Welcome to today's Energy Seminar. We have a very special event today, but before that, the usual housekeeping announcements. David Gray, our speaker, who's right here now, will be staying to meet with students afterward. This will include students who are assigned to this discussion section. If you're a registered student, you know what that means. We have permission to use this room for that, so we're not space constrained. So anybody else who wants to stay in the student community, maybe outside, can come and sit up in the front here and have a little extended Q&A with David. Registered students should sign that they were here in the sign-up sheet in the back. Good news, in addition, this is a day when we'll have an explore energy social outside with really good food right out the back door. That'll start 5.30, but go to 6.45 for people who want to chitchat with David. Maybe David will go join at the end if he's hungry enough at that point. And finally, on behalf of the Precourt Institute, Schultz Fellowship application deadlines for graduate students has been extended to January 27th and undergraduate fellowships to February 7th. So without further ado, we're gonna do this in the form of a brief talk by David Crane, our speaker, and a fireside chat with Stephen Chu, who will take over the podium now and introduce David and moderate the fireside chat and the questions, and a couple of us will run up and down the aisles with microphones for the Q&A session. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Professor Steve Chu, who you all know and needs no further introduction from me. Steve. Been asked to introduce David Crane and have a fireside chat with him. He may not remember, I remember him. What I remember is, well, let me just say briefly, he was an undergraduate at Princeton in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and from there he went to Harvard and got a law degree. He's probably best known for his time at NRG. It's a power company, an electricity power company. They recruited him maybe five or six months, I'm not sure, after they went chapter 11. So it's a very brave soul. They was willing to see what he could do with NRG. And he turned that company, this failing company, into a really ongoing concern, profitability, all sorts of other things. And with during that time that I got to meet him, NRG is a utility electricity company. He spent his, David spent his entire career in energy and various things, started with ABB as a Swiss company that does electricity transmission. I don't want to go through all of that, but I just wanted to say one thing that I do remember. When I was secretary, we had a loan program, and I had to personally sign for each loan. So if a loan failed, it was on me, and so all the failures were my fault. And there were some notable failures. There were some notable successes. Tesla, we kept Tesla from going bankrupt, certain bankruptcy, and allowed them to get out of a lot of warrants. We gave them a couple of billion dollars of warrants. Warrants are things you can buy, stock at a certain price. The price was $85, the stock was 350. We had 300,000 shares, you can do the math. But they needed to refinance, and so we struck a deal with them. You pay back the loan early. We won't capture full value of the warrants. So we saved them the second time. With NRG, NRG wanted to do a pilot demonstration, a big pilot demonstration of capturing CO2. The CO2 would then be used for enhanced oil recovery. In my opinion, it was the first medium large scale CO2 capture that showed at last there was some confidence that you could reach a price point for the capture of CO2 using advanced amines.  We, of course, there is no market yet for CO2, but we hope soon there will be. Now, so David went through a lot of things, but he's been nominated very, very recently to serve as the Undersecretary for Infrastructure within the Department of Energy. There are three Undersecretary jobs in the Department of Energy. This is a new one. And it is something where he will tell you about a new thrust in the Department of Energy to really try to accelerate deployment at large scale, not to wait 20, 50, 60 years, because we simply don't have enough time, but he will tell you all about that. So without further ado, and David Crane. Thank you all for being here. And I'm going to be very brief in my opening remarks because I'm so well, I'm honored to be here and to have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Chu, not only a Nobel Prize winner, but a former Secretary of Energy. So I don't want to keep him waiting. But let me just give a bit of a background and say it's very, very exciting, just to be particularly among students in the sense that I feel one of the things I bring to the party now is that I'm 63 years old. I spent 38 years in the private sector. I never really contemplated for any serious amount of time becoming a civil servant, working in government. I had the fortune throughout my career of doing something that I enjoyed, doing something that I thought was impactful. Working at a company where provided good living for 10,000 employees and being basically at the very end of my career, and having transitioned to a situation where I was serving on a few boards that were interesting to me. I had a lot going on in my personal life and in last about 12 months ago now, I get a call from the Chief of Staff of the Secretary of Energy. And there's a person named Tariq Shah and he, who I didn't know, and he said to me, he said Congress just passed this infrastructure law and they gave the Department of Energy $90 billion, which is roughly three times the amount of money it's ever been given in the past. And the one key to it is that we're gonna use this to bring all these emerging clean energy technologies to commercial scale to get across the celebrated valleys of death that exist sort of across entrepreneurship. And so we've got this $90 billion, but Congress is mandating that the money be a matched fund. So the government will provide up to 50% of the money, but the private sector. So we figure we need a private sector person to run this. And I said, oh, I said, well, I've been around. So what type of person you're looking for? And they listed five qualifications and I said, well, it sounds like you're reading from my resume. He goes, I am reading from your resume. Would you be interested in doing this? And it wasn't really anything that I actually aspired to do, but the point I'm getting to is that I hope that even when you're young, you realize what a shockingly historic moment that we are not only, I mean, you could say in the history of the United States, but you could say in the history of humanity, we were having a meeting with Christiana Figuera the other day and she was talking about how, we've actually been alive during the Holocene era and now we're in the Anthropocene in our lifetime. So she was putting it in these geological epics, but all I know is that from my perspective, I sort of look at American history in sort of 25 year segments. If you go back to, I'm not a technologist like a lot of people in the room. So I go back and I look at it and I say, okay, if you think of a generation as 25 years long and for the ease of math, let's start with the first generation, the founding fathers being 1775 to 1800. That means that the 2000 to 25 generations, the 10th generation of American leadership. And I think what's made America great is that in most American ages, the leadership class of the United States rose to the challenge of its time. So when we, as we end the 10th generation of American leadership, 2000, 2025, and I think that climate change has been the challenge of our thing. Did we succeed in solving it? And we did not in a couple of years ago, I was very pessimistic about this, but with this legislation that's been passed, we have this opportunity, those of us who are about to leave the stage, to create a difference to get the ball rolling so that all of you who are students here at Stanford can finish the job. And so that's what I'm committed to. And we're just extraordinarily lucky that Congress and President Biden have both cooperated to put these tools into our tool chest. So we have this on the board and we're gonna talk about this more, but just very quickly, let's start with hydrogen. In energy, in the energy world, you can very think of the 19th century as the age of coal, the 20th century of the age of oil. We have the opportunity with $78 billion now to create this as the age of hydrogen. Hydrogen is the fuel that can solve hard-to-abate industries. It's the fuel that can solve heavy-duty land transport, maritime, and ultimately, aviation. So this is a potential that we've never seen before to do hydrogen and for us to create these production hubs when you add the tax credits, creates an economic opportunity. Carbon management, we have money for carbon capture, demonstration size, pilot size. We all know, I think at this point, that we're not gonna go to decarbonized fuels entirely. We're gonna need some fossil fuels, so we need to decarbonize them and we have this $7 billion. Industrial decarbonization, I would say to all the environmentalists in the room, I think that we've done a disservice to ourselves by labeling steel, aluminum, cement as hard-to-abate sectors because I can tell you, having been on the inside of a steel company in the last few years, even the most progressive of companies in those sectors are saying, well, the environmental community is calling us hard-to-abate, so what that translates to us is that we don't have to do anything about this for at least another decade. So most of the heavy industry companies that I know are sort of planning on doing something about their basic industrial heat processes in the 2035 timeframe. The role of the federal government right now, and there's no other government on the earth that's allocated $6.3 billion to specifically address hard-to-abate sectors. What we wanna do is bring that corporate planning forward to make the companies that are in those space say that competitively priced green steel, green aluminum, green cement, green glass, food and beverage industry, that that's happening this decade, that's not happening next decade. And we have the others, the long duration energy storage, we all know that we have to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar. So, this is what was given us by Congress. We're very excited about it. If you look closely in the legislation, you can see signs of political horse trading, but for someone who's spent their life in the energy industry, I think this is just remarkably insightful of this tool that we've gotten. And now it's left to the Department of Energy, together with sister agencies that have other buckets of money. But for us, we think of the DOE, we're at the point of the spear on this. And between the Loan Program Office and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration, they offer debt, we offer what I call free equity. We give the money as if it were equity, except the difference is we don't require a return on capital or a return of capital. So it's pretty attractive money. We're willing to take risk. We're willing to put the entire power of the federal government behind it. We're gonna work with states and local governments on fast tracking permitting. We're gonna look at the purchasing power of the federal government to see where that can be helpful. So, the Biden administration, Jennifer Grant Holmes, Department of Energy, us at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration, we're all in on making this happen. And I look forward to hearing, and I look forward also for people to challenge what we have to say, but that's why I have to say, Dr. Chu, and so I'm gonna stick with that. So, thank you. Do you want to? It's great. I think this is my better side, so. That's right. I have no good side. Yes, me neither. Okay, so let me start with a perspective question. The Department of Energy is essentially an R&D organization. It supports a lot of research. The biggest sport of the physical science is there's a national lab system that's envy of the rest of the world, but there's now a shift going on, or if not a shift, a broadening of the perspective to deployment instead of R&D, hoping that industry will take what comes out of university's national labs and deploy. And Jennifer Grantholm, Secretary Grantholm, is very, very serious about really trying to get this accelerated. Can you give the audience a little perspective on why is it so important to begin to emphasize deployment? Well, let me say two things about that. And again, if we have budding scientists in the room, there's no greater hidden gem to me in the United States government than the 17 national labs. They're just extraordinary. I've only been in government for months. I've had a chance to visit two of the labs, and it's just, I went to law school, so my education was ill-used, but I mean, it's just very impressive, and it's important to commercial demonstration, because even today, we were dealing with a situation where the Department of Energy is supporting something that the private sector is taking over, and the private sector partner insisted on basically sort of talking in their circles about DOE support, because to them, the DOE backed by the national labs basically legitimizing the technology is like the good housekeeping seal of approval. And so it all starts from that technological core, but where we come in, where we're the new part of the Department of Energy, is that traditionally, the Department of Energy has taken demonstration very literally. We demonstrate at scale a piece of hardware, and we're not particularly fussed if once we've demonstrated, you know, it becomes a rusting hulk. But the legislation as passed by Congress has introduced the idea of, they call them hubs, so it's hydrogen hubs, and the word hub, I translate that into ecosystem. So as we evaluate proposals for hydrogen production, we are very intentionally told to look at the input fuels, the way they're producing the hydrogen, and the most important, what the hydrogen's going to be used for, and we're told to use it for four different purposes, so that they're called demonstration projects, but they're actually meant to be the enduring pillars of a hydrogen economy. And so that makes the requirement of very different skill sets, of very private sector oriented thinking to how to make these projects all economically viable for long periods of time, which as you can imagine, is particularly difficult in the case of carbon, because, you know, private sector solves for what society will pay for, and with there not being a price on carbon, you know, there's a fundamental challenge there that we have to face, but again, they've given tax credits and all, so we hope to get there. So, hydrogen is fundamentally a storage mechanism in my mind. You have energy from various, except for one, namely if you can take natural gas and shift it into hydrogen and CO2, sequester the CO2, then it's a conversion of natural gas to hydrogen, but you'd have to sequester the CO2. Of course, there's a different color, so the different colors of hydrogen, there's gray. You take the natural gas, you vent the CO2. You're no better off in carbon emissions, or you capture and sequester it. Which is blue. Blue, right. And then? And then there's green, which means you have completely renewable, wind, solar, whatever, hydro, and you turn that into hydrogen by some means, which then has no inherent carbon emissions, and so those are the different colors. Well, there's another, though. Gray, green, blue, is there another? Yes. Okay. Can we all just record that, like, I taught Dr. Chu something here, because I wanna record, are we being recorded, because I really want this. So no, we also are supposed to incent pink hydrogen. Is it pink? It's pink. Pink. From nuclear. Ah, okay, fine. Okay. I can see he doesn't believe. No, no, no, no, no, no. Nuclear, nuclear, people are very, because of high temperature, and electricity, and, but let's continue with this. It is something many of us want to invent better electrolysis, things like that. But where do you see this going, and when do you think we can get off of the blue hydrogen? Well, I think the, again, at the Department of Energy, we honor the legislation that we are tasked with implementing, and the legislation specifically calls for us to use hydrogen for four different purposes. One is for heavy duty land transport. Second is for hard to abate heavy industrial. One is for co-firing and power generation. I think the fourth one is destructing it. Most people from the private sector would suggest that those last two are not viable long-term markets. I mean, the old metaphor that they use, to use hydrogen for destructing, or to use hydrogen for co-firing and power generation is like washing your hair with heavy water. It's a valuable fuel that's being underutilized. The Japanese are starting to create a hydrogen infrastructure by using it for co-firing power generation with the very conscious intent to shift as quickly as possible to use it for heavy industry and for transport. We, as we select the 10 hydrogen hubs, have to pick for those four. But within that, there are a lot of issues. There's a lot of issues about connective tissue. We were discussing last night how to ship hydrogen safely. So we're looking at that and looking for, again, to me, that's all part of the hub, is that we're looking at the entire ecosystem and the weaknesses. And you mentioned new electrolyzers, and I know there's a lot of work. Electrolyzers for those is the key piece of equipment to make green hydrogen, because electrolyzer makes hydrogen through an electrical process. Help me if I miss that up. Traditionally, hydrogen has been separated in the United States using heat. And since wind and solar make electricity directly, electrolyzers are very important. A very great, a very good thing about the way that we've been incented is we have this money for hydrogen hubs, but it's not on here. But Congress also authorized something like $6 billion for critical manufacturing and supply chain. And if Secretary Granholm were here right now, she would be making the national security argument that as we pivot the American energy economy to these new types of clean fuels, the idea is not to substitute one foreign dependency for another. So the country's been dependent on Middle Eastern oil since I was a kid in the 70s, and now we don't wanna be dependent on electrolyzers from a different manufacturing country. And there's also a need for new types of technologies in electrolyzers because of the nature of the way electrolyzers would work, which you would know more about. And don't get me started talking about iridium and how we have to find a substitute for iridium, but in this country. Perhaps you can tell the audience about hydrogen in steel making and how, of course it's not gonna get rid of all the carbon emissions, but it can do a lot. And in your experience also with Tata Steel. Yeah, as before I had to resign for every aspect of my life in order to cleanse myself to join the United States government, I was on the board of Tata Steel. And Tata is an extremely progressive company that wants to do the right thing. And they have a long-term carbon reduction goal, but to the point I made earlier, and I've seen this in multiple industrial companies, not just the ones I've been on the board, and I should say that because you're not supposed to talk about what you hear at board meetings. But most industrial companies around the country, they have a three-step approach to decarbonize. First is we're gonna do everything we can to be as efficient because they're inefficiencies based in all systems and that'll get us 20% of the way. And then we're gonna depend on the actual energy industry to the second stage is usually the presumption of electrifying everything depending on the electric industry to have made itself zero carbon in the next five to 10 years. And then the part that becomes sort of fuzzy in 10 to 15 years on in the future is okay, but what about your core high industrial heat process? How are you gonna decarbonize that? And that's usually where they shrug their shoulders and say, well, we got 10 or 15 years if someone will figure that out. And that's to my point that we hope to bring that thinking forward. And part of that is hydrogen. Certainly one solution with steel, you have the traditional blast furnaces versus the electric arc furnaces. So the electric arc, maybe you could come up with the other solution, but for the blast furnaces, which is there aren't that many blast furnaces left in the United States. So I know I'm rambling here, but one of the issues we have to face when we talk about impact are we just talking about impact in the US or are we talking about carbon impact in terms of what we can prove that we'll actually have a knock on effect in other countries that are doing more of that activity. But certainly to demonstrate hydrogen as the source of high temperature heat for steel making or aluminum making is something that's a transformative, heavy industry project that we would love to see come across our desk because that's another thing about government. We have to wait to see who applies. And so that's one of the reasons we're here is if you wanna make steel zero carbon, call me, we'll talk. So one of the issues though is in those colors of hydrogen, the one that we do use, which is steam reforming, roughly speaking in the United States where natural gas is pretty inexpensive, it's about a dollar a kilogram. And people estimate that the blue hydrogen might be three, maybe less, but the could go to two and a half, or three, the green hydrogen, maybe four or five. And so the question I have for you is what do you think the prospects, what do we need a real miracle in electrolyzers? Or do we say in 10 or 20 years, the price of electricity, especially an overbundant electricity where you can get some of it for free or nearly free, maybe electricity will be $1.50 a kilowatt hour. And where does that, if it is $1.50, can it be in striking distance of using electrolyzers? You know, I think if it's in the $1.50, that would be a fabulous outcome. I would accept that with hydrogen for those who aren't that familiar with hydrogen. A very big part of the cost of hydrogen is actually transporting it. And so, you know, whenever anyone asks you about the price of hydrogen, you have to say, are you talking about hydrogen at the point of production or at the point of consumption? And of course, that itself is a, you know, completely different thing between, and that's why heavy duty land transport is both the highest value use of hydrogen and the most difficult, because trucks move around. You know, it's very much easier to build hydrogen next to a power plant and use it all right there. And so, I think if it can get to that and Dr. Chu, if you told me as a matter of physics that what I'm gonna say next makes no sense, then I will meekly submit to you. But I take great comfort, you know, just in my own life experience in what happened with the price of a solar panel, you know, during my business career.  And after a couple of years, I got disenchanted with wind for a variety of reasons. And I thought, solar's where it's at. You know, and so we sold the wind company and went all in on solar. And, you know, during Dr. Chu's reign, we built the largest solar thermal plant in the world, which you can see along I-15 if you're driving between LA and Las Vegas and built the largest solar PV plant in the world at the time. But when we first looked at solar, I think it was $4 or $5 a watt to buy a solar panel. And during the course of the Obama administration, in part because of overt government action, but in part just because there was an atmosphere at the time that solar's going to happen. You know, and that was not just the U.S., but that was Chinese manufacturing. It was German demand. It was Spanish demand. The price of a solar panel went from $5 a watt to, I think, 30 cents a watt. Did you know how low it got? Well, it depends on what you said. The oil and costs, it's below, yeah. Yeah, I'm just talking about the cost of the module. The module, yeah. I mean, the module is 30, 40 cents a watt now. The oil and costs are less than a dollar. The goal of the Department of Energy was a dollar a watt. Installed. Installed utility scale. But you don't think that's a good, do you think that we can do that with hydrogen? First, well, if it's going to be green hydrogen, you need $1.50 kilowatt hour. I do think $1.50 kilowatt hour will be possible within 15, 20 years. There you have it. Nobel Prize winner says it's going to happen. It's just my guess. I know it's going to happen, so. But there's more to hydrogen. When you were talking about hydrogen for airplanes, there was a little gasp in the audience because of what? Because it's pretty low density. But for me, when I think of airplanes and hydrogen. You know why I said that? Because we were just at a meeting with some entrepreneurs. And I'm like, man, I just tried to do hydrogen for long-duty land transport. This person, no, you got to think about hydrogen for aviation. Well, see, there are a lot of aspirational people doing stuff out there. But the way most people are thinking now is to take hydrogen and CO2, convert that into syngas. Then that's the feedstock. If it's a green source of syngas, instead of from fossil fuel, then all of a sudden, you can make liquid hydrocarbons, which are really very good for airplanes. That's good. You know, look, I'm in a battery company and people are talking about battery-powered airplanes and maybe little ones, but not 777. But so that's one of the other things with hydrogen. But let's get away from hydrogen, carbon capture. It's a big deal because you probably all know that talk of staying below 450 is what I would call wishful thinking at this point. I personally think we'll go over 550, maybe even 600 parts per million. And because of that, we will need carbon capture, not only from all the point sources, but also from the atmosphere. But how do you, in the government, start this? And I was funding carbon capture as much as I could when I was secretary. Because as well, it's in the future, but we need the technology. How do you see developing a market for carbon capture unless there is either a regulation penalty or a price in carbon? Well, I think ultimately, and I mentioned it before, I mean, again, if everything, the energy world is a private sector-driven infrastructure play unlike most other infrastructure like roads and things. And the private sector solves for what they'll be paid to do. And so ultimately, carbon capture is going to require a price on carbon. And as a pragmatic business person, and I was very involved in Washington as a business person when we tried to get the Waxman-Markey bill passed. And we not only didn't get that passed at a time when we had a hope and change president in his first super popular year, we had 59 Democratic senators, and we didn't even get it onto the floor of the Senate. I mean, we got blown out, we got beaten badly. So I think the way I look at it, the tax credits for carbon capture under the Inflation Reduction Act are exceptionally lucrative. And I think they last, and they vary, but it's a good number. And a lot of companies were going to do it anyway. I mean, what I found is, I mean, I had sort of an epiphany that made me sort of a climate warrior back in 2006, but whenever I went to my board of directors and say, I never talked about this is the moral thing to do. You get laughed out of an American boardroom if you talked about morality or anything like that. I talked about this is the sound business thing. We make most of our money from coal-fired power generation. If we don't do something to get rid of the carbon emissions from that coal-fired generation, they're gonna shut us down. So you have to appeal to that. And I think there's a lot of industry right now. I thought one of the biggest moments in corporate history that happened during the Trump administration was Exxon Mobil gets kicked out of the Fortune 500. I mean, Exxon Mobil like five years before had been the number one market cap company. And just to show how far behind they were getting. And so amongst the traditional fossil fuel, I think they want to see carbon capture happen. And I think they see enough economic return in terms of the tax credits for eight years, which does not itself create a market. But if in those eight years, we bring down the price of capturing carbon to the point where it's within the realm of possibility then maybe the idea of putting a price on carbon at that point will be more acceptable. And people who have heavy carbon emissions, things won't fight it tooth and nail as if it was a life and death matter for them as they're doing behind the scenes right now. So that's the best I can do for you. It's a two-step process. Yeah, well, actually what you said, and I'm gonna just turn over questions to the audience. There is this, what companies say in public on what they say behind the scenes, and there's beginning to be a shift. There, I'll say the American oil companies still behind the scenes through the American Petroleum Institute fight these things. I think the European companies are no longer fighting it. And so what I see them doing is with lots of pressure from their countries, their respective countries really trying to do something shall resign for the American Petroleum Institute. Is it because it's the American Petroleum Institute is behind the scenes, trying to slow everything up. And so I think these are first, good first steps along this way. But we'll see. That's all. So let's, we can go on forever, but I wanna start to throw it open to the questions to the audience. And so first students, do you have any questions? Yes. Thank you very much for coming. It's been a really fascinating talk. Can you tell us who you wanna, you don't have to, but I'd love if you'd identify yourself and what you're studying. Yeah, so I'm Evan. I'm a second year master's student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, department or the concentration in atmosphere and energy, which is a interdisciplinary renewable energy program. And I was wondering if you could talk more about how the different players will interact in the hydrogen hubs and any of the other similar like hubs that will happen. And I was thinking especially in terms of like how the basic sciences and then technology transfer offices at the national labs will interact with large industries and then also startups and kind of how that ecosystem will work. So as we've put together the solicitations for these and hydrogen is one that I have to be a little bit careful of because it's in mid competition right now, but the national labs and the applied science offices and the DOE informed, you know, the way we put together the tender. Now as it happens and reasonable people could differ like this, we actually think that hydrogen is one of the challenges that's more an integration challenge that apart from electrolyzers and manufacturing, it doesn't represent as much of a leap of faith in the technology as some of the others. Like for example, we have a lot of money for direct air capture, Congress has mandated that we have to look for direct air capture hubs that would sequester or remove a million tons of carbon from the atmosphere with unit sizes of at least 50,000 when the biggest one that we know of that's out there now is 4,000. So there's a lot of technological change, but in hydrogen, we are informed by the applied science offices and the national labs in the case of hydrogen, we worked with NREL. And they're part of the evaluation process. And so we've got that in terms of what I can say about the hydrogen hubs is that we have 79 concept papers for proposals of which we've gone through this process where we've encouraged 30, roughly 35, I don't remember the exact number, and we've discouraged the rest. Now the rules are, it doesn't matter where you got encouraged or discouraged, you can still apply but the sponsors of these represent a very wide range of type of entities. So there's some classic corporate sponsors that you would expect. And then there's ones which I personally refer to more as Chamber of Commerce bids where a particular part of the country, whether a state or a city, has organized all sort of the hydrogen interest in their area to put together a hub proposal. And both have merits and both have areas where they could get stronger. Hi, thank you for coming as well. I'm Daniel, I study environmental science in the sustainability school and an MBA in the business school. And it's really exciting to see all this funding that's coming out to make these first of their kind projects that are coming up. But I find myself wondering, what about the second of their kind, third of their kind, fourth of their kind? Do you think it'll be the private sector that will have the appetite to keep scaling from these demos up to scale? Or do you think the government will have to step up to kind of carry it, get the curve affecting upwards? It's a great question and one of the things that makes what we're doing very interesting is there's no defined answer to your question, but what I would tell you is this, first of all, if we at the Office of Clean Energy demonstration across these technologies, we can do the first of a kind. Then the loan program office, which can provide debt, we would love to hand the baton over to them and maybe they do numbers two through five. And then, I have idiosyncrasies as a climate person.  The people that go around say, to solve this thing globally, we need eight gazillion dollars. It's pointless. In my life around capital intensive projects, there is always money available for a well-structured project. So with a possible exception of three months at the end of 2008 during the financial recession where you couldn't do anything, the money is there if you've got a good project. So I think OSED can do the first of a kind. The loan program office, they come in and then I think we've been talking to financial players, they want to lean in on this. They want to be part of this. Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, they want to deploy money against green outcomes. And so I think that as long as we do it right, triggering the commercial way is not going to be that difficult. What's going to be difficult is doing it fast enough in the sense that we're working towards a Biden administration target of a zero electricity sector by 2035. You could say that that's aspirational. I might agree with you, but we're going to give it the old stand for college try to get there. If you work backwards from 2035 to, okay, well that means that full-fledged commercial wave has to be blown and going by basically 2030, which means that we have to get our projects done, sort of in the 2028 timeframe. Pick your technology, but my supposition is that we might be able to persuade the hydrogen community to start the commercial wave before the first of the kinds even finished, but we're also tasked with modular nuclear reactors. And after this country's history with the last nuclear project, I think it's going to be more difficult in the case of that technology. I would expect the commercials, the private sector is not going to come in until they see those first projects built on time and on budget, because there's not a great track record of that. Ironically, some of the other technologies benefit from having no track record, but no track record is better than an uninterrupted bad track record, so. Hi, my name is Rishi. I'm a postdoc in the chemistry department. Can you hold the mic closer to you because there may be some people who... Hi, I'm Rishi. I'm a postdoc in the chemistry department. I wanted to know, is a general question, but specifically for the carbon management bucket, how do you guys think about this fear of accidentally picking winners in terms of the carbon removal space and carbon capture versus some other strategies? And of course, this also applies to nuclear or other technologies where the incentives, how to structure the incentives so that they work for the best technology. So the question, and I'm gonna give you my very personal, politically incorrect answer to, how do we know that we don't pick winners? And then if you hand the mic to the person who I work with, is that Kelly, that is you back there, right? Kelly actually runs the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration. She just tolerates me pretending that I run it. And she will give you the government answer, but I have to say, private sector for 30 years, and the great thing that everyone in Washington, at the agencies, and particularly on Capitol Hill, we're not in the business of picking winners. From the private sector, I'm like, don't delude yourself. Man, you guys are picking winners in Washington all the time. It also used to be a second cliche that American government doesn't do industrial policy. But that third rail seems like you can get away with saying, well, creating a hydrogen economy is an industrial policy. You don't get fired for that anymore. But I don't know why the government says we don't pick winners when we're having solicitations. We've just encouraged 33 hydrogen hubs and we're gonna pick eight to 10. That's picking winners. I don't know why that's even a bad thing, but Kelly, what's the real answer? Kelly, before you answer that, let me just say that here at Stanford, when we admit undergraduate and graduate students, are we picking winners or losers? Would you rather us pick randomly? Yeah, it's good. And so, yes, so when you try to admit the best applicants, when you try to fund the best ideas, but you're not predetermined in these things, I want this phenotype of person or this phenotype of industry. And when I was secretary, very consciously said, it was too early to say whether photovoltaic solar would be better than thermal solar. And even when it looked like it was gonna be better, there was still some advantage of solar thermal because of heat storage. And so, you try very hard not to, but fundamentally, yes, you do wanna fund the best ideas. Admit the best students. The only thing that I'd add to that is that we are trying to be conscious of the fact that there will be technology advances as we move forward over the next few years. So for a lot of the programs that we have, we're not gonna put out all of the funding at once. So for instance, on the direct air capture hubs, we have $3.5 billion for these direct air capture hubs, which are still in technology development.  And so we're not gonna go out and pick four winners right away. We'll pick two winners, and then hopefully there'll be more winners to choose from in a couple of years. I think there was a question. Two. I don't know if there one down here. Yeah, you first. Oh, you first. Thank you. Hi, my name's Darcy. I'm a second year master's student in energy science engineering with a focus on energy storage. I had a question about thermal energy storage, especially given the last question, talking about how there are some winners and there are some losers. Right now, Hydrogen has received a lot of funding from the IRA and thermal energy storage really didn't seem to receive that much funding if any funding, especially in an industrial context in comparison. And I was wondering if you had any ideas why that was or any ideas about the benefits or yeah, the benefits of thermal energy storage or lack there. Well, I think the thermal energy qualifies under the long duration energy storage, which is I think defined as at least 10 hours and up to what, 120 hours? And that's right, Kelly, right? That thermal, yeah, so. And why is it 500 million for long duration energy storage and some of the others got several billion? I wasn't there when, I mean, Congress decided what the numbers are. But I mean, I do think thermal storage has a shot with what we do. I mean, if you ask me what did they miss, I would say they missed geothermal. Now there is money in the DOE for geothermal, but we don't have a program for geothermal, which is somewhat disappointing, but we could focus on what we don't have or we could focus on all the things that we can do to make a difference and we choose to do the latter. So, do you? Hi, I'm Charlie, I'm a sophomore undergrad studying international relations with concentration and energy environment and natural resources. Some of the conversation around the hiding hubs and some of the other hubs specifically and emerging industries with technology that's developing made me think about how you sort of are approaching the hydrogen hubs specifically, thinking about sort of the optical green hydrogen, but we're not there yet. And some of that infrastructure involved could be sort of entrenched over time. So how do you think about that decision making process with the hiding hubs and I guess phasing from blue to green over time? You know, it's a very good question and again, the competitive process that they usually use at the DOE tries to create to the fullest extent possible apples to apples comparison, but we have gotten, one of our frequently asked questions is, what does the perfect hydrogen hub look like to the Department of Energy? And we have to say, there is no perfect prototype of a hydrogen hub, number one and number two, we've been specifically told by Congress to look at it on a portfolio theory basis. And so, we don't know yet what formal proposals come in, but one of the things we're debating internally, what if someone comes in and they don't propose hydrogen production at all? They just propose hydrogen storage and six pipelines. One of the questions we're asking is, natural gas is traded off the Henry hub in the United States. The Henry hub is a place. The Henry hub is near Abbeville, Louisiana. It's a place where they have storage in seven different pipelines. So they create a market. Should we be intentionally creating a hydrogen hub, which again, may have no hydrogen production but be near a lot of pipelines. So, we don't have any firm answer to that. And if we did, I probably wouldn't tell you to it. But the combination that we have to think about how all the pieces fit together, and we actually apologize to the bidders. We're like, look, one uncertainty in your bidding is that we have to look at this on a portfolio basis, not just you against the next person. But we are going to try and create a system that has all the necessary elements to create a national hydrogen economy. Gulati, I'm a first year student in the atmosphere and energy program in the civil engineering department. As a student who's developing a startup in hydrogen and is also an international student, I wonder when I see such programs, how can international clean energy founders developing in America benefit from such amazing programs? Well, I mean, I think one of the things that makes America great is that we'll accept ingenuity and intelligence and hard work from wherever it comes. But so I would say bring your talents to the United States and work here. I think as was reported in the press a week or two ago, there is some griping from America's European allies that the legislation that allows us to do what we do is has a sort of a very American orientation and the sponsors have to be American entities. But talented international persons like yourself, I think it's not that hard to work within that context. My response to our European allies in particular, if anyone asked me would be like, yeah, to get this through the United, to get all this funding through the United States Congress, there had to be a certain amount of American, clear American benefit. We would love to see our allies all put their own money against the same sort of programs. And then we'd be again where the success story we had was solar where it was multiple countries that were incenting solar to get down the cost. Let me make a quick comment with respect to that. In Davos, there was Europeans that were complaining about how US centric, if you want this money, move your, move it to United States and everything. And if that people were all was asked about this, they said, no, no, America's spending, investing huge amounts of money. If the Europeans are complaining about, maybe their countries should also invest that kind of money. Because Germany started the solar by really heavily subsidizing solar in Germany. And it stimulated China to invest in manufacturing. And so the Germans were actually, because they were so heavily subsidizing solar, it got industry going. This I see as a very large subsidy, I forget what you call non-equity, whatever it is, we call them grants. Free equity? Free equity, it's called the grant. Here's some money, do it. There's, in our plan, there's also huge tax incentives, which are really motivating industry, but here's the problem. They will do this when there are these tax incentives. The hope is to drive down the cost in getting deployment significantly so that it's not gonna be $100 or $150 to capture carbon out of the atmosphere. Well, I'll take 100 any day of the week. It's about 300. But if you can get that, then it's a really different sort of space. So the hope is, can you get the first, the second with the subsidies, drive down the costs? So it becomes within earshot of then saying, okay, you can have permanent subsidies. I think we're gonna have to end it for the big program and move on to the next phase of your session here right now. So thank you, David and Steve, for such a spellbinding inspirational session. I think many of us, I think, would probably stay here all night in this format if we could. So thanks very much for coming. Thank you. Thank you.