Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
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Power Struggle
Hydrogen, Gas & the Real Energy Future
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What if the future of clean energy isn’t about replacing fossil fuels — but building on what already works?
In this new episode of Power Struggle, chemical engineer and hydrogen advocate Matthew Klippenstein joins host Stewart Muir for a refreshingly honest conversation about Canada’s energy future. They explore why only 29% of hydrogen projects succeed, why natural gas is still essential for a stable grid, and why the energy transition isn’t a “clean vs. dirty” debate — it’s about resilience, realism, and respect.
From the January 2024 cold snap to dispatchable power and the future of oil sands as carbon fiber, this conversation cuts through the noise to offer grounded, forward-thinking insights for those serious about building sustainable systems.
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
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Setting The Stage: Hydrogen And Identity
SPEAKER_01Maybe hydrogen has allowed me to experience life as someone with environmental ideals, but still being an outsider because overwhelmingly, almost all the hydrogen in the world is produced from natural gas.
SPEAKER_00I'm excited to welcome Matthew Klippenstein to Power Struggle. Matthew is a professional engineer and a longtime advocate for hydrogen solutions, fighting for an alternative fuel source for the future. He's been at the forefront of clean energy for over two decades, from electric vehicles and wind to today's complex energy systems. A frequent commentator, writer, and industry voice, Matthew helps bridge the gap between emerging technologies, public policy, and real-world deployment, often in unexpected ways. Today we're going to be talking about hydrogen. We'll be talking about LNG, natural gas, and we'll be talking about wolves and bison. Matthew Klippenstein, it's great to have you finally into power struggle. I've been waiting for this day for a long time. I just I love our energy conversations over the last almost a decade. Right. Well, thank you very much for having me, Stuart. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. You're an engineer, right? Yes. What kind of engineer?
SPEAKER_01So I got my degree in chemical engineering, and uh I've uh worked uh a lot of my time in hydrogen, uh, but also some time in wind energy, uh EVs, EV infrastructure, and I've been, but the majority of my career has been in the hydrogen orbit, I guess you could say.
SPEAKER_00Okay, chemical engineering. Well, I'm a historian by training, got into journalism. That was my career, so I don't really have any of the formal, you know, science background. And yet I find more and more in my career, my life, my travels, I I'm to I'm talking to engineers and geologists, biologists, uh also to lawyers and parliamentarians and you know people wrestling with all this. And it's you know the 360 of these energy issues cover all the bases. Right. And to understand, you know, the totality of it is is virtually impossible. Yet you kind of have to to see where we are in the world, right?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Right. Well, I think uh maybe to name-drop uh mutual friend Dunberg, you know, energy is life. That's his uh his slogan. Energy is life. Um and just riffing off of that, actually, you're being from the humanities, my being from the the sciences. Um in order to deploy any technology, not just an energy technology, there's there's a cost dimension, but there's also a consent dimension. So STEM, science engineering, they can make a technology cheap. You want that, low cost. But you really need the humanities to win the consent to be able to deploy that technology. And so there's the the sweet spot for any technology is that it is cheap and it's widely accepted. And I think there's something
STEM, Humanities, And Consent To Build
SPEAKER_01heartening in the fact that, yes, you need STEM, but you also need the humanities, which have been maybe underrepresented in the public dialogue for a number of decades.
SPEAKER_00The big opportunities that we've got in Canada. And right now, probably more than ever since I started ResourceWorks in 2014, it seems like the majority of Canadians are lined up with what I see as a kind of energy climate rationalist point of view, where they're saying, yeah, we we're gonna need to build things. You know, for a long time it seemed like even if people were thinking that, it was like I'm not gonna step out and say so. I'm certainly not at the barbecue or around the Thanksgiving table with my relatives. It was just something that you know people kind of held back. But now suddenly uh the world has changed. You know, trade relations have changed and so much else. Um what do you think has changed over the years?
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, just to riff off, uh one of the few humanities courses I took, I think it was a Greek philosophy, somebody Heraclitus said the only constant in life has changed. So there my Professor Harding out of UBC, probably retired by now. Um I think one of the dimensions that has changed is that um if we think on the on the political spectrum, then uh I think in past decades uh you often had political progressives being opposed to projects, political conservatives being uh in favor of projects uh for various reasons. A lot of them are on the fossil fuel side. But it's like in hockey you never play offense 100% of the time, you never play defense 100% of the time. What we see with uh, say, renewables projects in the United States is that we now have progressive political groups who want to help these things get built, and then we have conservative groups who are using the tactics perfected in past decades to impede them or block them. So I think uh I guess one of the interesting things in my life is that the first half, you know, um my wing of the political spectrum has generally been against projects. Now our our part of the spectrum is like, wow, you know, renewables are going to be a big portion, clean energy material, minerals. And so they want to get things built. And um I'm sure there's something uh parallel that's happened on the conservative side as well, uh, in terms of maybe there's a you know, there's a uh predisposition to like uh oil, gas projects, but uh maybe the aspects of mining, say, might not be in favor to rural communities, conservative voting communities in certain contexts, right? So it's a nice um it's a nice dynamic. Yeah, it's nice to know that my life isn't all one way. You know,
Politics Flip: Project Support And Opposition
SPEAKER_01the pendulum comes back and forth.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. When you say your end of the spectrum, just to be clear, that means left of center. Yeah. Well, uh yeah, I I I think we have seen this shift. You you mentioned the tactics of opposition to oil and gas projects have suddenly, at least in the USA, been adopted by the right to oppose wind projects and things like that. Um that that's interesting. What are some of those tactics you're referring to?
SPEAKER_01Um so just before we get to the tactics, um maybe speaking to my experience, so in 2016, I think this was the summer of 2016, um I went through the company that I worked for out to rural Oklahoma, and um we were helping a soon-to-be Donald Trump voter, he told us himself, set up a large wind farm, set up data collection for a large wind farm, on the local land. And he was very enthused about this project because it would provide royalties, it would help build a new school and maybe community amenities. Uh, the same year, I was assigned to help a wind farm in Canada, possibly the only one to get sued by the local community to do some technical work for them. And so your instinct would be to say, well, you know, Oklahoma, they wouldn't like wind. Ontario, they would like wind. Uh, but it was a it was a perfect encapsulation of the fact that consent really does matter, right? You can't just ignore stakeholders. Um, you might have unexpected places where projects go forward and unexpected places where they don't. The most famous or infamous example uh in terms of tactics was uh there was a book or maybe a movie that came out, like How to Blow Up a Pipeline. And I'm generally in favor of free speech as long as it doesn't incite violence. So I'm okay with that, uh, the the fact that it was published. I have the realization, though, that people who oppose renewables projects are going to read that book, take notes, and might also use the same, you know, whatever those things happen to be, uh, in terms of blocking or vandalizing electric infrastructure. This this did happen actually in Washington State around the time the movie came out, uh, but uh it it was like a little bit before there was no known connection to them and this particular book. Uh some electrical substations got attacked. Uh and so in terms of the change, um, I guess I go back to that. No one plays offense all the time or defense all the time, right? It's like there is something out there, maybe you will embrace it, but it might also be used against you, right? So you have to, you can't be too um hard-headed in terms of uh, I don't know, um declaring something good or evil. It's more like, is it useful or is it detrimental?
SPEAKER_00We were comparing uh notes before we started talking here, Matthew, and we mutually realized that it's exactly to the day, seven years, since the biggest capital project, private project in Canadian history, was uh cleared by investors. That would be the LNG, Liquefied Natural Gas Canada, LNG Canada project in Kidamat, which finally opened in late June, early July of uh this year, 2025. So exactly seven years ago, today, was when they announced that FID. A short time after that, my group, ResourceWorks, we did uh an event to bring some of the economic experts together. We did an event in Vancouver and I asked you to come and speak because I I knew what you were doing in hydrogen, and I also knew at the time there was a real hunger to learn about, okay, what does the future hold? You know, not just the short-term future, in a few years when L and G Canada gets built and starts shipping natural gas to where it's needed in the world, but also over the longer term. You know, it it commenced when we heard what you had to say about hydrogen and how it fit into the future. Right. A bit of a journey. And now, seven years later, I I think that hydrogen story has gone in directions that maybe would have been hard to predict at the time. And I want to find out why that happened. And I would even say, you know, what happened to hydrogen? Right. Matthew. So take me back to how you got involved in the hydrogen story. Trevor Burrus, Jr. So I was a co-op student.
SPEAKER_01I did a co-op term at uh Ballard Power Systems, a local firm. Right here eventually. And um I I wasn't sure what to do with a chemical engineering degree because I thought that I wanted to be in an organization which wasn't 10,000 people or larger. Right. How could I make
Tactics Of Resistance And Infrastructure Risks
SPEAKER_01my mark? This seemed interesting. It had kind of a niche in terms of its potential for uh environmental benefit to be a uh a lower-emitting solution than liquid fossil fuels. Uh and so I uh I did a co-op there. I worked there after I graduated, uh, that and some related companies for about 15 years. Uh it's uh it's been a fascinating journey uh hydrogen-wise, because you see uh many of the characteristics of early technologies. Um there's a metaphor called the Gartner hype cycle, uh, where something has some event to kick it off. Maybe we're with at this stage with AI. There's a peak of expectations that AI is going to take over the world. Then there's some sort of trough of disappointment where you realize the difficulties are that come in, and then you gradually develop into a sustainable market.
SPEAKER_00Just on Ballard power, so that's a Vancouver company. I remember when that was surging, you talk about the uh hype cycle. Yes. And I was in the news business back when Ballard was this hot news story. I think that stock ran up over $200. Uh it was part of the internet bubble, yes. Yeah, yeah, it was huge. And the promise of it was that you would have hydrogen as a transportation fuel, but then they started building like generators, and they had to deal with, I think, Coleman, like Coleman stoves for taking it into the remote places. And it it had this bright future, but then it didn't end that way. Although Ballard is still around today. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there you were at the peak of the hype cycle, starting your career in hydrogen.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Uh so um I think we've had another hype cycle that peaked around 2021 for a lot of clean energy technologies. Uh what happened is Biden gets elected in the November. Uh uh people rush into uh renewables or other cleaner technologies. I think possibly nuclear might have even part of that as well, because it is a clean uh clean source of energy. Uh and then what happened is the expectations get high, and then you get this weeding out process where the folks who have some substance to their plans uh tend to survive, and a lot of folks fall by the wayside. Um to describe this is that a recent publication by the Hydrogen Council, it's an industry association worldwide, hydrogen trade association basically. So they found that about 500 of their 1700 tracked project announcements had reached FID or later. So that's a survival rate of maybe 29%. And without context, that's difficult to get a hold of. And that's a that's a fairly similar survival rate with the with the hydrogen projects worldwide. More interestingly, um, we have interesting data from the United States where one of the national labs, I think it's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, um, compiled all the solar and wind projects that applied for transmission access. This is between 2000 and 2018. As of the end of 2023, only about 25 of those, 25% of those project proposals had actually been built. This applies both for solar and for wind. Uh and so you have this, I think, universal low survival rate for uh technologies that's very promising and emerging. Hydrogen's in the in the uh the doghouse, if you will, where a lot of the fluffy projects that didn't really have a good economic case have gotten shelved, and then we have a more sustainable core going forward.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell When you look closer at hydrogen as, say, an export fuel, and although that's talked about a lot, it's not done much, if at all. And you say, okay, what are the requirements of having a mature industry involved in the transport of uh gaseous uh fuel sources like natural gas, for example? Well, in LNG,
LNG Canada’s Milestone And Hydrogen’s Arc
SPEAKER_00you've got uh probably close to or more than a thousand LNG carriers ships. You uh you have probably around a thousand uh LNG tankers in the world that take LNG to where it needs to go. You've got the supply chain on either side. You've got you know the liquefication and then at the customer and you've got the regasification side, you've got the um commodity pricing so that markets understand what this thing is worth. And you can do contracts 20 years in advance, you can do spot trading, all of that stuff is just normal, like you're buying stocks in Microsoft or pork bellies or something. There's like it's all normalized. None of that exists for hydrogen yet. So I mean, the it's not it's not a knock on hydrogen that it's a new emerging thing. It's just that it hasn't had time for some of these sort of basic structural elements of being a traded commodity to come into existence yet.
SPEAKER_01Um not all the all the steps are in place or all the puzzle pieces maybe are in place. Yeah. And now to me, that's a feature, because I think it's more exciting to go from zero to one with respect to hydrogen markets, regional markets. Um it's it's wonderful to go from say one to three, maybe in terms of total electricity usage uh in various countries as we decarbonize. But to me, I think it's it's cooler uh to look at going from zero to one. However big that one winds up being, I think it's really cool to be on the front, see that at the front edge. It's like, I don't know, watching an egg hatch into a chick, maybe, something like that.
SPEAKER_00It's like, wow, that happened. Yeah. The innovations required are bridging a much bigger space, proportionately more influential space at the early end, whereas the later ones are about refinement and the market fit and that end of things.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. So we um we have used as a as a globe natural gas in large volume for, I don't know, a hundred years, something like this. And um before you had carbon pricing or concerns about pollution, why wouldn't you use natural gas? And now a lot of the energy in the natural gas comes from the hydrogen, maybe half from the carbon atom, half from the hydrogen. And so it it makes perfect sense to me that hydrogen wouldn't scale up under those conditions. There's no carbon pricing, there's no worry about pollution. Um the neat thing with hydrogen is there are a variety of ways to uh obtain it, and then where you can substitute it for other things, then that's a great way of uh decarbonizing, uh being cleaner, uh, while also maintaining a lot of the human knowledge about gas processing, for example. Um it is there's a popular bumper sticker, a popular slogan about electrify everything. And I think as a bumper sticker, it works well. Um I think there's a little bit of an analogy I could make to Yellowstone National Park, of all things. Okay. So once upon a time, um, you know, um ignoring indigenous wisdom, um, you know, folks like you and me had the idea that bison were good and wolves are bad. Yellowstone National Park should only have bison. Um after many years of um patient advocacy, uh, the park rangers or whoever reintroduced wolves. There are a bunch of beautiful, viral YouTube videos about this where the introduction of wolves or the maintenance of a wolf population provided this ripple effect of uh ecological benefits all across the park. And um I think it's a very similar situation here with gas energy. Um electrons can do a lot of stuff, that's fantastic. Molecules have a role as well. And um I think hydrogen is uh well placed to be part of that, probably not all of it, but to to play a part of that in providing a really resilient,
Hype Cycles, Ballard, And Project Survival
SPEAKER_01robust energy system which stays clean. Um and uh because you're not trying to like turn everything into bison, basically. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00One of the things about hydrogen is it seems to have served as a proxy in the energy culture wars, if if that's a phrase, you know, where you have this polarization, you know. Uh hey, I'm all for clean energy, but when you realize that clean energy kind of exists in in juxtaposition to its opposite number, dirty energy, um, you realize, wait a minute, uh th this seems like it's more political language than say functional, you know, engineering description. And I I don't I don't criticize anyone for you know using the term to to advance it. I don't mean it in that sense, but still I'm I am critical of it because what it seems to perpetuate, which is this kind of uh, you know, manichaean uh you know uh zero-sum game of well, what side are you on, clean or dirty? Well, it turns out that no matter what side you think you're on, eighty percent of the energy in your life comes from what some would call dirty fuels. Well, fossil fuels, yeah. Fossil fuels, oil and gas and coal combined is that 80 percent, or maybe a little less, depending on where you live. You know, 75 to 80. It's it's changing very slowly over time, but it's changing it's gone down. But um so it it seems to me that if we want to be consistent with how we live and what we do, you know, we do you know, eat food that's been fertilized with these natural gas-made fertilizers, and we go on airplanes, it et cetera, et cetera. Um, you know, uh do we want to spend our lives in the sackcloth and ashes of self-criticism for consuming the things that are required for the very act of life? Or do we have some confidence that we are able, as humans, to apply technologies and knowledge, uh efficiencies in a progressively better way? And so we can get away from the polarizations, which maybe serve some political purpose, I guess, but aren't necessarily that helpful. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Noting that in academia, um, there is a desire to get away from clean versus dirty and to use an objective measure like um carbon intensity. There are fierce discussions about what those carbon intensities should be, but in academia, at least there's a broad uh agreement, there's a general consensus. Um I would say that uh maybe hydrogen has allowed me to experience life as someone with environmental ideals, but still being an outsider, because overwhelmingly almost all the hydrogen in the world is produced from natural gas. Uh and so on that account, um many people uh who I would otherwise, whose um approval, say that I would otherwise you know, uh hope to achieve, classified hydrogen in the dirty category, which is kind of annoying. I think this goes back to this whole consent versus cost dimension of technology, because if I had been in solar and wind all my life, I would have this massive blind spot of what it feels like when someone calls your you know your pet passion dirty. Um I I do want to just acknowledge that as one of the upsides, say on the hydrogen front. Um in terms of decarbonizing, both uh red, I think listened even to Vaklav Smil. Uh he has uh he has the fact behind him that uh the energy transitions are quite slow. And I think um did you also interview um Fresa's the field for the right.
SPEAKER_00We had him on power struggle last year. That's right. And yet he argues that, well, there's not really an energy transition, there's an energy addition because it takes way longer for fuels like wood. We're still using as much wood as we ever did. We might be using it in somewhat different ways. And then Cole and and his his point was these things just don't happen. It's not an off-switch.
SPEAKER_01I have absorbed their insights and adjusted my energy transition or energy evolution, maybe. That might be a preferred term some listeners have. Um one thing I note from Fresaw's is that you had this situation where a lot of wood in in the UK in the 19th century was used instead of being burnt for firewood, it was used to prop up the mines to dig up the coal. That's and to me, that would still be uh a category that maybe we can have uh a huge success out of in Alberta with the oil sands. The big criticism of the oil sands is how carbon-intensive it is to burn them. But if you could use um the starting bitumen to make carbon fiber precursors or asphaltine,
Why Hydrogen Markets Lag LNG
SPEAKER_01one big insight from Fresaw's is that wood consumption in the UK increased even as coal came on because you used the wood to prop up the mines. Um that's a case where you're no longer burning the wood. And uh for us in the 21st century in Canada, I think the metaphor is well, what if we use the oil sands for something apart from burning them? If you use them to make high-value carbon fibers or other products, maybe asphalt components, then does it really matter how much we scoop out of the ground, as long as they're not being burnt and causing CO2 emissions. We have to make sure that the environment is treated appropriately, of course. Uh and so I'm hopeful, even with even with what uh Fresaux has noted, well, with what SMIL has noted, is that even if we wind up consuming more of a particular good, as long as we're not combusting it and adding that CO2 the atmosphere, as much of a worry. I guess the other thing that is a bit of a tailwind, a bit of an advantage that SMIL and Fresaux get is that since about 1800, world population has gone from 1 billion to 8 billion. We're not going to 64 billion, you know, anytime soon. And so um I would be really interested in like the year 2100 to spiritually hover over with SMIL to see if that little chart of exponentially uh increasing energy growth continues, or at least at that rate.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well, the current trends which have been revised on population growth is that we're gonna see a flattening even sooner. There's a whole bunch of countries that were expected to to flatten out in in growth later, but suddenly are going into that that that decline in population growth simply because women are having fewer children. Right. In all kinds of countries where uh it wasn't thought that would happen so fast. So we could be in 2100 and suddenly there's a smaller, I I'm not sure if a smaller population than now. I'm not sure what the curve looks like, but the you know, kind of doomsday scenarios uh really no longer have the same traction if these trends continue.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. That's right. Um maybe I want to emphasize that we want to have human flourishing. We want to have everyone or as many people as possible having a first-world equivalent uh lifestyle of the year 2025. Um that will consume more energy. Um I think a lot of that energy, just based on the rate of build-out, will come from uh renewables. Um I think like the analogy I've sometimes used is that poorer countries, maybe they get like one of these uh 12-ounce pop cans worth of more fossil fuel use. But they'll get like a four-liter jug of milk worth of renewables. Um I still see that there is, and it's universally recognized, there's a need for dispatchable energy. You want to have things that can turn on in the middle of winter, for example, to keep your grid going. Um at the same time, uh, you know, the pace of technology, the the build-out of uh any technology really in China uh will allow us to attain that flourishing, probably with fewer fossil fuels than was expected by
Electrons And Molecules: The Wolf–Bison Analogy
SPEAKER_01cynics of renewable energy growth.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you think of Africa and cell phones versus wireline, Africa without a lot of telephony, suddenly it has uh all the telephony it needs because people have cell phones. It skipped that phase of having to do this massive copper wire build-out of a phone system. And and I think the suggestion is that it it will also be able to skip um massive energy infrastructure from the say North American or European uh trajectory. Right. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Now I don't think that's gonna skip entirely. It's not like a clean break. But maybe it sounds debatable as to whether it will play out that way. But let's see what happens. Yeah, I I would imagine that like when I was I think when I was in school, I there was an article in uh in a journal saying that, you know, it would require more copper than there was in the world to connect every person in China to a uh telephone, right? And uh you you have these, you know, we've been we've only had 30 years of oil left since I was like a kid in 1980, right? We do we are pretty good at uh obtaining more resources. Well, I guess what I want to say is that I can see a lot of energy addition, maybe the vast majority of energy addition being brought through renewables, through solar in particular, batteries, wind. Um, but it is hubris to declare that we don't need dispatchable, you know, concentrated sources of energy, which is what we'd uh we we've often used hydrocarbons are, fossil fuels when they're from fossil sources. Uh and so I would come in on the um midpoint between the uh very idealistic people who want everything to run on renewables. Maybe they don't have as much on the consent challenges with transmission, say. Um, but uh nor am I in the category of you know, fossil fuels will increase in capacity forever.
SPEAKER_00Could you just come back to firm or or dispatchable power and explain what that is? Because hearing it from you, you're a hydrogen advocate, you're a renewables advocate, you've said you're from the left side of the political spectrum. Uh what does someone of your description say about what you might think of as natural gas typically, but it could be coal. Increasingly in North America, though, we've we've swapped um large amounts of coal for large amounts of natural gas. So that is the new firm power, right? Right. And how does it work?
SPEAKER_01So um there is a catch-all phrase to say that wind and solar are intermittent. And it's true they're not, they're not they don't the wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun's not always out. Um there's a slightly more precise terminology used to say that wind is intermittent. You can't really predict uh when it'll come or not, um, but that solar is variable because the astronomy and so forth, you can say, well, the you know, June 24th in Vancouver will be exactly this long. You will have something within a certain amount of solar. You might have very little or you might have a certain amount, but it's only variable as to whether it happens to be sunny or cloudy that day. So those are generally intermittent sources. Um dispatchable power is power that you can uh generate at will. Uh hydropower, as we have in uh in Canada, is a beautiful example of this because, for example, if the price of electricity is negative in California, we can import their power, and then later on, um, maybe during peak hours, we can dispatch that power by opening our dams further. I do realize that Resource Works has noted that uh electricity deficit at the moment, but uh that doesn't change the fact of the dispatchability of hydro, it's its great utility. Um not everywhere lives in mountainous regions, and so um in many parts of the world, natural gas and in some places coal are used as this dispatchable electricity, uh dispatchable power to generate electricity because no one wants to have power interruptions as soon as they can afford to have a stable grid.
SPEAKER_00And what do you think that means for the speed of changes in the energy system?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Pairing solar with batteries has proven remarkable um uh in areas as they've as they've increased deployment. So there was a uh, or there remains a concern in California about this thing called the duck curve, where you have a curve that kind of looks a little bit like a duck
Beyond Clean vs Dirty: Carbon Intensity
SPEAKER_01where you have a little peak of electricity demand in the morning. When it's sunny, uh solar panels provide a lot of power, so you get this kind of decrease. And then in the evening hours, you get this rapid increase of uh additional power required. Now a shocking thing happened this spring where the duct curve actually flattened out. There was so much midday solar absorbed by batteries and dispatched uh in the early evening hours, at peak use hours, that they didn't actually see a peak. So I think there's a tremendous amount that um, with more solar and solar particular, uh with battery storage, can help to address these peaks. However, um, unless you happen to Live in Hawaii, maybe I don't know, Nevada, Arizona, you are going to have rainy days and cloudy days and snowy days. As more applications become electric, you will have a corresponding need to have more dispatchable power. We might see scenarios where as regions decarbonize, wonderful, good for them, the electric grid size expands, and so you actually have to build more dispatchable peaker plants, more dispatchable power for those mid-winter emergencies or something like that. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00It's actually referred to as the January 2024 event. And there's all these reports out there. It happened in Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. Right. 25 million people live in states, provinces in this area. And I've been hearing from a lot of engineers and power system people about this, and I started to look into it. I've been reading quite a few reports on it. And it's it's quite surprising. I mean, in northern Alberta, one energy utility that distributes electricity that it creates mainly from natural gas, or all from natural gas, did the sums and worked out that over the several days of the cold snap, that the energy it supplied to the system to keep things running, all of it derived from natural gas. If you had to swap that out for batteries that were storing electricity you'd made somehow, maybe by wind, maybe by some other means, you would need the amount of batteries you'd need to serve one million people in northern Alberta in those cold days, 40 below, uh would be I think it was all of the EV electric vehicle, lithium batteries manufactured in the world in 2022 times 13. 13 years of 2022, that's how much battery you'd need to serve those million people in the depths of the cold snap. And um the monumental scale of amount of energy we use is uh one of the factors that will make it incredibly difficult to get to this, you know, 100% this or 100% that outcome. I mean, isn't it going to be a lot more time-consuming and complex in terms of how we change energy systems over time?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So that's where I would return to my wolf and bison analogy. So uh pursuing, electrifying absolutely everything, I can see the idealism behind it, I can see how someone arrives at that. Uh I still don't see that as an optimum, the healthiest solution. Um in uh I think in the United States, the last I checked, I think there were 83 gigawatt hours worth of battery storage. So that's not Canada. I mean, we have dams, but 83 gigawatt hours. Um and in Canada, every year, we draw down our natural gas underground reserves by the thermal equivalent of 110,000 gigawatt hours, so several orders of magnitude. Now I'm sure the battery storage will increase. You know, there's lots of progress being made. That's wonderful. Uh I think that for a resilient or a robust system, uh you will always need gas backup. You will always need gas supply as the safety valve almost to make sure you don't run out of uh the the stuff of human well-being. You don't run out of heat or power in the middle of winter. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00You you're a real heretic then, because you said you will always need that. I mean, um everyone else seems to be saying, oh, we'll need it for a few decades. And I never find out what they think will happen after those few decades end. But you seem to be saying, you know, those decades could last a long time.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell In my vision, in my heart of hearts, um gas energy, uh people assume that means natural gas. Uh as societies become more prosperous, we can tend to be a little bit more picky in sort of what we do, and I could see hydrogen playing a role for that in some capacity. And so that would be so hydrogen, if it's generated cleanly, of course, hydrogen is a vector, it's a path to achieving a robust system, a rugged grid, a rugged, uh, rugged uh heat services,
Energy Addition, Not Replacement
SPEAKER_01uh, complementing electricity uh without the emissions. And you get to keep a lot of the same skill sets. It's like uh it's like one of those just transition things. It's uh very different to say it versus have someone say it to you. But you can have a lot of expertise that we use for fossil fuels isn't specific. Like uh there's wonderful work being done on geothermal power, for example, which uh which is dispatchable. It's firm power. Uh and again, you can keep a lot of people, maybe mid-career people, doing the very similar activities, just redirect it a little bit, and then you don't have this image of these um young idealistic people hectoring, hectoring older people like you should live my way of life. Things like that. Again, going back to the consent thing, um, there's a little bit of an egotistical thrill to hold yourself superior to some other person, but that doesn't really make progress happen. But quite the opposite, actually, right? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_00We've had some incredible conversations about the future and some wild possibilities. I know you've been working on some ideas. You you've had a paper you've been developing. I don't think we have time on this podcast to get into it. But um what's your starting point for thinking about that longer-term future? I mean, if humanity is going to be around for a long time, it's gonna need a lot of energy for a long time, it's gonna need to do it on the same planet. I don't think we're all going to Mars. Maybe Elon will, and we'll see how it works out. But for those of us staying back here, we want to have a fit planet for a long time. Um, what's the big, big picture, like the thousand-year picture?
SPEAKER_01I guess for me the focus uh is that uh there's a lot of pen a lot of attention is paid to efficiency. Well, efficiency has its merits. Uh, but I think the real key property of a complex system, our energy systems are certainly complex, is how resilient it is or how robust. Uh resilience means you can bounce back from a disruption, like uh like that they bounced back in the grid in Europe when they had that Iberian shortage. But better still is robustness, which means you actually never lose functionality. I have great hopes that um with the extremes that we see, which are getting more intense, that we get um more attention paid to a robust energy system as opposed to a more mathematically efficient one. Uh efficiency comes out of the study of simple machines, you know, widgets or or whatnot, wonderful. But uh the concepts of resilience that we have come out of the study of complex systems, right? That is, the resilience is the defining feature of a long-lived complex system. If we can have more people talking about resilience, or again, robustness, then we can set our energy systems up to be long-lived and sturdy and not rickety, and that will allow us to have uh more well-being on the human side, even as uh we work to reduce the emissions portion, uh uh the emissions side effects, if you will, of these rugged energy systems. Aaron Powell, so does that make you an optimist? Aaron Powell I would say that I'm more optimistic now than I was 25 years ago. One reason for that is that uh you could see these climate trends and you couldn't really see any technologies that were coming up of substantial size. And now, you know, thanks in large part to the industrial machine that is known as uh as China, then we do have these technologies who are scaling up quickly. Uh I'm not utopian, I don't uh I don't believe in extremes, maybe. I'm pragmatic. Uh again, wolf and bison, that's a place for both. Um, but I am more hopeful that you know my grandkids or great-grandkids will have a better future now than I would have been earlier on uh without the accumulated 20 years of uh of uh wisdom and weight um behind me.
SPEAKER_00Another LNG project. So seven years since we we saw that big one get approved and now built, we've got others coming along, so hopefully it won't be seven years until we're back here. But uh really appreciate you coming in, Matthew.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, thank you very much, and uh really appreciate uh music of me story.
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