HIBT Lab! Universal Hydrogen: Paul Eremenko

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. So, as many of you know, on this edition of the show, we often talk to entrepreneurs working on world-changing ideas and products, technologies that might not be ready for commercial use today, but that could transform the way we live tomorrow. And also technology that will have to work in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change. In the United States, the transportation sector accounts for over a quarter of all carbon emissions, that's cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships. But we can see a light at the end of the tunnel for most of these forms of transport.

Electricity. This year in California alone. fifteen percent of all new car sales were electric. And by twenty thirty-five you won't be able to sell a combustion engine car in California. which also happens to be the tenth biggest car market in the world.

So in the future we'll have entirely electric cars and trucks and trains and even ships. But not airplanes. Airplanes are really hard to electrify, and the reason is simple. Wait. Batteries that store electricity are heavy.

To make it work, you'd have to fill an entire commercial airliner with batteries and still that probably won't be enough power to get that plane across the country. So What to do? Well, the answer might come from a relatively old technology. Hydrogen.

When you burn it, it's emissions free, just water vapor. It's abundant and is basically produced from water. And most importantly, it's super lightweight and could power many commercial aircraft, including the most common ones, 737s and A320s. The problem? It's really expensive to produce. At least for now.

And airline manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus. will have to retire most of their existing planes and make brand new ones. Now none of these challenges seem insurmountable to Paul Arameco. His company, Universal Hydrogen, is working to decarbonize the entire aviation industry by replacing the jet fuel that currently powers planes. With hydrogen fuel cells. So far, Paul and his co-founders have raised more than$85 million for Universal Hydrogen, and soon they'll start testing small prop planes that run entirely on hydrogen.

Paul was born in Ukraine, but grew up mainly in West Lafayette, Indiana, where his father was a mathematics professor at Purdue. We first landed in Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky for a year. Which is where I had to shed any trace of a Ukrainian accent and and learn English, uh, but also subsequently shed a southern drawl. Um and uh and then we move to West Lafayette. My dad's a math professor, uh still is there. And uh my mom is now retired, but all was also at Purdue. And not just a math professor. He was a recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Prize and so quite distinguished internationally known mathematician.

I have to assume that, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but you're probably pretty good at math as a kid. Ha well, not good enough. Uh I think it was always my father's aspiration that I follow in his footsteps and I was never quite quite good enough, so I settled for next best being an engineer. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

I know you went on to MIT and you studied aeronautics and then you got a master's degree in aeronautics at Caltech. Were you thinking already when you were a teenager that you would get into that business either maybe be a commercial pilot or An astronaut, or I don't know, w was that what you were thinking, maybe? Well, definitely I was a space cadet growing up and I was raised on the works of science fiction of the likes of Julne and Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov and so I always dreamed of space exploration and interstellar travel and things like that. But very difficult to have anything actionable to do. So I went, you know, the closest thing to that was hey, go learn how to fly.

And I think even before you got your driver's license, you got your pilot's license, is that right? This is true. Yes. I didn't even know that was allowed. Well, at least you can solo in an airplane before you can solo in a car. Uh. And you what you start taking lessons there and Just like at a airstrip in in in West Lafayette. At a little airport. Yeah. A little airport in Lafayette, uh just across the river, uh in the middle of a cornfield. Uh no control tower in sight.

It was actually a pretty nice place to learn how to fly, uh my flight instructor. Told me when I went on my first solo. If you get confused, if you get lost. Just find the nearest water tower and read the name of the town. And ever since then, my career has sort of uh oscillated between commercial aviation and space. And so certainly the last years and the last few roles that I've had have been on the commercial aviation side.

But I hope one day to return to the space site. Hm. This is kind of unusual.'Cause you were on this trajectory. And you would do this for a while in aeronautics. You're an engineer, but then you got a law degree in two thousand seven from Georgetown. What

Why? Why'd you do that? I did it because I was interested in in how decisions were made about what kinds of aerospace products we need to build. Um, so I was uh on the engineering end of a DARPA program as my very first job out of grad school.

And so I got very interested in in how the defense department, how the Pentagon figured out what to buy and when, right, and how to manage those acquisition processes. And so I was very interested in sort of national security law and kind of getting into the machinery of government and into the acquisition process. Okay, so you do this law degree, but really with the idea of how it would Help you understand the whole thing around like what you can do in aeronautics, right? And you did go and work for DARPA for the

You know this defense advanced projects agency in the Pentagon for a few years out of law school, right? Yeah, I did a few things in between, but ultimately did end up at DARPA. And so I was there for four years. Um, I spent three years as a program manager running a space program. and an advanced design and manufacturing program for complex defense systems.

And then my last year at DARPA I spent running what's called the tactical technology office, which is the big systems office. So it's the one that does all of the robots, satellites, X planes, and other large systems at DARPA. I mean, clearly from the time you were a teenager, you were going to do something around aviation or avionics. By the time you got to Ork at DARPA. What were you focused on or what were you interested in?'Cause I mean We know that, you know, emissions from airplanes is an enormous challenge, right? And certainly it's become worse in recent years. But at that time, was that on your mind? Was that what you were kind of thinking about wanting to do?

Yeah, I would say at the time electric propulsion was just coming into its own for aviation. And it took longer than for cars. because everything for airplanes has to be lighter and more reliable. But batteries were becoming good enough and motors were becoming lightweight enough. where you could start thinking about really having all electric airplanes for some classes of missions at least. And so one of the things that I did at DARPA at the very end of my tenure was launch a program for experimental aircraft. Alright, so here at Darp until twenty thirteen, you go to Google in California and

You're there for I think two years and you join Airbus. And you eventually become CTO of Airbus of the entire company. Yeah. Yeah. So after Airbus, you go on to join uh UTC, which is a United Technologies Corporation, and uh up until this point devoted your entire life, most of your life to the aerospace industry, and you were aware that there's an enormous challenge with Certainly with commercial aircraft, which is

Carbon emissions. Yeah, that's right. I mean, for me the signature and the ratification of the Paris Agreement was a really catalytic moment, right? Which the Paris Agreement requires to get to zero emissions by twenty fifty. And I was very much the squeaky wheel both in the Airbus C suite And then in the United Technologies C suite saying, Hey, guys, you know, we signed the Paris Agreement, right? Like we as a species sign the Paris Agreement. What are we as an industry going to do about it? Because aviation traffic volumes double about every fifteen years.

Um, overall, if you look at the fraction of all emissions that we produce as a civilization, Aviation is a relatively small fraction, um but that few percent is still more than the country of Germany. What wow. In terms of in terms of actual carbon output. So basically aircraft produce more carbon emissions around the world than Germany does every year. That's right. Of the global whole, it is a relatively small fraction, but it is the hardest to decarbonize. Mm. And so as the other sectors as in cars, right, there's a meaningful movement towards electric vehicles. Right. And there is a path.

Right, to get automotive to a Paris Agreement type emissions reductions trajectory. There is no such path for aviation. It relies on jet fuel and that's it. That's right. And there are not a lot of alternatives. So batteries Don't really scale. for the large aircraft which are the ones that produce most of the emissions.

So I know that you would go on to found this company, Universal Hydrogen, which we'll talk about in a moment, but when did you start to think about this idea? Must have been at least a few years before. Yeah, I mean hydrogen is not a new idea. uh first manned or crewed hydrogen airplane flew in the nineteen fifties, the Soviets actually flew an airliner called the Tupolev one fifty five. on hydrogen in in nineteen eighty eight.

Yeah. So this has been done before. And hydrogen is in many ways the ideal aviation fuel. It has the highest energy content per unit weight, so it's the most weight efficient energy carrier. It's light. Super light, and it can actually power a plane for a long distance. That's right. So it's been the holy grail for quite some time, even apart from emissions, just from a performance perspective. Right. Um the issue has always been can you get enough hydrogen? And in particular, can you get enough green hydrogen?

And people like to say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. But it is generally not naturally occurring on earth, right? So you have to produce it. And to be clear, hydrogen we can make tons of it. But really. That's

generally made by just burning natural gas. So generating hydrogen can be very, very Dirty. you're talking about producing it in a different way because the hydration you're talking about that Russian plane, for example, that wasn't produced In a clear. It probably was not. That's correct.

And so the easiest and cheapest way to produce hydrogen is to take a hydrocarbon, like methane, kerosene, right? These are all hydrocarbons, a fossil fossil fuel molecule, and break the hydrogen and the carbon, keep the hydrogen, but then you gotta do something with the carbon. Right and typically that carbon then goes into the environment and has has all of the adverse consequences. Yeah. Right. So it's defeats the purpose. I mean, if you were to produce hydrogen that way, there's no point. You might as well just burn gas, natural gas or or oil. Yeah. Exactly. So that is dirty hydrogen. But there is a clear to produce hydrogen and it's a very simple way, which is called electrolysis.

And with electrolysis you basically pass electricity through water and the H two O breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen. uh both of which are useful, right? Hydrogen for propulsion, oxygen for medicinal and various industrial applications. And all of this takes is electricity as an input and water as an input. And if the electricity is renewable electricity, or carbon free electricity. then you have a totally clean energy chain for for hydrogen production, and that's called green hydrogen. So historically, green hydrogen has been very expensive because renewable electricity has been scarce. Right. And one of the effects that the Paris Agreement has had

Is a massively catalytic effect on the production of renewable electricity capacity globally. And that's what's been driving a massive exponential decrease in the cost of green hydrogen over the past years. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll hear more from Paul about how the decreasing cost of green hydrogen has created an opportunity for his company to decarbonize commercial flight. Stay with us, you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm here with Paul Aramenko, the founder of Universal Hydrogen. It's a company that's trying to decarbonize the entire aviation industry by outfitting planes and airports for green hydrogen. So twenty twenty, you decide to found this company Universal Hydrogen. And what is the idea? It is going to provide airplane parts or it's going to provide

Hydrogen fuel for the future hydrogen powered airplanes. What's the idea behind the company? Well, in order to explain the idea, I have to explain the pain point, right? Any good startup addresses a a pain point, right? Rather than just markets an idea. So the pain point in hydrogen aviation. was first and foremost as we touched on the cost of green hydrogen. But there's a second pain point, which is how do you get the hydrogen from a point of production into the airplane? Um, all of that is expensive infrastructure. Right. And in order to transition aviation and start flying hydrogen airplanes.

sort of on scheduled routes. You gotta truck it or you gotta run a pipeline at most every commercial airport in the world. Which is how gasoline works, right? That's right. That's exactly right. But you gotta replicate this infrastructure. You can't repurpose existing gasoline or kerosene jet fuel infrastructure. You gotta recreate it from scratch and hydrogen molecules are very small.

So this is a fairly expensive proposition, and if you multiply it out by the scale of the commercial air transportation system, we're talking about like trillion dollar infrastructure investments that will take decades and have to be government financed and and all that. That is a big pain point. This is why probably Nobody was interested in doing what you decided to do. Um that's part of it, right?

So part of it is the cost of green hydrogen, part of it is getting the green hydrogen to the airplane. And try and do it in a clean way, right? Because you don't want to truck it with gas powered trucks. Yeah. Ideally you would use electric or hydrogen or some other kind of renewable energy for the truck as well. So we came up with a very elegant solution for this. And if you want to think about it this way, what are airports good at? Airports are good at moving people, right? They're good at moving cargo. And they're good at moving jet fuel. Yeah. So our idea was let's turn hydrogen into cargo instead of jet fuel. Hm.

Right. So let's put hydrogen in these modular capsules and move these modular capsules the same way we move Amazon packages, right? So let's move hydrogen through intermodal freight. And when that intermodal freight arrives at the airport We use existing cargo handling infrastructure, existing cargo handling equipment that we have at the airport. And we deliver those hydrogen modules directly to the airplane. We plug them into the airplane. They become the primary fuel tank on the airplane. So there's no fueling operation. Yeah. There's only a cargo loading operation. So this was sort of the key insight behind the company is let's try to solve all of these hydrogen logistics and distribution problems.

Because that's really the missing link. in the hydrogen value chain. Alright, now to do this and I know you start with some colleagues, you can't just start this with, you know, everyone puts in ten grand. I mean this requires Tons and tons of money because You are essentially

Creating this entire network and I think you've raised at least a hundred million dollars at this point, is that right? That's about right. Yeah, just south of a hundred. All right. So the idea is You're preparing for the aviation industry. to transition to

to hydrogen powered aircraft. Why do you think that will happen soon? Because it ha presumably it has to happen within the next has to start to happen within the next five, ten years. What gives you confidence that the commercial aviation industry will do that?

Well, yeah, I think it's important to segment commercial aviation into a few different categories of aircraft, right? So first of all you have regional airplanes. Um so these are airplanes on under a hundred seats, right, typically maybe fifty or sixty seats. Yeah The airplane we are specifically targeting as the first hydrogen airplane and which will be the largest hydrogen airplane to enter service will be the ATR seventy two. Which is about a fifty to sixty passenger airplane. And flies about a thousand kilometers. Uh and those are that's a turboprop plane, right? It is a turbo problem. That's right. Yeah, you see those in Europe a lot. They're not so popular in the US anymore. That's right. Although there are definitely some plans for a resurgence of turboprops if they are true zero emissions airplanes and available relatively soon.

And that segment is it's important, right? It's visible. But most aviation emissions come from what's called single aisle or narrow body. And this is the A three twenty and the Boeing seven thirty seven family of aircraft. I was actually surprised, right? Because these are not the biggest airplanes and they're not the longest flying airplanes. Yeah. Um, but there are so many of them and they fly with such a frequency.

that they constitute most aviation emissions. Wow, the seven thirty seven, the Airbus A three twenty. That's right. That family of aircraft, yep. That makes sense because they're like the Honda chords, right? They're so common. Yeah, absolutely.

Any flight that you take inside Europe, right, and many flights that you take inside the US, right, those would be the go-to workhorses of the airline fleets. Yeah. So targeting that segment makes a lot of sense. And in part you gotta keep in mind, again, that hydrogen is One of the big problems with hydrogen is volume, right? And these are not the longest range airplanes. So the volume necessary to power the kinds of flights that these airplanes fly. is quite manageable within the confines of an existing sort of tube and wing airplane configuration. Right. Right. You gotta lengthen the tube a little bit. Uh you have to add a few meters of length in order to accommodate the hydrogen. And of course you can get back a lot of efficiency from a new wing, right, that's thinner and lighter.

But it doesn't require radical change. It doesn't require the kind of flying wing, blended wing body type configuration. We hear a lot about electric Airplanes, okay, battery power like a Tesla, but just in the air. So battery powered, you know, you'd plug it in and then it would go. What's a basic challenge of trying to build

An electric aircraft that could go from Los Angeles to New York. So the basic challenge is energy density, right? So the amount of energy per unit weight that a battery can store. Right. And it is almost an order of magnitude worse than the energy density of jet fuel.'Cause they're heavy. You'd have to have basically an airplane full of batteries.

And no passengers to make it. Uh if that, right, you may not be able to take off. Right. Depending on how far you're trying to go. Wow. Right. That's true. So the best battery chemistry that we have today is called lithium ion, right? At least that we have in product form. And lithium ion batteries, even if you take them to their absolute theoretical maximum, you are never going to fly an airplane that's bigger than about ten people and uh a couple hundred kilometers distance. Well.

Well, there could be a new electrochemistry. Um but it took thirty years for lithium ion to go from lab bench into mobility applications into electric vehicles. And into small airplanes. So a new electrochemistry will take a few decades to mature. And frankly, having looked at the space, there isn't one

Right. So when we hear about like Oh, you know, the future is gonna be electric uh these kind of electric drone taxis. That's Plausible'cause you could m you know, when these things can hop from one building to another building in a downtown recharge and then go to another building, recharge. That could happen. That can happen and probably will happen, absolutely. But it's important to note that the future can be electric, but not battery powered. Right. And what I mean by that is that all of those uh electric air taxi type concepts.

I'm willing to bet as a second generation, after the first generation is battery powered, the second generation will be hydrogen fuel cell powered. Still electric. When you say battery powered versus hydrogen powered. They can both be electric, but a hydrogen powered electric plane won't require hundreds of batteries. You can just constantly replenish the existing battery. You would replenish the hydrogen, in essence. The hydrogen. Right.

So you can compare a Tesla to a Toyota Marai, right? Both are electric cars. Uh a Toyota Marai uses electric motors to turn the wheels. But the source of the electricity doesn't come from a lithium ion battery. It comes from a fuel cell. Which in turn takes hydrogen and air. as the input sources of electricity. Air comes from the atmosphere and the hydrogen comes from a tank. And that tank is refueled.

Alright, so you can buy a hydrogen powered car today. Hyundai makes them, Toyota makes them, Audi makes them. couple other car companies make them and you see them. I I see them in California sometimes. Hydrogen fuel cell cars. They're really cool. The Hyundai goes like three hundred and eighty miles on one tank of hydrogen. Very few places to fuel up. Like unless you live in the San Francisco Bay area or Los Angeles, you're kinda out of luck. Yeah.

The second challenge is right now it's really expensive. Like here in if you want to go I just checked, if you want to fuel up in Oakland, California It's like three, four times. Timan money. That it would cost you to fuel up on

uh regular gas. Um, so it's still early days with hydrogen cars. People are still like Mm. I think I'm gonna go electric. I have to imagine that some of these challenges also apply to aircraft that

the cost of the fuel is still very high. You wanna get This up and running. By twenty twenty five. I'm with you. I s I want this to work,'cause this is good for humans in the world.

But how are you gonna make that happen? By twenty twenty five. Well, one of the issues you highlight, which is the lack of infrastructure, is one of the key issues that we're trying to solve for aviation, so that we don't need a fixed fueling station at each airport, right, basically to fu to fuel the airplane. So that's one On the cost side, I think because hydrogen cars are relatively niche in California and absent in most places, there is not a well oiled uh, so to speak. pipeline of hydrogen from green production sources to these fuel stations.

And so this is also one of the issues that we're trying to solve. And we act as an intermediary between hydrogen producers and airlines. And is hydrogen produced everywhere around the world? So today it is not. There are a handful of production sites, I would say, in most major geographies. Um more so in some of the countries or regions that are more forward leaning in the climate change story. We do expect a very, very rapid sort of densification of the landscape of hydrogen production. Absolutely. Right. If if every airplane in Alaska

all of a sudden it's hydrogen powered, there are gonna be people who are gonna presumably start producing hydrogen there. Yeah. Well, and the demand for hydrogen is not limited to aviation or cars for that matter. There is quite a bit of work on hydrogen in in heavy duty trucks, in uh port equipment. industrial equipment, steel production, right, there's a lot of uh demand. And two of the leading green hydrogen producers in the world are investors in our company. Fortiske Future Industries um out of Australia and Plug Power out of New York.

And so we work very closely with both of those as well as other hydrogen producers around the world, and we understand the footprint of hydrogen production and we make sure that we match customer demand to that footprint, right? And in places where we have customer demand but no production, we have a few years, right, to send a demand signal. And and get hydrogen producers to develop a new project. Or in areas where there is abundant hydrogen. But no clear airline customer, right? We go and knock on doors and say, Hey guys, like we could do this for you. it would be zero emissions, it would have better equivalent or better economics to what you have today. Why would you say no?

And most of the time the airline says yes on those terms. Mm. So essentially You're a fuel company. you're a logistics company trying to figure out how to

deliver the fuel and you are like a a a manufacturing company because you're making these these retrofit parts. for these ATR planes, so There's a lot of moving parts here. Um how fast are you gonna be able to retrofit these ATR, these twin turboprop airplanes? How quickly? So the retrofits will start in twenty twenty five. Um the way that they're done is that we build a kit

and we deploy this kit to the airline or to a maintenance shop of the airline's choosing to install on on their aircraft. So we expect to have a fairly rapid ramp up. in terms of the ability to convert and have airplanes flying on hydrogen starting in twenty twenty five. And we would expect to be able to get through. at least half that fleet by the early twenty thirties. We're gonna take another short break, but when we come back, more from Paul Aramenko, co-founder and CEO of Universal Hydrogen.

Stay with us, you're listening to how I built this lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Paul Aramenko. He's the CEO and co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a company that's made it its mission to decarbonize aviation. Okay, so now You know that this can be Done. You can actually power a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320 on clean hydrogen power, okay?

Right now. That sounds great because these are zero emissions flights, essentially. No pollution, which is great for everybody. But I would imagine that Airbus and Boeing you know, for them to m do this.

would require them to make a massive capital investment'cause they would have to retrofit or maybe even produce new types of aircraft. That's right. So we think as a retrofit, um it'll probably stop at the regional scale, right? So f again for the ATR Um we are developing a retrofit kit. And it's just a matter of replacing the turboprop engine. Yep, well we replaced the turboprop engine with a fuel cell and electric motor, basically. For the bigger airplanes for the A three twenty seven thirty seven class

You wouldn't do a retrofit. You would do a clean sheet airplane design. When you say clean sheet airplane, you mean a brand new design. Yeah. You would do a brand new design. Okay. Um you can't do fuel cells and electric motors at that scale. If you're designing a new airplane, you can build a thinner wing, because it doesn't have to store jet fuel or hydrogen in it. So the wing can be thinner, which is much lighter, much more aerodynamically efficient. And you can make the fuselage slightly longer in order to accommodate the hydrogen.

And it would have to be done by Airbus and Boeing and would have to be powered with an engine produced by a GE, right, or a Pratt and Whitney or a company of that sort. But as soon as Boeing announces a clean sheet airplane, Airbus has to as well. Or their existing airplanes will stop selling, right? All the airlines will wait for the new one. All right, so given that you need these two massive companies to flip the switch and make this happen in order for your idea to really take off.

How do you know they will do it? I mean, are they interested? Are they enthusiastic? Are they saying We're in, we're gonna do this. I think that there's a varying level of enthusiasm between the two companies, let's put it that way. I think they will have no choice. Because Because the world is literally on fire around us. Yeah. And I think that it will be impossible for them

in front of their customers, in front of the regulators, in front of the travelling public. Come the late twenty twenties when they have to make a decision. 'Cause the new airplane would probably enter service sometime in the mid twenty thirties. That's probably about the timing. Uh so in the late twenty twenties I think it will be absolutely impossible for either of those two companies to say

we're going to launch a brand new airplane. that will burn hydrocarbons, right? If if they make a decision that is not a high decision towards hydrogen. In the late twenty twenties for this twenty thirty single aisle airplane. There is no hope for aviation to meet Paris Agreement emissions targets by twenty fifty. And I'm pleased to say that Airbus is an investor in in universal hydrogen, so I think they see the vision. We have a very positive and constructive relationship with Boeing.

as they're doing various design studies that will inform their decision in the late twenty twenties. Similarly, GE is an investor in us. Yeah. Right, and GE has been very forward leaning on building a hydrogen burning engine. For those class of aircraft. So I think the stakeholders are there, right? And and of course every airline or airplane leasing company that we talk to is incredibly enthusiastic by the possibility of a hydrogen single aisle airplane in the twenty thirties.

Because they're the ones that are feeling the pressure from the flying public and from the regulators. So you're talking about decommissioning over time. the majority or all the entirety of the fleets of seven thirty sevens and A three twenties And introducing essentially a plane that looks the same, but functions differently. I mean that costs, right? for those companies to do it. Presumably that will not be able to happen without government.

Involvement government subsidies. Well, governments support both companies in various ways. Right, certainly Airbus, yeah. So I think the decision to go hydrogen versus hydrocarbon for that airplane is principally a decision of risk profile. Right. They would perceive a switch to a new fuel as Technologically risky. And the question is whether you know the risk averse nature of the industry will allow such a decision to be made.

Can hydrogen Also power. An A three eighty and you know a seven eighty seven. Could it also do that? It can. It absolutely can. The issue is volume. Right, so those airplanes that are, you know, half the globe.

In range. And as a result, you need a lot of volume of hydrogen. And so in that case, you can move to a different airplane configuration altogether and and probably your listeners have Have heard of the blended wing body concept, right? Which is basically a flying wing. Okay. Where instead of a tube with two wings, the whole airplane is wing like shape. and has a lot more volume to accommodate both the passenger, the cargo, and the fuel storage.

Or you would need a different approach to storing the hydrogen. And so we typically store hydrogen for regional airplanes or for single aisle. In liquid in liquefied form. So as a cryogenic liquid. Or for smaller airplanes you can store it as a high pressure gas, as a pressuriz gas. For the very long range in order to solve the volume issue. You might store hydrogen in the form of ammonia.

For instance. Which is volumetrically quite efficient. But essentially to make this work on a seven eighty seven or an A three eighty You would have to change the design of the aircraft. You would have to massively change the design of the aircraft. Yeah. So you would have like you could have like a giant fat bubble tube and then sort of kind of fat wings too, and that that might work.

Yeah, but it would be a very different in flight experience for sure. Yeah. Where would the flatbed seats go? So let's talk about twenty twenty five when this Starts.

You're pretty confident that at least the first A T R retrofit hydrogen powered plane is gonna take off. Yes, we are. The long lead item for that is FAA certification, and we have been quite conscientious about bringing the FAA on the journey with us. Right, making sure that uh we don't just design it and then throw it over the wall and say, Please certify this. Right. That's not a recipe for success. Um, we have a very experienced team.

We have a former head of the FAA that's on our advisory board. Um, we have people who have certified a lot of aviation products in their careers. And we have a very constructive, very positive working relationship, I would say, almost side by side. Because the FAA has to Gain.

and understanding and a comfort level with hydrogen. that is uh on par with you know sixty years, seventy years of learnings from Jet Fuel, and do so in the span of just a couple of years. Right. So it has to be a very constructive partnership uh between us and the agency. Here's a question. I mean in California, right? Um, as you know, the governor is requiring all new auto sales to be electric in twenty thirty five. That's a game changer. We know that car companies like this because it basically forces them all to play the game now. They're not

you know, worried about one car company doing one thing and then they're gonna lose money. They all have to do this'cause California is a big important market. Is there a world where you know California, for example, says look, in twenty thirty five uh certain aircraft must be hydrogen powered or something like that. That has not historically been done in the aviation industry. And I suspect that the airplane and engine makers would not like such a regime, right? Up s sort of a patchwork of regulations that they have to comply with.

But look, to me This is an existential crisis for the industry and climate change is a potentially an existential crisis for the world for our species. So I think no measure should be off the table, even if it upsets the order a little bit that we're all used to. Yeah. Um so if a proactive jurisdiction wants to flex its muscles and try to catalyze change in this space.

I'm all for it. Hm. Um I want you to put your aeronautics hat on for for a moment. 'Cause we're talking about climate change, and it's it's here. I mean it's all around us. We've all experienced, you know, crazy weather related events Wherever we are around the world.

I mean climate change presumably w is already affecting air travel. I mean in terms of delays in terms of what aircraft can withstand. So even doing this, moving to hydrogen power plants, like The industry is Well have to face, it's already starting to face. Challenges us. Just getting airplan flying them around the world. Yeah, I mean I airplanes are pretty well designed to withstand, you know, wind gusts and turbulence and things like that, and no airline would obviously fly an airplane into a storm.

Um, I think the weather extremes that we're seeing will introduce additional perturbations into the air transportation network. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. I guess nothing more to say about that. It's just gonna be a reality. Yeah. I mean commercial aviation has been one of the greatest engines of growth in global prosperity and sort of interdependents and cultural understanding and ultimately peace. Yeah. Um since the beginning of the Jet Age. And aviation has to be not part of the problem, right? Right. Um, otherwise if we continue on as we do today. Right, flying airplanes on on hydrocarbon fuels. then eventually aviation will today it's a few percent of global CO two emissions.

very quickly I think aviation will start to stick out as a sore thumb. Right, as an industry that is incredibly difficult to decarbonize and doesn't have a credible decarbonisation roadmap. At which point the only way to tackle it will be to reduce traffic volumes. And I think that will be bad for the industry, but I think it'll be bad for for humankind. Yeah.

There's a proposal in France to eliminate Private air travel. many airports. I don't know what the status is, but it's it's really controversial. But it comes from a serious policy conversation around this because private air travel has really exploded in the last ten years.

And there is a measurable A fact. From private air travel. on contributing to carbon emissions. Do you think private air travel is you know, I don't know, is it a sin? It should it be

Should it be banned? I don't think it's a sin. I think it should be hydrogen powered. And while we do not yet have a product offering in this space, it's certainly something that we're thinking about. We don't want it to distract us because we think that that the decarbonizing the single aisle segment is by far the highest impact thing that we can do.

But it's certainly a segment that is addressable by hydrogen. And we're certainly looking at a product offering in that space. You know, in twenty ten I went and test drove a Tesla Roadster for a story I didn't know when I was a reporter. And it did seem it was cool. It felt like a really fast golf cart. But I didn't think

If you would have told me only ten years from now You're gonna see these electric vehicles everywhere in California. And um and uh now in California ten to fifteen percent of new auto sales are electric. I would have been stunned, I would have been blown away. I wouldn't have thought it would have happened that fast. Right now in twenty twenty two, I cannot imagine.

this gonna happen within ten years. That w in ten years Airbus Boeing are gonna be working on hydrogen powered plants. But I hope I'm wrong. Um Are you convinced in ten years from now they will be working on Building.

A hydrogen powered Seven thirty seven or equivalent plane. Well, first of all, I'll say that I think they're taking it seriously enough to where there's quite a bit of work In this direction going on today. Right, I think no one has committed or announced a hydrogen program quite yet.

But that's because a new program is not due until probably later this decade. But I think long before a decade from now, guy, you will be able to fly on hydrogen with a major regional airline, both in the US or in Europe or in other parts of the world. For a ticket price that will be equivalent or lower, with the comfort knowing that the airplane is producing nothing but water. Paul, thank you very much. It's my pleasure.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to how I built this lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowI Built This, and mine is at GuyRoz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.Roz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H I B T. At id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramteen Arablui. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

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