Michael Barnard: 0:03

when a, company like BASF with its integrated chemical plants goes to its supplier of heat, and says how do we decarbonize heat, well the supplier of heat are fossil fuel suppliers. They supply gases and liquids that burn and say, we'll say, well, they'll say the answer is, well is answer because it's a gas that burns. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 112 of the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. And before we kick off, I just want to take a quick moment to express my sincere gratitude to all of this podcast's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping this podcast going. And I'm truly grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who were passionate about climate. Supporting this podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support will make a huge difference in keeping the show going strong. To become a supporter, simply click on the support link in the show notes of this and every episode. Or just visit tiny url.com/climate pod. Now without further ado with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Michael. Michael welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Tom, thanks for having me. yeah, Michael Barnard, Chief Strategist of the Future is Electric Strategy Consulting. That's one of the few hats I wear. I publish prolifically. Prolific is the common word that's used. uh, sit on advisory board, and assist organizations to figure out what to do. Uh, and I do that because I project, uh, major areas of carbon problems and decarbonization solutions decades into the future. So, if you know where it's gonna be, you know, where we have to spend money, time, and energy, in the next few years, in order to kind of get there

Tom Raftery: 2:10

And you wrote a couple of articles recently, which caught my attention, and hence I reached out and asked you to join me on the podcast. One of them was around, decarbonizing marine traffic, and I wanted to talk about that. And you also wrote one on aviation, which we'll talk a little bit about as well. I wanted to chat about those because those are topics which, you know, are really heavy polluters, both marine and aviation, and ones which are really hard to decarbonize. and one which I haven't specifically addressed on this podcast before. 110 episodes into the podcast, or 112 episodes now, I think it is So, you know, you, you've ticked all the boxes. Michael, thank you for that. Let's set a bit of context first. I mean, in terms of what scale problem are we talking about in terms of emissions, what percentage emissions do marine and aviation take up? And, why are they so hard to decarbonise?,

Michael Barnard: 3:11

Well, let's start with a preamble. three big chunks of aviation, or three big chunks of transportation, ground, air, water. And so the first part of the preamble is that ground transportation is gonna be electric. It's gonna be grid tied or battery electric. India as an example, is at 83% electrification of all rail and heading for a hundred. China's at 72%, et cetera. All light vehicles, all medium vehicles, all buses, all long distance trucking. It's all gonna be electric. electric. So, ignore that, you that's just

Tom Raftery: 3:45

The, The only, the only thing I, I would say there, none of that is controversial. I would've said except maybe the long distance trucking where some people are still saying, hydrogen's gonna fix that, because electric can't

Michael Barnard: 4:01

Oh, they'd be wrong, but that's okay. Um, uh, the right now the battery energy density is sufficient for fully loaded semis, you know, large scale trucks, 500 miles. Um, Pepsi is taking its Tesla semis, 400 miles, delivering, you know, its sugar, uh, battery acid to warehouses. Right now it's 500 mile runs with, uh, Frito-Lay chips. As soon as we're talking that range, we're talking a time requirement for a trucker to stop and take a mandated break. Uh, the US transportation policy is, um, an interesting one. The USA has a much greater percentage of ground transportation by road rather than rail or shipping than any other in the world. That's because they built the interstate highway for strategic defense purposes, exploited it. There's a bunch of differentiators that don't wanna get into them, um, but battery energy density is just getting better Yeah. and battery electric operating costs and maintenance are much lower, and it's trivial comparatively to get large scale chargers to truck stops rather than to get hydrogen to truck stops. Um, you know, the States

Tom Raftery: 5:13

electric is ubiquitous and hydrogen, although the most abundant element in the universe, is not really abundant in terms of being ubiquitous for charging vehicles

Michael Barnard: 5:24

Yeah, I, I'm just finishing off an assessment of the US Transportation Blueprint, which will be pu published in the next, you know, day or two. Um, and so this is mind, but that said, if there's a niche for something that is in electricity, in ground transportation, it's a rounding that I'm gonna ignore. Okay. So we have to look then the and water shipping. Um, and there, it's interesting, right? What we we have with aviation, um, you know, there's kind of three chunks this for aviation. The first is you, you're burning a fossil fuel kerosene jet A, and when you burn a fossil fuel, you're taking millions of year olds you know, stored CO2 and returning it in all its glory to the atmosphere. Uh, so that's kind of problem one. Problem two is when you burn a fossil fuel in the atmosphere, you're released, NOx nitrous oxide. N two O. Uh, an N two O is um, uh, a really potent greenhouse gas. It's long-lasting and it's 265 times as potent of greenhouse gas CO2. Now, that's a small from modern jet engines, But it's that multiplier and the persistence are concerning. The third contrails. Those lovely little lines in the sky, Well, they're up in the stratosphere, they persist and they actually cause more reflection of, uh, heat back to the earth in the form of infrared is just one of those annoying things. So we kinda have to solve for those three problems, which means we wanna burn a lot less stuff in the sky and we want to fix the contrail problem. And so let's just start with aviation and move on to marine shipping. If you know, if you don't mind, cuz Sure. I I'll I'll say that combination is, depending on how you count it, one to 5% of global CO2 emissions. Like right now we're not counting methane properly, so the numbers tend to be about pure co2, but that's not the right number to to focus on. Unfortunately, that's what most of the numbers look at. So shipping, global shipping is in the same scale. It's up there, it's like roughly the same CO2 emissions. So this is, uh, significant segments and wedges we have to kind of yank somehow. Um, so both those, but let's focus and, and. I'll finish it off with marine shipping, just one bit on marine shipping, which is marine shipping, doesn't contrails, Yay. But it does have, something that, uh, aviation doesn't have black carbon emissions. soot particulate matter, unburnt hydrocarbons, crap like that, which also has a very high global warming potential. So we wanna reduce the amount of stuff burn in ship engines as much as possible. And ship engines also produce a lot of nitrous oxide, so we have to make sure we reduce those. So that's of the, the big chunks, right? It's like in the scale of like it's over for each mode of all global warming. And both of them have shot upwards in terms of usage since 1990. I mean, 1990 is kind of the, the dateline for when we consider, you know, us, the us as a society to actually have been serious about dealing with climate change. Kyoto Protocol and the creation of the U N I P C C were around then, and most of benchmarks are 1990, Yep. Which is kind because global aviation and global marine shipping have shot upward radically with massive increases in emissions since not necessarily the wisest thing we've ever done a society, or an economy. Um, but there are answers. So going back to the to the solution space for aviation, um, there's a few factors here. The is are battery, electric airplanes, possible and viable? And the answer is yes. we can do right now with current battery energy density, we can do small planes, general aviation, light aircraft, or you know, four or five passengers. Nine passengers, which are fully electric, and we can get. um, you know, uh, 200 to 400 kilometers of range, depending upon the operating conditions. For commercial aviation, we need to also allow for divert and other, uh, concerns and circling over the airport. So, you know, small planes, 200 kilometers, we have enough range for, uh, all the circling otherwise. Um, so that's kind of statement one. Statement two though is hybrid electric works just fine in aircraft. We can run actually 400, 500 kilometers with a

Tom Raftery: 10:04

60

Michael Barnard: 10:04

to a hundred passenger, um, jet, or, you know, a turbo prop or, you know, for example, heart aerospace's 30, uh, passenger, uh, hybrid aircraft. We can do that entirely on batteries. And

Tom Raftery: 10:18

then

Michael Barnard: 10:18

have the generator, the hybrid generator, be suitable only divert. and, uh, circling. And so what we do is put all the reserve in the generator. And fly electrically as long as we don't have to divert, or circle. Um, so boom, right? That means we can actually decarbonize

Tom Raftery: 10:39

all

Michael Barnard: 10:40

propeller driven aircraft pretty much today with today's battery engine density. Um, there's a bit of stuff about the hybridization. These are all new airframes.

Tom Raftery: 10:51

So that's statement

Michael Barnard: 10:51

one is we're not gonna replace, we're not gonna put batteries and electric motors in existing airframes for the most part. Uh, they're not designed for it. They're engineered to have fuel in the wings and for that fuel load to diminish over the course of the flight. And the mean gross takeoff calculations are all around fuel and stuff like that. And so batteries, they, you wanna put them low in the plane, you wanna have different, uh, you wanna have wing, you know, basically to get the range we need, we have to kind a bit more glider profiles today.

Tom Raftery: 11:27

Right.

Michael Barnard: 11:27

Right now, we, uh, Jet-A has so

Tom Raftery: 11:29

much

Michael Barnard: 11:30

energy density, we just push blocks of wood through the air

Tom Raftery: 11:34

and we don't really care

Michael Barnard: 11:35

much. They're aerodynamic, but we have a lot more levers to pull on that. We have different characteristics of the plane. Let, uh, change the glide aspect ratio a bit. Um, more to, you know, earlier, uh, flight patterns for non-electric engines.

Tom Raftery: 11:50

So we're

Michael Barnard: 11:51

not just gonna take dash eight,

Tom Raftery: 11:54

yank

Michael Barnard: 11:54

out

Tom Raftery: 11:54

the motor, put in a

Michael Barnard: 11:56

new motor, yank out the tanks, put in some batteries, and Except on the shortest routes. I'll Um, you know, I, I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is where I'm talking from this morning. Uh, you know, Tom, I think you're in Seville in Spain outside. also a beautiful part of the world. I'd love to some time. But We have, uh, globally something that everybody knows in electric aviation, which is we have Harbor Air. Harbor Air is a float plane operation that, you know, has routes to the Vancouver Island and up to Squamish and, you know, around the coast. And it's great. Uh, it's 30 minutes walk from where I'm sitting. I've taken it many times. My mom lives over in the island and it's downtown to downtown service. And they have Magni X, the electric motor, uh, aviation motor company, which is sadly diverting a bit into hydrogen fuel cells as a, you know, bit of a mistake on their part. I think it's strategic blunder. Um, but they, they have actually replaced the drive on one of the old, uh, float planes. And so they're working through certification and actually pressing into service for short routes. Okay. So they'll be able to do Vancouver to Victoria, which is, you know, 20 kilometers. You know, uh, dozen, you know, a dozen or 15 miles as the crow flies or the float plane flies. Um, and will be just fine, But most routes aren't that short.. Tom Raftery: Yeah, . And most operators won't be satisfied with a plane which is suitable for 50 kilometers or less. And so, you know, repowering old, uh, airframes is not gonna be the same pattern as we've seen historically. Like right now what we see is a lot of older aircraft with new engines, um, or replacement engines in them, not as much gonna be custom built airframes. So that's the bottom end of the market and it's a a smaller segment. Um, I, I've ended up flying a lot of turbo props. I flew from Toronto to Montreal a lot on turbo props off the island airport. I fly when I fly to Victoria from the airport here, as opposed to a float plane. I go down to the, uh, Vancouver airport and I get in a turbo prop that takes me 11 minutes a flight time to

Tom Raftery: 14:17

Vancouver,

Michael Barnard: 14:18

uh, the Vancouver Island Airport. Mm-hmm., um, and then rent a car and go see my mom. Um, but most people when they're get an aircraft these days are getting a narrow twin-engined, big engine aircraft. Uh,

Tom Raftery: 14:34

likes the 737's the A320's

Michael Barnard: 14:39

Yep. Um, you know, the, uh, and so you kind of look at those and you go, okay, why are, why we have, why do we have two engines as opposed to four? Why have the air, the, the size of the aircraft change? Well, the, the answer is those big two big engines are 55% efficient at turning kerosene into forward motion at 30,000 feet at optimum cruising And 55% efficient for burning fossil fuels is really good. Yeah, these are miracles of technology. I mean, like the internal combustion engine. I, I love the engineering amazing stuff in the internal combustion engine and I can't wait for both of them to go away, because problem Um, so let's talk about that longer path, like the shorter path over the next 30 years. It's gonna be easy to decarbonize all of general aviation, all of turbo props, all those things are relatively trivial to do. once start going 1,000 and to hub-and-spoke airports with, you know, an A320 or an A321J with a three oh, I looked at them recently, and the A321J like the most efficient, little, little, canard, winglets and all that stuff. It's insanely fuel-efficient compared to its predecessors. Um, I had to benchmark something for, uh, uh, energy consumption for, I think it was, I was doing Edmonton Airport, a projection of electrifying all aviation through 2100 as if everything on that battery electric, much could we Different story. So the, if we take an a 20, a thousand, uh, thousand uh,you not going that on batteries today. so, what are you gonna do it on? And that, that's gonna be running at 30,000 feet and it's gonna be generating contrails for part of its operational pattern, especially at night. Um, the time that's worse to generate contrails. Um, and it's gonna be co2 and it's gonna be producing nitrous So, the answer is sustainable biofuels. Um, and, and when we look at that, I say, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff being discussed. There's hydrogen being discussed, People are pretending that hydrogen is fit for purpose. When it isn't. Um, I'll explain that. And then there's people who are saying, well, what we're going to do is make synthetic, uh, jet A or synthetic other synthetic fuels from hydrogen and carbon and oxygen. We're gonna push those molecules together ourselves, and then we're gonna make a fuel for putting into current jet engines. Right? So we are gonna be burning something in jets for a long time. if we consider, uh, hydrogen, well hydrogen, you know, you can put in a gas turbine and nearly use it as a jet fuel, just as we use it as rocket fuels similar. but there's a lot of problems with hydrogen. Remember I said you had to rebuild the, an air, uh, build an airframe for battery electric. We really have to do for hydrogen. So hydrogen

Tom Raftery: 17:47

have its Airbus, have published its blended wing hydrogen kind of design. Is that what you mean?

Michael Barnard: 17:55

Yeah. The, the problem with hydrogen is, so remember said there's fuel in the wings. That means it's supported by the air, so you don't have to engineer to support that weight in the connection points of the body. Right? As you move forward, the wings are lifting up and the fuel in them is lifting up, and you don't have to worry about that in terms of your mean gross tonnage of weight uh calculations for requirements. But hydrogen is different. So first off, there's two aspects to hydrogen. Well, you can have it as gas you can have it as liquid As a gas, it's, you know, really nicely energy, uh, dense by mass. A kilogram of hydrogen is a lot equivalent to four liters of gasoline, Right? Right. So that's quite energy The problem is the volume. Hydrogen is pretty much the least condensable gas that exists. That we know about. Right? And, and this is physics, so we know about them. Yeah. Yeah., it's not like it's got like tiny, it's got two atoms, it's got nothing going on there. Um, the, know, and so the helium molecule is actually smaller, but that's the only thing in the universe. Smaller and diffuse then, uh, hydrogen. So hydrogen and inert, um, yeah, not helpful at all. Uh, so the, the hydrogen problem then is, much do we compress it? So if we take a fuel cell car in order to get any range, we have to compress hydrogen in gaseous form to 750 atmospheres, which means, know, take the earth's atmosphere at sea level and multiply that by 750. That's a lot. you know, the, uh, if we take a compressor in a standard refrigeration unit that's at about 50 atmospheres,

Tom Raftery: 19:50

If I remember correctly from my time scuba diving in college, the scuba tanks were at about 200, uh, bar, uh, which how, how bars to atmosphere. It's very

Michael Barnard: 20:04

closely related. it's very close. It's very, there's just slight differences between the two. And, and so 750 is a but still that gives you, uh, 400 or 500 kilometers of range with a car that's rolling along the ground. It's not taking off with lots of freight. So all the demonstrators of,uh, hydrogen aviation by, you know, zero avia and people that, they've been using gaseous hydrogen. And what that means is there's no room inside the airplane at all for except the hydrogen gas tanks. Um, and so if you're trying use gaseous hydrogen, it won't work. And so No, you can't, Yeah. like you're immediately running into the physics of the problem. You can't compress it sufficiently. matter what quality of tanks you use to get it down to an energy density that's remotely near kerosene, you can't put it in the wings because

Tom Raftery: 20:56

there's no room

Michael Barnard: 20:57

in wings all that volume. So has to go in the cabin. So everybody's saying, ok we need liquid hydrogen. And liquid hydrogen is amazing stuff. It's problem though, it's about 20 degrees above zero, that hydrogen turns into a liquid.

Tom Raftery: 21:14

So -250 centigrade

Michael Barnard: 21:15

a

Tom Raftery: 21:15

that's lot.

Michael Barnard: 21:17

Yeah, that's long way down. It's like hundred. It's almost 300 degrees colder humans like to have it you know, we're probably a 20, 21, 19 degree Celsius in our very respective places. Go a long way colder, like almost 300 degrees colder. And so here we say, can Well, can it in the wings then away from the passengers? And the answer is no. At that temperature, hydrogen likes to, uh, liquid hydrogen wants to boil off, and all that is, is it, it, the liquid evaporates into a gas mm-hmm.. and we have to prevent that it really wants off fast and it, and when it turns into a gas, again, it's, um, a) changing the volume radically. And b) hydrogen gas really likes to explode. Like, let's just take Nat. Yeah. It's the problem in the hydrogen . It's a great thing about it, but it's a problem. So let's just compare and contrast natural gas. Something most of us know about with hydrogen. Cause you know, there's various initiatives to try and put into people's homes to replace gas heaters and gas stoves. And I, I'll share that, that's dumb as box of putrescent purple hammers. Um, it's, a stupid, stupid idea. It's gonna die, But we're going through a weird hype cycle about hydrogen. So hydrogen natural gas, um, it's five to 15% of as a ratio to the air around you that it can ignite less and it won't ignite more and it won't ignite not enough oxygen, too little, you know, too much of the other stuff. And then it needs about, um, uh, hundreds of degrees as a spark to ignite. And now, and that means that in the United States, for example, 4,000 homes, um, uh, 4,000 buildings burn or explode every year because of natural gas we end up with in this situation. And dozens of people die from natural gas building explosions already. So Now let's take hydrogen. Hydrogen is 4% to 76% a ratio to air will It will ignite and it's a hundred, uh, uh, it's more than a hundred degree celsius lower spark point. So a spark that won't ignite natural gas will ignite hydrogen. A. If you get too much natural gas, you may, you know, pass out, but is not going to blow up. But hydrogen will just fill the space and the more hydrogen there is there and it sparks the bigger explosion. And now let's consider what a plane is. It is a pressurized aluminum tube flying at 30,000 feet. Mm-hmm. let's have a a hydrogen leak that We don't allow smoking in aircraft anymore. but I'm going to say that, you know, despite there being smoke detectors in washrooms, people still smoke in washrooms in airplanes. They're stupid that way. they have vape pens that they use in

Tom Raftery: 24:30

even if they, you think about the, the coffee machines, the, the temperature of the coffee machines in there

Michael Barnard: 24:36

uh, there's all sorts of electrical equipment that you could just have a sparking electrical connection. And you don't want hydrogen inside the plane with the passengers at all. Yeah, you can't. right. And so, but you can't put it in the wings because the boil off the physics of liquid hydrogen means that if you don't wanna lose it all to evaporation, you have to put it in big insulated ball shaped tanks. Thermally, that's the most efficient thing to get the minimum surface area, to the maximum volume. Right. It's just physics. And, so boil off, uh, for liquid natural gas is like one and a half percent, one to one point a half percent per day, um, on tankers. And it's gonna be 2-3% minimum for hydrogen if we try ship hydrogen. And so, you know, you take enough jet fuel and you put it in tanks and it's boiling off. You gotta find, you gotta vent that, you've gotta have detectors, you gotta do a whole bunch of stuff, but it's inside the fuselage. These big globular tanks have to be inside the fuselage, where normally you put passengers or cargo and it's not in the wings at our luggage and it's not in the wings. So it is not supported from engineering perspective by the wings, when it takes off. It's in the fuselage, which means it has to be calculated into the mean gross takeoff weight. So the longer distance you wanna travel, the more you have to carry and by far, it cuts directly into passenger or freight mass. And so the projections that are based about being able to fly the same distances with, um, hydrogen, liquid hydrogen as with kerosene, with the same number of passengers are specious nonsense. I think it was, um, uh, fly zero, you know, released a model that presented that we could take a 280 passenger plane, uh, 5,000 kilometers hydrogen. No, it's not gonna happen. So it's not gonna happen for two reasons, the first reason is do, do you know how much of a a, certified um, safety oriented

Tom Raftery: 26:53

industry aviation is? Yeah, absolutely

Michael Barnard: 26:58

Uh, it costs a lot to certify those things. The FAA and EASA really care about people not blowing up in airplanes. especially commercial ones Thanks. if you wanna fly a Yeah. Thankfully it is literally, it is much safer to get in a, a modern jet aircraft than to cross the street in a city. Um, statistically, you're much likely to injure yourself or be hit by something on the city street than to have the most remote problems flying 5,000 kilometers in an aircraft for on a per kilometer basis, aviation is the safest form of travel we have because we, the industry has done this amazing job of focusing on reducing risk and certifying aircraft. And so as we certify aircraft, the FAA's certification process, it's all about safety. It's all about things not blowing up. It's all about redundancy. Hydrogen in passenger aircraft doesn't pass sniff test certification So that's kind of statement

Tom Raftery: 28:02

one. Now

Michael Barnard: 28:03

economics. Go ahead. Oh, well, yes. Then there's the economics. I was actually gonna go to a different place and then I'll get to economics.

Tom Raftery: 28:10

Okay, go on.

Michael Barnard: 28:10

Um, so the next thing is the lifting wing model. The vision. In that case, what you're really doing is expanding the body so it merges into the wings. You have a a lot more room inside the body, so you can put the hydrogen tanks and the passengers in a big, and have the same number of passengers surrounding the hydrogen tanks I get it.

Tom Raftery: 28:40

Um,

Michael Barnard: 28:40

so kinda statement one. Yes, it's possible to do that and it does resolve this massive amount of space in the stuff. And you can do the engineering for the wings Um, But you don't resolve the safety concerns. You don't resolve the massive temperature disparity between these big globular tanks of hydrogen and these warm, squishy humans that are actually the point of this exercise. Um, the next problem you face, of course, is that battery energy density is going to eat the bottom of the aviation market. And you don't need a big airbus lifting wing body battery electric. You can put a lot of the batteries in the wings and you can put other batteries in the base and you can move them around. But you have to engineer for, um, balance of the aircraft, but that's entirely viable. And you design an aircraft for those characteristics for landing and takeoff. Uh, but you don't need a, a, big, weird lifting wing thing that you don't, that doesn't work gantries in airports, or anything like that.

Tom Raftery: 29:42

Sure. Yeah,

Michael Barnard: 29:44

yeah, yeah. Um, and so you kinda like look at this and go, okay, so the bottom end of market, we're gonna get up to, up to turbo, turbo props of a hundred passengers in you know a decade and a half. And That means the bottom half of the market is building recognizable aircraft. They're different, slightly different, but not massively different. We can use a lot of the same stuff we do today. We can tweak stuff, we get rid of exhausts and stuff like that. But then as battery energy density improves, oh, we're gonna be able to do thousand kilometer trips with 150 people, and then we're gonna be able to do 2000 kilometer trips with 200 people. And then my projection is, based upon the curves, I I think it likely, given what I know of electrochemistry and how much room to maneuver we have and all the innovation that's going into battery electric, we'll probably be able to do a Pacific flight with passengers, um, in, you know, a hundred plus passengers by 2070 or so, 2060, 2070. And then in another 30 or so years by 2100, we'll re start replacing most of the airframes. So my projection for aviation is battery electric for most aviation by 2100. That's civilian. Military is, you know, a separate weird topic. not discuss it. Um, but for civilian aviation, I project full battery is possible around, you know, the, the three quarters of the way through this, the century. And then that means that the airframes will slowly be replaced. So that's kinda the battery electric story. And that's good news, but it does mean that putting hydrogen into weird planes, has a diminishing market, makes makes less and less sense. And then you mention the the economics. Uh, there's a lot of ascientific, economically illiterate projections of hydrogen, green hydrogen costs out there. So, let's talk about hydrogen comes from briefly. Let's talk about two, you know, three colors of hydrogen. So hydrogen co comes from coal or natural gas. Mostly from natural gas. But if coal gas, which is just more methane mixed with other pollutants, is the same stuff. And go through processes which strip the off the hydrocarbon gas and you leave with a bunch of CO2 or a bunch of pollutants, which we throw into the atmosphere. And then you've got hydrogen, which is pure. And And when you burn it, it only delivers water. Oh, ignore the man behind curtain. And that hydrogen costs, you know, maybe, you know, 78 cents or something like that to manufacture. And then you can buy it for a buck, buck 50 per kilogram, right? And so that's, you know, in wholesale lots. Without distribution. But let's take, um, the gray and black hydrogen. You can gray hydrogen, which is the, you know, natural gas stuff. You can get into California gas stations for fuel cell vehicles,$12-$18 per kg

Tom Raftery: 34:05

That, and that's about 100km range, right?

Michael Barnard: 34:09

Uh, it's longer than that. You, you, the, um, you, you can actually get, uh, with a Mirai, I think it's, uh, 500, 600 kilometers range, No, per, sorry. Per kilo. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 34:20

So about 100km per kilo.

Michael Barnard: 34:23

which is why Toyota gives away $15,000 worth of free hydrogen with every Mirai they sell. New or refurbished.

Tom Raftery: 34:31

How does that work?

Michael Barnard: 34:34

It doesn't Um, but the reason that, you know, we can make grey hydrogen for like a buck or something, and it costs 15 bucks retail is because it's really hard. All that problems with compression, all that leakage, it likes to leak and then to recompress it to 750 bar. A high, a fuel cell car pumping station, it's about $2.5m. Whereas a supercharger location for a Tesla is like ¢250,000 know, kinda like look at the economics there and hydrogen's more expensive than the electricity you know, that's part of why all ground transportation will electrify. But hydrogen, let's take it and say what, well, what if we get rid of the problem with all the CO2 that comes off of that stuff? Blue hydrogen, we'll do carbon capture and sequestration. Well, that's gonna significantly, there's first of all, best case scenario, there's a 15% extra power required at that step, which is just capturing the co2, right? And. and and then you've gotta do something with the co2, which means you pipe it somewhere and put it underground. And that's only, that's for, uh, carbon capture, which is 85% efficient, single pass carbon capture. So every kilogram, instead of coming with, you know, eight of CO2 comes with and a half of kilos of co2. That, that's a win-ish. Not a great win. But it's more expensive, right? So that retail price goes up because the wholesale cost of manufacture up. The multipliers are all the same, you know, it's gonna be gonna be more expensive. Uh, so let's talk about the other one. Green hydrogen. You know, it's like, take renewable electricity and take water and, you know, put them together and split the H2O into 2 Hs, and one O and voila, we have hydrogen. Well, that's more expensive than blue hydrogen and it's probably always going to be more expensive than blue hydrogen, except when natural gas prices peak as they did last year. There's a lot of excitement in the green hydrogen community when green hydrogen was cheaper than hydrogen from natural gas, but neither price point was remotely economically sustainable. It doesn't matter if green hydrogen is cheaper than gray hydrogen, if no one can afford either. Yeah, at least for energy fair. Um, you know, it, like saying, okay, Tom, your heating bill has gone up to €2000 a month. But if we replace it with hydrogen, it's only 1800 euros a month. Aren't you you happy No, you're not You want your heating bill bill to be 200 euros a month like it used to be. Um, And that's kinda the hydrogen story every time you look at it. So we look at hydrogen, we say, okay, it's going to be more expensive. Green hydrogen is more expensive than blue hydrogen and it always will be. So an electrolyzer plant to manufacture sufficient volumes of hydrogen is a massive industrial facility. Electrolyzers are about one of 28 components in them. The electrolyzer is the non-commoditized, non off the shelf component in the plant. That means everything else in the plant is already cost optimized because we manufactured thousands or tens thousands or millions of them, The electrolyzer is the only thing in the plant that's gonna get cheaper. That means the capital expenditure on the electrolyzer plant is still going to remain a significant economic factor. Sure that matters because that means we have to use it a lot more. We have to have a high utilization in order to minimize the CapEx component of the hydrogen cost. Which which means we used to use it like 60 plus percent, 80 plus percent, preferably 90 plus percent. And as soon as we say that, say well, we're not gonna be using it for a third of the year off excess renewables because it's just gonna be really, really expensive. We might, that might be an an argument for hydrogen grid storage, where you know, we really have a strategic need and we're willing to stupid amounts of money for it. There are better alternatives there. I won't get into, you can make an an argument for that, but you can't make an argument for something use being really expensive. So what you have to do then is you have to get firmed electricity to maximize the utilization of the in infrastructure. Firmed electricity means we have to have renewables, transmission storage, administrative costs, regulatory burden, which puts it up around 100. Bucks a megawatt hour. Now it's not going to be 30 bucks a megawatt hour electricity running these electric electrolyzers and it'll be firmed electricity which is more like what you get outta your do, do you happen to know what you pay kilowatt hour in Seville?

Tom Raftery: 39:37

We're at about 20 cent per kilowatt hour. I mean, it varies with time of day and that kind of thing, but it in or around 20 cent per kilowatt hour.

Michael Barnard: 39:45

Yeah. And, and that's what you're getting. That's what these electrolysers are gonna be be running on. Right, and so that means that the, um, oper operation expense and the capital expense push price kilogram way up. If you drop the operational expense by only using intermittent electricity, you're maximizing the capital X portion. You can't, you're only going to bring so far, only bring the capital expense in. So hydrogen is always gonna be more expensive. These claims of $1 per kilogram green hydrogen manufacturing are specious nonsense. Um, mcKinsey and other companies like that are, I'm just gonna be saying they, they must be huffing hydrogen to believe these numbers. They, have, they're, they are, um, in a lot of cases, many of these analyses are done by b school graduates who have the best intent and their heart's in the right place. But they wouldn't know a periodic if it hit them in the head. And so they just don't understand the physics. They don't understand the infrastructure or the economics they've never been in an industrial plant and looked at the components. So they don't know how that works. So these projections of cost reductions based making electrolyzers cheaper, and they won't get nearly as cheap as people believe either because there's a whole bunch of stuff going on inside there, just don't hold water. Right. hydrogen is always gonna be be more expensive. That's just the nature of the the beast. It's, I've done the math on this. My, my gut is six to $8 per kilogram, delivered is the best case scenario for non-liquid hydrogen right? So that's six to eight times the cost of, diesel or gas North America. And is still multiples in Europe, right. So three x cost, three or or four x the cost. Of, uh, same amount of energy as, Jet-A. So very expensive. But then we get to the next piece which says, okay, what do we do here? Well, uh, what about if we make a liquid fuel? Like let's make liquid fuels outta that. Well, if you start with hydrogen being expensive, anything you make out of it is more expensive

Tom Raftery: 42:07

Yeah.

Michael Barnard: 42:09

So the entire hydrogen and synthetic fuels space, like, uh, uh, Audi's Blue Diesel it's nonsense. Um, Michael Liebreich said it very well recently. He said, um, the hydrogen hype is gonna take 20 for energy It's gonna take till 2030 to abate because it takes time to deprogram a cult a cult. Every time, you know, actual spreadsheet jockeys numbers, they go can't use this. And so hydrogen ain't gonna be there. All those reasons. Um, and it doesn't cure the contrail problem. Contrail problems are just an operational thing. We can actually fly a plane 500 meters lower, and get 60-80% to contrail reduction. we're gonna see a gonna see a lot of just operational minor operational changes, which will do that. Um, and hydrogen, we burn hydrogen in a gas turbine, it actually makes more contrails. Electric airplanes make no contrails. Um, Burning hydrogen still N2O. Electric airplanes create create no N2O. So, aviation biofuels on the other hand, well, biofuels. Well, let's talk about biofuels. We've been able to make biofuels for 6,000 years. So biofuel, here's the biofuel process. We ferment some stuff, make beer, um, that's 8,000 year old technology. We distill it into alcohol. That's a 6,000 year old technology. We can burn alcohol. We actually burn it in burn it in cars today. You can get corn ethanol in Brazil and run a, uh, uh, dual fueled cars entirely on alcohol Brazil We've been We've been able to do this for yep, forever. Um, and then the last the last bit, we don't actually, alcohol has about a third, the energy density as kerosene, which is jet fuel. So how do we make we make diesel or kerosene out of alcohol? Well, Otto Von Diesel, I think that was his name. I know his last name was Diesel. The guy we named Diesel after mm-hmm. made the first synthetic Diesel the first the first biodiesel in 1890. We've been been making, uh, biological process biofuels, since the 1890s. Um, you know, and so we kinda like that and go okay, well well that's great, let's move forward. there are now eight pathways for biofuels from waste streams. Let's talk, one I'd lean into is stalk cellulosic, bio fuels. you had a, a stalk of corn with the ear at the top. and get this

Tom Raftery: 44:46

so you

Michael Barnard: 44:46

this so you

Tom Raftery: 44:47

actually, where's ah, there, it's , the

Michael Barnard: 44:50

the ear at the top and the stock of corn. And that right now we make into ethanol, but that's stupid because it's calories for animals or people. So let's instead take the ear of corn and feed animals and people with it. Take the stalk, which is the same stuff. It's cellulose, it's hydrogen, carbon, carbon and oxygen in a different format. Mulch it throw it into it into fermentor, distill it, and put it into one of these upgrading processes that takes ethanol kerosene or diesel. We that that pathway alone for just the segments of aviation and marine shipping in my projections, will that will actually require biofuels, has enough energy in it. Just Just from our current crops of corn, wheat, and rice globally all all of the biofuels we need, as long as we don't waste it on ground transportation. Gotcha. Gotcha. So So rationality has to prevail. We have to electrify ground transportation, and we have and we have to electrify as much of aviation and marine shipping as possible which is easy. So biofuels are are about 30% price, uh, premium on other fuels, right? And so it's gonna cost more. Um, and that's just what it is. Uh, and so if and so if it costs more, then you know, we're gonna use less of it. We're gonna do some other stuff, but it costs a lot less than hydrogen / synthetic fuels.

Tom Raftery: 46:15

Okay. So, but Mike, in, in, in terms of marine shipping, um, 40, 40% of marine shipping today is for moving fossil fuels around. So if we get rid of fossil fuels, 40% of the requirement goes away, right?

Michael Barnard: 46:33

Absolutely, um, now now Paul Martin and I are having arguments about this, um, Paul Martin is a founding member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, and we agree on 98% of stuff. We disagree on aspects of details. So he is, I, is, I I, tend to defer to him on stuff like this, but it depends on where we look at the question. Um, Um he is focused on, he says the numbers he quotes are 15 to 25% of a barrel of oil are used for products which are value which we don't burn. Um, so so other industrial feed stocks and durable goods and stuff like that. And his perspective is we're gonna continue to do that. I suspect it's suspect it's gonna be less right now, being non-burnable products include asphalt for our roads. Um, we can actually just grind up our roads and reuse that asphalt. We don't need more roads. Let's Let's just, and we can just grind up the asphalt, reuse and repave roads with reused asphalt. At a certain point, we don't need more asphalt. It's already cheaper cheaper to recycle for most jurisdictions than it is buy new asphalt. a waste It's a waste byproduct of refineries. They're practically giving it away. Um, same with bunker fuel for for shipping. Resid is stuff they can't do anything anything else with. They've got it down down to, they've taken everything else of value out resid, including including diesel and kerosene and gasoline and aromatics and benzines. And the resid the stuff that still burns, but if they give it ships, then the ships engines burn it, So that means I that means I think 15 to to 25 percent of the barrel of barrel of oil, which persists. We're still gonna be pumping oil out. It's gonna be lower than 20% of oil will pumped. We'll be doing nothing burnable with which means that all stuff we currently fractionated into with a whole bunch of stuff, majority burnable stuff. It has to be majority non-burnable stuff. And then we end up with a bunch stuff which is waste, which we don't have any value streams for. So I suspect the economics lower that further because every barrel of oil produces less value. Um, that's kinda my thinking on this. And we have, um, Paul and I are, you know, having a bit of a debate, uh, which I defer to him on as well. He spent a lot of time finding biological replacements for fossil fuels in his career, and he knows how hard that is. But the biofuel question. makes it clear that we can do that, or a substantial portion of that, and I suspect we'll do a bit more of that. And the final though is fuel prices are go up shipping. Okay. just Okay just the nature the beast, especially for, you know, um, let's let's separate shipping into three categories. Um, first categorization inland. Short sea, which is like near shore, it is between Sweden and Norway, um, you know, Sweden and Germany. and, you know, what's naia across the Mediterranean from you for like Seville. You know, Seville has a port. Does Seville have a port?

Tom Raftery: 49:39

It does, yeah. does. Yeah. The Guadalquivir, it's, where a lot of the South American gold came back in the times of the, the, the, the Spanish wasn't an empire really, but call it an empire just for the sake

Michael Barnard: 49:52

But Seville morocco, for example, that's short short sea. Um, all those inland and shorter portions in the short sea, nearshore shipping will just battery electric. We already have uh, 1300 passenger cruise ships in the um, Three Gorges running hour tours on 7.5 megawatt hour batteries. We have autonomous container shipping, shipping being, being, um, prototyped and tested in the Yangtse in China and also Norway. I think it's Norway. of the Uh, we have massive of electrifying globally, and so we can see pattern here. and pattern is very clear. I'll give you the very clear Um, if shipping drops, because we're getting rid of bulk coal, and gas and a lot of the steel, um, then container shipping as a ratio And containers have this wonderful thing, they're the perfect size battery packs. Tesla Wartsilla already and behind meter storage batteries in container packages to Which are stacked and shipped exactly the way other container is, they've got big plugs on the outside. And so we sit sit there look at that, can say, okay, we can get like container with a few megawatt hours lithium ion or similar chemistry cell batteries, and we can winch it a ship Mm-hmm. And it can sail a port and it can get winched off with all rest containers and put in a special part of the port where it's plugged in to charge. And charged batteries the ship. I, spend a lot looking for weird reasons of my own container, shipping, logistical stuff, and the there's uh, only handful of the, of software packages and they all know what each container is and its status. And they already deal with containers which require electrical connections because there are containers. have to be put in a specific part of the, um, trans shipment and plugged in by a human being. And when they're unplugged, they're into the container ship in a specific spot. And a member plugs in to maintain those as frozen quantities. this is just standard stuff. This is all operationalized. All those containers turn into big batteries. They winched outta ships, they get winched back into ships and they get onto trains. Trains into trans shipment ports, ships come shipment ports, containers get winched of one and on to the other. Mm-hmm. batteries exactly the same thing. One of the biggest provinces in Germany did an assessment of rail, by the way, they said hydrogen is three times as expensive as direct tying, or hybrid battery plus grid tying. So batteries for the hard to put. Take tunnels, for example, one of the excuses, American, uh, railroad Association, says the of Railroads, association of American Railroads, A A A r. They, one of excuses they make, uh, for not electrifying railroads is they'd have to rebuild tunnels to put catenary line overhead lines, and they'd have to heighten the tunnels. But in Europe, they just say oh put a battery on the train and that enables it to get the longest tunnel. Makes sense. It's it's, it makes sense. you know, so you kind of sit there with a battery pack that's in a container you winch it a train into, in a trans shipment port and it charges and then maybe it goes on a ship. Maybe one comes off a and goes on a train. It's just, that's gonna be the pattern for the future cuz it leverages so much as what we do already. And so all inland shipping and two thirds nearshore shipping. It's going to be, um, battery electric and mostly containerized. Um, that leaves only the journeys, let's take, um, deep water. They kind of categor. they kind. No, that's deep water. So deep water is notion, running up a coast is considered nearshore. But that could include argentina to Guatemala Yeah. Yeah. You you're never are, necessarily outside land. You're never in deep water, but that's a long trip. And so for those longer and crossing oceans, we're gonna be using biofuels. Uh, a a, a big a big ship might use 16,000 tons of resid today as fuel crossing an ocean. We're not gonna replace that with batteries in this century, but we can replace it with Okay. Okay. and exactly the same arguments. Now here's a really interesting thing. So everybody's concerned about, well, biofuels, as I've said, there's, you know, just using the stalk, we have enough for all marine shipping, aviation, that's good news. That's not imposing on food supplies. It's using waste streams. There are seven more biological waste streams, which we can turn into biofuels, including animal dung, including vegetable oil, grease, uh, stuff and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. some of them use some hydrogen to supplement the process. Some of them don't. Which I think economics will mean they'll will be favoring the ones that don't more, they'll be more competitive, but we have enough and it's not gonna impact food supplies. But let's look at the other side. What about air pollution? Human beings care about air pollution. makes us us sick, it shortens our lives. Well, if all ground transportation and most inland and all inland and nearshore shipping are battery electric and a lot of short haul aviation battery electric, well, where is air pollution occurring? Mostly over not near humans. Um, and in this case, there's argument to be made that, you know, it's imperfect, but the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. My argument is that it is good enough, and there's this other one nice little thing. Biofuels burn cleaner than fossil fuels. a lot excess crap molecules in them that turn into nasty stuff. Like, we, here's actually a really interesting thing. A biodiesel or a biokerosene has more energy in a liter fossil fuel equivalent And it burns cleaner because it's more of the stuff we want and less of the extraneous stuff that comes along with it from, you know, so go back million years, um, a T-Rex dies a swamp. Mm-hmm. Right? All the biomass from the swamp, the stuff we like mixed t-Rex skin and guts and stuff. And the meat he ate from, you know, the, the triceratops he ate for lunch. And so we go down a few futures that's turned into sulfur and other crap, and we end up with these fossil fuels with weird stuff mixed in and we get rid of most of the sulfur. Um, we get rid of other stuff that's, that's problematic. But we still end with fossil fuels, which have some, a bunch of stuff in them, which isn't the burnable stuff that adds value. And so when we make biofuels, well it doesn't have T-Rex mixed in. We don't a cow into the fermentors and the distillers. don't do that we don't add sulfur. And so, you know, as we move forward more energy density for biofuel than for a fossil fuel, burns cleaner, cuz it doesn't have the trace elements. And in my projection it's burned away from human beings more than not. And so we vastly reduce the impact the health impacts of burning fossil fuels. We reduce noise pollution, where people are. Right. If you know, Let's take Seville, it's port, it's got an and it's got um, motorbikes transportation. Yep. And a train that you I I remember reading that. Yeah. Speed train less time than trying to drive. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Um, and so you kinda like, look at all those and the high speed train is undoubtedly electric. I'm just gonna grid tied, catenary lines. Um, and so you look look, at those and all those sources of noise and air pollution go away except for the airport haul flights, which will typically away from land. And the longest haul shipping, which will typically go away from land. So then noise levels in the city drop, the air pollution quality improves. um, you know, uh, everything that it can be electrified will be electric. It's be a lovely world. uh, it's gonna take us a few decades to get there. but, so that's all ground transportation, electric aviation, increasingly electric though, so by the end of 2100 all-electric, biofuels replacing fossil fuels and then diminishing use in aviation over that period. For marine shipping, all inland, all nearshore shipping, most two-thirds of nearshore shipping, battery electric, mostly container batteries, and then the rest biofuels. And we're not gonna replace 16,000 tons of biofuels of batteries this century. right? So we kind of have to say we're gonna be burning biofuels, But I've done the curves and peak biofuel demand for aviation and shipping that's compatible with us getting to very low carbon emissions 2060 2070. Like it's like really amazingly low. I was like, the marine curve was just like, wow, this is actually pragmatic, achievable curve. And we're close to zero in 2070 and at like 5% in 2060. These are manageable numbers to manage the climate crisis. Um, but biofuel demand smaller than all the, uh, the inflows that we have. It's very good news story, but it's running at a massive hype, which is preventing from just doing it. Anyway, so that's the story. I I, I, I didn't let you get a word in edgewise, but I know you like that, isn't it? You, You like to ask short questions and let the guest a good ramble on guy.

Tom Raftery: 1:00:24

Good. Good, good, Good, We are coming towards the end of the end of the podcast now, Michael, there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you is important people to think about?

Michael Barnard: 1:00:38

Um, one of the big ones is why is hydrogen being considered so heavily for energy right now? Why is this hydrogen hype there? Why is the hydrogen for energy cult exist? And, um, the answer is

Tom Raftery: 1:00:54

Who produces it? it?

Michael Barnard: 1:00:55

There's a lot of money in it. it's not like who produces it's who distributes it. Um, it's who uses it, and it's the governments which get money from all of this process. Let's just take, um, gas distribution. Do you have natural gas in your home? Okay. But you know, you probably, there's homes in Seville that do use natural gas cooking, right? So the gas utility doesn't exist in a few decades, yeah. and it's revenues and profits diminish and it's a death spiral. Um, as every connection is severed, they have to spend the same amount of costs all the distribution with lower revenue. And so there comes a tipping point when they're bankrupt because they're, and then nobody gets gas, right? And so they're trying to avoid that. Yeah. Um, and uh, I, I deal with industrial heat as well. Industrial heat is a 20% of global energy use and it's almost all fossil fuels. Um, so when a, um, company like BASF with its integrated chemical plants goes to its supplier of heat, and says how do we decarbonize heat well the supplier of heat are fossil fuel suppliers. They supply gases and liquids that burn and say, we'll say, well, they'll say the answer is, well is answer because it's a gas that burns. They don't have a business model that says, let's put an electric induction heating, because they aren't suppliers of electric induction heating. They're not the suppliers of electric arc furnaces. They're not the suppliers of electro plasma torches not the suppliers of heat pumps. And so, but the people who are answering, asking the question are asking of their current And so there's this really interesting tribalism, and these are people they've had probably had lunches and dinners and poker games with possibly for decades. They like people. They're probably friends. They in the same neighborhood. You know, you're gonna say, well, you know, John, I, uh, you know, about 20 million a year. I give you a sign off, you know, every march. Well, goodbye. Um, uh, let's take, uh, let's take Canada where I sit. Um, so five to 7% of our gross domestic product is coal, and gas, right. A a as the federal government being a, uh, progressive government, which is put in one of the best carbon taxes in the world, you know, progressed up to 133 US by 2030. And three elections have been fought with it as an So this actually, Canada is behind this. but 7% of GDP talks cuz that's of into governments. that's ancillary economic benefits that's direct gdp. There's secondary benefits from that. There's, um, housing and ship and retail businesses and B2B that's all, all coming off of that. And so you you kind of multiply by two, two and a half to get the secondary benefit stream if you've got that big a chunk of your economy. And so the Canada's and the Norways, Saudi Arabia's of the world, they all really need hydrogen from fossil to be a thing. If it isn't, then their reserve value disappears. And, and you know, you know, do you have a a trillion dollars worth of reserves of, of natural gas as does and it's gone, that turns into zero value. And if you've got like a trillion dollars worth of oil reserves as BP might, and that turns into something worth $100bn they're gonna, it's really, they're in their vested interest pushing, there's a lot of, lot of, cognitive problems there. There's al, there's also operational and capEx problems. Back to this, like there's the the cognitive problems. There is the tribalism of your friend Brad, and, you know, you give 20 million to a year and here in return treats you to really nice dinners and at poker you and loses at golf you. but there's a capital cost expenditure. a. um, a big cement clinker is a 500 million dollar capital expenditure refueling, and that uses natural gas use a jet of natural gas like 10 meters long and five meters wide inside. So it's a lot gas and the alternatives. We can do electric clinkers. They're actually experimenting with jet plasma jets and we've had electric clinkers before, but they're not the same. You can't just replace the fuel the capital expenditure. So you've got a capital expenditure problem. you've got a very significant capital assets, which are designed and built fossil fuels. What are we gonna do maybe we're gonna put labor, you know, put something else in it. Maybe we're gonna put biofuels, biothane, don't know. Um, but we can repl everything we need over time. It's all gonna electric But then then there's the next thing, electricity, when we're using it directly as heat, um, as you know, not as a heat pump, but directly as heat is more expensive using natural gas. You've got a sunk capital cost and you've got higher expenses. No business likes They're going to resist that as long as possible. So we've got a whole bunch of alignment in society, this massive industry, which is very, has, you know, the, the, there is a moral case for fossil fuels. And to be clear, that moral case fossil fuels is now over. Um, you know, the moral case, isn't we? it when didn't have replacements, yeah. There there was a moral Now we have replacements. So thank you very much. Uh, your hacienda in, uh, Portugal, and, uh, drink mojitos or whatever you drink and go down to the beach. Work on your tan. Thank you very much. Get out of our lives. Um, like British gangsters. Um, we don't want them around anymore. Um, and so that's where we with fossil fuel industry. Great that they exist. gonna be declining rapidly, like peak oil, peak coal was 2013, peak oil demand is later this decade, peak natural gas is mid next decade. And after that, it's a decline for them. and so that's a fundamental and why there's so much hype for hydrogen right now

Tom Raftery: 1:07:42

Cool, Michael, really interesting. Thanks, uh, million for coming to the podcast today. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the any of the things we talked about, where would you have me direct them?

Michael Barnard: 1:07:53

LinkedIn, LinkedIn Michael Barnard TFIE Strategy, uh, advisory Board with FlyMax, Uh, what else is on there? Co-founder of Distance or my current hats there's all the publications, uh, through illuminem.com and CleanTechnica.com

Tom Raftery: 1:08:11

Great. Michael, that's been excellent. Thanks a million for joining me on the today.

Michael Barnard: 1:08:16

Tom. Pleasure to be here. Great to chat with you, great to chat at you and your audience. It's been fun