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As Russia and Ukraine remain at war, the European Union is having an energy independence crisis. After China, the biggest importers of Russian oil are Germany and the Netherlands, while the likes of Poland, Slovakia, Finland and Lithuania get more than 50% of their total oil imports from Russia, according to the International Energy Agency.
Last week, the EU announced a plan to phase out Russian fossil fuels. In some ways, the strategy looks eerily similar to what’s happening in California right now—especially when it comes to hydrogen, which is swiftly emerging as a clean energy option.
“We simply cannot rely so much on a supplier that explicitly threatens us,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech to the European Parliament. “In the long run, it is our switch to renewables and hydrogen that will make us truly independent.”
The plan, called REPowerEU, outlines both short- and long-term solutions for achieving energy independence and states that “terminating [Europe’s] dangerous overdependence on fossil fuels from Russia can be achieved well before 2030.” The strategy focuses on using hydrogen as a way to decarbonize industry—specifically calling for a “hydrogen accelerator” to build out infrastructure and replace demand for Russian gas with up to 15 million tons of renewable H2. According to Hydrogen Europe—an organization of more than 300 companies invested in expanding the gas’ role in the path towards carbon neutrality—the accelerator program should be focused on identifying existing pipelines that can be repurposed to carry hydrogen.
In California, the situation is both different and similar in various ways. The United States is mostly energy independent at this point and Russian oil imports are now officially banned, but the complexities of the global oil market often make it cheaper to export our oil and import oil from other countries. The U.S. basically does everything when it comes to oil: we produce it, we export it and we import it. It must be a real trip to be on an oil tanker out in the middle of the ocean, and pass another oil tanker going back to where you’re coming from. (You’d think a phone call would save a whole lot of trouble.)
But global economics aside, the challenge of transitioning to a future devoid of fossil fuels remains urgent—and hydrogen, especially in California, has been rapidly picking up momentum. SoCalGas has unveiled Angeles Link, an ambitious project to deliver hydrogen through its existing natural gas pipeline architecture. The utility is also building a prototype home that runs on a hydrogen microgrid. A slew of waste-to-hydrogen companies are popping up, offering ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into hydrogen. And companies like Universal Hydrogen are trying to decarbonize the most stubborn sectors of the economy through the gas.
Hydrogen-powered electricity may never become as cheap or efficient as that powered by solar or wind, but the gas has benefits that make it attractive to California and Europe alike—especially when matters are time-sensitive, such as the urgent need to cut funding to an adversary’s war effort or a looming climate apocalypse.
For one, hydrogen is already storable and transportable, and with the proper infrastructure can serve as a piece of the intermittency puzzle—providing electricity to the grid when demand is high, and wind and solar sources may be lower than usual. Electrolyzers—the machines that produce hydrogen—can also run on accessible fuel stocks like nutshells, manure, dead trees and solid waste. Waste-to-hydrogen currently represents just a small fraction of the total hydrogen production globally, but converting such materials into hydrogen effectively removes carbon from the environmental cycle and, in some cases, creates a material called char that can be used as a substitute for coal. (Obviously, if you burn that material again, you’re only breaking even on the carbon cycle—but for industries like steel and chemical manufacturing, breaking even would be a massive improvement.)
For better or worse, desperation often begets innovation. Suddenly, small pieces of the puzzle begin to look valuable. A few more tons of hydrogen here mean a few less barrels of Russian oil there. A few more electrolyzers means fewer houses that rely on natural gas when the grid is stressed. The total calculus of carbon neutrality is, as ever, built on a thousand tiny improvements. In Europe’s case, it’s just a shame that it required something like Russia's invasion of Ukraine to spur such initiatives into action. — David Shultz
Netflix Tests Charging Users Who Share Passwords
The days of watching Netflix for free on someone else’s account could soon come to an end. The streaming giant is testing an extra fee for subscribers who share their Netflix accounts with people outside of their households.
Miso Robotics Teams With Chipotle On Robotic Tortilla Chip-Maker
The fast-casual Mexican restaurant chain has partnered with Pasadena-based robotics startup Miso Robotics to bring Chippy, the “autonomous kitchen assistant,” to its restaurants. The robot uses artificial intelligence to cook and season tortilla chips.
Fintech Startup BayaniPay Wants to Make It Easier to Send Funds Overseas
BayaniPay, a Manhattan Beach-based fintech startup that provides cross-border money transfers to Asian countries, has unveiled a new partnership with Pasadena-based East West Bank on a checking account product that will allow customers to bank with BayaniPay and should make it cheaper and easier for them to send money.
Snap Gives AR Creators A Way to Augment Local Landmarks
The Santa Monica-based social media giant is taking another step toward its goal of overlaying the physical world with digital objects—launching a new feature that lets creators turn local landmarks into augmented reality experiences.
🎧 Listen Up: How Upfront Ventures’ Kobie Fuller Keeps a ‘Performance Mindset’
On this episode of LA Venture, Upfront Ventures partner Kobie Fuller talks about his approach to investing, understanding users’ needs and why he tries to keep a "neutral" mindset. Fuller is also the co-founder and chairman of Valence, a community and network for Black professionals.
What We're Reading Elsewhere...
- Citing continuing supply chain issues, Tesla raises the price of its EVs.
- Wonderfuel launches to produce reality TV funded by NFTs.
- Electric charging startup EVgo expands its partnership with California grocer Save Mart.
- Kia partners with Massachusetts-based Currently for on-call charging services for EV owners in L.A.
- More influencers are taking to the boxing ring to boost their recognition (and earn a prize purse).
- Knightscope deploys its first SoCal-based security robot to San Bernardino to patrol the parking lot of a 970K-square-foot distribution center.
- L.A.-based insurtech platform Blockforms opens an equity crowdfunding campaign.
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Connect Airlines hopes to start flying passengers around in a hydrogen-powered plane as soon as 2025, thanks to a deal announced this week with Hawthorne-based Universal Hydrogen.
The Boston-based airline has yet to launch, but it intends to kick off regular service between Toronto, the Northeast and the Midwest starting this spring — for now using jet fuel. Connect Airlines is one of several to sign a letter of intent to buy hydrogen conversion kits in the coming years from Universal Hydrogen, joining Icelandair, Air Nostrum (in Spain), and Ravn Alaska.
Universal Hydrogen plans to begin installations of its hydrogen-electric powertrain kits in the next three to four years, pending regulatory approval. The startup is designing its kits for planes that would otherwise guzzle down jet fuel.
Connect Airlines aims to launch hydrogen-propelled flights within the year, the company told dot.LA. So far, Universal Hydrogen’s other partners have offered few specifics on their launch plans.
As the aviation industry looks for ways to slash its carbon footprint, hydrogen has emerged as a top contender to supplant jet fuel. Hydrogen is clean-burning and vastly lighter than batteries, potentially making it ideal for air travel. Hydrogen has downsides, too. It’s more expensive than jet fuel today, and clean hydrogen produced via renewable energy is relatively scarce.
All told, it could be decades before hydrogen-powered planes go mainstream.
Airbus aims to deliver a hydrogen plane by 2035, while Boeing is looking out as far as 2050 for larger aircraft. The Aerospace Technology Institute, a U.K. research group, recently said it expects to see hydrogen planes in the mid-2030s.
Universal Hydrogen is an early mover, but it isn’t the only one.
U.K. and Hollister, Calif.-based ZeroAvia is also working with airlines to launch hydrogen-powered passenger flights, starting with London and Rotterdam as soon as 2024.
In addition to making the kits, Universal Hydrogen says it will also supply airlines with green hydrogen fuel. It raised $62 million in October to move ahead with its plans, which include test flights beginning next year.
Connect Airlines’ owner and a number of others participated in the funding round, including Mitsubishi HC Capital, Tencent, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures and Spencer Rascoff's 75 and Sunny Ventures. (Full disclosure: Rascoff is the founder and executive chairman of dot.LA.)
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Facing a future filled with human-caused climate catastrophes, Universal Hydrogen has set its sights on the sky.
Frustrated that the aviation industry was not moving fast enough to cut down on emissions, former Airbus Chief Technology Officer Paul Eremenko teamed up last year with former Georgia Tech engineering professor John Paul Clarke and Jon Gordon, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, to launch Universal Hydrogen.
The Hawthorne-based company produces a kit that eliminates carbon emissions from regional aircrafts. It's one of several startups working to reduce commercial travel's emissions. But it has even larger ambitions, seeking to develop a hydrogen fuel distribution network that it hopes will be used in airports around the world.
Universal Hydrogen said it is on track for their first flight test using their hydrogen fuel cell powertrain on a 40-person passenger regional airliner in 2022 at Moses Lake, Washington.
"We want to be in the business of supplying hydrogen to the user, in this case the airlines," said Chief Commercial Officer Rod Williams. "We'll be able to take an aircraft and convert it from the configuration today which uses a turboprop engine powered by Jet A-1 fossil fuel to a configuration which uses a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain and produces no carbon dioxide."
Universal Hydrogen hopes to sell hydrogen fuel capsules and module technology to serve as both the fuel tank within the aircraft and the method of transporting hydrogen from where it's produced to the aircraft. Their hydrogen fuel capsules offer 2X weight savings over conventional tech. "That's important because there's no infrastructure that exists today to transport hydrogen," Williams said.
Hydrogen is generally regarded as a cleaner fuel, since it produces only water when consumed by a fuel cell. There are a variety of ways that hydrogen can be produced, such as natural gas, nuclear power, biomass and renewable power like solar and wind.
There's a lot of money being invested in hydrogen, including a $52 million fund announced by the Energy Department in July. But not everyone is convinced of hydrogen's benefits; some research suggests it's still too energy-intensive to produce.
That's because much of the hydrogen now produced comes from natural gas facilities, but converting that production to wind and solar could open the gates to a greener aviation industry.
Mark Jacobson, the director of the Atmosphere and Energy program at Stanford University, and one of the authors of a study published in that found that so called "blue hydrogen," a product the natural gas industry has been promoting, produces a larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning natural gas or coal for heat.
To really make hydrogen green, he said the industry will need to convert to wind and solar.
"If the hydrogen is green hydrogen and it's used in a fuel cell in an aircraft, that's actually the best option for long distance [commercial air travel]," Jacobson said.
For smaller and short haul flights, he said electric planes are promising.
Universal Hydrogen announced last week that they secured $62 million to accelerate the first test flight of a hydrogen-powered aircraft that's expected to take off in 2022.
Investors in the round include Mitsubishi HC Capital, Tencent, Stratos, GE Aviation, Waltzing Matilda Aviation, Fourth Realm, Hawktail, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Jeff Wilke and Spencer Rascoff's 75 and Sunny Ventures. (Full disclosure: Rascoff is the founder and executive chairman of dot.LA.)
The circumstances couldn't be more urgent. Air traffic dumped 915 million tons of greenhouse gas-causing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2019. In 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated approximately 612,000 barrels of pollution-belching jet fuel was consumed each day by U.S. commercial passenger flights. And, given the uncertainty surrounding climate change legislation on Capitol Hill, it's unlikely the aviation industry will face much pressure to change how it operates. That's where Universal Hydrogen comes in.
Clean-burning hydrogen has long been an attractive alternative to petroleum in cars. Yet, due to the cost of implementation, it has yet to really catch on in that sector (though there are a few promising instances of adoption: hydrogen fuel cells have been used in cars built by Hyundai and Toyota). Adoption has been slow in aviation as well.
But that may be changing. Airlines and operators including Icelandair, Air Nostrum, Ravn Alaska, and ASL Aviation Holdings (cargo aircraft) have committed to purchasing Universal Hydrogen's conversion kits.
Though the company did not disclose the price of their kits, they expect the cost of their hydrogen will be far less than the jet fuel used today.
"Our goal is to not increase the cost of travel and we expect that by the time we get to 2025, we'll be able to achieve the same cost that an airline has today," Williams said.
How A UH2 Airplane Works www.youtube.com
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