated by storage and distribution costs and the reason that I see natural gas is the most clear analogy to hydrogen. They're both gases they're both chemical energy carriers and one of there's really two big differences between hydrogen and natural gas. One is is that natural gas has a half trillion dollar infrastructure that allows it to be distributed economically and it also has the ability to just leave it in the ground until we need it so it has kind of inherent storage aspect of it but you can see that these maps for electricity and natural gas are very similar in terms of how they service the country and hydrogen pipelines have strong analogies to natural gas pipelines in terms of their ability to move energy or impact different areas. There's a question about materials cost and in safety in this and that's been hit on as well a little bit. This I wanted to show because it highlights the cost of moving energy long distances and the difference in my mind between chemical energy carriers and even liquid chemical energy carriers versus gaseous energy carriers versus electrical and so this is fairly recent analysis work that basically looks at how expensive it is to move energy in different forms over different distances and this is basically a megawatt hour over a thousand miles and what's clear is the liquids whether they be oil ethanol or methanol have the most economic transport of energy available at this scale. When you switch to gases you know it's a factor of two plus and hydrogen has this perhaps 30 percent adder from natural gas. It has one third of the volumetric energy density hydrogen does of natural gas but it also has a third of the viscosity which means it flows more easily. It also has additional materials compatibility limitations which means that there are some limitations in the materials that can be used and different concerns when it comes to safety but the wires themselves are much less efficient economically moving energy and they have no capacity for energy storage so there's this whole aspect of how we will firm our energy system in the future and how you can do that with hydrogen in ways that you can't do with electricity in the exact same way. At NREL we've done things to basically look at where supply of energy is versus where demand is and then look at things that can put together maps about how you would move hydrogen in the most economic way to basically connect our supply of energy in the country to the demand of energy in the country and a lot of these maps are highly driven by the economics of wind and how it's such a valuable renewable resource for the country but how we actually have most of the wind in the center of the country and we have most of the demands around the coasts and so how you do that and what you would do will lead to some of the solutions that you would look to longer term in these spaces. There's a number of needs in this space and some of them have been talked about earlier we've had bulk storage and liquefaction workshops recently pipeline to R&D is really an important area for this it could be hydrogen only there's a high blend project going on within the national labs right now that includes a bunch of industrial partners which is how much hydrogen can you inject into natural gas lines it also includes some considerations for can you remove the hydrogen downstream so you can use it as hydrogen and just use the infrastructure as a vector rather than only allow the hydrogen to be used for its thermal energy which would be a value loss for the hydrogen potentially and other things about conversion of natural gas infrastructure there's clearly a number of safety issues that were talked about that also play into this there's things about compression hydrogen storage materials and dispensing as well that fit into this space but with the limited time I have left I want to talk a little bit about making hydrogen this is where I serve as the director of a 50 million dollar consortium that basically in my mind serves as the blueprint for the billion dollars in clean hydrogen in the infrastructure law and one of the aspects of this is making hydrogen is the inherently obvious first step for everything else we're talking about but electrolysis specifically has the most competitive economics and basically allows you to balance the renewable generation challenges in ways that other hydrogen generation routes do not so synodic showed this bar chart where basically we're talking about how we will bring down the costs and I'll have one more chart later that talks about it again but there's these enablers for this which are low cost electricity low capital costs and basically getting to scale our huge factors in meeting these cost targets and you can see that there's three different colors here between electricity capital costs and fixed on m and I'll come to that in a waterfall chart later on to show where we'll actually take those costs out but really it comes down to cheaper electricity and lower capital costs of the system there's different types of systems I actually don't think I want to talk too much about it but there's a low temperature type which basically is trying to flex to the intermittency of the energy system and then there's a high temperature type that offers an increased efficiency but doesn't necessarily couple to the intermittency of what the electricity generation or what renewables may have in the future the the consortium that I'm the director for is is called H2NU it's hydrogen from next generation of electrolyzers of water it has currently nine national labs in three universities but it will add many more universities and many more industrial partners and it really is based on a limited fundamental knowledge of degradation mechanisms in these systems and understanding the cost performance durability tradeoffs so that we can take the capital costs out without sacrificing performance or durability but it doesn't come down to just efficiency it comes down to economics efficiency is a big lever in economics but as electricity gets cheaper you can trade off efficiency for capital costs and still become more economic so the last slide I'm going to show focuses on hydrogen levelized costs and you've seen people talk about kind of where current costs are in this three to seven dollars per kilogram level and here we've basically talked about what we need to do in terms of increasing efficiency increasing lifetime and decreasing capital costs and that can get us from kind of this 350 down to a two-dollar range which is kind of our 2025 or 2026 target but then we have to take advantage of this variable electricity cost and basically cheaper electrons and still go further with our capital cost reductions to do things like get down to the one dollar per kilogram there is a need for a tremendous amount of research to enable this to happen but scale up is also critical and neither one of them by themselves can get to these cost targets and both of them together are required to basically enable us to go in that direction and with that I'll end my presentation and turn it back to Dan and be happy to participate in any panel on discussion that happens from here on out that's great Brian thank you so much for your presentation I'm Brian keep your video on and I'll invite Alexa and Rachel to turn their videos on and we will use our remaining 12 minutes or so to start digging into some of these questions um Alexa I'm going to start with you and then we'll hear from Rachel and then we'll hear from Brian um in part because I want to kind of build on what Brian was just talking about um infrastructures and an important piece of the hydrogen conversation there's sort of small i infrastructure like just infrastructure generally and then there's capital i infrastructure as an ii j a and so I'm curious um you know based on what Brian was saying about the a lot of the costs of hydrogen are in distribution and storage and I think that comparison to natural gas Brian that you made was really really helpful to help people understand like how does this stuff actually need to work um what are the considerations for building out hydrogen infrastructure and sort of what are the or what's the potential for the funding and programs that were provided for any infrastructure investment jobs and infrastructure investment and jobs act to advance this work and Alexa we'll hear from you first please great thanks so much Dan um yes I mean I think for starters um as as Brian pointed out that a lot of the costs um of hydrogen kind of the levelized end cost of hydrogen will be in that distribution and storage infrastructure component um having said that I think for the early hydrogen projects that we're likely to see there will be there'll be an effort to really minimize that component at all um so you know really heavily co-located um production and end-use um uh um production and end-use projects if you like um and we already see that there's there's an operational um project a green steel project in sweden which is really tried to kind of co-locate those two um except for where there may be existing hydrogen transport infrastructure so for example texas already has a significant set of hydrogen pipelines that are you know existing infrastructure that use for those purposes so um and I think this is the point Rachel made um I can see you know an early hydrogen projects emerging and not having to necessarily build out that solid network of distribution um though they may have to have storage components um I think that will emerge over time as kind of a a need for regional infrastructure in particular and perhaps in the long term that more long-distance infrastructure although I think that will be kind of just just because of the cost addition but also because of the complexities of building that really large-scale multi-state linear infrastructure um we may you know it may take many years for that that full-scale infrastructure to emerge in terms of kind of dollars from the infrastructure investment and jobs act um the hydrogen hubs program I think the share that's directed to that common carrier infrastructure versus end-use and production projects will really depend on what other policy mechanisms do do emerge so if we do see for example some of the tax credits that in that reconciliation bill that will largely go towards subsidizing um the the costs of production um and perhaps reserve more dollars for that connective infrastructure piece um from the hydrogen hubs funding pool um having said that if we don't see some additional incentives either at the federal or state levels I think they were going to see much more of that funding from the hydrogen hubs program directed towards just simply trying to achieve commercial viability um with um for the for the production and end use um end uses and then of course that connective infrastructure is still vital um but we're going to need to see kind of business cases that that actually um stack up and we'll probably try to minimize that that common carrier cost I would I would expect um very interested to hear Rachel and Brian's perspectives on this question as well yeah thank you Alexa I agree with a lot of what Alexa said and I'll keep this brief you know obviously infrastructure touches on the production transport and end use I think on the end use side as I mentioned you know outside of those existing hydrogen applications um a lot of those kind of new applications for hydrogen are very novel and we still need quite a bit of um testing and piloting of the different um you know infrastructure that we need so for example a steel plant that uses hydrogen or you know a bunkering facility of ammonia at a port that will supply the ship that will run on ammonia um there's still a lot of understanding that needs to happen and this is where the hydrogen hubs initiative could be really illuminating in many ways but I do want to touch on the transport piece because I mentioned this I would like to have an asterisk master it because again there's still a lot we don't know about transport infrastructure the extent we need transport infrastructure is it going to be a region regional networks or national networks the leakage piece needs attention and prioritization do we have the sensor design do we have the materials to minimize leakage so um I agree with Alexa the first round of hydrogen projects should be co-located to a very large extent until we can have clear clarify and and build the knowledge around transport infrastructure to then start launching into it should there be a need for that I don't know that I have all that much to add um the the issue is is there's going to be some issues with making enough hydrogen and consuming enough hydrogen there's only a couple sinks right now where you could drop hydrogen into in the kind of scale that you'd want to and that would be really just displacing hydrogen in the reforming process or in the ammonia generation process you can also burn it in combustion turbines but that to me would be less favorable than in in one of displacing it from a current application and there's even going to be some challenges in getting enough electrolyzers to produce what you'd want to for some of these as well so so there's issues on both sides and then you know the economic transport of this stuff or to create the economic transport to me is is really the issue that I'm most concerned with thanks um so we have a little bit of time left and so I'm going to ask two questions and I'm going to ask them to be I'm going to suggest that they're rapid fire questions sort of lightning because I one that kind of came up to me as I was listening to your presentations and I think we've referenced a couple projects overseas there was one in Sweden but I understand there are also projects in Norway and Japan I'm curious sort of in a rapid fire fashion maybe Alex Alexa will start with you and then we'll go to Rachel and Brian again what are one or two things that other countries are doing to deploy green hydrogen that we might want to or that we could learn from here in the United States and if that's if you don't have a comment on that or if Alexa takes all the good answers and also curious if there are um um sort of applications that are being used elsewhere that maybe we should look at more closely here in the United States yeah um two reflections I think in response to your question Dan um the first is that the first wave of hydrogen projects I think will require kind of an immense amount of orchestration and coordination with both public sector agencies and private companies so the project that I mentioned in Sweden which is a green steelmaking project um that really came as a multi-year collaboration from multiple private sector companies and that were actually responsible for different parts of that value chain so there was an iron ore producer or miner um a steel maker an electricity utility and then ultimately they involved Volvo as the off-taker to buy the green steel that that plant ultimately produced and they worked in a fairly collaborative manner as well as with um like agencies from the Swedish government to really build that business case for the project and get it off the ground and so I think we'll see you know that replicated in the US and around the world that there's kind of a lot of collaboration um and effort that take that that is gets put into getting those first projects off the ground and then in terms of making projects competitive so the next wave of projects is easier and just far more commercial and um and rapid I think one of the couple of the mechanisms that we see overseas um for incentivizing that production um are mechanisms that are kind of um provide mechanisms to bridge the cost gap for end consumers but do that in kind of a way that is centered around price discovery and efficient subsidization so for example in the UK they're they've kind of recognized the fact that different end-use sectors were required different levels of support and so they're negotiating with different projects the exact level of of cost subsidization that's needed so that that's an efficient use of public dollars that also achieves a viable business case for those sectors um similarly in Germany and in other parts of around the world they're using reverse auction processes so that's where um contracts are awarded to um the projects that need the lowest subsidy again recognizing that there's a need to provide that um for public dollars to bridge some of that cost gap but wanting to spend it in the most efficient spend those public dollars in the most efficient way possible so um I know that that's kind of a complex um mechanism to put forward in the US but I think that that is really going to help industries overseas um to grow rapidly and efficiently thanks Rachel um my full of time fully agreed the the Swedish hybrid sort of steel hydrogen steel plant is something I'm personally very excited about and we've seen uh two of the biggest steel companies across Europe now have you know significant commitments to start using the technology commercially and before the end of the decade which is pretty substantial second project I'm personally keeping track of is the port of Rotterdam which is moving very kind of aggressively in a good way towards using kind of decarbonizing maritime shipping via hydrogen um and I think we could learn a lot as a beta test of this of this use and I'll keep it here Brian I was going to say ports but I'm probably even more interested in the heavy-duty hauling of freight from ports rather than the maritime aspect but both are important thanks so much um so our final question um and Brian maybe we'll start with you we'll go in the reverse order this time um just for our audience which you know is is congressional staff and other policymakers sort of from a again sort of from a lightning round perspective um what are the what is the biggest opportunity um in terms of unlocking green hydrogen is there is it is it more r&d is it new markets is it we need to you know develop you know infrastructure networks I'm just curious what the what the number one thing you would say is it would would unlock green hydrogen the the fastest maybe most so so I think it's market market certainty um is is what what I think would would do it um there's been no shortage of being able to raise funds for different things um in the hydrogen space recently you can see what's happened to different stocks in the space raising capital is not an issue r&d advances are absolutely required to make this happen um but they aren't the most important things in in it as far as markets are Rachel I agree with that and I think the way you get market certainty is partly via these very targeted policies I think policy is absolutely critical at this point let's target those existing hydrogen users let's target those you know hard to electrify applications which part of this is r&d because again those are not commercial and I think the hubs again can be very consequential in this sense by providing this targeted approach to it um and um and hope we can build on that model. Alexi you get the last word today. Well and I'm actually going to echo the first word um from Sinus as you follow at the beginning that cost is actually absolutely the number one factor and and equal um kind of overcoming that cost premium that we see today for green hydrogen bringing it into line with incumbent fuels and feedstocks um I think you know we'll see that naturally through industry scale over time but policy has a crucial role to play this decade in bringing that cost premium down um to a certain extent but also in in being providing that those kind of early market commitments on a public procurement front to actually kind of induce those very first projects even if perhaps you are paying a slight premium um to get those first projects off the ground. Well thank you to the three of you Alexa, Rachel and Brian for your excellent presentations it was an awesome session it was very nice to get to meet you in the course of planning the briefing as well thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your perspectives and insights I'd also like to thank Representative Byer for his leadership on this issue and for joining us today as well thanks to his staff for making the participation possible and then also Dr. Sinita Sachapal with the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy really tremendous work going on at DOE and Sinita thank you so much for joining us as well and thanks for your leadership getting all of this you know further along it's really really exciting. I'd like to we'll go ahead and end there sorry for running a couple minutes over um my colleague Dan O'Brien just put a slide up um this is a survey link um if uh folks in our audience uh would like to take that survey and help us understand how the briefing went from your perspective with your audio problems video problems are actually using a new AV setup today you might recognize this isn't my office home office this is my real office we're trying something new so let us know how it went um if you have ideas for additional briefings we read every response if you could take a moment that would be great means a lot when people take uh fill out our surveys thanks to our wonderful audience I know we didn't get to all of the questions in the Q&A but I think we tried to work them in and our panelists I think answered many of them as well just sort of organically um I'll close by taking a moment to thank all of my ESI colleagues who helped make today's briefing possible I mentioned Dan O'Brien but also Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, and Savannah tons and tons and tons of hard work has gone into this briefing but also all of the other briefings and scaling up innovation to drive down emissions and our living with climate change series um last plug for the newsletter if you want to sign up for our additional uh our future briefings you can visit us online at www.esi.org this is also the point in my closing when I thank our interns Emily and Grace there are spring interns and they will uh and actually are already starting to go on to their next adventure so Emily and Grace thanks for all of your work this semester or the spring bringing our briefings to our audience so we wish you all the best um and I think by the next time we have a briefing we'll be introducing new interns so thanks again Emily and Grace and um we're looking forward to meeting our new intern colleagues we'll go ahead and wrap it there I wish everyone a very happy Wednesday and um we will see you next time thanks so much and thanks again panelists