Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables
In this episode, Anthony Wang, co-founder of ETFuels, describes his company’s business model of using renewable energy to make green hydrogen, then using the hydrogen to make carbon-neutral methanol.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Anthony Wang, a mechanical engineer by training, spent years as a researcher on hydrogen technologies. He worked with governments to develop policy and infrastructure plans — he was project manager on the EU's big hydrogen backbone project — and with private companies like Total and Shell to develop hydrogen technology roadmaps. He has authored or co-authored several industry-defining reports on hydrogen and been cited in countless publications.
A few years ago, he decided to throw his hat in the ring and try to actually build hydrogen projects in the real world. All his research and contacts in the energy world led him to a very specific — and, to me, extremely intriguing — business model.
ETFuels, the company he co-founded, develops projects that couple giant off-grid renewable energy installations with hydrogen electrolyzers; it then uses the resulting green hydrogen to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels. (First up is methanol for shipping, but the company plans to branch out into other e-fuels.)
This model somehow manages to implicate half the stuff I’m interested in these days — green hydrogen, markets for hydrogen fuels, off-grid renewables, coupling renewables directly with industrial loads — so I was eager to talk with Wang about it. We dug into the limits of “electrify everything,” the difficulty of transporting hydrogen, and the economics of e-fuels, among other things.
This one gets fairly deep in the weeds, but if you find the real-world challenges of developing clean-energy projects interesting, you don’t want to miss it.
All right, then, with no further ado, Anthony Wang. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.
Anthony Wang
Thank you so much for having me, David.
David Roberts
So you were sort of recommended to me as somebody who knows a lot about hydrogen, about sort of green hydrogen, the markets. I know you've worked with public on policy roadmaps. I know you've worked with private companies on technology roadmaps. So I know you've given a lot of thought and sort of analysis to the green hydrogen phenomenon, the green hydrogen market. And you settled when you decided to start a company of your own, you co-founded this company, ETFuels. You settled on a very particular business model, which I just find sort of fascinating as it sort of implicates half the things I'm interested in these days in the energy world.
So I wanted to just run through it with you and talk about why you made the choices you did and get into some of the bigger issues that way. So just for listeners' benefit, the idea here is you find a big piece of land somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. You build a bunch of renewable energy, mostly solar, maybe some wind. Instead of hooking the renewable energy up to a grid, you pipe it directly into electrolyzers and make green hydrogen out of it. And then instead of exporting the green hydrogen or selling the green hydrogen, you use the green hydrogen, combine it with CO2 to make methanol, basically, carbon-neutral methanol, which you are then going to sell to shipping companies. So that's a big puzzle. That's a big puzzle with lots of pieces put together. So I want to kind of start at the front end of it. My intuitive reaction to this is you're taking valuable renewable energy and then you're converting it to hydrogen, you lose a lot in that conversion, and then you convert it again to methanol and you lose a lot in that conversion as well. It sounds sort of inefficient.
So the question com
