How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Universal Hydrogen: Paul Eremenko

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Commercial air travel has connected humans across the globe in extraordinary ways. This connection, however, comes with a cost: about a billion tons of carbon emissions annually. There’s been major progress in other transportation sectors with cars, trains, trucks, buses, and even ships that run entirely on renewable energy. But for planes, the path to flying carbon-free hasn’t been so clear. Paul Eremenko is on a mission to change that. His company, Universal Hydrogen, works with stakeholders across the airline industry to transition to an abundant clean-burning fuel source. You guessed it – it’s hydrogen!This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with Paul about the massive challenges the industry faces in updating planes for alternative fuel sources. Paul also shares how his long track record in aviation prepared him to launch his own company, which has now raised more than $85 million to lead the charge in transitioning aviation to green hydrogen fuel. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. 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, 15% of all new car sales were electric. And by 2035, you won't be able to sell a combustion engine car in California, which also happens to be the 10th 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 Arameko. 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 learn English, but also subsequently shed a southern drawl. And then we move to West Lafayette. My dad's a math professor. Still is there. And my mom is now retired, but 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. Indeed, yeah. So I have to assume that, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but you're probably pretty good of math as a kid. Well, not good enough. I think it was always my father's aspiration that I follow in his footsteps, and I was never quite good enough, so I settled for next best being an engineer.

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 what 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 jules Verne and arthur clark 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. Ah. And you start taking lessons there and just like at an airstrip in West Lafayette? At a little airport.

Yeah, a little airport in Lafayette just across the river, in middle of a cornfield, no control tower in sight. It was actually a pretty nice place to learn how to fly, 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 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 side. This is kind of unusual because you were on this trajectory and you would do this for a while in aeronautics, you were an engineer, but then you got a law degree in two

2007 from Georgetown. Why? Why did you do that? I did it because I was interested in how decisions were made about what kinds of aerospace products we need to build. So I was on the engineering end of a DARPA program as my very first job out of grad school. And so I got very interested 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 at 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. I spent three years. I spent three years. 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

work at DARPA, what were you focused on or what were you interested in? interested in. Because, 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 weight 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. All right. So you're at DARPA until 2013. 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. That's right. So after Airbus, you go on to join UTC, which is a United Technologies Corporation, and up into 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 pollution, 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 2050. 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 signed the Paris Agreement. What are we as an industry going to do about it? Because aviation traffic volumes double about every 15 years. Overall, if you look at the fraction of all emissions that we produce as a civilization, aviation is a relatively small fraction. But that few percent is still more than the country of Germany. What? in terms of actual carbon output. So basically, aircraft produce more carbon emissions around the world

that Germany does every year? That's right. Of the global hole, it is a relatively small fraction, but it is the hardest to decarbonize. And so as the other sectors, 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. First manned or crude hydrogen airplane flew in the 1950s. The Soviets actually flew an airliner called the Tuple of 155 on hydrogen in 1988. 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. 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. When you talk about green hydrogen, you're talking about producing it in a different way because the hydrogen you're talking about that Russian plane, for example, that wasn't produced in a clean way. 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 fuel molecule, and break the hydrogen and the carbon and then you've got to do something with a carbon. Right. And typically that carbon then goes into the environment and has all of the adverse consequences. Yeah. Right. So it defeats the purpose. I mean, if you were to produce hydrogen that way, there's no point. He might as well just burn gas, natural gas or oil. Yeah, exactly. So that is dirty hydrogen. But there is a clean way. 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 H2O breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen,

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 is an input. And if the electricity is renewable electricity or carbon-free electricity, then you have a totally clean energy chain 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. Hmm. We're going to 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 Arameenko, 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 2020, 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 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 point point, which is how do you get the hydrogen from a point of production into the airplane? All of that is expensive infrastructure.

Right. And in order to transition aviation and start flying hydrogen airplanes sort of on scheduled routes, you got to truck it or you got to 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 got to replicate this infrastructure. You can't repurpose existing gasoline or kerosene jet fuel infrastructure.

You got to 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 all of that. That is a big pain point. This is why probably nobody was interested in doing what you decided to do. 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 trying to 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. 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. which are 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. 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. All right. Now, to do this, and I know you start with some colleagues, you can't just start this with, you know, everyone puts in 10 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 $100 million at this point. Is that right? That's about right. Yeah, just out of $100. All right. So the

idea is you're preparing for the aviation industry to transition to hydrogen powered aircraft. Why do you think that will happen soon? Because that 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, 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. So these are airplanes on under 100 seats, right? Typically maybe 50 or 60 seats. Yeah. The airplane we are specifically targeting as the first hydrogen airplane, which will be the largest hydrogen airplane to enter service, will be the ATR 72,

which is about a 50 to 60 passenger airplane and flies about 1,000 kilometers. And that's a turboprop plane, right? It is a turboprop. That's right. Yeah, you see those in Europe a lot. They're not so popular in the U.S. anymore. That's right. Although there are definitely some plans for 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 A320 and the Boeing. 737 family of aircraft. I was actually surprised, right, because these are not the biggest airplanes and they're not the longest flying airplanes. Yeah. But there are so many of them and they fly with such a frequency that they constitute most

aviation emissions. Wow. The 737, the Airbus A320. That's right. That family of aircraft, yep. That makes sense because they're like the Honda Accords, right? They're so common. Yeah, absolutely.

Any flight that you take inside Europe, right, and many flights that you take inside the U.S., 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've got to keep in mind, again, that hydrogen, 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 got to lengthen the tube a little bit. 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. Because they're heavy. You'd have to have basically an airplane full of batteries and no passengers to make it. 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 10 people and a couple hundred kilometers distance. Wow. So that's not going to solve the problem. Well, there could be a new electrochemistry, but it took 30 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 that jumps out and says this is going to change everything. Right. So when we hear about like, oh, you know, the future is going to be electric, these kind of electric drone taxis, that's plausible because you can, 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 is, by that is that all of those

electric air taxi type concepts I'm willing to bet as a second generation after the first generation is battery power, the second generation will be hydrogen fuel cell powered. Still electric. Just to clarify, 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. 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. All right. So you can buy a hydrogen powered car today. Hyundai makes them, Toyota makes them, Audi makes them, a couple other car companies. them and you see them, I see them in California sometimes. Yeah. Hydrogen fuel cell cars. They're really cool. The Hyundai goes like 380 miles on one tank of hydrogen. A couple of challenges, very few places to fuel up. Like unless you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, you're kind of out of luck. Yeah. The second challenge is right now it's really expensive. Like here and if you want to go, I just checked. If you want to fuel up in Oakland, California, it's like three, four times the amount of money that it would cost you to fuel.

up on regular gas. So it's still early days with hydrogen cars. People are still like, I think I'm going to 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 want to get this up and running by 2025. I'm with you. I want this to work, because this is good for humans in the world. But how are you going to make that happen by 2025. 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 you don't need a fixed fueling station at each airport, right, basically to fuel the airplanes. 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, 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, 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. Because there's going to be money to be made. Absolutely. Right. If every airplane in Alaska, all of a sudden is hydrogen power, there are going to be people who are going to 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 heavy-duty trucks, in port equipment, industrial equipment, steel production, right? There's a lot of demand. And two of the leading green hydrogen producers in the world are investors in our company, Fortiscus future industries 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. And in places where we have customer demand but no production, we have a few years, right, to send a demand signal 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. Hmm. 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 manufacturing company because you're making these retrofit parts for these ATR planes. So there's a lot of moving parts here. How fast are you going to be able to retrofit? these ATR, these twin turboprop airplanes, how quickly will that happen? So the retrofits will start in 2025. 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 airlines choosing to install 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 2025. And we would expect to be able to get through at least half that fleet by the early 2030s. We're going to take another short break, but when we come back, more from Paul Arameco, 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 Arameenko. 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. They cause no pollution, which is great for everybody. But I would imagine that Airbus and Boeing, you know, for them to do this, would require them to make a massive capital investment

because they would have to retrofit or maybe even produce new types of aircraft. That's right. So we think as a retrofit, it'll probably stop at the regional scale, right? So again, for the ATR, we are developing a retrofit kit. And it's just a matter of replacing the turboprop engine? Yep.

We replace the turboprop engine with a fuel cell and electric motor, basically. For the bigger airplanes, for the A327-37 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. 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 Pratt & 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 going to do this? I think 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. And I think that it will be impossible for them in front of their customers, in front of the regulators, in front of the traveling public, come the late 2020s when they have to make a decision, because the new airplane would probably enter service sometime in the mid-2030s. That's probably about the timing. So in the late 2020s, 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 they make a decision that is not a decision towards hydrogen in the late 2020s for this 2030s single aisle airplane, there is no hope for aviation to meet Paris Agreement emissions targets by 2050. And I'm pleased to say that Airbus is an investor 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 2020s. 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 of course, every airline or airplane leasing company that we talk to is incredibly enthusiastic by the possibility of a hydrogen single-isle airplane in the 2030s, 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 are all, the entirety of the fleets of 737s and A320s and introducing essentially a plane that looks the same but functions differently. I mean, that costs, right, for those companies to do it is enormous. 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 A380 and, you know, a 787? Could it also do that?

It can. It absolutely can. The issue is volume, right? So those airplanes fly routes 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 probably your listeners 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-isle 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 pressurized 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 787 or an A380, you would have to change the design of the aircraft. You would have to massively change the design of the aircraft. Yeah. So you could have like a giant fat bubble tube and then sort of kind of fat wings too. And 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 2025 when this starts. You're pretty confident that at least the first ATR retrofit hydrogen powered plane is going to 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 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. We have a very

experienced team. We have a former head of the FAA that's on our advisory board. 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 an understanding and a comfort level with hydrogen that is on par with, you know, 60 years, 70 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 between us and the agency. Here's a question. I mean, in California, right? As you know, the governor is requiring all new auto sales to be electric in 2035. 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 going to lose money. They all have to do this because California is a big important market. Is there a world where, you know, California, for example, says, look, in 2035,

certain aircrafts 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? That'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 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. So if a proactive jurisdiction wants to flex its muscles and try to catalyze change in the space, I'm all for it. Hmm. I want you to put your aeronautics hat on for a moment, because we're talking about climate.

change, and 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, 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 planes, like the industry is we'll have to face, it's already starting to face, challenges just getting airplanes flying them around the world. Yeah, I mean, airplanes are pretty well designed to withstand And wind gusts and turbulence and things like that. And no airline would obviously fly an airplane into a storm.

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 there's nothing more to say about that. It's just going to be a reality. Yeah. I mean, commercial aviation has been one of the greatest engines of growth in global prosperity and sort of interdependence and cultural understanding and ultimately peace since the beginning of the jet age.

And aviation has to be not part of the problem, right? Right. Otherwise, if we continue on as we do today, right, flying airplanes on hydrocarbon fuels, then eventually aviation will, today it's a few percent of global CO2 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 decarbonization 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 humankind.

Yeah. There's a proposal in France to eliminate private air travel in many airports. I don't know what the status is, but it's really controversial. But it comes from a serious policy conversation around this because private air travel has really exploded in the last 10 years. And there is a measurable effect 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? Should it be, should it be bad? 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 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 2010, I went and test drove a Tesla Roadster for a story I did 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 had told me, oh, in 10 years from now, you're going to see these electric vehicles everywhere in California. And now in California, 10 or 15 percent of new auto sales are electric. I would have been stunned. I'd have been blown away. I wouldn't have thought it would have happened that fast. Right now in 2022, I cannot have. imagine this is going to happen within 10 years. In 10 years, Airbus, Boeing are going to be working on hydrogen-powered planes. But I hope I'm wrong. Are you convinced in 10 years from now they will be working on building a hydrogen-powered 737-ro-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. 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 U.S. 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. That'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 how I built this and mine is at guy ros, and on Instagram I'm at guy.org. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablui. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Carrie Thompson.

Our intern is Susanna Brown. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.