what's oman's Vision in this hydrogen story and how is a super company going to help Stay With Me [Music] with me is Dr ferrasal abdiwani the acting managing director of hydrogen Oman AKA hydram how do you do very well thank you welcome to the show and we are getting straight to the questions about hydrogen what is it what is this molecule all about and why is it important fantastic first of all great thank you very much penny for hosting over here and it's a pleasure to be promoting green hydrogen Summit from our perspective hydrogen is a very interesting energy vector or pathway a potential for decarbonization so the whole story really revolves around multiple things from a Global Perspective it's one of the tools that humanity is looking at decarbonizing the world and trying to get the temperature and the climate change under control it's also a great opportunity for economic diversification so when we look at the hydrogen story and why this molecule is important important we look at what is used traditionally for and what our Ambitions as a Humanity for it are historically hydrogen has been used in a very Niche space so the global consumption by 2020 of hydrogen was between 80 and 90 million tons per atom that's a very modest quantity and it's very Niche areas it's used for example in the petrochemicals Industries for in refining it's used to create urea and fertilizers out of that so very limited use which is primarily as a as a primary feedstock going into these chemical reactions our Ambitions are much greater than that because it has the potential of helping and Abate the emissions from hard to Abate sectors that involves steel manufacturing heavy Transportation so there are different elements if you Google and the audience Google something such as the the hydrogen ladder you'll be able to see the different sectors that that hygiene can address okay has hydrogen ever been used refuel as I remember growing up the flammability and danger of hydrogen it's still in the back of my mind so how is that resolved or was that just a myth no so hydrogen is a is a flammable gas is more important is also a very difficult molecule to contain um yeah if you remember from the school days we were together so it's one of these molecules that easily impregnates different containers and gets out of them it causes brittleness but all of these things have been solved so a few decades ago the safety aspects of hydrogen have been resolved and taken care of and as you know technology keeps on evolving so I don't think that is an issue it's just that it was not cost effective as a solution all right to be used for this I'm sure there are some areas where it was I think in rocket propulsion and other elements it was used in a while for a while over there because the budgets were bigger women yeah yeah it seems like you talk about scalability can you talk about the scalability and how it can actually be of importance to us in the world and to among sure so this is a very important question um particularly if you talk about green hydrogen specifically so hydrogen traditionally has been always created from fossil fuels primarily coal and then gas and then oil and what they do is they gasify it and what you do is you reform this this hydrocarbon you heat it up you put it in close contact with steam and they reshuffle their bonds reform in a way so hydrogen gets ejected out and then the carbon when the hydrocarbon bonds with the oxygen and you get carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide coming out for every kilogram of hydrogen that you produce you produce between 8 to 12 kilograms of carbon dioxide intense it's very intense okay so that's why they call it gray hydrogen and we'd say close to 95 percent of hydrogen up in 2012 20 was always considered gray hydrogen and that that causes a lot of emissions and it's using these Niche areas and the transportation of hydrogen is very limited it's a very localized use of this molecule now as humanity is looking at using it in different elements and they want to transport it and use it to decarbonize the hard to evade sectors what's happening there that we need to find new ways of how to make it clean with less emissions Associated and you have two different ways one of them is you still keep this chemical reaction approach and then you capture this carbon and you and store it or use it and that's where blue hydrogen and other types of hydrogen of course hydrogen is colorless is the same hydrogen the colors are used to just identify how it was made right so in other words how dirty it it actually is pulled out so from oil I'm hearing it's black or gray from gases blue no so so from all fossil fuels yes it can be gray yeah or it can also be blue the difference is that when it's gray you allow all of these carbon Escape carbon emissions to escape and if you capture it and now this is where the different countries differ they have different standards you capture 95 percent of you can capture 80 of it so there's some variation around the world if you capture it based on the specifications of that country and you store it and you prove that you have stored it and kept it away then it becomes blue so the colors are depending on how much carbon actually is held is saved from the environment yes I would say the method in how it was so in green is technically great for the environment because it's zero carbon correct and I did not describe uh green specifically green is very different green is not made using this thermal or chemical process it's done electrolytically so what that means is that you take water distilled water and you take electricity and you split chemistry in school again absolutely is it any electrical chemistry rather than thermal chemistry and what you do over here is you split the oxygen and hydrogen you get oxygen coming out as a product and you get hydrogen going out as a product and there are multiple types of electrolytic hydrogen so if you use nuclear power to do this electrolysis then it's called pink hydrogen pink wow okay if you use 100 renewable energy so when and it's called Green right and if you use the grid which is mixed then it's called Brown and the colors just keep on going what's really important from my perspective is that you have green because that has zero um yeah and of course you get some things in the process that get captured and then you have the other colors and what we really should look at across all of them is what is the carbon content associated with rather than colors yeah how many kilograms of carbon or methane or other emissions are carbon equivalent carbon dioxide equivalent that is associated with this production too technical on that but at least we understand that the colors are got to do with how much carbon is not escaping to the environment the carbon capture which is what the fine finally I'm starting to understand what that means because I couldn't actually picture that now with hydrogen as a fuel or hydrogen as a carrier what is it I don't understand and how could it be used once it's out so hydrogen now that we're looking at using it it still has the primary use we have a lot of gray hydrogen used today and what obviously makes a lot of sense is that in addition to looking at these new markets first you focus on the existing markets yes so you go to the existing Market where hydrogen today is used and you say what you need to decarbonize Let's replace your gray hydrogen your dirty hydrogen with this cleaner hydrogen whether it is whether it is green pink blue whatever whatever makes sense economic sense you go and replace it then you have the new Industries and sectors where you can use hydrogen and those basically are heavy industry this is heavy manufacturing that includes steel for example those are the two that really come to mind that's why we need the scalability to be able to actually uh so we need the scalability to drive the prices down so gray hydrogen costs around a dollar per kilogram whereas green hydrogen for example is anywhere between two and a half dollars to six seven dollars nice you're giving us a reference where do we want the green hydrogen now so you want it to be cheaper because ultimately what you want is that you do not want to subsidize the transition into a new product you want economies to benefit from it and you have what we call a learning curve you need to have the skill you need people to inject cash into it to bring the scale into these Supply chains you want the Technologies to get the Investments to evolve all of these new technologies that can improve efficiencies and then you will reach price points and analysts expect that by 2035 green hydrogen with all of the proper Investments and backgrounds and Technology breakthroughs will be cheaper than gray hydrogen speaking of Investments congratulations hydrogen Iman was launched on the 23rd of October and it's called Hydro so now this with this new company which I'm calling it a super Organization for the future what is hydrom's role how does it connect to PDO and Edo and the hydrogen story of Amman sure fantastic thank you for asking and for the congratulations the whole team is really proud of and the nation thank you and it's just the first step so you mentioned the word super I hope that we enable a super economy in Oman that's our role so high drum as the brand name is was basically created after Direction you know following directions from his majesty to create an entity that helps develop the sector and that was translated into orchestrating the sector so our role is really an orchestrator and it was also decided that we should be incubated and be part of Edo so energy development among energy development Oman was originally created as a entity or a vehicle that is responsible for the government's sharing PDO the government owns 60 of petroleum development a month and that is now held within Edo energy development Iman the beautiful thing about Edo is that it has a diverse board representation you have two board seats from the Ministry of Finance two board seats from the ministry of energy and minerals and one board seed from oia so three of the most important influencers when it comes to this particular sector the energy sector in in Oman being incubated there is fantastic it gives us alignment with these key decision makers and it also gives us a space where we can run you know when you start you've been in startups before and you know how it is so it's really important for you to have the helpful conditions to nurture you so it's a startup and not a regulator so it's a company that is going to orchestrate the sector and because we were just launched we are obviously a startup we have our you know a startup means you just started recently yeah and yes elaborated orchestrate sure so if you look at the hydrogen economy and you have multiple players who are the players that are there you have the international developers who want to come in and to participate in this sector either through Investments or providing technology or providing operations you have the local companies who are aspire to do the same and have the capabilities you Additionally you additionally have the supply chain both International and local so you have no money you have for example the grid company you have the water company the gas company for gas pipelines you have multiple lens you have the ports you have the different government entities yeah you have the land itself how is it sounds like you talk about the whole economy so you needed someone to be in the center of all of these different stakeholders and to make Oman truly an easy place to do business in and to fulfill certain objectives the nation wants so Oman wants to ensure that energy security is met yes Oman wants to ensure that there's diversification of the economy we want to assure that ensure that decarbonization is taking place we want to make sure that the end products we're delivering are very competitive high quality and we want to ensure that we have Innovation yes so to do that you need to have a structured approach to the market and you cannot allow multiple players to display haphazardly and that's how high drums come in that's how hard so you know when the stakeholders the government officials looked at it the private and the government entities looked at it they decided that we need this orchestrator and I can describe more absolutely and we'll come with more of a description right after these breaks [Music] welcome back to the hydrogen story where my guest is Dr farasa abdulani the acting managing director of hydrogen Amman AKA hydram welcome to the show now previously we spoke about the orchestration of hydro and I cut you off during the break please continue all good so in the before the break we spoke about the multiple stakeholders we have yeah and this is to show the complexity of the economy or the ecosystem around us so what are the roles of hydro the first role obviously is to be aware of the market situation so one of our first objective objectives are to understand what is the world's appetite the external world for hydrogen whether it's International markets or the local markets so that's our duty to be always continuously checking the market from a demand perspective a supply perspective technology Evolutions we will be responsible to putting out similar to how for example the electricity sector companies they do they put a five-year statement or a seven year statement where they talk about projections and that is to enable us to do our next role which is planning so once you know what the market is heading or you have some feel for it you start planning and that's our next role we plan and then we raise our plans to our auction board and our regulator the ministry of energy and minerals and our board what our plans are they get approved and we move ahead so we plan the market accordingly we structure the project this is all done no so this is on an uh evolving basis so we do this continuously so we do it let's say on an annual basis so for this year yes we have done that um we although we were launched officially in uh in October we started our work let's say the company was incorporated in June but we really started working in July time frame August so we've done quite a bit of that and the ministry before we were formed were taking that responsibility and they passed parts of it to us so then we do the structuring of the projects how these projects should be we looked at the land in Oman so do we have projects and what projects are we involved with very good question so um I'll come to the projects that are existing but when I talk about projects I'm talking about the project structure so how do we want as Oman to invite the industry to participate FDI FDI the local companies we have national champions We want to grow our local companies the state-owned ones and also the private sector so we structure it by saying what are the rules of the game how do you want people to play in this economy in Oman so you slash regulator also we have a tinge of Regulation to us we prefer to call it Orchestra I think it's nice that it's in-house at least it helps you operate faster and for us the word regulatory is definitely with the ministry of energy so there's a policy maker and regulator okay okay gotcha we orchestrate so we get quite a bit of our role uh through how do you call it delegation from the ministry demonstrate could do a lot of what we do but if you look at how the market operates as a private sector entity or a government entity we can execute this role more efficiently and more attractively to the industry could I ask you where is this Market heading in and are we kind of sure that we're heading in the right direction with it so the hydrogen markets is nascent and it is unclear because if you look at it particularly two years ago when I started looking at this Market through my role in op Alternative Energy you had a whole wide range of expectations of what could happen I think the market has evolved now in 2022 where things are more concrete but there's still a very flexible Market we in Oman are looking at the two degrees curbing the emissions it's about Net Zero 1.5 C two degrees so we're looking at two degrees instead of 1.5 C we hope that Humanity will reach 1.5 but we think the most realistic approach and how the economies are moving is more towards the two and we're looking at the sustainable development scenario the one which balances economy with the emissions reductions targets so if you look at that we believe that the world will have around 400 million tons of hydrogen consumption by 2050 and Roman will provide how much of that that's a very good question so first how do we break this Market we believe this 400 about 46 percent of it will be yeah 46 percent of it will also be blue and then you have still remain a small quantity that's still Gray and then this green 50 of it is tradable and fifty percent of it is localized same with the blue thank you for the breakdown nice one so our Market the global market that we want to address is 100 million tons wow and we want at a minimum to be providing at least 10 percent of that okay um and I did not finish all of our roles on orchestrations yeah and the projects yeah this seems to be another show the projects were in the hadrons in okay um if you don't mind I'll just please three more bullet points this is your situation and then we go into the project so we have taking the land we have the master plan of what we want to do we reflect that on the land so the ministry did a wonderful job along with a committee of different stakeholders including the ministry of housing Minister of Defense environmental Authority and others to identify lands that could be suitable for Oman for renewable energy and for green hydrogen and they identified 50 000 square kilometers for green hydrogen an additional 15 or 16 000 to provide the grid with clean energy Foundation is getting set absolutely and that was a wonderful task that they managed now they're handing Parcels of those lands to us hydron to basically delineate break it into different two delanate so basically clean up because not all of it is used so 50 000 is gross and then you have different things either you have roads or corridors of grids and whatever Pipelines so we identify what is really usable and we make them into congruent and usable blocks that are related to each other you can make out of it common infrastructure that is one of our other roles so first we clean up the lands and then we set up what their dimensions are for blocks to be economic have the skill uh economies of scale and then design it in such a way that we can have a common infrastructure so not each project has its own pipeline or its own private grid we have economies of scale in these utilities that make them usable and then the last yes I just see good foresight that's what I like yeah well it's a group work that was done by multiple stakeholders it's a very different angle of coming into a great project for the future I love it and to be honest Oman has been working in green hydrogen for two years prior to that wow good info and what became clear is that it needs to be orchestrated so that we can maximize the value for Oman for the world and to avoid losses of potential value capture and then the last last role that I would like to mention is basically aggregation of data so there's a lot of data that is generated here so you conduct when campaigns you can conduct solar assessment this data needs to be captured so that when you have the next round of options and that's a role we do we auction these projects out of this lands you want to build on the data that was collected from previous projects once they're up and running and campaigns that we run so auctioning is what what we do and you ask about projects yeah continuously so there are projects that like you're active something's happening now so what has happened is that on the 6th of November just a few days ago actually this week at the time we're doing this interview we launched our first bid round public auction bed round from our side we started with new projects so you're asking what are your projects we don't have any today because we're still launching launching these and we're launching two blocks and dotcom and then we have two to four coming up in April and far region but there are prior projects that exists what we call Legacy initiatives one that the government through different agents so whether it's oq alternative energy or so that says okay alternative energy and then you have Acme that went through see that both highport and Acme contracted their land reservations through opal CZ wow so now you have these different initiatives that exist and regular new players and just pushing to help the economy well they were entrepreneurial they were very uh foresightful they knew that this is something that will happen they knocked on the doors for Monday showed their potential with that how prepared does that make Oman be and how is our long-term game so the first question is that why did they come to Oman okay and because Oman is one of the best five countries in the world when it comes to to renewable energy resources for hydrogen production or in general but for hydrogen the proximity of these plants to an abundant Water Resource the sea that can be distilled or demineralized to be used so they came because they knew oman's potential and they had access to the market and the stakeholders so they came in early and the government and the nation appreciates that so what has been done is that to also make everything conform it's been now regularized so we also have a parallel process where the ministry and the different stakeholders have handed these initiatives to hydram so we have two parallel tracks we're harmonizing the previous initiative the Legacy ones and we're running our auction process and we have a system that is best really described in a presentation rather than verbally and we leave that for the summit absolutely make sure we see you over there now just coming in to this long-term game I mean you said out of 400 million tons we're looking at 10 of the 100 million is that our long term plan um it will depend on the market because we're talking about 2050. so we have a much more concrete immediate Target which is one million tons and minimum by 2030. um but yes we're starting with this and if the market is larger than we anticipated to be or we find that we have a much bigger value proposition to the world than actually the 10 million tons we talked about are 8 million tons by 2050 that represents one third of a month's potential which can easily scale up to 25 million tons of hydrogen nice so we have that flexibility to swing up and serve more to the global demand but today we're looking in the immediate term and for us to deliver to in 2030 we need to have our projects awarded by 2023 yeah I see that so within the next 14 months we need to deliver enough projects buy an auction process that is fair and transparent and is Equitable to the different parties involved to deliver one million tons and we have decided that it will go across six different blocks so 167 170 000 tons of hydrogen per block and we're not defining the end product they can choose to do it in hydrogen itself which is not feasible or ammonia or methanol or use it for local Industries which we highly recommend can you bring your steel industry over here or think of other end Products that come further forward connected industries that we want to bring into Oman I hope everybody is still with us a lot of numbers and percentages and all that you can see previous episodes to try and understand what's going on I asked the same question repetitively all the time and Dr ferras's take was actually quite meticulously clear for me at this point so check out the other episodes and you'll be actually with us right now just want to come back to hydrom Impact versus size okay can you elaborate what you mean by okay is hydrom going to be a massive company and going to give a massive impact yes super company so we see ourselves as being a very small and agile company we don't foresee ourselves to be Beyond 25 30 people in this organization what we are here is to do a super job and by creating super uh Partners so our local Champion we want to ensure that we have the mechanisms to have a national champion from a development perspective that steps up and fills this role and we have that we want to look at our existing infrastructure utilities so whether it is the grid the oq gas networks with their gas do they want to evolve into hydrogen gas hydrogen pipelines as well we have Magis multiple stakeholders who can benefit and grow tremendously so our role is actually to be the Catalyst for super companies to exist so with all my shows my angle is how can the citizen benefit how can they can actually get something from hydrogen what can they get from Hydro it's an excellent question and for us the impact on society is one of our cornerstones we it's something that we Aspire and is our mandate to deliver and what I want to make clear is that hydrogen is not for example such as gasoline that you get out of a fuel station that's immediately thank you for that Clarity it is something that could be used and Europe for example hydrogen is being considered and in cold Nations as a heating fuel so that you use it to fuel instead of LPG or other forms okay let's see what it is but the primary use of hydrogen is really industrial and the benefits that the society will get are not direct use of hydrogen but instead this will be users through the industrial application so can they be part of the employment can they be jobs absolutely jobs can they be part of the r d yeah can they be part of the entrepreneurial shift to be part of the supply chain thank you so these are the elements that we are working very hard to ensure that the money population gets into jobs r d and the entrepreneurship there's many sizes of this hydrogen economy now for the future how do we know and we've got one minute to go how do we know that Hydro is successful that's a very good question and it's something that we look at always so for us to be successful we need to match our forecast or Beyond so one walk the walk when you talk the talk absolutely so are we able to deliver the hydrogen competitively are we able to attract the different Industries are we able to create these super companies you mentioned yes have we made Oman Ahab where the manufacturing knowledge transfer another question I'd love to ask for another show maybe we'll see how it goes Dr sosan Who's in charge of the Oman hydrogen Center she can represent the academic side fantastic we have Dr Hari lahansi from high fly wonderful speakers you can touch on those elements well we should look to the Future and what hydrogen brings into US regarding the green and economy I'm definitely benefiting from it because of me getting into the media asking the question so I really appreciate your time with us Dr Faraz the acting General acting managing director of hydrogen Oman AKA Hydro make sure you know this brand thank you very much thank you for having me my name is [Music]