Waste-Based Fuels Could Cut Shipping Emissions Without Replacing Engines

What if the fastest way to decarbonise shipping isn’t a shiny new fuel, but the waste it’s already throwing away?

Shipping moves 90% of global trade, yet it’s still one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. In this episode, I’m joined by Nicholas Ball, CEO and founder of XFuel, to unpack why cost, physics, and adoption matter more than climate theatre when cutting emissions at scale.

Nicholas leads a company turning difficult waste streams, including oily residues from ships themselves, into fully compliant drop-in fuels for shipping and aviation. These fuels work in existing engines, use existing infrastructure, and can deliver up to 85% lifecycle emissions reductions without charging shipowners three to five times more than fossil fuels. That last point matters. A lot.

We dig into why shipping is so price-sensitive, why infrastructure uncertainty is paralysing fuel decisions, and why waiting for perfect solutions risks locking in higher emissions for decades. You’ll hear why XFuel focuses on waste-based and recycled carbon fuels, how lifecycle emissions are verified under EU rules, and why “drop-in” isn’t a marketing term, it’s the difference between pilots and adoption.

We also tackle hydrogen head-on. Why it’s massively inefficient as a fuel. Why scarce renewable electricity should be used to decarbonise grids and industry first. And why electrification should happen everywhere it can, with fuels reserved for sectors that genuinely have no alternative.

If you care about climate tech that actually scales, real-world decarbonisation, and cutting emissions in sectors that don’t have easy answers, this conversation matters.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Nicholas Ball and XFuel are pushing practical climate solutions into one of the toughest corners of the energy transition.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

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Nicholas Ball: 0:03

For every 1 to 3% of all the fuel that's consumed in, in ships turns into this oily residue sludges, which is either, illegally dumped at sea, incinerated for no value in the ships themselves, or at the very best sent to a cement kiln, or to incineration for electricity generation, things like that.

Tom Raftery: 0:24

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 251 of the Climate Confident Podcast, where we focus on what actually moves the needle on decarbonisation, not the glossy brochures. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Now shipping underpins roughly 90% of global trade, yet it remains one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. The fuels are energy dense. The margins are thin, and most proposed alternatives come with I watering costs, unbuilt infrastructure or timelines that politely ignore physics. Hydrogen ammonia, methanol, we hear the promises constantly. What we see far less often are solutions that can scale now, work with existing engines and get adopted without blowing up balance sheets. My guest today thinks the fastest way to cut shipping emissions isn't by reinventing ships, but by reinventing fuel. Nicholas Ball is the CEO and founder of X Fuel, a company turning waste streams, including oily residues from ships themselves into fully compliant drop in fuels that can deliver up to 85% lifetime emissions reductions while competing on price with fossil fuels. If you care about real world decarbonisation, adoption over ideology and why economics still decides everything in heavy industry, this is a conversation worth your time. Nicholas, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Nicholas Ball: 2:08

Yes. Thank you so much, Tom, for having me on the show. So, yeah. I'm, I'm Nicholas Ball, and I'm the CEO and founder of X Fuel.

Tom Raftery: 2:16

X fuel. Okay, great. And tell us a little bit about X Fuel, Nicholas. What is it? Where are you based? That's interesting. What is it you guys are doing? And, and a little bit of the why. We'll get more into that in a minute.

Nicholas Ball: 2:30

At X Fuel, we, we essentially develop and deploy technologies that can turn various types of waste materials into low carbon, drop in transport fuels, specifically for shipping, heavy good vehicles and, and aviation sectors. And really the whole meaning of our company is to avoid the need to basically using the carbon above the ground to avoid the need to kind of drill, extract, refine, transport and, and combust brand new fossil fuels. We are a, multinational company. We are our headquarters based in Ireland, but most of us are based in actually Spain in Majorca in the Balearic Islands where we have our R&D center and developing our pilot plants here.

Tom Raftery: 3:07

So let's start. Nicholas by setting the scene. Shipping moves about 90% of global trade. Pretty much everything that's on my desk here was in a ship at some point. I, I gotta think.

Nicholas Ball: 3:21

I would say one, one of the, the biggest challenges is just the energy density of what ships use, which is basically fuel oil. Right? And, and the product itself that they're consuming. It's very hard to replace that not to replace it at all, but to replace it with something that is price competitive and actually comparative in the market. So I would say that that's one of the biggest concerns and one of the biggest issues in the shipping sector. And a lot of people say it's, it's obviously hard to abate, and also I hear this a lot in conferences and, and with different speakers potentially one of the last sectors to be decarbonised just because of these, particular difficulties. We're trying to tackle those challenges in different ways and in innovative ways. So hopefully we're on our way. Let's see.

Tom Raftery: 4:01

And is it mainly a cost issue or is it more about infrastructure and regulation or something else entirely?

Nicholas Ball: 4:10

Well, so, so infrastructure's obviously a massive point. So what we do at X Fuel just to kind of compare it to what you would typically have with different alternative fuels, is that we work with drop-in solutions, so they comply with fossil standards. They can work with existing infrastructure, both engines, but also logistics and all of that. Comparatively with other kind of technologies and other, other usual contenders out there would be like the methanols, the ammonias different kind of transport fuels that people are looking at, the hydrogen, or hydrogen derived fuels is essentially the infrastructure question as you mentioned. You know, so there is no infrastructure right now currently deployed for this. There is massive amounts of confusion of which infrastructure to deploy in ports which one is the contender, which one should be used, not used. We don't wanna be doubling up and, and deploying multiple types of infrastructure for multiple solutions either. And, and that's a big, big issue. And then of course, the economics, right? I would say that shipping is probably one of the most price sensitive industries I've ever come across in my life. When we are looking at fuels, that can be anything from, three to, five, six times more than fossil fuels, and that that's a massive issue. And so what's helping with that is regulation. But. Yeah, a regulation is not quite there yet in terms of, it's, it's not so, consistent. It's not so dependable.

Tom Raftery: 5:27

Sure. So Let's, you know, against that backdrop, let's talk about the idea that you ran with. What, what was the light bulb moment that led you to create X Fuel? Was it frustration? Was it a lab experiment gone, right. Or was it, you know, something else?

Nicholas Ball: 5:42

We've been developing technologies to work with waste materials for a long time. So at its core, the technology was developed, you know, 10, more than 10 years ago. It was probably like 12 years ago now. And, really the frustration at that time, as you can imagine, there was no regulation. In fact, you know, climate change wasn't even on the agenda for most, countries and politically around, around the world. So our frustration was that we truly believed that the only way to have adoption in any low carbon product was to be with price parity with fossil fuels.

Tom Raftery: 6:13

Hmm.

Nicholas Ball: 6:13

That was our kind of moment of like, okay, we have to achieve something in this space. It's, it's a hard thing to achieve obviously, a lot of people have been working on this. But that was kind of our, North Star and what we were trying to aim for. And so we've been developing technologies that can turn different waste materials into drop in products and with different sustainability profiles and different price points. And so I would say the beginning phases of our technology and some, some of the other ones that we've developed didn't quite hit that mark. Right? So there was always that premium. That green premium that we had to achieve and people would have to pay for. And it's only more recently where we've been experimenting with other types of waste materials where we can actually get kind of below that. And, and that's really what led us to continue developing our technologies and wanting to bring them to market. It's that moment of saying, okay, for us to actually have impact in this industry, we're gonna have to develop something that actually is a contender to fossil fuels. On a price level. So that's what all our, members and our co-founders that have had our North Star or let's say, have looked at being the, the main reason for developing what we do.

Tom Raftery: 7:20

And what you're doing is you're taking waste that's usually costly to dispose of, even sludge from ships and turning it into a drop in fuel. How does that work in plain English, if you can?

Nicholas Ball: 7:37

Yeah, yeah, sure. So in the. Beginning of our journey, we worked with agricultural residue, so, so lignocellulosic, biomass woody biomass, basically agricultural residues. It can come from forestry residues or all of these types of, of materials. And so the first technology we kind of were developing at the time, and, and we have a, big pilot plant here that can kind of process this or co-process this with other waste oils, and turn that into a drop-in product for the shipping sector. But at a price point that would be at, at a high, high price point. And, and the really, the, the emphasis here is to avoid the need to break down the material to what would be known as a gas phase. So for your viewers, you know, typical approach would be gasifying this material and then using Fisher Chop for some kind of way of building out those molecules to produce the product that you, that you have. The issue with that is it's extremely energy intensive, extremely expensive. The equipment that you need to do that is also typically very expensive. And so the economics never really work out very well in your favor.

Tom Raftery: 8:35

Right.

Nicholas Ball: 8:36

In our case what we try, to do is kind of remain at liquid phase as much as possible in the different technology we developed. And so with this biomass we got there, but it was still a premium product. and something that we realised that shipping sector wasn't that interested in. So, on the back of that it's serendipitous, but we developed another type of technology to take that biofuel and turn that into road fuel standards. So typical diesel, you would have petrol stations in Europe is called EN 590 as well as the other aviation fuels. And the only way of doing that today is basically depending on oil and gas, right? Hydro treating, refining technology, standard refining technologies. And so we developed at a second technology, we developed, it was, it's what we call clear, CLR. which is a kind of very different refining approach to taking these hydrocarbon liquids and turning 'em into high, high quality products. The reason why I tell you all this, Tom, is what we realised with this refining technology is we can actually use a lot of different waste materials without the biomass, without the, first technology I was telling you about. And so we've found other waste materials that other people are not really looking at, one of which is residues from the ships themselves. So it's taking these kind of wastes. For example maybe people are not aware of this, but for every 1 to 3% of all the fuel that's consumed in, in ships turns into this oily residue sludges, which is either, illegally dumped at sea, incinerated for no value in the ships themselves, or at the very best sent to a cement kiln, or to incineration for electricity generation, things like that. So, we were able to take this kind of waste materials, oily residue, sludges, and turn them into fully compliant products marine gas oil products for shipping sectors, road fuels, and potentially aviation fuels as well. And so that's the kind of waste and the kind of technologies we're working with. The motivation with using these kind of waste is that we could get to a point where our price of our product was below fossil pricing, and still deliver up to 85% greenhouse gas savings from a well to wake basis. Very compelling product, one that sold itself, drop in product that they already being purchased by shipping sector. And obviously meeting regulations as well, which is important. So yeah, that gives you an idea of kind of what we do, the different technologies we've developed and, and obviously there are others in the pipeline and other waste materials we're working with, but, it's our, unique selling proposition, right?

Tom Raftery: 11:01

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically you're taking waste garbage. You're turning it into, let's call it Go Juice. So it, it's, it reminds me very much of Doc Brown in Back to the Future with the DeLorean And you taking the rubbish outta the bin and putting it into the DeLorean and flying off into the sunset.

Nicholas Ball: 11:25

exactly. I mean, we haven't got, quite to to that level of garbage. Although I think that's something we are discussing internally in terms of what are the most difficult types of waste that we could, apply our technologies to. But the emphasis of our company is always the same. We realised very early on that to have real impact, like true impact in the industry, we have to have a product that has a interesting sustainability profile, so actually saves GHG savings, you know, from an LTA perspective, and that we have to make sure that product is adopted and, I think most people forget about that part, right? Like you can have the most sustainable product in the world, but if it doesn't get adopted for economic reasons or for other reasons, you'll achieve no impact.

Tom Raftery: 12:10

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 12:10

So what we've decided is exploring those boundaries and say, okay, well maybe the type of waste that we're working with, like for example, this oily residue is in theory a fossil waste, right? So it's so you could argue, okay, well. How much impact can you have here? But, ultimately, if you are achieving this at price parity or setting up price parity of fossil and having true adoption of this product, you are having a real impact. And, and so this is where we're working with different waste materials and try and finding that balance where we actually have adoption and, And, you know, purchasing of these products to have real impact. Rather than delivering a product that no one will buy at mass because it's too expensive, for example.

Tom Raftery: 12:48

And what about results? You know, what, what's happening on the ground today? You've, you've claimed up to 85% lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil diesel. How do you verify that and what does it mean for ship owners? I mean, you, you said yourself, you're taking essentially what is a fossil fuel and turning it into a fossil fuel granted a, a waste product of fossil fuels and turning it into fossil fuel that can be used. So talk to me about that.

Nicholas Ball: 13:17

The regulations that we use are, are typically kind of not the mandatory, right? So we're talking about regulations that actually have to be used in the shipping sector. So in this case it's purely your maritime UETS, things like that So they state and stipulate very clearly about what the calculations have to be done to achieve, GHG savings. And, and there's certain thresholds you have to meet. In this case, it's around 70%. And so the intuitive thought about this is it's what's called a recycled carbon fuel, by the way, just to be clear, so it's called an RCF and RCFs are typically thought about as taking gas streams usually. So imagine if you are emitting something from a cement kiln. Some companies will take the emissions and try and capture those emissions and then repurpose them into a fuel, right? But the regulation also allows for liquid waste streams as long as you can prove that whatever they're currently being used for is so terrible and so pointless, that if you can repurpose that waste stream into an actual product, you're avoiding the whole value chain of, like I said before, like the drilling, the extraction, the refining of brand new fossil fuels. And so in this case. And what we've done, our validation with SGS for our fuels is showing that actually in one of the best cases is that you're burning this for the generation of electricity, and that's in a very inefficient process. Burning waste to generate electricity is a terrible approach compared to, other approaches. And so if we can repurpose that into a very high value product, we can save up to 85%. There are better use cases, by the way, so we're working with big shipping companies around world, who burn this on board for no, no use. That's obviously the worst case, right? In fact, there's an even worse case from an environmental perspective, which is illegal dumping, which has been shown to happen, even EU waters quite regularly of this material. And other oily residues, not just this material. Showing the kind of whole value chain of saying, okay, well what's currently happening with this material? If it's being burned for electricity generation, what is the emissions that we take for replacing that electricity? So we have to account for that. We have to include that in our emissions as well. So we're saying, okay, we have to replace that generation. We have to obviously look at all of our value chain, our production emissions, if we have any, depending on what we're doing, transportation, all of that. And this is how we get to 85%. And we essentially compare that final number to a brand new fossil fuel, which is in the EU, 94 grams of CO2 equivalent per mega joule. And then we compare that emission statements. We say, okay, what are the savings here? And so that's an important process. We take it very seriously and we get it certified by kind of ICCU plus depending on the products and what we're trying to do. It gives you an idea of what, what we have to go through and what hoops we, we, we jump through in and ensuring that it's kind of truly low carbon products that we produce here.

Tom Raftery: 16:02

And we've referred to it several times as a drop in product. Essentially that means no changes to the ship's engines, you can just swap it in and sail away. Zero problems.

Nicholas Ball: 16:18

Yeah. That's a incredibly important point and why we do what we do. The products we produce are true drop-ins, meaning they comply with existing fossil standards. And currently, for example, marine gas oil, which is the product we produce, it's around 20 30% of what, shipping companies would, would purchase anyway. So essentially being able to buy our products, which has been tested in engines, it's been tested with blending studies with other sustainable products, other fossil fuels, and shown to work as well, if not even better than standard fossil products. We essentially can be used as a drop in replacement. We can be blended, we can be used as is. We can be traded in the market as it was. And, and so that makes it extremely interesting for shipping companies because most sustainable products require not only the infrastructure change, not only the engine changes, retrofitting, which is extremely costly, and in many cases unknown to be the right, fuels. And you have to make that decision early on. It makes this a, a product that can be, you know, used in transition immediately right now delivering impact today, which, which is a very valuable point for our products.

Tom Raftery: 17:55

And you mentioned at the start that could be suitable for aviation, road haulage or maritime, but you're focusing in on maritime. Why that as opposed to road haulage or aviation?

Nicholas Ball: 18:09

So as a company and as me personally, but as a company as well. We truly believe in the electrification in everything we can do globally. Like we are not advocates of fuel for everything, right? That, that is not the intention. I know it sounds crazy. We're, we're called X Fuel, right? That's what we do. And we've been doing that for a long time. But, the numbers don't lie. And we're, we're scientists and we're engineers, right? So electrification is by far the best way to decarbonise every sector that we can. The reason why we're going with shipping and, and obviously in the future aviation is because they're the most hard to abate, the hardest to decarbonise by a long shot. It's actually an interesting statistic. So when we, we've obviously done a lot of fundraising over the last, three, four years. When we looked into the data from the IEA, we found something really interesting. A little bit depressing but interesting. And that was that oil consumption for shipping and aviation specifically. So if you take those two data points outside of the general transportation sectors, oil consumption's actually projected to increase 60% by 2050. And. That is something that people are not quite understanding and, and it's a mixture of reasons, right? It's hard to abate but also growth in those sectors. You know, we're not stopping to transport goods around the world. But also at best, even if we met all pledges fully on time and fully pledges not what's in policy, but actually just pledges, we would only reduce it 15% by 2050. And this was already a, a year ago, so I'm sure those numbers have been updated and, and given where we are with the US may be even worse today. I think when we realised that, we realised that actually our focus has to be those sectors really, because even a heavy good vehicles we're seeing some movements in battery technologies, electrification, where could be interesting and, and, and could get there. but that's not to say we can't produce that product and we could produce other products. We could produce, you know, for passenger vehicles, no issue, right? It's just diesel. But we just don't go after those sectors because we just don't believe in them. So yeah, that, that's the reason really. It's a mixture of technical reasons, but also just fundamental beliefs of what we think should happen in the decarbonisation journey in transportation.

Tom Raftery: 20:22

And you, you mentioned you've got that pilot plant that you're operating at the moment. What's your pathway from going from pilot to powering all the world's ships?

Nicholas Ball: 20:38

Yeah, it's definitely a difficult pathway for anyone that goes down this route of, actually trying to make and deliver, impact in the sector. So we have two pilot plants deployed. We're commissioning another one right now as we speak, in fact that you might hear some background noise. We're on site, but we are moving to commercial activity. So we're building our first commercial facility right now. We recently got funded by the EU as well as some other capital that we've managed to secure earlier this year. And so we're going to build our first commercial facility. It's a modular facility. All our technologies we try to modularise for, reasons of financing and, and others, which we can go into later, but really at this scale, we're moving to a single module, which can produce around about 14,000 tons per year of product for the shipping sector, from around 16,000 tons of waste. That's kind of the, what we're looking at. That journey takes a long time. It takes, you know, engineering efforts. It takes a, a lot of different things as, as we're moving towards commercialisation. But we're excited about the next phase of commercialisation and where we're gonna go next. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 21:40

Okay. what kind of timeframe are you thinking of for this scale up?

Nicholas Ball: 21:47

So for our first commercial facility, we are aiming for the end of next year, end of 2026. And then more scalable production by beginning of 27. That's our timeline. We are looking and have a number of projects around the world that we are developing with different partners and quite excited about the, phase of development after that as well. We wanna get our first one up and running to kind of iron out the kinks before we go out for a second round of multiple projects. And I think that's also quite interesting with what we do in terms of the projects are very much globally distributed, just like shipping is and just like waste is, which is a decentralised, feedstock in many ways. And then of course the replication of the modules is what makes this, should make this easier as we scale this out and be able to move faster later on.

Tom Raftery: 22:31

And if we were to fast forward five or 10 years, where do you see the advanced drop in fuels fitting in alongside the likes of hydrogen, ammonia and the other e-fuels that we mentioned earlier?

Nicholas Ball: 22:45

Well, I'd love to get your perspective on this because I, I've listened to a couple of your podcasts, but, obviously, and, and, and not just in preparation, but even before, so I'm a listener, but I think. the issue that I'm seeing is for the other alternative fuels to be contenders, and I wish this wasn't the case, is that we essentially need a lower cost energy, right? So they all depend on low cost energy to achieve what they achieve, you know, and, and ultimately all comes down to production of hydrogen as well as the capture of, carbon, of, of some form. That, doesn't matter whether it's methanols or whether it's, ammonias in, in many sense. The, issue with that is I just don't see that coming fast enough in the time that we need. In fact, if anything, I see that every time that we produce more, energy, we find ways of consuming more energy. AI being a great example today.

Tom Raftery: 23:31

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 23:33

and so see this, kind of crash where I don't see where we're gonna actually decarbonise aviation or, shipping any time in the timelines that we need. And so I, I think of us as a backstop, I think of us as a transit at this stage of what the materials that we're working on. We obviously working with longer term, large scale or larger scale feedstocks that we, we hope to bring to the market as well. But I think of us as like a backstop to that industry and trying to approach waste feed stocks, advanced, feed stocks and achieving advanced bio and advanced recycled carbon fuels to the sector that are interesting from a price point. And that can actually deliver impact. But do I believe we can develop a technology or develop a, a company that can decarbonise the entire industry? I don't think anyone can say that. That that's, a multi-trillion dollar industry. Just being open and honest though, Tom,

Tom Raftery: 24:23

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 24:23

but yeah, I'm not sure what you, what you're thoughts are on the energy side and the transition there.

Tom Raftery: 24:29

Yeah, I, I think hydrogen is a, an expensive distraction, frankly, and the hydro and the fuels based off of hydrogen. It's massively, massively inefficient. If we were to use green hydrogen to create fuels, you're talking about, let's say we're taking wind as an example. You need three wind turbines, just picking numbers outta the air here to create the amount of hydrogen to convert into a fuel versus an electric one if you went straight to electric. And I know we haven't got electric's, you know, powering big ships yet, but I think that's where we're headed eventually. A single turbine would get the same amount of traction if you're going direct wind turbine to electricity versus the three turbines you'd need to make the hydrogen to send the ship the same distance. know, it's that inefficient

Nicholas Ball: 25:29

Yep.

Tom Raftery: 25:30

electricity is three times more efficient And you said it yourself earlier. So I think hydrogen is a distraction. It's an expensive distraction. It's a handy distraction for the fossil fuel companies 'cause they make most of the hydrogen today with methane reforming. So they're pushing it. But I don't see it long term happening and we're, we're seeing it in land transportation where, cars are shifting to EVs 10 years ago when the Nissan Leaf. Probably 14 years ago at this point, when the new Nissan Leaf first launched, it could go about 70 miles, you know, a little over 120 kilometers on a single charge. And the new leaf that's coming out this year can go 400 and 480 kilometers, you know, 300 and something miles on a single charge. That's how the battery technology has advanced in that short space of time, 10 to 15 years. And the price point is still the same for the car. And because of that increase in the quality of the batteries we're seeing now road haulage shifting to electric. I mean, again, you had this whole distraction around hydrogen and people built hydrogen trucks. we, we had that whole fiasco and buses as well. And any pilots that have gone out on those have failed miserably because the economics just doesn't work. And also the infrastructure isn't there. Whereas electric trucks are coming on in leaps and bounds now in China. And of course where it happens in in China, it'll happen in the rest of the world a few years later. And I think the maritime wealth sector will see the same thing just a decade or so later. So I think, yeah, I think we're heading to the electrification of shipping transport initially, like with road transport for the smaller ships and eventually longer term we'll get to the container ships as well. I mean, the container ships is probably even easier because you just take a couple of containerized batteries. And you know, they take the place of a couple of the containers and you're off. And when you get to a new port, you just swap out, you know, the container batteries for new container batteries, and it's, it's a swap. And off you go.

Nicholas Ball: 27:44

In theory, I mean, I think when you look at the energy consumption of liquid fuels in a container ship, it is, massive. It's an enormous amount of energy that's being used just for a single journey. I, I can't remember the exact, numbers from equivalent of a, an entire country's day consumption in Europe, a small country in, in the EU. I think

Tom Raftery: 28:03

Hmm.

Nicholas Ball: 28:04

it was something, it was something crazy like that with the latest comparisons there. I think that battery technology will take if it ever does, will take a very long time to make that economically viable. Because of course with, the energy density of fuels themselves, or fuel oil specifically, is just so high that to achieve something like that or remotely near that from battery tech for shipping will be very difficult. And the same applies for aviation, because of course the weight obviously matters as well, right? I mean, we're talking about and size, right? So of course we're going liquid if we liquefy hydrogen or whatever it's, we're gonna be doing, or or pressurising, I should say. It, it's a whole nother, whole nother ball game. So I think, yeah, I agree with you that we're gonna have advances in those sectors, which is why heavy good vehicles has not really been for us a major contender or passenger cars, right?'cause it's all, it's the same product, right? It's diesel, all these modes of transports are obviously consumers for us in many ways, but it just doesn't make sense longer term. And so hence why we're kind of going with the shipping and aviation. But yeah, completely agree. and I think, yeah, the numbers obviously don't stack up in terms of the inefficiencies in producing kind of a hydrogen derived fuel. I've had this conversation with other, people in terms of, even if we're producing renewable energy, you know, where should that really be going? It should be decarbonising, our grid. It should be decarbonising all the industries that need it and not using it for liquid fuel today at least you know. If we found it in a place, if we became in a place where we had an abundance of renewable electricity, then I think the argument could, could be interesting. It'd be okay, maybe this makes sense.

Tom Raftery: 29:31

The, the trouble.

Nicholas Ball: 29:32

and we won't be there.

Tom Raftery: 29:33

Yeah, the, the trouble with that argument though is if you have a place with an abundance of renewable electricity, then it, it's unlikely that you'd have an abundance of renewable electricity 24 7. And if you want to run, yeah, if you want to run electrolyzers economically, they have to be running 24 7. And so if you're only running them eight hours a day. You've lost 66% of their their, their, well you, you've increased their ROI, twice, 2, 2, 3 times.

Nicholas Ball: 30:10

yeah.

Tom Raftery: 30:10

it makes, it makes no sense.

Nicholas Ball: 30:11

that we're kind of yeah. On, off kind of electrolyzers. But I think, we're missing the point there. I think just because you have excess renewable energy in a place, the issue is then it shouldn't be in that place, right? It should be kind of infrastructure changes, grid, base load battery tech,

Tom Raftery: 30:29

it. Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 30:30

it shouldn't be, let's, use it for this.

Tom Raftery: 30:32

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 30:33

that's where I lose that little bit.

Tom Raftery: 30:36

What, what's happening today is where you do have an abundance of renewables. Places like Scotland, for example with wind, you're getting the wind curtailed. And that's a problem as, as you said, of it being in the wrong place. What you do there is you build interconnectors And you just, I mean, the argument that people put against for, or put against renewables is the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine, and that's rubbish. That's absolute rubbish. Yes, the sun does always shine, and yes, the wind does always blow. Just not always in the same place, but the 24 hours a day, the sun is shining. So you just need to build interconnections And you can move that electricity. China are building massive, massive HVDC cabling to move gigawatts of renewable energy outta the desert into the places where it needs to be used. So, yeah, no, the, you, you're right. The, the abundance argument is, is fallacious.

Nicholas Ball: 31:35

Yeah, it is. And, then by the way. They will be that, that we, we need hydrogen, right? We use hydrogen today, right? I mean the, the, the, the biggest use of hydrogen is obviously enough in our production of fertilizers, right? Ammonia. If anything, it should be used to decarbonise those sectors first. I think rather than be used as a fuel, which is in itself is, is inefficient, right? So I'm a big advocate for, for producing green hydrogen, but for the right reasons

Tom Raftery: 31:58

Hmm.

Nicholas Ball: 31:59

you know, obviously for the right places. The second biggest use of hydrogen, I believe is, is in refining right? So it's treating our, our liquid fuels and hydro treating such. The other kind of implication of using less liquid fuels is of course that we would need less hydrogen anyway. And, and the question is that we could kind of green that and put that into, fertilizer production rather than turning it into a liquid fuels or fuels in general, and burning them which seems crazy, right? But anyway, there, there's a bit of a tangent there, Tom, but I, I wanted to get your opinion on, on that because it's it's an interesting discussion.

Tom Raftery: 32:31

Yeah. Coming back as you, as you said, off that tangent, what would success look like to you personally by 2035 say?

Nicholas Ball: 32:39

2035 success for us is essentially being a major contender, a major leader in low carbon drop in fuels for the transportation sector. And I think that there is a massive gap in the market where there are basically two options, right? You either are going for something that we all know, but very expensive options. Or you are, you have not put your eye on the ball, which would be the fossil industry. The oil and gas industry, which have completely kind of moved off renewables more recently again. It seems to be going back and forth here. And so I think there's a huge gap in the market for us to be able to take as a market leader in that. I think the closest company to us is something like Neste, right? Who are producing kind of sustainable renewable fuels, things like that. But yeah, that would be a success for me is being a market leader in that industry, and providing real options to customers that have no options, like there

Tom Raftery: 33:29

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 33:30

The shipping company does, and not all of them right, but, do wanna decarbonise. They do see that this is an important step. They just also don't see how this is gonna work if they suddenly have to pay three, four times more for their fuels. And who is paying for that extra, right?

Tom Raftery: 33:43

Yeah.

Nicholas Ball: 33:43

who's going? Is it the end consumer or so this is the issue? So yeah, that, that's where I see success.

Tom Raftery: 33:49

Fair enough. You've built a company on the belief that innovation can clean up some of the dirtiest industries. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs tackling climate challenges?

Nicholas Ball: 34:02

Oh, that's a big one. That's a big one. So, I would say first one would be focus on economics. I think we already covered this topic in our discussion, but again you can have the most sustainable product out there. but without the right economic case and the price point, then, then you'll have no impact. And obviously in that case, no success probably. And there's a great, a great post by Extentia. It's one of the venture capitalists in the space at Climate Tech who have this priority list. And they say what, startups sell. And at the top is kind of sustainability and at the bottom is price. And in between this kind of resilience and other things there and performance. Then on the other side it's like, what does industry want? And it's completely the reverse right at the top, it's basically price, and at the bottom it's sustainability. So I think understanding those, priorities is really important. The other is, around fundraising, around sizing your, projects appropriately, making sure that you can actually get 'em off the ground and actually have impact. So don't go too big, don't go too small. And, and all that journey around fundraising, finding capital, whether it be through grants, whether it be through obviously venture capitalists and other corporates and things like that. Keep strong, keep at it. And it's the long game. It's not the short game. It's just not something I believe you're gonna have success overnight. Right.

Tom Raftery: 35:16

Yeah. Yeah. Fair, fair. And if the shipping industry could do one thing tomorrow to accelerate decarbonisation, what would it be?

Nicholas Ball: 35:25

I would say a, a few of these are, doing this already, but it's to . some kind of coalition whereby they commit to large quantities of money to purchase low carbon fuels. I think the the purchasing side is what the most important part to get everything off the ground and to actually finance some of these projects. So some, some of these are doing this already, so I'm not saying this is not the case, but, but there are definitely, there's a very long tail of shipping companies, right? So you probably, you only hear about the top five in the news in decarbonising and the rest, have a very different thought process around decarbonisation and, and obviously are very against it in many ways. Because of the fact they can't afford it, right? So they don't have balance sheets that can afford these kind of things. And, and so this is where I think there's there's a big issue there. Yeah, I would say that's the main, the main thing they can do and obviously be open to other alternative fuels and, and think about how they can support companies like ourselves and others.

Tom Raftery: 36:19

Yeah. Yeah. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Nicholas. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Nicholas Ball: 36:31

No, I think we covered a lot of, a lot of things. No, I, I think we have it all, all covered. I like the, the conversation part we had around the energy pricing and what we should be doing and efficiencies. I think that was an important, important part of the piece. But yeah,

Tom Raftery: 36:44

Brilliant. Okay, Nicholas. if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things that we discussed here in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Nicholas Ball: 36:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on a personal level, of course reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to have a chat about anything and every, everything around climate change. And of course we have our website, x fuel.com. Right? So feel free to read about a little bit about what we're doing there.

Tom Raftery: 37:06

Perfect. Okay, Nicholas, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Nicholas Ball: 37:11

Thank you Tom. Appreciate it.

Tom Raftery: 37:13

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.