The City View: Chris Jackson, CEO of green hydrogen firm Protium, talks easing sustainable energy transition
Today Andy Silvester chats to Chris Jackson, CEO of UK-based green hydrogen energy firm Protium.
They go back to Protium’s roots; discuss what green hydrogen acutally is and how the company aims to simplify the decarbonisation process for the companies it works with; and go through why hydrogen, rather than solar and wind energy, might put people at ease with qualms about a regular supply of fuel.
Andy also goes through the news: private equity firm Apollo has dropped its takeover pursuit of publisher Pearson, and Germany has triggered emergency plans to manage gas supplies.
Episode transcript (auto-generated)
Andy Silvester 0:12 Good afternoon and welcome to The City View podcast me Andy Silvester editor here at City A.M. In a minute I’ll be joined by Chris Jackson, the founder and CEO of Protium, Britain’s leading green hydrogen firm will talk about how businesses can benefit from new green technologies, as well as what recent events in Ukraine are telling us about the need for energy independence. Firstly, corporate headlines though with help from our friends over at PA and we’ll start with Paris and the education publisher. The private equity giant Apollo has dropped its takeover pursuit of the publisher after the company rejected a third bid to buy the firm. The London listed companies for shares slump after Pearson turned down the 7.2 billion pound approach bosses said the move significantly undervalued the company and its future prospects, and the turnaround led by CEO Andy bird does seem to be paying off. Apollo had said the four bits final and other UK takeover rules it must now walk away from bidding for at least the next six months Germany has triggered emergency plans to manage gas supplies following the Kremlin’s demand for contracts to be forthcoming. We paid in rubles that’s raised the prospect of power rationing in Europe’s largest economy of Russia further reduces gas flows into Germany and the German economy Minister Robert hubback has activated what he called the Early Warning phase of an existing emergency plan. That means that the crisis team from the economics ministry the regulator and the private sector will monitor domestic imports and storage and supplies for short. Germany’s network regulator does have the power to Russian gas supplies, with industry being first in line for cuts to the passenger levels have grown to around 80% of 2019 levels as bookings remain almost unaffected by the war in Ukraine the company said today, overall summon bookings went up by 2.1 million since February while in the UK demand has grown by about 14% on pre COVID levels. Nordic countries and Poland no registered subdued levels of activity since the wars outbreak are on course and the trends are in tax and Chief Executive Fritz Joussen people wants to travel with the demand in bookings and expect a good summer ’22. The firm also announced it would begin paying back its credit lines from the German government it was bailed out on three separate occasions. And sticking with transport transport Secretary here grant Shapps has urged the government regulated to disqualify P and o ferries chief exec Peter Hamilton. On the basis he is quote unfit to lead a British company unquote. The cabinet minister said he Britain’s the insolvency service convey his firm belief that Hamilton actually no longer be in charge of the under-fire ferry operator. There’s all sorts of jiggery pokery going on appear and ferries to this day. p&i ferries this morning accusing the maritime regulator of being unduly rigorous in its safety procedures which seem to ships detain wash amps continues to say that the company should rehire the 800 staff it let go rather unceremoniously just under a fortnight ago, one is going to run around no doubts elsewhere. Publisher Bloomsbury is enjoying a welcome boost in the recent blockbuster Crescent City novel, Usain Bolt has joined the management team an Esports Fan Company, and IKEA has announced plans to shut its Tottenham Hale stores. It continues to focus on smaller but more numerous stores and meatballs will have to live long only in our memories. And it’s now my pleasure to welcome Chris Jackson, the CEO and co founder of protein and a company that’s bringing green hydrogen to businesses, Chris is sickeningly young and secondly, bright and it’s companies like protein, there my mind at least will be at the forefront of the reality of getting the world towards Net Zero. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Chris Jackson 3:33 Pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Andy Silvester 3:35 And I think we were talking off air before we press the record button about, you know, the fact that everybody talks about hydrogen as being a part of our of our energy future, and it undeniably is but perhaps there’s a bit of sort of lack of understanding of why that might be the case. So why don’t we just start with what it is that that you guys are doing and why it’s so exciting about bringing renewables kind of into, into the business world quickly, easily, and at a cost that companies can bear? Chris Jackson 4:06 Sure, no. And I think you’re right to point out this is definitely an area of interest, but perhaps a bit of a low knowledge base, so happy to help them be on the show. So protein is a UK based green hydrogen energy company. We build dedicated renewable energy infrastructure for businesses that are looking to decarbonize and we try and build a holistic offering. So we try and decarbonize clients heat power and transportation requirements, through dedicated combinations of solar and battery and green hydrogen production, predominantly through a process called electrolysis, where you split water into hydrogen, oxygen. And essentially the way I try and help explain hygiene or green hydrogen to people is to say, we already use hydrogen and ing system today. The problem is that it’s usually associated with carbon to think about coal or natural gas or diesel. They are all hydrogen based fuels. It’s just the carbon associated with it. That is the external Deal, the problem that we’re trying to deal with. So we’re really trying to rebuild, fundamentally the way that we use energy to make sure it’s sustainable, but also delivers better value for clients. Andy Silvester 5:10 Yeah, and you’ve certainly got an interesting client list. It’s been growing over the past year, why don’t you just sort of catch us up on the past year because there’s obviously exciting developments in Teesside. But there’s also partnerships in, in Wales with really big corporates amongst others. Chris Jackson 5:25 Sure, so Protium announced a project alongside the Prime Minister’s 10 billion of new green investments before the climate events last year, we’re working in partnership with Budweiser, UK to decarbonize their Mega brewery, it’s the UK is joint largest brewery, based just off the M 458 acre industrial estate. So that’s a really exciting project where we’re essentially developing mixture of renewables and free hydrogen production to decarbonize heat from the brewery as well as power and some of the heavy good vehicles that operate at the site. So that’s really exciting. And it’s a key part of helping Budweiser to get to net zero by 2026 of that brewery. And you know, obviously, Budweiser has been a pioneer in a number of areas, you might have seen little zero carbon or 100%, renewable electricity, battery logos on their cans of Budweiser, so we’re excited to be able to help them do that. We also, as you mentioned, announced a project working with corn in Teesside. Another business looking at trying to be net zero by 2030. So we’re proud to support them. And other projects that have been listed the property worth flagging is with the recladding whiskey distillery, Isla mother, Remi contra family, and with loganair and Xero via as part of the governance funded future flight projects. So looking at how we can deliver 19 seater zero carbon flight between initially Glasgow and Inverness. Andy Silvester 6:49 Well I’ll tell you what, we’ll come back to why those companies have all signed up in a minute. But why don’t you take us back to the the origins story here, because as I understand it, it was an idea that that began out of what you were doing the World Bank. Chris Jackson 7:02 So there’s various different takes on this story. Or you’re the man who should know which is? Well, I know, it depends how far back you want to go. But session today I’m sitting in Bologna, at the Seychelles Hopkins University. And it was here really where I did my first paper on hydrogen with my then Professor Mark adecuado, my now business partner Marco, who’s the Chief Investment Officer at Protium. So in some ways, that’s kind of, I guess, the seed of this, it was the two of us sort of put the business together in July August 2019. But you’re right to say that it was really during my time at the World Bank, where I think the idea of hydrogen sort of came to the fore in a very pronounced way, I think it’s very hard for people to understand, but actually, we often treat electricity and energy as the same thing. And they’re very fundamentally different in terms of scale. Electricity, or power is only 20% of all the energy we consume in the world. And the other 80% is essentially for heat and transport. And that’s predominantly fuel based. And so when we talk about decolonization is a massively harder step than many people really appreciate. And sitting at that kind of 30,000 feet view from the World Bank, I realised quite how far behind everyone was and started trying to figure out well, what technologies are actually commercially available today, that could actually help to address some of the challenges and hydrogen just kept coming back as the key way to do that. And I’m not an engineer by background, but I do have the ability to pull together a consortium of very bright, capable people, which is what I’ve been really privileged to be able to do a protein and to try and actually deliver commercial technology solutions in a sort of simplify framework for businesses, because that’s how we’re going to make netzero happen, we’re going to have to find a way to take all this complexity, and make not just the technology side of it, but also the commercial and contracting side of it simple enough, that actually ordinary businesses and not just the biggest largest businesses in the world can engage with it, and ultimately, retail consumers as well. Andy Silvester 9:00 You’ve stolen the next question out of my mouth, which was about how you get to that point where, you know, companies that are not of a certain scale, have or not of a certain size, who can’t necessarily or don’t feel, let’s say, rather than can’t but don’t feel they can put the resources behind this and think, oh, we’ll do it down the line. Your role, presumably, is to come and say, Actually, this can be this can be an awful lot simpler than you think. Chris Jackson 9:21 So I think that that is our role. And I think we also need to be able to do as part of that is to be able to kind of help bring some of the investors on that journey with us as well. And that’s something we’ve been spending quite a bit of time doing too, because in some senses, the issues now around that zero, and I think maybe this is the thing that public find quite hard and policymakers sometimes quite find quite hard, is the challenge is really not so much about the technology. We have the technologies today that could get us to a net zero future by 2050. It’s not perfect by any means, but they do exist. The question is how do we what are the trade offs that we’re willing to accept in terms of the land that we’re willing to Use the type of safety regulations and permits that we require for people putting in new infrastructure. What kind of financial risk are people willing to take over what time period, these are the challenges that actually are really crucial to resolve. And the markets are getting better energy as a service, you know, something that really has come to the fore a lot more. And I think we owe the tech world probably thank you for software as service and mobility as a service and all these things. But yeah, I think that’s helping in our model we call a HESCO. Hygiene as an energy service company approach is kind of playing on that theme, is precisely to try and take away the stress of if you’re a midsize business, how do you fund all the capex that you require to get your energy system to zero emissions? Well, you probably can’t even if you could afford the capex? Is it appropriate for your business to be using so much of your balance sheet to fund those assets? And taking the technology risk? Our answer is no. Investors also we’d like to find a way to support these types of businesses to decarbonize, and they’re looking for businesses and operators that can provide them with the comfort that they can use that. And I think the crucial bit which Hydra is probably a little bit different for is that you’re now dealing with an energy sector and probably not a source of energy, we’ll come back to that, but an energy that that has versatility. So in the past, if you build a solar or wind site link to a customer and they go bankrupt, if you don’t have a good connection, it was quite a challenge to get people comfortable that risk. But when you’re producing a fuel, there are means of then distributing that fuel to other customers. And that we believe starts to fundamentally de risk the attitude of investors towards supporting decarbonisation of these types of businesses. And if we don’t do that, we’re not going to decarbonise Andy Silvester 11:44 you mentioned policymakers, and the compromises that they will have to make. You could argue that politicians are not necessarily built for compromise in heart in our modern political system. What is it? Do you think companies like like yourselves in technology, like you’re developing, will make those discussions easier, it will make solutions easier, I suppose. Because we’ve all spent an awful lot of time over the past months for reasons that are blindingly obvious, talking about energy independence, talking about the energy mix, talking about powering the life that we want to live here, without relying on old dirty sources of energy from parts of the world that perhaps we might not want to associate with anymore. Do companies like you investors that are backing you, do they make that transition easier? Chris Jackson 12:35 Well, I think we do. I mean, I think the key thing to remember is that, yeah, I think because energy operates across such a long timeframe. It’s quite challenging, sometimes for policymakers to be incentivized, and, frankly, to understand quite how long the tail is of the decisions they make. So you know, if you look at waves of big investment in energy and energy efficiency, they’ve always followed crisis moments into the energy market. So some of the most profound energy efficiency measures or came out of the last oil shock, you know, from the 1970s. So there is kind of something inevitable about these moments being very important transition periods for energy systems. And I’m sure many can see already that, you know, people are actually realising today that the most expensive form of energy is the energy you can’t get hold of when you need it. And so actually, you know, for as much as people have said, Oh, it’s really cheap to have natural gas. I think there is a you know, or do use diesel or petrol, I think there is a bit more of a recognition that actually, it’s some of the savings people may have made over the last 10 years by stealing natural gas unhedged, many of them will have lost all of those saving benefits in the last few months. So that is actually shifting perceptions quite fundamentally around energy, which is good for businesses like ours. And I think there’s a there is probably a broader piece for policymakers get to around jobs, because I think the transition is not simply going to be delivered by, by essentially investors investing in assets where there’s no job association with that, and there’s no local benefit associated with that. I think that is probably the next big step that to be honest, the industry needs to do more on but also government needs to help industry with which is to say, if we cannot demonstrate that the new generation of energy technologies are creating long term jobs that are also creating local economic opportunities for people that will have solar farms and wind farms, hydrogen sites, large battery facilities, offshore wind, these types of assets being put in place if we can’t demonstrate what that does and what that means for people. We’re not going to have the buy and we require from countries like the UK to frankly, deliver on the transition. We’ll see this in London, right? I mean, how many people are willing to have massive disruption of streets being ripped up to have new cabling put in so that people can have you know less gas and more electric or we can have more Electric buses instead of using diesel buses, people may want to go that direction. But people have to see the benefits behind all of that disruption, and all the additional cost that comes with it. That’s something that I think is how policymakers but I think companies like ours are trying to do that by taking what holistic view by bringing together customers by bringing together local communities, bringing together expertise and trying to bring investors in as well. And that ultimately is going to be the key to making sure that these investments go ahead. Andy Silvester 15:27 Yeah, it does seem the way that improving the way that story is told will be a key part of people wanting to wanting to pick up the book to stretch this this horrendous metaphor. Chris has a pleasure speaking to you sounds really exciting what Protium are doing and I’m sure we’ll hear more from you in the future. Perfect, thank you so much for your time. And that’s all from us at City View today. I will be back tomorrow. From me now, goodbye.