 Fa ydych chi fod yn angen i ddefnyddio. Mae'n ddweud bod'r amser o'ch gyfrifio ar y cyfrifio. Mae'r seef yn cael wedi'i amser pan ffordd a'r fara ystyried, sy'nемd i yn yn agosodio'r negydydd ac eich bod yn cyfrifio ac yn gwech o'r llwyth i gyd. I'r ystyried yn mynd i'n meddwl ar y cyfrifio am y panel, ac mae'n gwybod ar gyfer gwahau, chyfnodol yn cyrraedd ac yn cyrraedd cyhoeddentau, the hydrogen vision of one, one, one real. I would love to begin with a quick introduction of each of the panellists, so if I can begin with let's say Rob on the other side, if that's okay, just a quick intro. Sure, yeah. Rob Hansen, I'm co-founder and CEO of Monlith. Am I doing my slides now or? Later. Later, okay. Good. I actually came to Stanford in 2006, so I originally am from Canada and packed up my 1997 Honda Civic, and I drove to my girlfriend's house, and she put all of her belongings into the car along with mine, and we drove 27 hours straight to Stanford and moved into Escondido Village. And so it was kind of actually my first time living in the country and my first exposure to Stanford, and my first exposure to the concept that you can start new companies, which sounds silly here, but Stanford's really special that way. Like the students out there, you can actually just start companies. That's a thing you can do. And so ever thankful for Stanford for that. Great. And hi everybody, I'm Ted McLeven, co-founder and CEO of Verne. I actually just recently graduated from Stanford Business School, so it feels like just one year ago I was leaving the campus, and so fun to be back here today and up on the stage. Really Stanford, over the last two and a half years, and really continuing ever since I graduated, has been that ecosystem that has really contributed to what has been the foundation and the early growth of our company. So just seeing the guys up here on stage, I talked to Niko and Jimmy just earlier this week, apart from this panel last week, and so it really is that the community that, as Rob was saying, is all about entrepreneurship and innovation. But then the continued network that you get from Stanford that really is what helps launch, I think, a lot of these companies in sectors that aren't just technology. We're in Silicon Valley, but all of us up here are starting hard tech companies. And that's what I think is quite exciting. My name is Niko Pinkowski. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a business called Nitricity. I also graduated with a PhD from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering as of August last year. Our startup business makes fertilizer. I first made, we turned air and water into liquid form, fixed nitrogen fertilizer. The first solid form fertilizer I made was in Escondido Village. We've scaled up since then, no Jimmy from PhD and Ted from Interactions within the Stanford climate ecosystem. I think Rob Hanson is who I look to for what a business should look like down the road. And so I think we talked to your team really, really early on in our process. We make fertilizer, we make nitrogen. We don't use hydrogen, so I'll be a little bit of the odd duck out. But look forward to talking about this with everyone here. We're looking forward to hearing your views, Niko. For sure. Hello everyone. My name is Jimmy. I'm the CEO and founder of Evolo. We make electrolyser stacks, low cost electrolyser stacks. Before you say, oh gosh, I'm not an electrolyser company. There are like a hundred of those. First of all, you're right. There are hundreds. But there are so many issues and we have noticed that no matter what, you can be a huge company or a small startup. They always address one or two. There are many. And so for the first time, we're actually trying to put together a comprehensive solution to this challenge. And so that's what we do. AEM, I'll tell you what that is in a few minutes. I started my career at MIT. I did mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, did a lot of research at MIT, developed a technology that became the core IP for a pretty successful startup. But I didn't join the startup. I just developed the technology. And then I came to Stanford to work with Arun, my junior, who you met a couple of hours ago. I got my master's in management and then another master's in mechanical engineering. And then I finished my PhD with Arun. In parallel to all of this, I worked with a couple of VCs and specifically in the hydrogen space. And they gave me multiple deals and I always said no to all of them. And so they said, well, you're either a terrible investor or you are very picky. And so how about you just go do it yourself? And that's why I'm here. Thank you, Jimmy. And my name is Mayan Gerda. I am a Sloan fellow at the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford. Prior to the GSB, I'm a two times co-founder and investment management in Europe. Built two investment houses, each a billion plus AUM each. Invested in just under 200 companies. And I've been involved in the climate space now for about three or four years. And looking to build in climate post GSB. Gentleman, thank you so much for being here once again. And I'd love to now spend a couple of minutes just showcasing your companies and going into a little bit more detail into each one of them just for the benefit of the audience. And this is where we can use the slides. Yes. I just, when you talk about your company, could you also talk about who assisted you in leaving after you left Stanford where you wanted to start the company? Who helped you thinking through how to do it? And if there was a Stanford entity involved or not? Yeah, good question. So the question was kind of who helped you start your company when you left Stanford. So maybe I'll start there. Sitting two to your right is a guy named Rob Morgan who actually gave me my first job. So I didn't start a company when I was at Stanford. I left in 2007 and this was CleanTech 1.0 and Rob was executive vice president at a company called Ostra, which was a solar company. And so took a chance on me, gave him my first job, and I was lucky to get experience there and ultimately sold that company. And then another guy's here back in the back, Jeff at Azimuth, and he wrote me my first check. So when we finally, it's pretty important. It's a pretty important part of starting a company is idea plus check. And so Jeff was one of our early believers. Back in 2012 when we started this company, no one was talking about hydrogen. If you talked about hydrogen, you kind of shied away because people thought you were some type of a crazy person that was going to, whatever, come up with the next hydrogen company. So Jeff had some vision and wrote this first check. And then actually in this room, there's like five or ten different groups that have helped us all along the way. So it really is a special place, Stanford, in the network you get from being here. So monolith, we're methane pyrolysis. So methane pyrolysis is taking electricity plus natural gas in making solid carbon and hydrogen. Methane's got this really great thermodynamic property. If you heat it up to very high temperatures without any oxygen around, it splits into solid carbon and hydrogen with almost 100% conversion. That does two things for you. One, you've just made clean hydrogen because there's not CO2 emitted. And then number two, if you can get that carbon to come out in a high value form, you have created not just clean hydrogen, but clean hydrogen that is at the same cost as SMR today. So the 111 plan, like methane pyrolysis where you get high value for your solid carbon, is a buck of kilogram today. And in the center, that's our first commercial scale plant. It's the world's largest methane pyrolysis plant ever built. So that's the company. One thing about splitting natural gas that I will mention is natural gas takes seven times less electricity to split than water does. And the reason for that is water is at the zero state, right? Water is just happy to exist. Methane's being lifted up in the energy state to a much higher, so it's much easier to cleave it apart. And this is why it matters. So this is global energy, primary energy from 2019 by source. And so obviously the fossils dominate. There's still 80 plus percent of our total energy use. But you can actually split those, right? Because when you burn a fossil fuel, you have two reactions. You have hydrogen to water and you have carbon to carbon dioxide. And so what methane pyrolysis lets you do is it lets you still access the energy of that deep time energy transfer, right, which is fossil fuels. But without doing the deep time transfer of carbon dioxide from the HN atmosphere to today's atmosphere, that's because you can take 50, 60 percent of that energy vector as the hydrogen. And this is just to give a scale of annually how much energy is just in the hydrogen of, say, natural gas. It's more than all hydro nuclear wind solar combined. So that's the power of methane pyrolysis. This is what it works out to on a full life cycle analysis. This is using Greek. This uses LCFS assumption for upstream methane emissions. So SMR 11 in change. You can put carbon capture on it. Pyrolysis with pipeline, 100 percent fossil gas. You had 0.45. Most of those are upstream. Electrolysis you can get down to zero. And then pyrolysis with RNG, it's a really fun one. This is using landfill gas, 60ci LCFS landfill gas, right? And you think what happens there is CO2 is fixed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. You get glucose, you anaerobically digest it into methane. Typically burn that methane and put the CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you pyrolyze it, the carbon is now a solid gets sequestered. You've drawn down. So it's not negative that you avoided emission. It's actual drawdown. The carbon in your hand is a solid used to be carbon in the atmosphere. You can measure the C14 of it. And then finally, this is where we are on our scale. So we've done 2,000 X scale up from small scale lab through a partnership in France with a pilot plant to our demonstration plant, which was on the San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, just down the road from here. And then I've now moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, because that's where we built our first commercial plant, which is shown there called Olive Creek 1. And that's the full scale. From there, we just build additional reactor units out. We just announced with the US Department of Energy a little over a billion dollar conditional loan to do that specific 12X expansion of Creek 2. And then from there, we build projects around the world. And the very last thing I'll say is our initial focus is on hydrogen in the existing industries. So the project in Nebraska is making ammonia. Huge deal from a security of supply right now. But just our existing hydrogen production, the world's 100 million tons of hydrogen we make to make ammonia and refined fuels, results in a gigaton of CO2. So if hydrogen production were a country, I think it would be number six on the list just above Germany. So while the future area is really exciting, it's also really important that we clean up that sector. All right, thank you. OK, great. So I neglected to say what Vern actually does when I introduced myself originally. But what we do is hydrogen storage, so really the middle of the value chain. And actually part of the origin story of Vern was hearing all of the activity and excitement both on the academic and commercial side on the production stage of the value chain, all new electrolysis, methane pyrolysis, a lot of important R&D and commercialization upstream. But we all know of the challenges with hydrogen being a light element in terms of actually being able to store and use the hydrogen. So that's the insight really that led to us at Vern, getting Vern off the ground, was a focus on that storage and distribution of hydrogen. So what I'm showing here is two real conventional ways of dealing with hydrogen, dealing with this really light element. In order to make it usable, you either compress it and you compress it to rather high pressures, 350 or 700 bar, or you liquefy it and bring it all the way down to negative 253 Celsius at a low pressure. And what we're focused on at Vern is really what we see as the sweet spot between these two. And I'll go into why we see this sweet spot in a minute. But where we store it is called cryocompressed. Earlier you saw it referred to a supercritical. We're storing the element in the supercritical form at both cold temperature as well as at moderate pressure, so negative 200 Celsius around liquid nitrogen temperature and 350 bar, so moderate pressure. So you can think of it as a cold and compressed gas. And the benefit of storing hydrogen in this cold and compressed gas state is that we are able to achieve very high density, which is really the objective in terms of making hydrogen more usable for things such as heavy duty transportation. But it's a lot more efficient process than liquefaction to get it to that high density state. So we get the density of liquid hydrogen with greater efficiency. So to put some more numbers to this and to walk through exactly why we're so excited about the cryocompressed state, I have one chart up here, which might look like it has a lot going on, but I'll try to walk through it. So the temperature is on the x-axis there, and the density is on the y-axis. And so you can see starting at ambient temperature and low pressure output of an electrolyzer, where you just have ambient hydrogen. That's at the bottom right hand corner of the graph. That's room temperature, hydrogen, and low pressure. The objective is to get to the high density state, and that's at the top left of the graph. So what we want to do is to get over there, get over the top left. There's one pretty well trodden route, which is following that orange line. That's the liquefaction route, so you're moving over and up to get to that inflection point when you liquefy hydrogen and you see that rather vertical line. And then you get to those really high densities of around 63 to 70 grams per liter. What Vern is focused on is really that light blue region that's just next to that dark orange, which is a cryocompressed state. There you can see we're not as cold as liquid hydrogen, but we're at a moderate pressure. And in this state, we actually get to liquid level hydrogen densities. But there's another route to get there. We don't have to follow the orange line. We can follow the blue line. So essentially, we pressurize the hydrogen and then we cool it. This is important for two reasons. One, because there's different energy requirements to follow these two different routes. Following the orange line takes an immense amount of electricity and is rather inefficient. The other end following the blue line is a higher efficiency process. So it takes less electricity, less input energy to cryocompress than it does to liquefy. The other reason why this is important is flexibility. And where flexibility matters is if you drive a truck and your truck has a hydrogen storage tank on it, if it has a liquid tank, you need to go to a station that has liquid hydrogen. But not all stations might have liquid hydrogen. Whereas if you have a cryocompress tank, you could fill up your truck at a liquid station or at a cryocompress station. It gives you a lot more supply chain flexibility. And just to wrap up with a couple more pieces of data here just on what I was saying on the left-hand chart, showing that the liquefaction energy requirement to go straight to the liquid state for liquid hydrogen and then the blue bars are two of our processes to do that blue route, that cryocompression. More, less energy required to get to the same result in density. And then the actual application that we're targeting in the earlier stages is heavy duty transportation. So class A trucks and mining haulage trucks. And that's where the density really matters to these operators so that they can go their full range and carry a full payload. And so in order to carry that high density hydrogen, the chart on the right is showing that result in density that we can get to with cryocompression. Relative 350 or 700 bar or even liquid hydrogen. I won't dwell on this too much more and we can talk more about transportation application or other things later in the panel. But just to answer the question in terms of Stanford and how Stanford has helped really get this off the ground. I actually, similar answer to Rob, there's a lot of people in the room that have really helped from the early days. I took the hydrogen seminar class back when I was first taught in 2020 here at Stanford. I took a class that both of these two have taken taught by Dave Danielson called Stanford Climate Ventures. And Dave really was helpful beyond that class just in getting us going from there. So both of those are actually through the EIPER program, I believe, Energy Resources School, even though I was in the MBA program. So there is that ability at Stanford no matter what program you're in to take classes across the street, as we called it. And so yeah, Professor Majumdar was also our academic advisor for a grant that helped us build our very first prototype. So there really have been a number of faculty members and just the broader community here that have helped from day one. Fantastic, thank you Ted. And I took Stanford Climate Ventures three times as well so I can attest that the climate ecosystem here is very strong, very collegiate and very collaborative. I represent Nitricity Inc. We manufacture fertilizer. We make it with air and water and we do so using the same fundamental approach as lightning. So after a thunderstorm you'll observe that it's very green the next day. That's because lightning breaks down nitrogen and the air and rain water absorbs that into liquid in the form of nitrate. This is a non-hobber Bosch, a non-amonio direction to make fertilizer. We started, co-founders of the business met at Stanford supported by Tomcat grant. We won the basis pitch competition after I think the second try sometimes these things take some persistence. And we won some pitch competitions which allowed us to buy pizza and bring post docs and PhDs together and try to build things in our backyard in East Palo Alto. This was not the first thing that we tried. We looked at 20 different approaches to make fixed nitrogen fertilizer. Today fertilizer is synonymous with ammonia. It's not necessarily the case and we found that by getting out on farms. So we built equipment in East Palo Alto and we trucked it down to Fresno County and during COVID we all moved into an Airbnb across the street from a farm like this one. This is a California farmland growing a subsurface irrigated tomatoes. Fertilizer is usually furtigated. So it's provided in liquid form and then injected into the water and sent out at the discrete times, maybe seven times. We started building projects that are used solar. So we didn't sell our own solar and it'd be distributed production of fertilizer. So we would day in and day out, spend time on these dusty and very hot farms in the summer building this equipment that turned air and water into fixed nitrogen and then would inject it and grow crops with it. It was a really engaging time. We started getting visitors like the United States Secretary of Agriculture and a lot of investors. We attract some capital and we're scaling this now up. We call it lightning fertilizer. I think we're gonna see a great competition between green Haber Bosch or water electrolysis plus a Haber Bosch reactor versus this approach. The cost targets for this are looking very good. And so I think we will see this be a competition in the next 50 years and there's gonna be some places where one works and some places where the other work. Just to highlight, fertilizer is an immense market. There's two feedstocks for fertilizer. You can fix nitrogen in the form of ammonia or you can fix nitrogen in the form of nitric acid, HNO3. Nitric acid underpins some of the largest markets in the world including N, P and K fertilizers as well as a variety of polymers and additional chemicals. Everything from your yellow and green kitchen sponge you used to wash dishes this morning to the tape that's on the James Webb telescope required nitric acid in its creation. This is a, it's electricity to acts. It's an electricity to molecule play. But I do like to highlight that a large portion of ammonia is then converted into other types of fertilizer. And some of those premium types are nitric acid. So nitric acid leads to on the order of, with other ingredients, about $41 billion worth of nitrogen. It can lead to, and not all of this is processed through this approach today, but it can lead to $45 billion worth of false acid production and also potassium in the form of potassium nitrate. So some of our solid form fertilizer is shown above. That's equivalent to our sports car. That's probably the most expensive fertilizer in the market in a place that we're starting today. Thank you, Nico. Let me start by addressing your questions. So the three of us are related in one way or another to Stanford climate ventures, which is supported by Precord Institute for Energy. So I just wanted to say that because that really is the class that changed the story for Evola. Let me start here. So once again, we make electrolyser is taximars, specifically AEM, anion exchange membrane electrolyser is taximars. I already introduced myself. So let me just tell you a little bit about the team. When I started this journey, I created this list of what I call the gods in the field. What are the people that are really the most amazing. And I'm very proud to share that these two gentlemen, Scott and Art, wearing that list and they joined full time early last year. Scott, in my opinion, the best stack designer in the world and has been doing this for the past 20, 27 years, more or less. Art Shirley, he was the head of chemistry at BOC. He also worked in the hydrogen space at Lindy and early keyed playing a key role in areas such as project development, as well as supply chain. And so they're both full time. You can see Naomi, my advisor, I run my gym there. Alan, not sure if you've heard of him, but he's the chairman of Next Hydrogen. He actually sent me a check without even knowing the terms. So that was quite an honor. And then you can see the rest of the team. I'm a little embarrassed because there's one person missing and his sitting in the back. So my apologies. And then we have some great supporters. Breakthrough Energy, for example, gave us quite a lot of money late last year. A couple of VCs, RPAE, the California Energy Commission in a few national labs. So here's the problem. And this is what I was saying earlier. We think of, when we think of the electrolysis space, immediately the first thing that comes to mind is cost. And of course that makes sense. Of course you want to reduce your cost as much as you can. But there are so many other issues. This one is particularly interesting. The demand and the supply are just completely different at the moment. There are multiple studies and I'm just quoting one of them here. I'm not sure why all my numbers got moved. But anyways, 400 gigawatts are required by 2030. This is what we have seen. People want this. The problem is, as you can see in the graph, converted to gigawatts, we only have about 70. And that's already exaggerated a little bit because this includes deals that are under negotiation. So by 2030 we will be able to deploy 70, best case scenario, maybe a little more. But we need 400, so what's going on here? And the problem is that these things were not designed for manufacturability. Not pems, not alkalines, not solid oxide, none of them. That makes them expensive. There are also geopolitical issues. The supply chain is a big problem. Just to give you a story, people always try to convince you that there is a lot of iridium. It doesn't matter if there is iridium or not because what matters is iridium is actually a byproduct of mine in palladium. 85% of that comes from Russia. Then it goes to China. Not because they are the only ones that know how to process this metal, but because we don't want to do it here because it's an incredibly dirty process. Okay, so the Chinese do that and then they send it back. At that point, we call it green. I don't know if it's green, but that's another story. So it is so dangerous to have your entire company based on these type of supply chains, and that's just iridium. There are many other issues. So the alkaline people tell you, ah, I just used nickel. Okay, well a couple of months ago nickel quadrupled in price. And it is one of the dirtiest processes in industry just to process nickel. So what do we do? And that's more or less what we're trying to address. And so let me start on the left. So high speed manufacturing of pure water AM electrolysis. So let's go word by word. So on the left you can see the diagram. If I just put a black box there and you see the water going in and the oxygen and hydrogen coming out, you might think this is a PEM, a proton exchange membrane, but it's not. It's actually an alkaline system. It uses the an alkaline chemistry. What that means is we can use steel, just steel, nothing else. In many forms and sheets and all of that, but just steel. Not even super fancy steel, any type of steel. And of course we've done a lot of work in that area. Now key, saying simple is quite key here. We use water, but just water. There is no potassium hydroxide. There is none of those corrosive things that everyone uses. And that's the problem. When someone gives you a new stack and they tell you it's high current density, low voltage, all that stuff, very low cost, but then they don't tell you that you have to deploy, develop a completely new balance of plant. And so the system integrators, the EPCs, they're not going to be happy. So we just use water. And so what that means is water goes in, water comes out. And you just need to cool down the water and put it back in. Everyone knows how to do this. It's nothing complicated. The next thing that I would like to point out is we do differential pressure. What that means is I can give you high pressure hydrogen, low pressure oxygen. That's really important because if there is a little bit of a leak, nothing is going to happen. If you have both at very high pressures and there is a bit of a leak, well that's not fun. That's going to go very wrong. And that's the issue with today's alkaline systems. And so this, actually I put this together from different technologies from different places. The membrane in the middle is the anion exchange membrane that came out of a university in the East Coast. The electrodes are developed by ourselves and a national lab as well as this stack. Now if we go to the next one, high throughput manufacturing, this is quite important and perhaps the most important part of this whole company. What I'm showing here is, and hopefully you can see it, how much does it cost to build a manufacturing facility per gigawatt of production per year? That's in the y-axis and then in the x-axis is how big is it? So the idea here is you can see that to build a gigawatt of production per year a facility with that yield, you need 100, in some cases more, in some cases a little less, million dollars. That's a lot of money. And so this stuff is really expensive. At the same time, they need to be enormous, which is another big problem. So our goal here is to design from day one, a system that is very easy to make and this is very hard. Our small sales at the R&D stage today are quite small, but the manufacturing facilities that we use to make that are exactly the same that we will need in the future to make the five megawatt system. And so all of this was carefully planned from day one. So in the future, if you have 100 million dollars, I can give you many, many gigawatts instead of just one or less than one. And then finally, business plan, we make stacks. That's it. We don't make balance of plans. We don't deploy. We don't finance any kind of, we just make stacks. And I think this focus is going to be quite critical since that is the core, that's the issue. No one can make stacks. No one can make these many stacks. So we'll be very, very focused and then just work with system integrators, EPCs, et cetera. Go to market, we can talk here for a long time, but we particularly like this steel industry and fuel cell electric vehicles and long-haul trucking. I'll just pass there. Thank you so much. Really appreciate that. So we have methane pyrolysis at scale. We have cryo compression of hydrogen for trucking. We have decentralized lightning fertilizers like the sound of that. And AEM electrolyzers without critical materials designed for scale. It's fascinating to see that this has all come out of the Stanford ecosystem. And Jay, you preempted my question, which was going to be how has this come out? And I guess if I could ask you just to spend 10 seconds on advice for students who are looking to do what you've been doing over the last few years and making that transition from lab to reality, what would your advice be outside of taking Dave Danielson's Stanford climate ventures class, which I think is a common denominator? Jimmy, do you want to go in reverse order? Yeah, sure. My first suggestion is exactly what Cathy Ayers said a couple hours ago. Go to industry and figure out what you should be working on. Everyone, including a Stanford, every university you can think of, everyone does research on catalysis. That's important. Don't get me wrong. But things like ink processing and coding, I can barely think of one university, maybe two that does research on that. That stuff is really hard, and that is what is keeping us from scaling, not catalysis. And so go talk to people in industry. You will learn a lot, that's my suggestion. Dico, any thoughts? Stanford's got a great support system. Access to people who can give you world-class advice and capital from private funding right across the street to good grant exposure. But it can be pretty challenging, I would say for students interested in entrepreneurship, it takes a lot of determination and applied consistently over a long period of time. And for you not to quit along the way if you have the vision that you're really excited about and that's big enough. Thank you. Ted, perhaps a business school perspective. Yeah, I think what I was going to say is just to tap into the network of recent graduates that have started similar companies because I think that is something unique about Stanford and something that definitely helped us get off the ground. Even outside of the hydrogen space, just folks starting other hard tech companies talked to Tim Lattermer at Furvo, company that was maybe a couple of years ahead of us just to understand how they took those first few steps was incredibly instrumental. Another example, actually kind of a fun fact, Niko was our first landlord for Vern, so our first facility was actually a sublease of the nitricity facility. So you never really know what you're going to find when you call up some of the recent grads or just other folks that have just gone through those steps, just maybe one or two years in front of you. And Rob, I'd love to hear how many students have reached out to you over the years as you've been on your journey to ask for advice. Yeah, I don't know how much advice I can do all out, but what I loved about what you both just said and Jimmy, the team you've put together, is eventually everyone realizes how short life is and how little time you have. And so you just kind of have to do it. There's only so much planning and so much talking. It's like then you just got to do it. I mean, those are examples, right? In COVID you went out and you rented an Airbnb and you built a prototype and you started putting nitrogen into the ground. So that would be my advice is do all of those things and then just get on with it, take the risk. Perfect, thank you so much. We're going to come back to actually how to improve if that's even possible, the Stanford ecosystem. So wait for that. But I'd love to speak to you guys about our appreciation for your commitment to build within the hydrogen ecosystem. It's a dynamic area, it's not easy to build in and you have to have a very strong founder vision to commit to the journey that you guys are committing to. So I'd love to hear your views on what excites you about the industry. What systemic changes do you think might be needed and what's your broader vision for the future of hydrogen? So this is a pretty broad question but please take it where you may. We'd love to hear your views. Sure, I mean, I think where hydrogen connects for me is that we need to build a high energy, low emission future. There is no path to a low energy, low emission future. We learned that in COVID. We shut the world down and we reduced CO2 emissions by like 5, 10%. And so that's where hydrogen is really quite exciting. You have some energy density, you have a variety of different vectors that you can come including in our case, the deep time energy vector which is going to be very important. And so I think hydrogen is consistent with a view that is consistent with human nature. Right, as humans weed a million calories of food a year, that's what kind of propels our metabolism and everything we do. And then we consume another 85 million calories of energy services. And so we're going to need that high energy future and hydrogen can help build it. I was going to say something similar on the inevitability of it and the requirement of it. I don't think anybody really thinks that electricity alone will get us to a net zero future. And so there really needs to be another energy carrier out there and hydrogen is what really, it shows a lot of that promise. It has some fundamental characteristics to it that make it a pretty great solution in a variety of forms for a variety of use cases. I think too often the conversation gets a bit sidetracked into which use case will happen first or what's most efficient or cost competitive today or in 10 or 20 years. But I think there's broad consensus that hydrogen is required for us to get to a net zero future. And so I think that should be enough for everybody to kind of get working and get going on it. Thank you, any other views on that? Over frame, okay. That's great to hear. Now bringing it back to reality and today. So bringing it to the real life context of building a business today in this space. A lot of the business models and TDAs, the technical economic analyses I see are rooted in where people think the world is going in terms of renewable energy prices, natural gas, et cetera, you know, following the puck towards where it's going. But you're in the field today and I have a feeling you're seeing something very different as you're actually building the ventures versus designing them. I'd love to hear your views and maybe we could start with Rob on this one. Sure, I mean, I'll maybe start being a little more controversial so I think in this room there's been a lot of talk and a lot of you that we're gonna have ever decreasing renewable electricity prices, which is like completely dissociated from reality, right? Last year electricity solar in the US in basically every market, PJM, SPP, ERCOT, it went up, went up 5%. And so, and then now for me it's been quite enlightening moving to the Midwest for a little while. Best wind resource, but man, NIMBY is a real thing. And a modern wind turbine is like 600 feet tall and the tip rotates at the speed of sound. And so it is gonna be hard to build out the renewable kind of dream that we have. And I think it's gonna result in more expensive renewable electricity than a lot of forward roadmaps have. I could very well be wrong, but it just makes a shift in how you think about making the energy transition if the future is not kind of anywhere you can plug into $20 megawatt hour renewables. Thank you. Niko, I don't know if you have a view on this. So we just built a 50 kilowatt solar array on a farm and so I have a dollar per watt estimate and it came out to 60 cents per watt. So I'm extremely optimistic about the potential. Now we discounted hundreds and hundreds of hours of our own personal time. So I think that the balance probably came out to several dollars a lot. But I'm pretty optimistic about solar prices, but we're not purchasing the volumes at the same scale. We need it. We need low cost electricity. Our business does and relies on it. Arguably there's a better resource allocation than Stanford PhD graduates putting down solar arrays in the middle of the field. But yeah, absolutely. Can I make a comment? Yeah, please do. That reminds me of a huge development taking place in Western Australia, where this solar farm is not being connected to the grid because there's going to be an imbalance. But it's still getting built because hydrogen is seen as an enabler. So now we can have a solar farm here because then we can convert it to hydrogen. Then to ammonia or something else. If it's ammonia, you can ship it to Japan or something. Anyways, that's one example. I see the same in, I don't remember, if it's south or north of Chile where there's a lot of wind and the same story is happening. There is struggling to imbalance the grid and they're like, oh, but we can still put some value in this resource that we have by creating hydrogen. And I see it more and more and more. And so if you really connect behind the grid at a solar farm, it's not OPEX anymore. It's CAPEX or all you need to do is to amortize your solar panels. And that falls under your CAPEX, right? That could be maybe the way to address this issue. I'm just brainstorming, to be honest, but yeah. And if I could add one thing as well. I think one thing that a commonality amongst as different as our technologies are, a commonality is that we're all working on really step change technologies. And so there can be some pretty big error bars in a lot of our forward TEAs for what we're doing to still make sense. And so we're not talking about a 5% cost improvement relative to the current technology or a 10% cost improvement because otherwise none of us would have been able to get off the ground. And that's really the kind of the business of a mature industry, a mature player to kind of continue to push down those costs. What we're all working on is on really new technologies that for our example, we double the density which means we decrease or cut in half the storage cost on a per kilogram basis. And I think all of us can say a similar thing. That's why some of this uncertainty in the TEAs which of course there's a lot of are not as impactful for our business cases. That's a great point. The level of innovation that you guys are aiming to achieve overcome some of the real life nuances around input costs, et cetera. That's a great point. We're now going to move back to the Stanford ecosystem but before we do, I'd love some audience participation just to help our panellists out. Could you put your hands up if you're a corporate partner? If you're here from a corporate. Thank you very much. Could you put your hands up if you are an investor? Could also be part of a corporate but if you're an investor? Perfect. Could you put your hands up if you are a member of Stanford faculty? Thank you. Could you put your hands up if you're a Stanford student researcher, postdoc, et cetera? Brilliant. Thank you very much. I'll be back in a second. Before we go there, I guess sticking with the big picture and coming into the fantastic fireside chat that we heard earlier from professors Rice and Majumdar, geopolitics and energy are critically intertwined even more so today with the conflict in the Ukraine. That has led to a shortage of ammonia and rising prices. I'd love to hear your thoughts, particularly Niko, on a startup like Nitricity and how that startup idea or mission has different impacts now than you had when you imagined it and how you see the market kind of going for you specifically in a decentralized production format. When we founded the business, ammonia cost $250 per tonne. I think you probably remember that. There's projections that it's going to hit $2,000 per tonne today, so that's a 10 times increase in one of the most fundamentally important chemicals in the world. That means that global hunger rates are going to increase. They're projected to increase from $250 million to $500 million to people who are severely affected by food insecurity. A lot of people have told us recently that the timing is really right for our business. We founded the business when people said it was totally crazy. Some startups get lucky and the market turns and it turns in our favor, and I'm sure it happens the other way around. Fertilizer in particular is hugely geopolitical, and I'm sure Rob can speak to this as well. As the volumes of ammonia you'll be producing are pretty big. What a world we're walking into, right? One of the driving forces for that increase in price of ammonia is the Tagliati pipeline, which is the largest ammonia pipeline in the world. It runs through Russia all the way through Ukraine and it offloads at Odesa. That's often where the marginal global price of ammonia was set. It's 15% of global ammonia trade flows. That pipeline is shut, so it's not just sanctioned and going to other places, it's physically shut. 15% of the global ammonia trade flows have come off the market. The rich countries of the world have bid the price up from all the marginal producers from $250 to $1,500 a tonne. We will pay anything in this country because if you fertilize corn you get 10 million calories per acre. If you don't fertilize corn with nitrogen you get 3 million calories per acre. Any organic farming is like a million calories per acre, so it's great but it's not feeding the world. We're going to have food shortages and it's going to be brutal. This is the part that we'll cut through. I'm a very strong believer in the lowest cost left side of the supply curve always wins with the exception of this overlay. It doesn't matter what electricity prices are if you don't have a supply chain to bring you a key input to growing the food for your country. I think we're in for a very interesting ride the next several years, but like you we had lucky timing. Henry Kissinger started the United States fertilizer innovation farm and that's how geopolitical it was. The International Fertilizer Development Center was founded by Henry Kissinger as a geopolitical play. I think we're going to see green hydrogen or other approaches like nitricities are getting a lot of government support right now because America can really step up and be a leader. We're privileged in the fact that we have all the nitrogen we need. Places like Brazil only have the import 80% of their fertilizer and from China and Russia. Very, very problematic right now. Great, thank you. I guess that's a sober reminder for the students thinking about building in the future to take geopolitics into account, so I appreciate that. Now going back to the Stanford ecosystem last couple of questions before we move on to Q&A. So you've been through this journey. Some of you more recently, some of you a few years ago. The new school of climate and sustainability is being launched or is in the process of being launched. There is a huge amount of excitement amongst the student body, which I can definitely attest to. I guess thinking about how the Stanford ecosystem has helped each one of you. What words of advice do you give to the people designing the new school around what resources or opportunities you'd like to see in addition to the ones that you've made such good use of to date? I'll open that up to whoever wants to go first without cold calling. Well, I have a soapbox I sometimes get on, so I'm mic'd up now, so it's a great time. I think, and this potentially is a GSB perspective as well, because I was coming from the business school, I think there's a lot of students that are in this entrepreneurship environment and get that entrepreneurship bug and want to start a company. And then they go search for some sort of problem. And then what they land on is like a dog walking app or a different food delivery service. And we've got a lot of real problems that actually need to be solved. And so what I'd love to see is the new sustainability school really foster or direct the attention of this really smart and motivated student body to solving the long list of problems that we already know exist, as specifically related to climate. And so I think that could, the business school could really benefit from that. There's a couple of courses there all about startup creation. And I think too much of the emphasis is on finding a problem when I think we have a lot of problems that we know exist and we could really channel the students in the right directions by at least bubbling up to the surface maybe for those who haven't spent their time really researching the space as much. That's a great point. Just as an anecdote that most recently at the GSB there was an idea to help you find Cheerios more easily in a supermarket. Thank you. Anyone else on words of advice for the Stanford? Sorry, Jay. I don't think anyone mentioned how much money they needed to start their company. That's a very good question. Would anyone like to tackle where, well, why don't we stop with Rob because you're furthest down on the journey. Yeah, so we were starting in 2012. There wasn't a lot of ambition in this part of the country to invest in clean tech companies. So we were in New York City. We were in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, more traditional energy investors. And they really got us a long ways down the road. And then we added great strategic partners, SK out of South Korea, Mitsubishi out of Japan, Nextera out of the US. So we're pushing on half a billion dollars invested into the company over the last eight years. We're a fair bit smaller than that right now. You're early, you're early. The very first money into the company actually did come from Stanford. It came from the Tomcat Center. So that was around $50,000, which was enough for us to build our very first prototype. And that went a really long way in term to get the next money and the next money, of course. And so really that earliest check from the Tomcat Center at Stanford to help us build the prototype, just $50,000 showed that we were more than just a handful of folks with a PowerPoint deck. So that was really pivotal. For us then we were able to win a few pitch competitions and prizes at a few hundred thousand dollars here or there, but really started to raise money from both grants, so the Breakthrough Energy Fellowship, which I'm in with Jimmy. So that was a few million dollars from them as well as some private capital. Our private capital has actually largely come from strategic investors. So large truck fleet as well as OEM, a vehicle OEM. And so really bringing in, I think the industry is starting to participate even in earlier stage technologies. I think Ted is being quite modest. He actually won the, was it the MIT Clean Energy Prize, but made us very proud to go out to the East Coast and move that from Stanford. The year after Niko I will say. And the year, sorry? Niko won it the year before us. And Niko won it the year before. So really dominating even on the East Coast. Our first money in was $5,000. So we were super excited, wanted to found a business. Founding a business costs like $1,000. If you want to structure it appropriately, like a Delaware C corporation that can take venture capital funding, that's a lot of money. Especially if you're a graduate student, you have no money. Especially if you liquidate your life savings because you have the opportunity to go to Stanford. Like that's like a really big deal to be able to get any funding at all. And so Nitricity's first money was $5,000. And at the time, that's a huge amount of funding because you can incorporate a business and you can get pizza, you can get drinks for folks, you can get folks together and get the nucleus of like great people working on something. And it even left enough to build prototypes which helped us get a Tomcat grant and win some of these pitch competitions. And the number of, I think it must have been, right now is that we were really lucky because there's pitch competitions for clean energy everywhere in 2012. I'm not sure if that existed. Nothing. So I mean, we've all done these circuits for pitch competitions and if you prepare hard, you can get some capital to try an idea. It's really, really transformative. So in our case, Stanford Starix allowed me to get in touch with a few angel investors, some of them from pre-court actually. So that was a few hundred K. And then we won an ARPA-E award and that was pretty big. That was like 500 K. And then a couple other small awards here and there and then finally breakthrough energy, a few million dollars from them. Fantastic. I do want to leave a little bit of time for Q&A from the audience, but the last question I'll ask you is there are a lot of industry partners and investors that we saw from the poll earlier here today which is fantastic to see. So thank you for being here. In an ideal world, what is it that each of you could get from partners in the ecosystem to help you? That is the question. I just want to see if there's any way we can make meaningful connections happen over champagne, which is on ice at the moment. I'll open it up to anyone here. I can give it a shot. Many things come to mind, for example, I'll get to the important one last, but just as an example, the distribution and transportation of hydrogen from point A to point B worries me a little bit. I haven't seen anything particularly interesting. The storage is being averaged, thankfully, but the transportation is worrisome. So when people ask me, I'm like, can you please work on pipelines or something because that's worrying me. Just an idea. But then the second one. We're at the point where manufacturing, as I have said multiple times, is so critical and we see such a huge potential to reduce costs just by working on manufacturing. But are you really going to ask a VC to invest $20 million just to build a manufacturing facility? Doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do because your cap table is going to get all messed up. But then there are no grants. Of course there are no grants for tens of millions of dollars. And that's where partners come in and you can offer some sort of exclusivity, either geographical or something. But I think that is absolutely critical and given the audience right in front of me, that would be what Evolw would find extremely important. So please come and speak to Jimmy about that champagne. Niko. I think industry, so we're partnered with Black and Veach. It's part of their IgniteX program. It's recently announced and they've been really helpful. Industry partner, they offered to come in and even help us find a space that was zoned appropriately and help us make renderings for pitch decks or simple items. So it's less, it's not like a contract or anything like that, but operationally and execution support has been really great. And so programs like that or teams at industry who are dedicated to supporting startups, simple things like what is the zoning needed to build a chemical facility can take a huge amount of time for a small team of founders to figure out. I would add demonstration projects are very important for us. So partnering not even for a scale deployment, but just to have one demonstration. And so for us what that would look like would be to partner with, say a company that a mining company that wants to transition its haulage fleet over to hydrogen operation haulage trucks. We would need to make that happen and we would need to partner with the mine as well as a haulage truck OEM as well as a hydrogen producer. And so really pulling together these consortiums, I think as a new technology provider we can try to energize that conversation but I think a lot of the momentum happens when the partners take the lead there. So that's an example of one type of coalition that I'd love to bring together to do a mining haulage demonstration. And I guess I would just say as well, one of the things that can be really helpful for startups is just help navigating some of these large, the large entities that are a lot of the partner institutions is to make sure that when you do interface with some young companies like ours, kind of help shepherd us through the complex organization chart. Fantastic. And we need people. So we're in this like scaling people dramatically from say 200 to 1,000. So engineer, scientist, project developers, especially students, if there's students there out there in the audience. I got hands up so they're definitely there. We have offices here in the Bay Area, offices in Denver and Kansas City in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the south of France. So there's international travel opportunities. So come work at Monolith. Thank you so much, gentlemen. We'll take one question just in the interests of time if anyone has a burning question for our panel. Please. All right, thank you. Rob Mordio, Hage Cycle. I'm curious. Sorry, Rob, more about the new, I'd say, modularized sounds like technologies. How are you guys thinking about your supply chain manufacturing fabrication with an eye towards having a commercial product that is saleable and you can have a warranty on it and performance and maybe even a balance sheet to stand on behind you? How are you guys thinking about that to a part of the problem? Niko, do you want to take this one as the modularized thing and then maybe, Jimmy, you can check in as well? We're eyeing the similar scale as Monolith in terms of project size. So it's still very distributed. And so we recently pivoted away from modularized systems to these larger scales. So all were afraid. I can make a couple of comments. The way we're trying to handle this is to have four specific products for different sizes with the biggest one being a five megawatt system, even though that's so big compared to two days state of the art. In reality, it's pretty small given the demand. So it is technically modular. And so the way we're trying to put this together is number one domestic supply chain. Yes, you can get some very fancy nickel from Japan, for example, that might perform better and optimize your voltage. You can reduce it a little bit, stuff like that. But in the long term, it's dangerous. So maybe we stay away from things like that. Yes, of course, you can code it with some platinum or gold or stuff like that. But maybe you stay away from things like that. So keeping in mind is this idea of domestic manufacturing. So if you want to make it in Chile, everything you need is, you can find in Chile. You want to make it in Australia, same thing. So that's number one. And then number two, try to take a very comprehensive approach because I think the easiest way to answer this from an electrolysis point of view is to focus on efficiency. That's what people use to say, at least. Have a very, very high efficiency system. It doesn't matter if it's modular or not. You can share your balance of plant. It doesn't matter how big it is. That's not true anymore. Things like shipping, no one thinks of shipping. If it doesn't fit into an ISO container, your shipping costs immediately blow up. And so there are so many little details and so I'm just going to say, take a very comprehensive approach when solving a problem. What you learn in classes is very fun and science is awesome, but it's not the solution all the time. Hopefully that helps a little bit. Thank you so much. I think we're at time, so I really appreciate it. And thank you for being here with us today, guys. I really appreciate it.