Dr. Pradeep Haldar University of South Florida

Foreign hello everybody this is Steve Hill CEO of new hydrogen and I'm privileged to be here today with pradeep haldar Dr pradeep haldar and I'll give his qualifications in a second pradeep welcome thank you for being here my pleasure good to be here glad to have you Dr pradeepaldar serves as the Director of sustainable business courtesy faculty and Adjunct professor at the Patel College of global sustainability at the University of South Florida Tampa he's also president

At halavation a management and Technology Consulting Organization for clean energy semiconductor and materials technology and is co-founder of cell Electronics an Electronics manufacturing Solutions provider he's the author or co-author of over 200 reviewed papers conference proceedings with 10 patents issued or pending and a senior member of IEEE he recently received the Fulbright scholar award and is a fellow of The Institute of physics recipient of the president's excellence and research award excellence in community engagement award and

The business reviews technology award for energy and sustainability she has a PhD from Northeastern and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and B Tech from iitbhu that is just the beginning that's just scratching the surface uh with pradeep's experience and it's it's just a privilege to have you here today they get all that right got it pretty much it's pretty close okay pretty close it's good well thank you for your patience and hopefully we'll do better

Moving forward um it's a privilege to have you and I and today I'd like to focus on despite I mean you have a vast experience in the whole world of renewable energy um but focusing down to hydrogen which is kind of the interest of our audience as well as renewable energy but speaking broadly first the applications for hydrogen are enormous and I think sometimes uh when we hear the word hydrogen we think of we don't think

Of it kind of fully of all the applications that could potentially be out there what are the what are the common applications maybe some that people don't think about very often well the the shortest term applications hydrogen is a is a material that um that that is used extensively in several different industry sectors today already uh they include for example petroleum refining uh the production of ammonia that is converted into fertilizers is also uses um hydrogen

Chemical industry uses hydrogen uh quite a bit from uh from methanol production standpoint uh and uh it's been also deployed in multiple applications on the in the transportation sector area for sure but the current the current largest applications are in in industrial and chemical processing if you will um looking out in the future longer term uh hydrogen could be looked at as a fuel uh a completely clean green fuel that could replace fossil energy into the

Future so there are tons of different applications it's a good storage medium from an energy perspective it has very high energy density so it is being looked at carefully as a replacement for for fossil fuel into the future which begs the question really um hydrogen Is Not A New Concept is using as an energy carrier or as the fuel um and yet it really hasn't become a mainstream idea what is the reason for that in your

Mind yes hydrogen has been around for a while I mean you know going back almost 50 60 years um our all of our space space missions the polo for example has used hydrogen as a fuel for for rocket propulsion in space uh you know you can't necessarily and easily burn fossil fuel because there's no Oxygen out there in space to to combust with the fossil fuel so so the technology for creating power or energy in space

Has been around for long periods of time 50 60 years and you know from a green fuel perspective it has a lot of potential um the the barrier for for hydrogen has primarily been the cost of production uh in terms of getting to be you know widely used and there's the incumbent fossil fuel as well uh you know that there's so much uh already invested in infrastructure and resources related to fossil fuels petroleum-based fuels that uh

There's been in the past very little effort to try and replace that with with with hydrogen but hopefully we we look at that changing in the near future I mean you know with our uh with the greenhouse gas emission goals that we need to achieve by 2030 and 2050 uh hydrogen is one of the options that's that's a very viable option to help reduce our our greenhouse gas inventory levels uh not just in the US but

Around the world yeah it's definitely been an increased emphasis lately what do you think is the reason for that why why now well there's this there's this big push to get to Net Zero as you know and you know it is there is no uh it is my belief and I think a lot of other people feel the same way too that there's no one Silver Bullet that's going to solve our problems our planet problems our

Climate adaptation issues or um uh getting to Net Zero so hydrogen is considered to be one of those those mechanisms to get to I mean you know we have solar we have wind we have energy storage Technologies and hydrogen is definitely one of those approaches to add and reduce our greenhouse gas inventory significantly to get to Net Zero by the 2050 time period uh it's not the only way I mean we're looking at you know we

Need to get to the the federal government has set the set the rule to get to uh 50 reductions in greenhouse gas inventory um by by 2030 itself from our 2005 numbers and and at least 10 to 15 percent of those reductions could come from hydrogen um in terms of achieving some of those targets now remember today most of the hydrogen I mentioned it's used in petroleum refining it's used in Iron steel making in in in

The chemical industry they they're considered to be gray hydrogen not green hydrogen so they're produced not necessarily from you know clean uh green water splitting or electrolysis it's it's produced by um again some of our our own fossil fuels that sort of broken broken down and reduces the um the content of of um of let's say a methane or something like that but uh in the future with green hydrogen uh we can achieve those greenhouse gas

Emission targets by just water splitting using Renewable Energy Technologies to produce the hydrogen from water for example yeah and I think that's that's the critical point is this moving towards tomorrow we haven't had the wind and solar to such an extent that it's so accessible and the prices are coming down on that energy source where we can begin to look at replacing some of those fossil fuels that that right now is obviously the cheapest ways is

Through uh steam Reformation or through um burning fossil fuels to create hydrogen which really doesn't make sense in the grand scheme of things but there hasn't been a lot of incentive to do that because the price simply hasn't been there for these heavy Industries to start replacing um replacing these these methods with some green method however I think now we're reaching that Crescendo right that that inflection point where the Technologies are catching up to the point

Where we can start to look at this with additional incentives and things going forward and you have you have a big picture of Renewables in general what is the what is the uh I like to think about wind and solar you brought that up wind and solar we've learned a lot over the past time especially with how the government can or how incentives can be put in place to kind of nudge these things forward is there

A play for that and hydrogen and what's happening right now in your mind oh oh absolutely without so I mean you know there's a couple of things so so the the key driver Steve as you've mentioned is you know cost has to come down significantly today the cost of hydrogen is roughly about somewhere between 13 to 15 dollars a kilogram uh for it to be used in a widespread way I'm talking about Green hydrogen now not

Not gray hydrogen like you said that's from Steam reforming um uh you know you we need to get to a target of of what we call a dollar a kilogram from a production standpoint I mean then there's the cost of actually transporting it getting into way you need to use it etc etc but uh there is a what the doe calls a hydrogen shot program that they have created the federal government has created in the next

10 years they want to get to the dollar per kilogram number and they've chartered out a strategy and an outline in a roadmap of how to actually get there um this was lacking in in the past and so I think this is going to be a key driver to to making it happen and as you've said I've been around I've been in the renewable clean energy space for about 35 years working on this stuff I worked

Uh I worked on hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies in the early 2000s when it was you know then when the federal government had had pushed it at that point in time um uh and then right after but then all of a sudden you know there were signals that they're going to pull out of it but there was a slightly different Focus there that was you know producing hydrogen and ethanol related biofuels and so there was a

Mix of things that the federal government had invested in that they pulled out but I'll tell you I've seen through the um been through the process of of solar the scale of solar I'm starting to see and I've also been through we've been working on on on battery energy storage and and basically again very similar goals we had back in 2011 the federal government had set up what they call the sunshot goal I mean I call

I mentioned the hydrogen um gold the hydrogen shot goal that to get to the dollar per kilogram doe in 2011 had set up a goal to get solar down to less than a dollar a watt from a technology perspective from a scale and Manufacturing perspective at that time the cost of solar was eight to ten dollars a watt and guess what within a decade less than a decade the doe actually achieved those goals and now you

See solar to be basically commoditized from an installation perspective and if you look at the lcoes the levelized cost of energy for solar it competes with any technology that's out there same thing happened with wind and the same thing is you're going through that process right now with with energy storage batteries and things like that and I think with this goal I mean the doe has committed you know through the um a bipartisan infrastructure law there's

There's almost nine billion dollars which actually that was not even the amount that was invested in in Solar Technologies in 20 in 2010 when the cost came down so the just the the the scale and the and the amount of incentives and funds that are being put into this um from a technology development perspective from a commercialization perspective from a scale-up perspective from achieving that hydrogen shot is going to drive um acceptance and Adoption of of

Hydrogen over time again as I've said before it's not going to be the only Silver Bullet technology that's out there but uh it's going to have an impact and contribute towards our Net Zero goals into the future yeah it's certainly a huge opportunity that has really just only begun I think gaining Steam and momentum and to your point these critical Investments are what's necessary to really not just forward like we did in wind and solar and

Now we're seeing those economies taking place but it does make me think about um scaling up and new hydrogen is uh um my company that we work on developing the cheapest green hydrogen that we could possibly uh we could possibly generate through collaborations with UCLA and UCSB we're finding some really innovative ways to make this happen scaling up is always a challenge though right and in your experience you've seen and I know you do a lot

Of Consulting with fledgling Technologies and renewable energy what do you see as kind of the major challenges moving from Lab scale victories to scaling up to production for these fledgling Technologies uh it's it's not easy you know somebody has to make that first jump to invest in a gigafactory of the future right that's what it's going to take that's what happened with solar that's what happened with energy storage and pretty and prices are coming down I

Mean you know what's driving the EV Revolution is the fact that the cost of Lithium-ion batteries have come down significantly because of the scale of of large-scale um gigigawatt manufacturing now you know unfortunately sometimes the the one the first in uh doesn't necessarily make it and survive all the way through the end um but you know they're the ones that are are taking the big risk and setting up the big gigigawatt Factory I mean you've seen

That even even in the um even in the Telecom industry right in the in the 80s and 90s when when deregulation hit the Telecom industry there was a huge push and all the companies that invested in setting down and laying out the infrastructure like the fiber optic network uh Technologies the global Crossings the worldcoms of the world all of them that invested significantly disappeared because they were gobbled up by somebody else so you know you'll see

Some of the same thing happening here it happened in solar to some extent some of the first few companies that invested heavily in scaling up their operation for solar have sort of um fizzled out fizzled out in the sense they've been bought by others and and that has been that has continued as well you'll see the same thing in energy storage presumably and and in hydrogen as well so but I'm starting you know you are starting

To see a lot of the smaller scale players even the small startup companies and the larger players also getting into hydrogen in a big way and setting up these infrastructures I mean you know you need these pipelines of of hydrogen all around the country you need hubs which the doe Department of energy is now focusing in on deploying uh where you can produce hydrogen at different locations in a network Hub and spoke kind of model that

They've looked at from different Technologies everything from nuclear to renewable energy to biofuels and things like that our biomass to create hydrogen for example so setting up that scale so the you know federal government is helping in doing that now and and and and and you know um that that first factory that produces you know whether it's those electrolyzers for green hydrogen or or some other new technology you know thermal process that that's efficient or whatever

Is going to have to happen for it to get to those cost levels excellent insight and I was just thinking um I was recently at a hydrogen refueling station for with a friend with his Toyota Mirai um and the cost of hydrogen per kilogram for him uh was over 30 dollars per kilogram uh to refuel now that's that's a that's a delivered cost right that's what it costs at the pump per se and so that's different

Than the dollar Target that we're hitting but what you can imagine if we do get to that level how that will change but the infrastructure is also interesting California just last night I believe approved over a hundred million dollars in building infrastructure for these hydrogen refueling stations throughout the state these kind of initiatives are what really are helping Propel things forward because it's the chicken in the egg scenario as many have mentioned before okay who's going

To put it down first are we going to build the infrastructure first are we going to create the technology and then let the infrastructure follow and in this case I think we're both driving ahead trying to reach that goal but it's certainly helpful that these kind of initiatives are taking place to really Drive things forward and and Steve I mean you know the government I mean irrespective of what people think the government has a huge role

To play in setting up that initial infrastructure now you know they did I mean in every technology or industry sector that you think about whether it's you know semiconductors or nanotechnology which is also an area that I have uh a lot of experience in uh you know without all of the Investments that the government made in the 60s and 70s to set up Silicon Valley which is now Silicon Valley uh would not have happened you know

Uh as an example so so they play a big role I mean they've done it in the Solar space in the renewable space uh I mean I you know I would say that I would argue that they did it for the fossil fuel industry in the early 1900s when fossil fuel was the choice of fuel that was out there to be had so um so the government does have a role to play in helping set up

These infrastructure capabilities even in fact even manufacturing capabilities of need be yeah even back to the railroad industry I mean in the early I mean who put those uh you know put the incentives in place for those lines to go through and uh create all of this infrastructure that we need well maybe driving cars in too is another yeah the interstates right we need all of this we can't rely on that indep um completely but we

All we all have a role to play and looking forward to how we can make this move forward and and uh pretty but there's anything if anyone would like to reach out to you and your consultancy in your business how would they reach you well they can reach they can email me I have a website uh you know um hallovation.com that's the name of the company uh they could reach out to me there they could reach

Out to me on my email pradeep.haldar hellovation.com um so those are a couple of couple of ways they could reach out to me um and I'll be happy to you know answer any additional questions or or concerns that they have fantastic well it's been so great meeting with you and talking with you the time flew by so quickly it's uh it's always great to talk to an expert in the field and to feel your optimism for

The industry I think we've got great things ahead and as people like you they're helping it happen so thank you so much for your time and being with us today and good job in putting together these podcasts uh and getting the word out that's part of the mission that has to also happen I mean building awareness public awareness of the benefits of the Technologies are are obviously very important and I commend you for the work you

Guys are doing at uh at the company developing the new technologies which is also needed thank you it's good being with you Stephen thanks likewise thank you very much have a great day yeah bye-bye bye-bye