Paul Rodden • Season: 2023 • Episode: SIS 16
Listen Now:
>Direct Link To The Hydrogen Podcast MP3<
Watch On YouTube:
Listen On Your Favorite App:
Welcome to The Hydrogen Podcast!
Special Interview Series – Jill Evanko / Chart Industries – Let’s explore the world of hydrogen energy with an enlightening conversation featuring Jill Evanko, the visionary CEO of Chart Industries. Chart has long been at the forefront of cutting-edge technology solutions, with decades of experience in the hydrogen arena. As we navigate the intricacies of hydrogen liquefaction, storage solutions, and the broader energy transition, we’ll touch upon the challenges, successes, and the potential of hydrogen fuel cells.
From the recent milestones with Howden’s acquisition to the promising road tests of liquid hydrogen tanks, this episode serves as your comprehensive guide to the fast-evolving hydrogen landscape. Whether you’re an energy enthusiast or simply curious about the future of clean energy, this episode promises rich insights into the sustainable potential of hydrogen, leadership philosophies in the sector, and what lies ahead for the industry. So, tune in and let’s embark on this hydrogen journey together!
#ChartIndustries #hydrogen #TheHydrogenPodcast #EnergyTransition
This is an important topic, and one that I hope everyone in the hydrogen industry pays attention to. Thanks for listening and as always, if you have feedback on this interview, please feel free to email me at info@thehydrogenpodcast.com Have a great day, Paul Rodden
VISIT THE HYDROGEN PODCAST WEBSITE
https://thehydrogenpodcast.com
DEMO THE H2 ADVANTAGE
https://keyhydrogen.com/hydrogen-location-analytics-software/
CHECK OUT OUR BLOG
https://thehydrogenpodcast.com/blog/
WANT TO SPONSOR THE PODCAST? Send us an email to: info@thehydrogenpodcast.com
NEW TO HYDROGEN AND NEED A QUICK INTRODUCTION?
Start Here: The 6 Main Colors of Hydrogen
Transcript:
Paul Rodden 0:00
Hello everyone, this is Paul Rodden. I want to welcome you back to the hydrogen Podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jill Evanko, the CEO of Chart Industries on the future of hydrogen liquefaction compression and liquid hydrogen storage solutions chart is recognized as a global brand for the design and manufacture of highly engineered cryogenic equipment used from the beginning to the end in the liquid gas supply chain. The distribution and storage of products and engineered systems are fundamental delivery and in use of liquid gases across a multitude of applications in the industrial gas and for energy. The company’s unique product portfolio is used in every phase of the liquid gas supply chain, including upfront engineering, service and repair. Being at the forefront of the Clean Energy Transition, Chart is a leading provider of technology equipment and services related to liquefied natural gas, hydrogen, biogas and co2 capture, among other applications. This is a really fascinating topic. And having a solid understanding of this segment of the hydrogen value chain is I think, crucial for full cycle scale up of the industry. Okay, enough of me talking. Let’s queue up the theme song and we’ll dive right into the interview. So the big questions in the energy industry today are how is hydrogen the primary driving force behind the evolution of energy? Where’s capital being deployed for hydrogen projects globally? And where are the best investment opportunities for early adopters who recognize the importance of hydrogen? I will address the critical issues and give you the information you need to deploy capital. Those are the questions that will unlock the potential of hydrogen and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Paul Rodden, and welcome to the hydrogen podcast. Okay, welcome back. Today I have the pleasure of introducing Jill Evanko, the CEO of Chart Industries. Jill is the president and CEO of Chart Industries serving in this capacity since June of 2018. She joined chart in February 2017 as the CFO and prior to joining Chart, Jill was the CFO of Truck Light Company, as well as having held multiple operational and financial executive positions at Dover Corporation and its subsidiaries. Prior to joining Dover in 2004. She held financial and operational roles at Arthur Andersen, Honeywell Corporation and Sony Corporation. In addition to serving on Charts board of directors. She also serves as an independent director of the board of Parker Hannifin Corporation. Jill received an MBA from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from LaSalle University. She is the winner of the 2020 Exxon Mobil powerplay Rainmaker award, the 2020 s&p global Platts energy award for Chief trailblazer and the world LNG Executive of the Year for 2020. She serves on the nonprofit board of directors for the National Association of Manufacturers NAM and the US India Strategic Partnership forum. Welcome, Jill, thank you so much for joining us on the hydrogen podcast. It’s great to have you on the show.
Jill Evanko 3:04
Yeah, I’m so so appreciative that you had me on the show. And looking forward to our conversation today.
Paul Rodden 3:09
We’re looking forward to it also, for some, it feels like the conversation of using hydrogen to power the energy transition has picked up steam in the last couple of years. But this isn’t a new energy source and Chart Industries has been working with hydrogen for a long time. Now, would you mind giving our audience a brief overview of Chart Industries and the role hydrogen has played in the company?
Jill Evanko 3:33
Absolutely. And it’s interesting because if you look back and Chart legacy, we served hydrogen markets for over 58 years. And now with the addition of Howden into our portfolio, they have over 100 years of hydrogen experience, nobody cared about that until May of 2020. So we’re in, we are in year three and a half now have an intense amount of focus in the market on hydrogen. And that’s something that we can bring our 150 plus years of experience to. So I’ll step back a little bit and you touched on in the introduction, a really good summary of what we do in hydrogen. If you think about the hydrogen value chain from three buckets, the first being the production of the molecule, the second being storage, and transport, and the third being end use, we serve all three of those in a variety of ways. So we do not produce our own molecule itself. But we provide process technology to liquefy hydrogen to those who do as well as storage and transport ball tanks, storage tanks, ISO containers to move the molecule, liquid hydrogen and gaseous trailers, as well as compression into all of those aspects of the first two buckets and value chain. And then finally, we serve the end use market with our capabilities from hydrogen fueling stations, mobile refuelers onboard class eight heavy duty tanks, that also can serve the trains and planes, types of applications. So the best way to think about us a broad base installed base. And that’s something that’s really important to the hydrogen economy, especially because there’s lots of players that want to be in the hydrogen hype. And having that install base gives our customers a high level of confidence in the actual working relationship of the products and the technologies, as well as confidence that the safety and certification standards can and will be met. And then the last part I’d say is with the addition of Howden and we have our we’re now able to touch much deeper into the gaseous hydrogen piece of the puzzle, as well as the liquid. And I do think it’s going to be a combination of both that serve the the energy transition,
Paul Rodden 5:35
I have to say, Chart. It’s an impressive company. It’s got a wealth of products and businesses under its umbrella. Can you go into detail about, you know, kind of your core offerings that are important to the hydrogen economy and discuss the projects that Chart Industries has been involved with that, that will accelerate the energy transition?
Jill Evanko 5:55
Absolutely. So we call ourselves molecule agnostic, and we serve what we deem the, the exactly, it’s so nice place to be right. And I love how you characterize the question in that we’ve been blessed we’ve been we’re privileged with the portfolio that we have, because a lot of our equipment can be utilized in traditional applications, which was the starting point, oil and gas all the way through to applications like carbon capture, and hydrogen and helium. And so having that ability to use our same manufacturing capability and capacity to serve all these different molecules gives us flexibility and agility when you have softness in one end market, and everybody’s gung ho and another. So that’s a really nice portfolio to have. When we talk about the business, we talked about the nexus of clean, clean power, clean water, clean food, clean industrial. So the core offerings, I talked through the value chain, that same value chain that I described for hydrogen is the same for any molecule, and you kind of translate that product offering into into these other areas. So we do have water treatment technology and capability, which is something that we’re seeing more and more out there in the world is partnering energy and water power and water together, especially outside of the Western Hemisphere, where the lack of power and the lack of water clean water is becoming more and more prominent, especially for governments. And then we have a carbon capture capability technology from small scale, which is pretty cool, because it’s for beer and wine. So it’s my favorite part of the business all the way through to large scale, which would be cryogenic carbon capture for anything that’s industrial or oilfield, you guys are all very familiar with that. Talking about the hydrogen economy itself, you know, some of the key projects. And it’s it’s an interesting economy, because I think it’s evolving from the one we’ve talked about May of 2020. That was almost all space, space exploration, utilization of hydrogen molecule. And now you’re getting into the power and power to end use and energy sources fueling, so more applications and broader applications. And what we love about the hydrogen market is that there’s plenty of first of a kind activities that we’re getting involved in early and some of the areas and projects that I point to range from hydrogen liquefaction, 15 tonne per day liquifiers that are now getting bigger and bigger and smaller and smaller. So it’s pretty fun to see, hey, we’ve got a micro one that we want to do. And then how large can we go? And what’s the right, what’s the optimal amount? Do you chain them together or not. And then we’ve done like hydrogen for E-methane for ships. And also, we’ve done Shells, red to green hydrogen project, and that utilize is another housing capability and compression capability there. So the fun ones that are more targeted around end use, because I think what you saw in the first two of the last three years of actual commercialization was a focus on production and storage and transport. In this last year and a half, we’ve seen more commercialization on the end user, which to me is a nice sign that the economy in the ecosystem is developing toward demand. Absolutely. So then we get into things like hydrogen mobile refuelers for for customers like Nikola, we’ve got hydrogen fueling stations and refueling stations for heavy duty, as well as light duty transport. And it’s one of the more fun ones where we have I think we have the only liquid hydrogen onboard vehicle tank that works together with various different fuel cells. And just recently with Hyzon Motors, we use our liquid hydrogen tank on their onboard vehicle for PFG foods. And it was a road actual very successful road test.
Paul Rodden 9:40
And congratulationson that, by the way, that was huge.
Jill Evanko 9:43
Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s really great to see and you know, with no boil off and just the distances that liquid can go really tells you that it and I’m a proponent by the way of don’t use hydrogen for everything right. It has to be for the right application. I think it’s silly. And again, I’m going to in a position to be able to say that because we serve other molecules, if you’re a hydrogen only company, all you’re saying is hydrogen. But this is a great example of it really is the right application. For liquid hydrogen in this class eight heavy duty and above. I don’t believe that hydrogen in light duty or passenger vehicles is the right application. But this demo and this pilot and the fact that the the tank brings the capability to go long haul long distances with similar payloads to diesel is a testament to the evolution of the hydrogen ecosystem right now.
Paul Rodden 10:33
I’ll say this. And this is just all fun. I’m a complete proponent of light duty vehicles being hydrogen. I talk about it a lot on the show. And I’ve got some others that push back on me for that. But no, I will go to my grave saying, let’s put it in everything for cars, all cars. All right, so it’s just me,
Jill Evanko 10:51
would you Let’s go down a rabbit hole here.
Paul Rodden 10:53
Sure.
Jill Evanko 10:54
So let’s say hydrogen, instead of electric vehicles for light duty, let’s just focus on passenger.
Paul Rodden 11:00
So what I always say is, you know, a fuel cell EV, it’s still an EV. So it’s still an electric vehicle. I don’t think there’s one enough lithium to support a global change over for EV. But that being said, I think hydrogen even still has a role in synthetic fuels. So a lot of the technology that we’re seeing now with hydrocarbons and splitting out the hydrocarbons early instead of later in the refining process, being re coupled together for Syn-fuels, I think, is a much more elegant solution than just, you know, flipping a switch and going right to fuel cell vehicles, I think it’s just a much more smooth transition.
Jill Evanko 11:40
I think that I think that’s actually a really good answer and appropriate way to think about it. You I think the challenge you have with just light duty is is you got you still have to fight this battle against you know, traditional, you know, my Ford F 150, you know, that that changeover. So it’s an interesting debate, I’m going to just do a selfless plug here on the litium side there’s this ongoing debate about the cleanliness or the need for mining. And a key portion of the business that we have on Howden signing compression and fans is really around clean mining. Because as you need more lithium use mines are getting deeper, hotter, and you need that that ventilation capability in the mines. So I don’t see mining going away, it’s how do we make them cleaner and greener. And, to your point, right, there’s definitely needs to be a considerable amount more lithium, if you’re going to get there on the battery side of the house.
Paul Rodden 12:35
I think ultimately, as you go down that rabbit hole like we’re talking about, the most, I already use this word once but elegant solution would be to have that fuel cell in conjunction with a smaller scale battery, and one that’s not entirely entirely reliant on just one large battery pack something where I cant remember the the car that’s coming out with some supercar that has a smaller lithium pack and a fuel cell that where the fuel cell can charge the battery in the car runs off the battery. I think that’s more along the lines of where we should all end up looking for that end goal.
Jill Evanko 13:07
I drove a rental car that was kind of an E hybrid or something and it was amazingly powerful and quiet. So I might there might be convert me somewhere one of these days.
Paul Rodden 13:18
I’ll get you I’m gonna get you there.
Jill Evanko 13:20
Okay, In the meantime, moving toward in the business, I will be toutung the heavy duty and above…
Paul Rodden 13:26
Absolutely. I think that that really is the first application for it. So again, congratulations on the on the Hyzon deal with the liquid storage, I thought I want to read that it was I was amazed by it. So congratulations.
Jill Evanko 13:38
Thank you.
Paul Rodden 13:39
And I am impressed by the scope and diversity of Chart Industries. And it looks like to me outside of producing hydrogen Chart has every aspect of the hydrogen value chain covered. And that sets you up to be this one stop shop to help hydrogen producers achieve their goals. Can you go into detail on how Chart Industries is supporting their customers and energy transition and meeting their environmental and operational goals?
Jill Evanko 14:07
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s really important to as well, because one of the things that you sit in a unique spot in our company is that not only do we have our own internal sustainability targets and ESG goals that you see reported out every April in our sustainability report, but we get to help our customers achieve theirs and it ranges. It’s not just hydrogen, right. It’s anything from hydrogen, like we talked about across that value chain, but also pieces of equipment that we provide, such as dosing which doses molecules into packaging as an example. And so the ability for those producers of water in a bottle to cut down on amount of plastic right, those are the types of things we’re able to really help our customers through our product offering and therefore in turn for their customers. They’re able to still have firmness in a bottle of water but have less plastic or PET. So that’s a great example of not just staying in the hydrogen aspect of this, I would say there’s a few things that we see in terms of how we help them that are really pertinent to this one stop shop concept. One of them is that in some of the, I would say these newer economies, hydrogen being one of them, the customer has a concept. But they really need the ability to bring that concept to feed through the engineering work and understand where are they going to get the pieces and parts to make it work and then have someone guarantee that it is going to work. And that’s a great place, how we’re able to help our customers where if they come to us with an idea early on, we’ll work with them on that design. And then in conjunction with that, we have all the mission critical pieces and parts in house that they don’t have to go out to 15 or 20 different vendors or have multiple sub sources. And that was really one of the foundations of the Howden acquisition that we did was to bring that kind of last missing piece of compression for specialty and hydrogen in particular in house, one of the longest lead time items. And so you not only do you help the customer by they get the products from us, they work together from us, we give them guarantees that they’re going to work, but also we can control the schedule. The other part of that is we tell we do have candid conversations where we say that’s just not does still do it is not going to work, you’re going to waste money. And so I think that is a you know, also unique thing for our customers have a supplier and partner that will tell them. No, that’s ridiculous. Because there are some ridiculous things happening out there. You know, and that’s, that’s important for the success of the industry in our opinion, right is that you don’t get ridiculous that therefore in turn supersedes the practical. Yeah, and we can play a key part in that. And then the last part of how we can help our customers here is is really around really around being partners, I think something that we have to be super conscious of as hydrogen ecosystem is that we cannot be solely reliant on the public sector, the government, whether that’s the IRA, whether that’s funding, we need to ultimately become self sustaining. And that doesn’t mean one of us in the value chain makes a lot of money and the others don’t we really have to partner up and and I think we see that with our customers and our partners and we try to be the same for for them.
Paul Rodden 17:18
I’m really glad you mentioned that, you know that so many people are trying to hop on to the IRA and other government subsidies. And that’s fine at first. But yeah, I’m with you 100% Get as self reliant as soon as possible. So you don’t have to really rely on those government subsidies because they will go away at some point.
Jill Evanko 17:36
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, we saw we can only equate things to solar and wind and all that right. But yeah, the more that we as a private industry can figure out how to be self sustaining. And don’t get me wrong, I think those things are helpful in kickstart economy, but not not being solely reliant on that is important.
Paul Rodden 17:52
Absolutely. As an aside, one of the things that I do like about Chart coming into the hydrogen space, is your ability, your history, to be able to scale and, you know, increasing your scale your scope, and and adjust that. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve been having an issue seeing within the industry now, so many of these smaller tech companies coming out with new technologies, and that’s kind of their their big concern is scaling up production. And I would venture to think that with your history with your background, in chart, that’s, that’s not going to be a concern.
Jill Evanko 18:31
That’s true, very true. And you know, one of the one of our philosophies, we have a strategy that we internally call flexible manufacturing, so flex manufacturing strategy. And the the foundation of that is that we want to ensure that we can make every single one of our products in more than one location. And think, you know, I don’t want to say we’re 100% there, but certainly 97% Plus, yeah, and that really gives you the flexibility, it really allows you to scale up or down, which I think is equally important that you don’t have what you saw 10 years ago in our business was okay, big LNG project came in, and that was it. And that was great and had to ramp up and everything’s going crazy. And then when that comes to an end, suddenly you’re having to lay off 25% of your workforce. And my job is to keep many people employed, and continue to profitably grow the business and think having that flexibility, and having welders and welding training programs and folks around the world that can go to different jobs, and we’re able to scale up and down and share that talent is what allows us to do that. And so no, I don’t I don’t necessarily have the concern about capacity although we try to stay ahead of it and invest in it organically and inorganically where we see opportunities. We don’t always time that right. But usually we kind of have too soon, right? Which isn’t necessarily horrible. As long as it’s not too too soon. So yeah, I think I think what I what I’m more concerned about, which you didn’t ask me to answer this question, but I’m gonna answer it anyway. Is Yeah, I’m more concerned that you get, everybody wants to say they’re in hydrogen. And so then you get entrants into spaces and the hydrogen value chain that don’t really understand the difficulty of producing or holding, storing or using the molecule. And, you know, the first time you have a real bad incidents, safety incident that can cause can cause the demise of the hydrogen economy. And so you know, ensuring that we’re all being super conscious of safety certifications, and not having competition and just be able to come in without those those characteristics is very important to me.
Paul Rodden 20:36
I’m glad you brought that up, too. I recently have had several questions come in asking about safety and regulations and everything. So that is on other’s minds. So I’m glad to hear that you’re taking it seriously to you’re thinking about it.
Jill Evanko 20:50
Yeah, we do a lot ahead of time on safety. We’re leading with governments on safety and certifications, we do have the only or certainly one of two only certifications for South Korean liquid hydrogen trailers. And that was a heck of an undertaking group code for liquid hydrogen storage in China and multiple years, three years. I think it took us so while that’s hard to do, I think it’s important because it sets what the next guy’s requirement is. Now I would suggest that the governments that are spending time on their own hydrogen work should probably be talking to each other about some form of global certification.
Paul Rodden 21:26
I like that. Let’s just get that going.
Jill Evanko 21:29
Yeah, yeah. You know, I’ll dial these folks up as soon as we’re done.
Paul Rodden 21:33
Okay, perfect. If you don’t, I will.
Jill Evanko 21:36
Okay. Sounds good. Let’s both doing two calls a day.
Paul Rodden 21:39
So okay, looking at the big picture, I’m curious to get your thoughts on hydrogens role in the energy transition. So again, big picture, what do you think it’s going to do? What What will it take to create that secure energy future with hydrogen?
Jill Evanko 21:54
Yeah, I mean, I think Listen, everybody’s got a view on is it 30% of power in the future? Is it what what percent, and I don’t have a view on that, I think it’s going to be a part of the total solution. I think the key is that we should all be thinking about the energy transition as a hybrid. And there’s not one single answer. But I think that it’s really important on the scale side of things and getting to scale getting to getting away from pilot and demonstrations getting into real scale. And you’re not going to get there, you’re not going to have hydrogen be 10% plus portion of the energy transition unless you have the ability to link California to New York City as an example, or the ability to link Copenhagen with Amsterdam. And so how do you how do you bring these these things, these things together, and do so in a scaled way? I think you’re starting to see a little bit on that. And that’s really what some of these programs are trying to do. But we’re always away from that yet.
Paul Rodden 22:53
I think so too. If we switch gears a little bit, you’ve mentioned a little talking about the Howden acquisition. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that acquisition? What led you to the decision to acquire them? And what does it mean for chart industries and the future of the hydrogen economy?
Jill Evanko 23:10
Yeah, so we’ve been we’ve been around the Howden business for years and very familiar with it, we also had partnered with them on certain things. And with respect to hydrogen itself, we loved the global footprint that Howden had filled in a lot of the geographic gaps. Well, I talked a little bit about more access to gaseous hydrogen, but I didn’t talk at all about geographical locations like South Africa, Middle East, Chile, Vietnam, these were locations that we didn’t reach, Chart did not have a presence in the let alone a manufacturing presence and power in does. And that’s brought us the ability to get closer to some of the projects, regions that we do think are really going to be focused on energy transition. And also, by the way, water, clean water. And so that’s something that we liked. We also love the aftermarket service component of the housing business, bringing that into the chart family, we’re now over 30% of our business and aftermarket service repair. So it’s not just about hydrogen, not just a an application that is further penetrated for us, but also our ability to get close to sticky with customers around the world and bring all that mission critical equipment that we were lacking to my prior answer about these renewables customers want a one stop shop. There’s no doubt about that. Right. And so that gives us a really unique place to be. And then the last thing I’d say is we were pretty thoughtful around the fact that Howden in doesn’t compete with some of the big guys and compression that we worked with on big LNG projects, we never will. And so it really kind of facilitates our ability to penetrate the specialty areas of our end markets without disrupting the bigger LNG work that is certainly currently in a strong cycle and we expect that to continue for the coming years.
Paul Rodden 24:53
It was switch gears a little bit again, and get to something that I’m passionate about and get frustrated with. I’ll be quite honest On on the regular reading stories about hydrogen, and that’s the colors, everything started off with these color schemes. It drove me nuts, it still does. I understand why they were doing it. But now that you know carbon intensity is making more of its self known. Do you think there that there’s this debate over that? And does it cause us undue confusion or barriers on the supply and demand side of you know, quote unquote, green hydrogen just versus low or no Ci?
Jill Evanko 25:33
Yeah, it’s funny, you go back to that I use that may 2020 marker and the conversations and everybody was like, it’s got to be green, green, green, green. And now, you guys are nuts. Right? We’re not going to rip out all of the existing infrastructure around the world and replace it all with green hydrogen, like, it was just ridiculous. And you know, and what we what we would see commercially was not, yes, some green, but a lot of our backlog at that point in time. And still, today are a variety of different hydrogen applications. And they’re not, they’re just not pureplay Green. Nevermind, like to your to your point, right. Nobody knows how to actually classify what pure pure green hydrogen means. How far up or down the value chain, do you go? Well, I remember back, I would talk about it at home. And I remember my, my daughter at the time, she was like seven. And I she’d say, What’s the difference between pink hydrogen, blue hydrogen, green hydrogen, purple hydrogen, and you say… Well, I don’t know what to say nothing. And I like to say that same thing, right? Because what if we’re really all aligned on this concept of a transition, you have to take steps to get there, and you can’t go… You can’t go right to the answer in its entirety. And therefore, I think any color, I think any progress in utilization or blending of something that is a cleaner option, even if it’s not in its entirety, is progress. And so I’d like to eliminate the conversation completely about that. I also think that we’ve gotten ourselves, we as an industry have gotten ourselves into a funky discussion about ways to work, the system of capturing credits to call yourself fully green. And that’s just really not if the if the actual intent is to become cleaner, and have less carbon emissions, that utilizing a credit system to get to an answer doesn’t doesn’t actually get you there. So I think it’s incremental progress is more important than any of kind of these mechanisms that everybody wants to use to measure.
Paul Rodden 27:43
Alright, surprise, surprise, treat a transition like a transition. Not like a light switch.
Jill Evanko 27:49
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, who’s gonna rip out all the existing infrastructure? Nobody, right? No, no, no one’s going to and oh, by the way, as soon as your power goes out at home, you, you don’t actually want it to be to stay out. And you don’t actually care if you know, if you’re in Texas in the summer, and it’s 110 degrees, and your air conditioner goes out, you don’t really care. I guarantee you, whether you’re co2 friendly,
Paul Rodden 28:12
right. Being in Houston right now, and it’s 103. Outside, I hear that…
Jill Evanko 28:17
you know, I mean, I hate to say it, but let’s all Let’s all call a spade a spade. If it impacts us. We’re going to be less concerned. Yeah. So I think that’s also like really important. How do you get how do you get that existing infrastructure? A little cleaner?
Paul Rodden 28:32
Right? Right. I love it. So when I was doing some research on the company, I came across a concept that charts calling the nexus of clean, then it’s an interesting strategy. And I was hoping you wouldn’t mind explaining it a little bit to the audience and showcase how it can be leveraged to create value from the recent IRA.
Jill Evanko 28:53
Yeah, so the nexus of clean actually came about the term which, which I think we had like trademarked I don’t know, I don’t know why. But next is a clean, clean power, clean water, clean food, clean industrials, it came into kind of that tagline, because we would talk internally about all the inter linkages between these end markets, especially when we were seeing the desire for these applications and these customers to achieve sustainability goals or to provide for a cleaner environment. And a one of the greatest examples I gave when we say interlinkage and to us it generated from how do we sell more? How do we sell more of something to these customers that already exist? We have a customer City Brewing in Wisconsin. They started as a customer of ours as a beverage tank customer, so co2 for brewing, and then they became a customer of ours for earthly labs small scale carbon capture technology, because in brewing, you need co2. They were buying co2 from the outside and bringing it in and now With the earthly labs offering, they’re able to capture co2 through their brewing process and reuse it into making their beer. So not only are they not emitting that co2, they’re spending less on buying co2, then that same customer, we say, well, here again, the nexus clean their breweries, typically not theirs, but breweries as a whole typically will have an odor or water odor problem. And so then in turn, we start talking to them about air stocks or water treatment system. And so this is this is the Genet genesis of the nexus of clean is that customers, typically we’ll need more than one of these solutions to not only help them achieve sustainability targets, but also actually make their business better. And in many cases, it’s more economical for them. And so that’s really what what the next clean is all about. And then take that next step to your second part of the question on the IRA. So, you know, we’re conscious that we we don’t, we don’t want customers that only can afford to do what they’re going to do because of the IRA. But yet, we like the fact that they’re able to at least maybe get started with Ira assistance. And when you start looking at the aspects of the IRA, we have some webinars, by the way, if people are interested, we can provide those that talk about the genesis of if you’re a hydrogen Ira applicant, but you’re going to incorporate carbon capture, are these credit stackable as an example, or you know or not, or if you’re going to utilize the US made in America equipment into your project, how does that work in conjunction with the IRA. So there’s, there’s a lot of opportunity here in that nexus of clean, not just hydrogen specific to the IRA,
Paul Rodden 31:48
one of the things that I admire about you is your leadership acumen. And with everything you have going on, you still make time to promote and praise your team publicly. I saw you participate on a call for summer interns recently, and your prominent role in the Emerging Leaders Program and employees that I’ve talked to have raved about your positive contributions to the hydrogen economy and the community. So I don’t want to put you on the spot here. But I’m going to, would you talk about your core leadership philosophy, and how you contribute to educate and encourage the next generation of hydrogen industry leaders?
Jill Evanko 32:26
Yeah, I think it’s so important as as a leader that you ensure that there is that next generation, especially in industries like ours, where it is you can, you can see the potential for industrial manufacturing, becoming a lost art, where there’s other more intriguing and interesting and kind of sexy things out there in technology in tech. But if you look at our business, we have, we get to offer all of that together, where we actually are like, you know, we have clean tech, we are innovative and kind of look for what we would say next gen stuff. So I think it’s really important that you know, you create an environment that people are interested in, you spend so much of your life at work. And so how do you create an environment that gives people the opportunity, and it’s my favorite part of my job, you know, talking to the interns, it blows my mind the level of capability, capacity intellect that these guys have man don’t have a clue what they’re saying half the time. But that’s, you know, fostering that and giving them avenues such as the Emerging Leaders Program, or the rotational engineering program, are just really important to the success of the business in 1020 30 years. And so this educate is really important. But I think practical education is more important than, you know, certainly, you know, we’ll pay for, for tuition for certain MBAs and all of that, but it’s more about, you know, if I, if you have somebody that has, has the desire, then let’s give them the chance. And we do that from the shop floor on we’re just implementing a shop floor engineering program inside of Chart. So people want to become junior engineers can do that welding programs. And I could go on and on this is, as you can tell, just like really close to my heart. And I think it’s, I think it’s super important. And I would also say that you as a leader, do not expect people to work harder than you do. And I think if you show them that, then you will get the best of their hearts and minds. And that’s super important for the future. The last thing I would say that is, and I don’t know that this is different, it’s just probably a different time We’re in people in our company. And I think this applies to every company, they want to, well, a company can’t necessarily have a heart itself that people can. And so giving back and allowing for the time for people to give back is super important to our team members. And we’ve tried to foster that whether that’s through giving an extra day of vacation a year for them to to volunteer for matching donations or that type of thing. So again, I think all of it goes toward toward the future of whatever you Whatever ends up being the winner in energy transition, its Chart’s is going to be a part of it. And so you got to have the people to make the product.
Paul Rodden 35:09
No, I think so too. When you have employee buy in on your goals, they work harder. It’s not just that they work harder they put themselves into it, because they believe in it. Yeah, this, this really is an industry that if you believe in it, you can make a drastic difference. And so that’s, that’s one of the things that really stood out to me that you promote. And it really resonated with me also.
Jill Evanko 35:35
Yeah, it’s really cool. I, we started this thing I would do a daily shout out daily spotlight of one of our team members, or a group or something that was was just something positive, we want to share, we started that may 20, may 2 2020, when COVID was like at its height. And it was a way to connect seven days a week, I send a shout out for me. And that’s been the case since May 2 2020. Never missed a day. And I have never had a day where I don’t have a backlog of people nominating each other. That’s sort of a shout out. So it’s, you know, it really goes they want to they want to work together. And if you make the space to allow them to do that, it’s so successful.
Paul Rodden 36:14
That’s great. We can talk about policy. The US government has announced several subsidies and incentives for hydrogen producers recently with the with the IRA, and the 45 Q and the 45 V credits, one of the things that I found that was missing was to really kickstart hydrogen in the US for incentives for the demand side. But the US government just made an announcement earlier last month, regarding notice of intent to explore and invest up to a billion dollars in a demand side initiative to support the regional clean hydrogen hubs. Do you think this will work? Does it solve the chicken and egg issue? And also, I would love your thoughts on if Europe is going to follow suit and announce their own plans for that that kind of an incentive? Yeah.
Jill Evanko 36:57
So this is this will take a lot longer than the podcast time that we have to, to really get to get a lot of impact there. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. And, you know, maybe I’ll just pluck off a few comments, you I think, and I touched on this maybe a little bit around the edges earlier, but no one ever said, no matter what the industry, no matter what the end market was, no one ever said waiting for the government to decide was a good strategy. And that’s something I think that we all should be really conscious of, because it will take a long time. And and that’s and I think the government themselves would tell you that all the government’s would tell you that right, this they’re slow. They’ve got processes. And that’s where we sit today, right? We’re a year plus from the announcement of the IRA, and it’s yet to be actually rolled out. So my view is this. Great. I think it’s, I think it’s the ideas generating the right thought processes. But I don’t love the idea of having multiple different I mean, you named What, like five in your question. I could. Yeah. Right. And so I think there there it does create confusion. It’s interesting, because even pre Ira announcement, there was a lot of confusion about the 45 Q’s on carbon capture. And I actually think the IRA announcement clarified something on the 45 Q’S but then created noise on the hydrogen side, I do think that Europe and all these other economies are going to follow suit, because there’s a fear that manufacturing and or the energy transition gets ahead in one region or another. So I think that there’s there’s going to be follow on around the world. Again, I go back to you, I wish I wish the government’s been worked together on a global certification, a global pricing construct, you know, things like that, that I think would be more demand generating than individual regionalized credit or funding programs. Now, with all that said, I’m not I’m not anti it, I think it’s gonna kickstart some activity. And that’s a great thing for the economies. I think we just have to as private industry, make sure that it’s, it’s not the only thing that is driving demand and backlog.
Paul Rodden 39:09
And one last question, you have a wealth of experience in the hydrogen industry. And we always talk about the future of the hydrogen industry. But what in your opinion, do we need to do right now to help the hydrogen economy move forward and solidify hydrogens importance in the energy transition?
Jill Evanko 39:29
Well, I think you touched on it and a lot of the dialogue we’ve had around being practical and pragmatic about that, and how we go about it, right. So instead of just saying we’re going to everybody’s got to be green in order for it to get started. That’s super important. This idea of getting away from demonstration and getting some scale. I think we’ve got to do that. We’ve got to talk about using existing infrastructure more and more and more. And, you know, I think the other thing is just generally speaking, that right application for hydrogen versus hydrogen being the only answer and And I was an early proponent of hydrogen before all this started for lots of different reasons, including for the future growth of the business. So I think that it’s very important also that when we, as private sector leaders have the opportunity to speak with government officials that were aligned on what are the three things we need, versus, you know, when I get an audience with somebody important and start saying this is what chart does, you got to say, we’ve got as leaders to get together and say, These are the three things we need for the hydrogen economy to succeed. And we all have to drum beat that in otherwise, otherwise, I think we’re going to end up with more and more confusion. So we’re well on our way, though, like, I don’t get any of my comments to be that we’re not well on our way. I’m more of a realist, but where we were two years ago, we’re in a way more pragmatic place today. And so I think we my closing comment would be we are well on our way for hydrogen to be a very important piece of the future of energy and future ofpower. And we all just need to continue to make sure that we’re pragmatically approaching this ecosystem and ensuring that we don’t have a safety incident.
Paul Rodden 41:14
Wise words, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. Really interesting to see the inner workings of chart industries and the incredible value chain you’ve built out for the hydrogen industry. I also love the the nexus of clean concept that you all are working with, and I encourage all of my listeners to check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today.
Jill Evanko 41:37
It’s been wonderful, great conversation, and I look forward to many more.
Paul Rodden 41:41
Excellent. Alright, everyone. Thank Jill again for joining me today to discuss her views on the hydrogen industry. In my opinion. She’s done a fantastic job as the CEO of chart industries. And I look forward to watching her shape the hydrogen economy in the future. You can check out chart industries website at www.chartindustries.com to see everything they have going on. Thanks again. I hope you have a great day. Take care. Hey, this is Paul. I hope you liked this podcast. If you did and want to hear more. I’d appreciate it if you would either Subscribe to this channel on YouTube, or connect with your favorite platform through my website at www.thehydrogenpodcast.com. Thanks for listening. I very much appreciate it. Have a great day.
