Heat Treat Radio #101: Hydrogen Combustion 2023 — Fuel of the Future?

Meet the Experts (02:15)

Doug Glenn: First, let me do some introductions. I’d like to start with Mark Hannum, the manager of Innovation and Combustion Laboratory for Fives North American Combustion. He is a combustion engineer with a broad range of application experience with ultralow emission technologies; his largest focus has been on lean premix/lean premix with fuel staging. Flameless combustion is also an area of interest for him. His work has covered everything from lab research and prototypes to first field installations of new technology.

This is your first time with us, Mark. Thank you very much for being here, we really appreciate it.

Mark Hannum: Thanks for the great introduction.

Doug Glenn: Next up is Brian Kelly, coming to us from the balmy Houston area. Brian is the manager of Applications Engineering for Honeywell Smart Energy and Thermal Solutions (SETS) and the current president of the Industrial Heating Equipment Association (IHEA). He has almost 30 years of experience in the field of combustion with a focus on combustion system design across a variety of high and low temperature applications. Welcome to you.

Brian Kelly: Good to be here.

Doug Glenn: Then, Bob Sanderson is our next guest. Bob, this is your first time with us. Bob is the director of Business Development for Rockford Combustion. Throughout Bob’s 32 years of experience in the combustion field, he has worked in automotive, abatement oxidation, aerospace, agriculture, food and beverage, HVAC, heat treating, power generation, and more. Bob brings system integrations and the application experience of how systems interact in various environments to his current role at Rockford Combustion. Bob is a member of the NFPA-86 technical committee. We’re glad to have you here, Bob.

Bob Sanderson: Thank you.

Doug Glenn: Finally, our standing person, who’s been here for all three: Joe (Joachim) Wuenning from WS Thermprocess Technic GmbH [aka, WS Wärmeprozesstechnik GmbH] in Germany and also WS Thermal Process Technology, Inc., in the United States. Joe’s company has been on the cutting edge when it comes to hydrogen combustion. In fact, I think the last time Joe and I spoke was just a couple of months ago at THERMPROCESS where, once again, you were giving updates on hydrogen combustion and things of that sort. WS Thermprocess has truly been a leader in the hydrogen combustion area. And Joe is an IHEA member, as well.

A Year in Review: Updates on Hydrogen in the Industry (03:54)

Joe, we will start with you: In the last 12 months, what has happened that has advanced the hydrogen combustion “cause,” if you will?Joe Wuenning: What we have seen in Europe now is that several steel companies are getting large funds to really go in on the hydrogen road make green steel. And, of course, if you have the green steel, you will also convert the downstream processes. So, we really see it coming now that they are getting the right amount of hydrogen into places. These places are large locations where the steel plants are running.

Hydrogen needs to be transported by pipeline; you cannot transport it in a truck or something else. But I think the use of hydrogen is rolling and going.

Automotive companies will ask for green steel. How long it will take until the real heat treat shop will get to the point of using hydrogen for combustion is uncertain, but I’m sure it will be, in the end, coming also there.

Doug Glenn: Okay. So, it’s definitely growing and you’re seeing it in Europe.

Joe Wuenning: Absolutely. Like I said, at the moment, we are still at the trial phase, because hydrogen is not largely available at the moment, but large projects have started so it will be in a couple of years.

Doug Glenn: I might mention, Joe is our lone international representative, in one sense; it’s great to have that perspective. In fact, with these technology things, sometimes Europe is a bit ahead of the U.S.

Brian, let’s jump over to you. What have you seen changed in the last 12 months or so?

Brian Kelly: To your point, certainly we are a global company and we’ve seen projects secured that have come to fruition which are firing on hydrogen. They’ve fired on hydrogen to prove it works and then moved back to natural gas since the H2 supply is not readily available.

What we’ve seen in the U.S. is a slowdown in some of the inquiries and questions about hydrogen. For about eighteen months, we were hot and heavy. We were weekly talking to our customers about what they have to do to get ready. Often, we offer the basics of hydrogen, here is what you can do in the future, let’s talk, if you need to.

What I’ve seen are some larger corporations doing prototype projects and vetting out, and saying things like, “Hey, if I need to take X number of furnaces to hydrogen, where do I start? How does it affect my product?” We’ve been doing some testing with customers on some hydrogen firing to really vet out their material and things of that nature. This is happening in pockets; for example, at one site by a certain date, we’re going to be the first green site for a company, and though it’s years from now, we need to plan on being able to fire 100% hydrogen or 100% natural gas.

Before, it was sometimes more talk of blending and things of that nature. Now, I’ve seen more of a trend to say — if we’ve got it, we’re going to burn it; if not, we’re going back to what we’re used to. Some things like that.

There may be a slowdown in the fervor of the talk about hydrogen, but it is certainly in the background and maybe a little bit more towards how do we be more green until hydrogen gets here?

Joe Wuenning: Maybe the slowdown, I would say, is not a loss of interest, it’s more that the people understand hydrogen is not so complicated. It’s a good fuel, you can burn it. Before, many people had no idea whether they could use it or not. Now, our people in the lab think it’s easier to burn hydrogen than natural gas.

Doug Glenn: You bring up a good point which maybe we’ll hit on later: hydrogen supply.

Mark, let’s jump over to you, though. In the last 12 months, what are you seeing?

Mark Hannum: I would say that, for me, probably the biggest thing is some of the regulatory and law changes that have happened. The Inflation Reduction Act certainly puts in place a lot of the supports for hydrogen production and hydrogen-based systems for decarbonization. I think the EU also has some regulatory and law changes and additional support between the government and private sector to try to make some of these really huge investments that need to occur to try to bring hydrogen supply online.

I think those are really the biggest things. And I totally agree with the other panelists; I think awareness, focus, and knowledge have all increased a lot about what hydrogen is, what it takes to burn it, and what those systems look like.

New Users of Hydrogen (10:26)

Doug Glenn: Brian, let’s start with you on this next question, and that is: Are you seeing any new applications or industries that seem to be adopting hydrogen? I know we mentioned steel, and I think Bob has mentioned some labs and things of that sort, but are we seeing anything new, as far as the breadth of where hydrogen is going?

Brian Kelly: It’s come from a lot of different places for us. We’ve had food and beverage, some heat treating, and plastics. It has come from a lot of different directions. Some of the inquiries of a few of the projects that we’ve worked on have been waste to energy, sequestering CO2, and capturing the hydrogen. That’s how we’re going to produce it. So, looking at some different industries that may be popping up, a lot of them are doing prototyping and pilot-type things. So, there is a lot of variety.

I can’t say that I’ve run into any new applications, per se, because we deal with a lot of different ones. But certainly, some of the industries do seem to be adopting hydrogen, anywhere from air gas to oxygen and reusing the hydrogen for fuel to further the process. So, it’s been a variety.

Doug Glenn: Joe, how about you? Are you seeing any new applications or any new industries?

Joe Wuenning: Yes, of course. For example, Dunnes gave away coffee beans roasted on hydrogen, so I think if you have high margins, you can apply these things everywhere, where you want to get rid of the fossil fuels.

Of course, our business is in the steel and heat treating industry. I’m not so much in touch with the other industries, but I think it would come from everywhere — everywhere the people are willing to pay for it. Of course, we have never beat natural gas on price, so far. Hydrogen is never going to come free out of the ground. But we all know the reasons why we want to get rid of the fossils.

Doug Glenn: I know the steel industry has been an early adopter, at least some of the steel industry. Are you seeing more applications in heat treat?

Joe Wuenning: In heat treat, we see another tendency and that is the use of ammonia. We try to check out whether we can use ammonia because, like I said before, with hydrogen you need pipeline connections, and it will take quite some time until the pipelines will carry hydrogen to the last little heat treater somewhere in the countryside.

But ammonia is another storage form comparable to propane or butane where you can easily transport the stored hydrogen. However, ammonia is quite a bit more difficult to burn because it involves NOx formations. It’s not so easily flammable; you have to crack it first, there are steps to take. We introduced it into our lab to check if we can use ammonia directly for these more remote sites.

Doug Glenn: Mark, how about you? Any new applications or industries that you’ve been noticing?

Mark Hannnum: Yes. First off, I want to respond a little bit to Joe and the concern about pipelining hydrogen and all that. I totally agree that it’s a big concern, but one of the nice things about hydrogen is if you have a clean source of water and electricity, you might be able to make hydrogen in a remote location. You might not need to pipeline it; you could make the gas on-site and use it on site.

So, that’s something that’s really not possible with probably any other fuel that, historically, we’ve had in use. You know, we’ve always had to bring a fuel to a manufacturing facility but now we can bring water and electricity and potentially have a gaseous fuel that we can use.

So, adopt hydrogen? I mean, not really. You know, all the investments are being put in place, like Joe said earlier. In the steel industry in Europe, these major investments are being played out and committed to but we’re years away from being adopted, like for use day in and day out.

Right now, there are a lot of segments that are performing really meaningful tests at industrial scale, because they’re all trying to de-risk the switch from natural gas to hydrogen. Are there any process-side impacts that they need to understand that would impact product quality or product suitability or any of those things? All that stuff is going on now and I think it’s going to take a couple of years for everyone to sort of work through and have a good understanding of whether there’s anything they need to be worried about beyond just the fuel switch itself, if there’s any process.

Doug Glenn: Right. Yes, your point about having water and electricity is a good one but, I guess, the question has to be: Is it economical? I mean, this is the issue of creating on-site hydrogen — it’s the cost. The economic system always comes into play here.

Bob, how about you on the applications and industries?

Bob Sanderson: A lot of the push I’ve seen has come out of the aerospace and the automotive industries, not so much on the products that they make but more on the manufacturing side of it. What they can do to adapt their processes and put things in and understand how that impacts them. They’ve got a tremendously large investment to make lean manufacturing and they need to make sure it is spot-on. There has been a lot of discussion on that and trying to work things into those facilities.

Advancements in Hydrogen (16:20)

Doug Glenn: Bob, I wanted to turn around and start with you on this next question and that is: Not industrywide, like we’ve been discussing, but what has your company specifically been doing over the last 12 months that maybe you hadn’t been doing before, if anything?

Bob Sanderson: We’re doing a lot more work now with stainless materials. There is quite a bit of involvement using stainless and other materials that have higher nickel contents and other materials to help work into the grain boundaries.

Working with hydrogen has some unique challenges compared to other fuels. It’s the smallest atomic molecule out there and it just wants to permeate into everything. With a lot of the higher, high-end pressures, there is a lot of chance of steel embrittlement, but if you can get away from those higher ends and try and get down to more usable, friendly working pressures, you don’t stand as much risk on the hydrogen embrittlement and dealing with leaks and permeability. So, just helping people understand that those are some of the changes that need to come into play for a safe, long-term solution in their applications.

Doug Glenn: Mark, how about Fives? What’s been the activity over the last 12 months, specifically at your company?

Mark Hannum: It’s been a super busy time for hydrogen, for us. We have installed some hydrogen firing capability in our lab; it was about a $400,000 investment. So, at this point, we can fire a substantial amount of input for longer durations than we could before. So, that’s really helpful when we’re looking at what the impacts are across our entire burner product range, when we look at a conversion from natural gas to hydrogen.

It also lets us perform some process-based studies where we can really simulate industrial processes and have a longer duration hydrogen firing. So, we’ve been able to support some customers by simulating some of their processes here and actually firing the materials that they would normally fire at their plant to look at hydrogen impact on those materials.

We’ve also gone to a couple of our customer sites and participated in studies with them. One of those earlier this year, right after THERMPROCESS was Hydro Aluminum in Spain; we melted aluminum with hydrogen without any natural gas. That was, I think, the first industrial scale melting of aluminum with hydrogen.

Doug Glenn: Interesting. Joe, how about WS? What have you guys been up to the last 12 months?

Joe Wuenning: We have now put into place an electrolyzer for making our own hydrogen, so going that route, and not relying on the bottles coming in or on ammonia supply. We installed a big ammonia tank so that we can run the ammonia tests on site, develop the crackers and account for them. And, of course, we are involved in several research projects together with universities and some sites who do all these things and to try it out.

Doug Glenn: Brian, how about Honeywell? What’s been the latest?

Brian Kelly: The latest this year is an investment for our factory in Lata to have that electrolyzer-type system, so a full-blown, cradle-to-grave type of system to be able to produce the hydrogen. Muncie is investing in that whole substructure with the capability of increasing to tube tankers before the electrolyzer comes so there is significant investment on that end. And from the product end, we’ve just kept testing and looking at the whole product line, not just burners, but all the controls and things to be associated with hydrogen firing.

In addition to the controls behind the system, we must also think about the development of simpler and/or more complicated systems. These updated systems are necessary because of changes in air/fuel rations, and all the concerns that pop up when using different fuels. These systems need to take into account what the process is requiring, namely holding tighter air/fuel ratios and also be less dependent on low temperature air-heating applications, but also be able to use higher temperatures and higher oxygen rates with some excess air. We’ve been working on those types of systems, and looking at that when the customers are in a situation where they can fire on either fuel. How critical it is to hold capacity and air/fuel ratio and things of that nature, and how can we make that as easy as possible for the customer? We want our customers to say, “Hey, we’ve got to have Honeywell because these guys know what they’re doing.”

But, yes, a lot of activity on that basis. And even in product development looking at the future — lower NOx and lower emissions burners that go in conjunction with hydrogen. In the lower and high temperature range, we’ve got to look at a burner that can fire via flex-fuel type burner. Maybe not just hydrogen and natural gas, but something in biofuels or renewable-type fuels.

Doug Glenn: There is a common thread that a couple of you talked about in getting electrolyzers and hydrogen supply and things of that sort, which is a critical issue, right? Realistically, for industrial applications, does anybody care to speculate on how many years it’s going to be until even some of the more major metropolitan areas have reliable hydrogen supply, or is it all going to be on-site generated?

Mark Hannum: I’ll start if you want. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) certainly encourages hydrogen hubs where you’d have a localized geographic area that has a centralized hydrogen production facility and then local pipelining to the industrial users. I think some of those similar ideas are in Europe as far as having a concentrated production facility and then having a local network. So, you locate your production facility in an industrial cluster where you have short pipeline links to feed those.

As Joe mentioned earlier, it’s really challenging when you have a more remote industrial point that now needs a long pipeline run. It's a lot of money to make that pipeline. Certainly, my experience in the U.S. would say figuring out a legal route to run that pipeline is probably going to be a huge challenge. It’s going to cross multiple property boundaries.

That, for me, is the challenge. But I think, certainly the government is putting in money in the U.S. and in Europe to try to facilitate these hubs being formed and have industrial users online. Maybe it’s going to be five years at least for that to be the case.

Brian Kelly: On Mark’s point, certainly some of the activity we’ve seen is around some of those possible hub sites. Some of the sites we’ve seen that are firing significant amounts of hydrogen, or have that capability, may be near a hydroelectric plant or a nuclear plant, and some of those hubs are going to be strategically placed so they can produce. I’d say it will be between 5 to 10 years. And I think it’s going to be regional because of these hubs and because of the companies.

Honeywell is saying we’re going to be carbon neutral by 2035. Some of these larger companies will say they are offering green products, they are going green, and it’s just not going to be in the thermal process area. We would like to think it’s in the thermal processes area. When we start talking about their Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, some of their Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions are a much larger percentage of their carbon footprint than what their thermal processes are.

Carbon neutrality goals apply to big steel, and bigger industries in general. Some of these really high users with higher thermal loads (like cement) are going to be the industries that are looking to switch over first to some kind of carbon neutrality or something to reduce that carbon output. They’re going to be some of the main focuses, not “Bob and Tim’s Heat Treat” in Skokie, IL, and things of that nature.

Those are some of the things we’ll see, but, in the meantime, this isn’t going away. In my almost 30 years, we’ve heard all kinds of stuff — methanol, ethanol, which is sometime going to come back into the fold because of being a renewable-type energy source. This was hot and heavy in discussions, but it was always in the background. The more we continue to legislate and see other things happen around the world, the more we approach that being carbon neutral. [blocktext align="left"]Carbon neutral doesn’t mean you’re producing zero CO2, but you’re offsetting it somehow and seeking to benefit the planet in how you proceed with your business.[/blocktext]

Doug Glenn: Right. Bob or Joe, any speculation on reliable hydrogen supply, even to regional areas?

Bob Sanderson: I think for both, necessities are going to drive a lot of this investment happening. Currently, the major manufacturing of hydrogen is along the Gulf Coast and up through the upper Midwest where there is a bunch of oil industry and steel industry, and hydrogen is highly used in those areas. Because it’s readily available, I think that the large users will be through those vicinities first.

But to get out to the outer coasts to service Los Angeles and the East Coast areas, they need more out there available. They will have to develop newer technologies, and it’s going to come. There are a variety of people working on it. The first need isn’t necessarily going to be for the large users, but it’s going to be to supply the utilities because they’re going to have to find a way to blend hydrogen into the fuel lines right now and help bring those down. They’ve got to get a reliable source on that.

I know that there are people working on fusion technology right now, where they’re able to take a variety of materials, put it in, and break it down to more of the atomic levels. It’s not just hydrogen they’re getting out; it’s the whole range of all of the gases and the materials that come out. So, they’ve got a lot of reactors that are working with that. It just needs scaling and time to rev that up but it’s going to come.

It’s not exactly the same, but if you look back to when the auto motor first came around, gasoline was big in use for those vehicles because it was a byproduct of manufacturing kerosene; so, it was cheap, it was affordable, but gas stations weren’t around and the pipelines weren’t around to transport it. That didn’t hinder the automotive industry from coming around, and it will be the same way with this industry. It’s going to come, but it’s probably going to come in a way that we haven’t envisioned here or are talking about, just yet.

Joe Wuenning: I think with the technology there, we can have it. It’s a question of, are we willing to spend the money and accept the changes and whatever to do it. Many people think it’s the right thing, other people think it’s a waste of money. We will have to see how it comes about. Five to ten years might be a realistic horizon for me. I think in Europe, they’re starting in former northern Germany, Rotterdam, so, they will have their first access. How fast this will happen, we will see.

Doug Glenn: I appreciate that. It’s an interesting perspective. I think the supply issue is probably one of the biggest obstacles that we have for adoption, right?

Obstacles to Adoption: Supply, Price, People, and More (29:40)

Let me ask you this: Besides supply, what do you see as the biggest obstacle for companies adopting hydrogen?

Mark Hannum: There are only two real challenges, I think, and that’s supply and price. So, if you’re going to take supply off the table, then price will be the other one. I think that’s been a theme running along here.

One thing I will say about something Bob mentioned in the last question is that yes, there is lots of hydrogen production in the Gulf Coast and up through the central to Midwest, but it’s all SMR (steam methane reforming)-based. For us to really put a dent in CO2, you’ve either got to sequester all the CO2 off those steam methane reformers or you’ve got to move to electrolysis or something. You’ve got to come up with a green process which is established, and just scaling up is the real key, to get to, sort of, this gigawatt scale to where people are trying to get to.

I think I saw a slide a few months ago that the biggest electrolysis plant is only 100 kilowatts or 200 kilowatts or something like that (maybe it’s a megawatt). It’s nothing compared to what the industry needs. So, scale-up is the big challenge: How do you get to gigawatt scale?

Doug Glenn: Bob, how about you? Biggest obstacle besides supply, and maybe I ought to throw price in there?

Bob Sanderson: Yes, you took the easy two off the table.

Doug Glenn: Well, nobody said this was going to be easy, you know.

Bob Sanderson: It’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve on the logistics of the handling, the safety, and the management of it. It’s just a little bit of a new technology that people have to get familiar with in order to understand how to bring things in and manage it.

Just in terms of running the utilities through the building: If you have a little bit of a leak, people are used to looking for that sulfur odor right now — that’s not going to be quite the same. If it’s a leak, the leak is going to be up in the trusses and gone. If there is an odorizer added, it’s not going to be where the gas is.

So, there’s just a little bit of a learning or knowledge to get through there, and a lot of the code committees are working hard on this. As it becomes increasingly predominant, they’ll have to stay ahead of the safety issues. It’s a common phrase that, “Codes are written in blood.” I don’t want to have codes that take that kind of a learning experience with hydrogen; we want to stay ahead of it.

Brian Kelly: Besides price and supply, that’s certainly one of the major points because that goes to bottom dollar, the cost of my unit. I agree with what everybody else has said.

A lot of these systems that are in place now in heat treat shops have premix systems, right? Premix and hydrogen don’t play well together because of the flame sweep. This issue is also true with older equipment — some of this stuff isn’t up to date.

What every burner manufacturer has been working on is: What can I do? Does my product work on gas and hydrogen now? What do I need to modify to work on one or the other? What we work towards is — hey, can it operate on both? Sometimes that’s not possible. So, there’s going to be some capital investment on this, too, to upgrade furnaces, to upgrade thermal processes, or whatever it is. This being Heat Treat Today (with an audience of in-house heat treaters), we’re talking higher temperature, but the same goes for any thermal process.

Some of these technologies and a lot of the lower temperature-type methods we use to reduce NOx emissions don’t really work with hydrogen. So, how do we figure out, on the lower end of it, that almost every process — even in a heat treat shop, where some people have solution tanks and make up their heaters or whatever it may be — some of it is going to be planning for that capital investment.

They’re going to have some time until they get that price and the supply. So, it’s like — hey, start planning new systems when you have to upgrade something, let’s plan on this to be viable for hydrogen or something in the future.

It’s hard enough to get some of these shops to keep spare ignitors on the shelf, let alone start talking about the burner upgrade in the next ten years.

Doug Glenn: Right, right, exactly. Joe, how about you? What do you see as a major obstacle?

Joe Wuenning: The major obstacle is that people are unwilling to change, I think. They have done something for the last 50 years. People have a hard time quitting smoking, even if they see that it’s not good for them. So, they’re going to keep running fossil fuels even if they understand or accept that it’s not good for them. I think that will be the hardest thing to change is people’s minds if they have to do something.

Doug Glenn: Good point. A good selection of answers, there, that’s great.

 

All right, the next question has to do with geopolitical situations around the world: Is it helping us or hurting us? Is there anything specific you guys can comment on there?Brian Kelly: I think, certainly, the whole sustainability/decarbonization has helped. We’ve seen emissions levels — which were requested to be guaranteed out of our equipment and our systems — have certainly come down. And that’s worldwide, where for certain countries, you kind of got the feeling that they don’t really care. Now, with this advent of being greener and reducing CO2 and even NOx, we’ve certainly seen the NOx levels or the emissions levels requested out of our equipment have come down worldwide in the last three or four years. To me, that’s a good thing. It’s good for business, but it’s also good for the environment.When we start talking CO2, the CO2 we produce here doesn’t just stay in North America, it travels all over the world. If one country is doing all they can to reduce it and the five others aren’t, as a dreamer, it would be nice to have that worldwide coalition to say, “Here’s what we have to do as a planet to accomplish this in the next 50 years.” It’s not going to happen in five. But I think it’s been a positive thing.Doug Glenn: Bob, how about you? Any geopolitical situations around the world that have helped us or hurt us, here?

Bob Sanderson: Coincidental with this, and Joe may have more input on this, there was a change in the fuel market throughout Europe with pipelines changing and fuel embargos. There has been a huge sea change in the demands for alternate fuels to Europe so it’s a lot of shipping from this end to get things over there for alternate fuels as well as how to process those fuels. There’s been quite a bit of work, not necessarily in hydrogen, but in a lot of alternate fuels for vaporizers and different processes to deal with CNG, LNG, and different fuels to make up for shortages. I think that has helped keep people’s minds thinking about different fuels, different sources of energy, and trying to drive efficiency factors.

Mark Hannum: Yes, for sure. What’s been mentioned already and what I mentioned earlier was that there is a lot of government support that I think has really come in geopolitically and not just in the EU and in the United States, but I know that China is really having a large deployment of green electric production which could eventually lead to green hydrogen production. I know India is really working on some planning and work for what their green and hydrogen strategy is, and Australia; all of these places are really heading, in a really aggressive way, I think, towards trying to find ways that they can all participate in whatever marketplace there’s going to be for hydrogen or other green fuels in the future.

Reasons for the Push: Is It CO2 or Something Else? (39:23)

Doug Glenn: Okay, guys, I want to ask you a question, here, a little bit off the path, basically going back to the very fundamental reason why we’re doing this, and it’s been mentioned multiple times. This question probably won’t be a surprise to you. Whether or not you want to answer it is completely up to you, and that is the assumption that CO2 is a bad thing, and it will be harmful to the world. I think that’s basically why a lot of the moves to alternate fuels and things of that sort.

So, I’m reading the paper Sunday morning, and I get this article that says, “Princeton MIT Scientists Say EPA Climate Regulations Based on a Hoax.” The article is basically about two professors — William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT. I just want to read one little part of this and get your comments, if you’re willing.

The guys say that the assumption about CO2 maybe isn’t as dire. In fact, they are saying it is not dire, at all: “Current concentrations of CO2 are around 400 parts per million. . . . But if you could double the amount of CO2 from 400 to 800, and that will take a long time, the amount that you’d decrease radiation to space is only 1%. Very few people realize how hard it is for the addition of carbon dioxide to make a difference to the radiation to space. That’s what’s called the saturation, and it’s been well known for centuries.”

It's just one example. Joe, you’ve mentioned it before, that there are some people who believe it’s an issue and there are some people who don’t. Any comments about whether we see people moving in one direction or another? I mean, I feel like I am hearing more people drawing a big question mark about whether CO2 is really bad or not.

Joe Wuenning: Let me give an example: 45 years ago, I was skiing down a glacier in the Alps, right down to the bus stop. I did that ten years ago. I had to walk for four or five miles because the glacier was no longer there. People think global warming, and whether it’s related to weather extremes or storms (you can argue whether that has something to do with global warming) . . . . But if a real big, big ice block melts, I think that’s a long-term indication that our world is getting warmer and warmer, and I think there’s no doubt about it. If you look at the ice in Antarctica or Greenland, I think that you will see that we have a problem.

I believe it and I think I understand the physics behind it — why the CO2 emissions into the atmosphere makes it gets warmer — and I think it’s severe. I really think all the changes we have to make now are much less than the changes which would be forced onto us by nature.

Are changes directly made from climate, or also from wars or conflicts or from whatever?

We adopted to changes during the corona virus, and with that we had no change. And it was not so difficult. Now, if we have to choose to do this or that, it might be more difficult. I absolutely think we have to do it.

Effect on Heat Treaters (47:15)

Okay, last thing: Is there any question that you would like me to ask that I have not yet asked? Something very basic that you think in-house heat treaters — manufacturers with in-house heat treat — would want to know about hydrogen, or did we cover everything?

Brian Kelly: I think, to them, it’s going to come down to, how does this affect me and how does it affect my business? Right now, it’s not going to.

I’ve had several conversations at MTI, and I’m like, “What are you guys hearing about hydrogen?” Some people are like, “What? Not a thing.” Some of them, in different areas of the U.S., are heating things with electricity because it’s more financially viable (and in greater supply) for them versus natural gas, and vice versa, all over the place. I think, as we go on, it’s not going to be just hydrogen, it’s going to be all these technologies that can reduce your carbon footprint.

We’ve all got them in our product lines: there are firing techniques and different fuels — do they look at the electrification? Because sometimes you hear, I’m just the plug, I’m zero carbon, and I’m like — at that power plant, you might be higher carbon, dude.[blocktext align="left"]Really, our message to a lot of the people we talk to is: Just be informed so when you hear about it, you don’t panic.[/blocktext]

It’s all those conversations to get in line. As we keep progressing down the sustainability road, all those things are going to grow and you’re going to have resources for them. Really, our message to a lot of the people we talk to is: Just be informed so when you hear about it, you don’t panic.

Doug Glenn: Yes, exactly.

All right, gentlemen. Joe, thank you. Mark, thank you. Bob, thanks. Brian, thanks. I appreciate you guys being with us. It’s been very informative.