Hay to Hydrogen: a Discussion with Louise Brown

Jon Paul Driver 0:05
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast. Your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul Driver in today’s episode, we’re joined by Dr Louise Brown. She is the CEO and founder of Hydgene Renewables. And you might be wondering what Hydgene Renewables has to do with the hay and fodder industry, but I promise we’ll get there. Welcome to the podcast.

Louise Brown 0:29
Thanks. Jon Paul, it’s great to talk again. We first met a year ago, and it’s really great to continue the conversation.

Jon Paul Driver 0:36
At the Afia conference in a hay and fodder world, right? Yeah, correct.

Louise Brown 0:40
I find myself drawn to this world quite often, and there is a connection between being a scientist and working with the ag industry. So, yeah, happy to tell the story.

Jon Paul Driver 0:49
Well, where does it start?

Louise Brown 0:51
I am a scientist by training. I have a PhD in biophysics, and was part of the academic world for nearly 20 years developing technology very much for for adding value to the body of knowledge of just science. But then along the way, we made quite an interesting discovery, where we could make hydrogen gas from an engineered organism or a bacteria. So that was the start for us, and we I left the academic world back in about 2021 and have spun out technology. We started developing into Hydgene Renewables. So I am the CEO of hygiene and one of four founders. We are a deep tech startup company, and we’re scaling up green hydrogen production from biomass residues. So the biomass is the loose connection to what we do, but really the stronger connection is where the value of hydrogen is for the ag industry that that we can, you know, get to that you’re

Jon Paul Driver 1:52
using biomass, which is where hay and fodder comes in as a feedstock. But then there’s also an output that’s useful to farmers, correct?

Louise Brown 2:03
So we do make hydrogen, and hydrogen is a pretty interesting chemical. It’s probably the most abundant chemical on the planet today, but we actually have to make it. And I can go into details of where it comes from today, but we have to make it in a cleaner way. And that connection to how it’s used on farm is hydrogen is one of the core ingredients for making ammonia. And that ammonia, of course, is used for synthetic fertilizers. So you can start to see that connection between we use at hygiene, that biomass residues as our feedstock input. That’s the energy we need to be able to make the hydrogen to make ammonia to then go back on farm and be used helping with food production.

Jon Paul Driver 2:45
So I’m no expert in this, so help me stumble through this. I looked up the haber bosch process. That’s the origins of nitrogen fertilizer and explosives and all other all sorts of other stuff. It’s one part nitrogen, three parts hydrogen, NH three, right to make ammonia, correct? So if you have nitrogen and hydrogen, you can make fertilizer. And so you’re talking about taking biomass, plant stuffs, and making fertilizer out of it. This is the input output model that we’re talking about. And I suspect we’re going to talk about getting it down to farm scale,

Louise Brown 3:20
yeah, how would Okay? So let me dial back to actually. How do we do this? How do we start to replace the ammonia that today comes from the haber bosch process, and then start to green it and find other ways that we can then take it from, you know, large scale, which is how haber bosch is done today, back onto the farm. So you’re correct, hydrogen is a core component to that NH three molecule, the ammonia molecule. And the haber bosch process today takes the nitrogen from the air, but it needs that supply of hydrogen, and that hydrogen is made from the fossil fuel industry today. So we call it brown hydrogen because it’s come from natural gas or coal. So it can be black hydrogen. It’s really dirty. It’s got a really high carbon footprint. So the hydrogen that goes into ammonia, into the haber bosch process, you then need a high temperature, high pressure. So a lot of energy is required to form that ammonia molecule. The only way you can get the economics to work is to do it at very, very large scale. So we’re talking plants which are close to, you know, 100 tons of ammonia per day. So super large plants, they they sit, usually, next to where the fossil fuel industry is, where the hydrogen is made. They take the hydrogen, they make the ammonia, and then there’s a fertilizer product that follows. Sometimes the ammonia gets turned to urea. You use carbon dioxide to be able to do that, and the oil and gas industry has that CO two supply as well. So it’s a really dirty process, really high carbon footprint, but it’s what goes into food production today. So if we I think someone once said to me that, you know, half of our body is made from ammonia. That’s come from the fossil fuel industry. So our carbon footprint ourselves is not great, so we definitely need a way to decarbonize production of ammonia, which actually means decarbonizing the production of hydrogen first. So green hydrogen today is dirty in its production method. More than 99% comes from that fossil fuel industry, and half of that hydrogen is used for ammonia production. So it’s a really big industry today, so there’s a lot of effort going into how can we make it more clean? And we hear a lot about electrolysis. Electrolysis is where we can take water and we can split it using energy into hydrogen and oxygen, so that hydrogen can go into ammonia production. So to do it cleanly, you need a renewable source of energy to split that water. So we’re talking about large scale renewables like wind and solar. So there is a lot of effort today and a lot of money being put behind electrolysis, which is great when you’ve got large scale renewables and excess green electrons that can go into making hydrogen. But if you’re in regions where you don’t have that land for solar farms or wind farms, or it’s not very windy or sunny, you need other ways to be able to make hydrogen. And why we need to make it close to where it’s used is because hydrogen is not a molecule you really want to be moving around. Today, it’s very small. It’s difficult to compress. A lot of cost and complexity goes into trying to move it around so you want to make it close to the source of where you want to use it. So this is where we came in. As I said before, I’m from the university sector, and we work in a field called synthetic biology. It’s a new way that we can engineer organisms, microbes, to do things they’ve never really done before. So back in about 2018 my team and another academic called Professor Robert willows, we engineered bacteria to be able to take in sugar molecules. So this is where the sugar connection to the biomass comes from.

Jon Paul Driver 7:06
I’m thinking oat and hay, right off the top of my head, absolutely.

Louise Brown 7:10
So you take in the sugar molecule, and we’ve engineered this organism to have, like, it’s like a catalyst. It’s got an enzyme pathway that convert that sugar into hydrogen now. So there is a lot of bioengineering that goes into taking the sugar to hydrogen,

Jon Paul Driver 7:26
sorry. Ch, four is sugar, yeah,

Louise Brown 7:31
very simple, monomeric sugars. So we can work with things like glucose, xylose, arabinose, the very simple. We can work with any type of sugar, but really, from one sugar, theoretically, you can make 12 hydrogen molecules, and that’s where we’ve been focused. Our tech development, on our research to make sure we can optimize as much hydrogen out of one sugar molecule,

Jon Paul Driver 7:55
ch, 1206, is glucose. There we go. I love the chemistry. I had to look it up well. But it helps to think H is hydrogen. We have H’s available in sugar. It’s just making it make sense in my mind.

Louise Brown 8:11
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other key molecule, the key atom in that sugar molecule, is carbon. So this is carbon that is now available from above the ground. So the other way to make hydrogen is carbon from under the ground. So where we wanted to change our focus was we need a feedstock to make hydrogen, but let’s work with carbon that’s above the ground, and the carbon sits in those sugar molecules. So carbon is a really important molecule, yeah, if we can make it from plant material, which is makes the sugars that’s sequestering that carbon dioxide from the air. It’s a biogenic source of carbon. It’s clean, and then we can start to make clean hydrogen, and that hydrogen then can go into the ammonia production pathway. Look, we’re jumping with chemistry all over the place. I love it.

Jon Paul Driver 8:58
Okay? I think I understand the connection between the carbon and hydrogen in sugar. We understand that, oh, anybody that’s chiseled oat and hay gunk out of the back of a baler understands that the higher the sugar content, the worse it is. So it’s not hard for hay and fodder producers to think about sugar in hay and then taking that hydrogen component, converting it to ammonia. But we’re talking about your process, takes the sugar and converts it to hydrogen. Correct, okay, I’m tracking and then once you have clean hydrogen, then you have cleaner fertilizers. Correct, am I? Am I catching all this? Right?

Louise Brown 9:38
Yeah, that’s perfect. Okay, I just wanted, but the really the challenge is, not only do we make want to make clean hydrogen, to make clean ammonia, but we’ve also got to compete with the fossil fuel industry. So you’ve got to develop the technology to make sure that we compete on the economics of the product we’re trying to make. So a lot of the development. We go into is focused on, you know, really driving down the cost curve of the unit economics. So it’s not only can we make, you know, those 12 hydrogens from one sugar, but where can we get a supply of sugar? That is, that is low cost, that is not have other market opportunities that we have to compete with. And this is where that connection to the ag industry started to develop, probably around sort of 2020 2021, for us. So as scientists in white lab coats in a university, the sugars that we always worked with came in a white bottle with a red lid. We never thought about where they came from. We could just buy them from another chemical supplier. So it’s like, well, this is very expensive sugar. We can’t make low cost hydrogen. We have to find a way where we can, you know, unlock the value of other low cost sugars for manufacturing. So this is the ag industry, and in about 2020, 2021, the Australian Government put out a challenge through one of the government agencies of and it was connected to the grain and Research Development core, where they were looking for a very environmentally clean way to make fertilizers, to make ammonia, but they knew that they needed hydrogen, and they wanted to connect it back to the agricultural industry and farming. Could we find a way to make hydrogen on farm? And it was a beautiful moment for us at hygiene, because we thought, well, farmers, they grow things all the time, and everything has sugars in it. So this was our opportunity to really start to understand where were we going to get those sugars from in the ag industry that could get us, you know, cost competitive, and that gets to your excitement about the different types of feedstocks that we could possibly use. But I can tell you, it’s probably not what you thought we’d end up using, where we see the value. So I’m happy to talk through feedstocks if you can go there next Absolutely. Yeah. So we, again, we started talking to the ag industry and farmers really trying to understand, sort of, the supply of feedstocks, the cost of feedstocks. It is an input that we have to purchase. You know, I don’t know about many farmers that give things away for free. I haven’t found one yet. So it was really, you know, what feedstocks are in the ag industry, that might be sort of biomass residues that we could value add to, and we started looking at straw as the first feedstock. And in Australia and globally, a lot of straw post harvest, where, where the stubble load is high, is burnt in the field, or even in a lot of places, it just gets plowed back in and it goes to landfill. Now that, in itself, has a carbon footprint. So of course, you burn and you produce CO two, but if you put it back in the land, there’s a methane component to it, and methane is 20 times worse than CO two. So we knew that there was an excess load of straw stubble that we potentially could tap into. So again, we’re leaving stubble that is needed for soil health and other benefits. And it was looking at that excess straw that was available. We then worked with farmers and connected, actually, with feed Central, saying we needed some material we could test because, you know, I am a scientist. I don’t have a farming background. I don’t have, didn’t have a lot of connections in the ag industry. Then and feed central were fabulous at giving us a whole range of different products, or feedstock, straw and hay, that we could test. And we worked through many different feed stocks from all the different wheat, barley, sorghum, corn, straw. So all the straw products, we looked at hay, Oton hay, vetch hay, as well canola. We looked at even the milling products from the grain industry. We tried some of their waste products. We’ve looked at cotton gin trash. So today, our team has tested over 130 different biomass feedstocks with our technology. But by testing, what that means is we have to pull that sugar content out. And it’s not just the soluble sugars, the nutritional sugars, that have value, value as an animal feed. It’s those lignocellulosic sugars, the ones locked in the fibers are the ones that we wanted to

Jon Paul Driver 14:25
the ones that are completely indigestible by animals,

Louise Brown 14:28
correct? Yeah. So this is where straw is really interesting, because when you can unlock those sugars and we can extract them, about 40% of the weight of that straw is usable sugar. So you go from soluble sugars, which is roughly 10% to about 40% in in what we find is really valuable for

Jon Paul Driver 14:46
our process. That’s much higher than I anticipated. Yeah, and

Louise Brown 14:49
it doesn’t require a lot of treatment to be able to extract those sugars. There is a heat process to pull apart the fibers, and then we get the complex sugars come out, and then we are. Get them into their single, monomeric forms. So there is a enzyme process to simplify them so we can use them in our process. But yeah, between about we find, on average, between about 30 to 40% of a lot of the straws have usable sugars. And so this is very low cost sugar feedstock now for our process to be able to make low cost hydrogen. So we always, so this is where, you know that engagement with the ag industry, we needed to then, okay, we knew we could get a lot of sugar out of straw. It was really trying to understand, you know, what is that cost to collect that straw? What is that price point where a farmer will change their behavior to want to then collect the straw for our purposes and work with us rather than using it, rather than burning it on the field or using it for animal bedding, for example,

Jon Paul Driver 15:49
or sometimes is just roughage in diets. And there are uses for those types of things. Yeah,

Louise Brown 15:56
absolutely it. And this is where you know for some farmers to sell additional residues that they have is good for bringing in income, but others will keep it for when there is a drought season on and animal feed prices are high. So we acknowledge that, and we know that there are sort of geographies where there isn’t a lot of excess biomass residues out there for us to use, but in some regions, such as in the Victorian wheat belt in Australia, we have a lot of farming partners where there is quite a lot of stubble that is available for making quite a lot of hydrogen. So they’re the regions that we focus on, not where, you know, it’s really important to retain that stubble for soil health.

Jon Paul Driver 16:37
Thinking about no till areas, the Mallee comes to mind, right? Very dry, very dry regions, absolutely.

Louise Brown 16:46
Yeah, and that’s where, when we tested the straw, we found it doesn’t have to be at a certain age of from harvesting. We can take straw that’s been on the field for quite some time. We can take water damage straw, even if it’s got a pest or other weeds in it, it’s still a value to us. So we can work with very low grade straw. It doesn’t have to be high quality at all. So there might be benefit there, if a straw that you know is not shedded and becomes damaged and has no value, that’s what we like to work with. Where

Jon Paul Driver 17:19
in this development process. Are you? Yeah. So we spun

Louise Brown 17:24
out the company from Macquarie University in 2021, so we are a venture capital capital backed startup company. We’re about 18 people today, and we have a lab or a factory facility, actually, in Sydney, where we’ve got an in house pilot. So that pilot today can take all different feedstocks, we extract the sugars, and we have our bio catalyst. That’s that engineered organism that now can convert those sugars to hydrogen, and that’s operating in our facility in Sydney. But you can appreciate we don’t want to be making too much hydrogen in a building. We want to find a way to use that hydrogen directly and not store

Jon Paul Driver 18:02
it Hindenburg? Yeah, yep, that

Louise Brown 18:06
question pops up every now and then, and there’s a lot of debate as to what actually caused that disaster. And you know, having a wooden frame on a Hindenburg is not the most Yeah, practical way of working with hydrogen, either. But it’s that hydrogen oxygen mix that makes it explosive. It’s not and we’ve worked with hydrogen for many, many years. It is a big industrial chemical molecule today that we know how to work with safely. Yeah, there are safety concerns, and this is where, if you don’t need to store it or move it, but can use it straight away, that’s where you can really start to address some of those safety concerns that transitioning to this new green hydrogen economy, we’re starting to face if we think we’re going to move hydrogen around the world. So our focus today is, yes, we can make hydrogen in our facility. We’re working with a farmer partner in central New South Wales. We want to deploy our technology now on farm and start to scale up production and work with, you know, the residues produced by that farmer. But again, a farmer today doesn’t really use hydrogen. It is not a molecule that, yeah, they’re not. There are no, well, there are hydrogen tractors, right? Yeah, right. There’s hydrogen. So it can be a fuel for hydrogen tractors, and they’re under development. It can be used in what we call a fuel cell to make electricity directly. So you might be able to run irrigation pumps on it, but it’s not really a great usable chemical on farm today, so we we are now focused on finding that technology where we can turn that hydrogen to ammonia and then, it starts to become quite valuable for a farming community to have that own security of supply of ammonia based fertilizer in their region. But that’s a new technology, and there’s a couple of options or projects that we’re looking at. As I said before. Haber bosch is the gold standard way of making hydrogen today, but that’s done at very large scale, and that would require a lot of hydrogen from biomass residues, so we want to try and scale down that process. So we are working with a university partner, the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, on the design of a smaller haber bosch plant that we can take on farm. And some of these systems actually do exist around the world. There’s one developed in China, for example. So smaller systems are around, but you need that supply of green hydrogen. The other opportunity that it has we’ve become involved in in the last six months is working with a company that’s based in the UK. They’re called neum, and they have a they call it a nano catalyst material that can take hydrogen and convert it to ammonia under lower pressures and temperatures than the haber bosch. So it’s, again, it’s like a catalyst material. And we’ve just been funded through an Australian, UK bilateral grant scheme where we will couple our two technologies together, and working with our farming partner, we will take that straw, convert it to hydrogen, and then we’ll work with neum on their nano catalyst material to take the hydrogen to make ammonia. So bringing those two modular components together will then start to really demonstrate that we can take that environmentally clean way of making ammonia on farm. So that’s a really exciting project that we’ve just picked up the funding for. But there’s other, you know, technologies being developed around the globe, really for for trying to find ways to have a more modular approach for ammonia production. And we’re always interested in looking at those opportunities and supplying the hydrogen that is required for that ammonia production,

Jon Paul Driver 21:46
I’ve been on several dairies that have methane digesters, as I think about that. There’s a building with an engine that burns methane. There’s a large vat, if you will, that takes manure and other feedstuffs and digests the things and releases the methane, right? And the scale of this is maybe a couple of acres. It’s It’s not huge, but it’s also not really small. It was quite the investment. I’m thinking of a particular group of three dairies that built it together. How do you see farmers coming together to create even though you’re talking about scaling down. How do you see farmers coming together to create the infrastructure to have these maybe modular fertilizer production units? I mean, that’s where you’re headed.

Louise Brown 22:33
Yeah, we are. It is a modular system. And I’m glad you raised the biogas industry and anaerobic digesters, because there’s a lot of synergies, too, with hydrogen and biogas production and projects that we’re working on today for integrating into some of those existing plants that, you know, in Europe, they’re quite prominent, less so in Australia, but starting to really capture the the attention of helping to transition to, you know this green future is, is through biogas. So the anaerobic digester sector, you’re correct. Jon Paul, it takes in a feedstock input. It has a living micro organism that can then digest it to make that biogas. Now we can use that same feedstock. What we want to use from that feedstock is the sugar component, whereas the anaerobic digester sector likes to use the proteins and the fats. That’s what its microbes like to use. So there’s a sugar component there that we can first use for our process to make hydrogen, and then what we don’t use would still go back into the anaerobic digester sector. So where the value of hydrogen is for biogas. This is where it becomes quite interesting again, is if you can inject that green hydrogen we’ve made into the biogas plant, you can then make more biogas. You increase that yield because they’ve got excess carbon dioxide that would combine with our hydrogen to make more methane. And then the other value that you would get from our hydrogen is you would reduce that carbon footprint, because you’ve got a clean way of making hydrogen. So we Yeah, ammonia is one application that we’re very focused on, but biogas, upgrading through anaerobic digester is another one. So those plants exist today, and you’re correct, they’ve got quite a small footprint of production. They work at quite large scales, and this is where we would bring in our modular catalyst technology, and we could integrate into those plants. So a lot of them know how to process the feedstock. At the beginning, we would take that sugar component and then our hydrogen gas would be injected directly into, you know, a biogas plant. So but the challenge is, yeah, that these projects do require large infrastructure upfront. It’s what we’re working through today to really under and it’s capex costs or infrastructure costs, which is not as significant as some chemical manufacturing plants out there. They are tanks and, you know, steel in the ground and vats and sugar and. Just flow bed reactors. So it’s quite simple, but it is an upfront cost, but the value over time for producing those, you know, if it’s biogas or ammonia, the payback, we’re quite confident, is there for the farmer, and this is what we’re working through today, through the field deployment of our technology with our farming partner in New South Wales, where we will start to test what some of those business models look like for getting a return on investment on that upfront capital cost.

Jon Paul Driver 25:30
So we’re not we’re not there yet,

Louise Brown 25:32
Not quite.

Jon Paul Driver 25:33
Are we talking about a five year horizon, 10 year horizon? Definitely not

Louise Brown 25:38
10. We’ll deploy our technology in the field from next year is our aim, and that will be a small modular plant. We’re targeting maybe 10 kilograms of hydrogen, which will make about 50 kilograms of ammonia. And if our performance of our catalyst in the field is as as good as it is in our facility in Sydney, then that could be even five times as much. So it’s quite a substantial green hydrogen plant. And then from 2026 to 2027 we start to scale up into what we call commercial demo. So we want to be targeting production of like one ton of hydrogen per day, which will make five tons of ammonia. So quite substantial amounts.

Jon Paul Driver 26:21
That starts to sound like farm level fertilizer production to me, correct?

Louise Brown 26:25
Yeah. And then by 2028, that commercial full scale would be a 10 ton hydrogen per day plant. So you’re starting to look at a cooperative arrangement for supply of that feedstock. And then the value would be, you know, distributed again, to that regional area from where that feedstock is coming from, so not really on farm, in terms of one farmer would have a 10 ton plant likely on site, unless a major player, but really to make those economics work and to bring that value back to the communities, especially for ammonia production, we do need to start producing at scales between sort of that one to 10 tons of hydrogen, which would get to that five to 50 tons of ammonia production per day?

Jon Paul Driver 27:04
Yeah? I mean, five to 50 tons of ammonia actually sounds like a reasonable amount. Yeah, that’s a scale that a farmer can talk about. Yeah, correct.

Louise Brown 27:11
And it’s something I’ve learned from engaging with farmers, is they don’t talk in kilograms. They like to talk in tons when they talk units. So I’ve had quite a lot of learnings from a farmer in terms of units of scale. But we are ambitious. We know, you know, the ad sector and the anaerobic digester sector absolutely works at those scales. We need to achieve that, and we want to achieve it over the next five years and by 10 years, absolutely have commercial deployment of our plants at scale. This

Jon Paul Driver 27:41
all sounds like almost science fiction, but it’s so exciting to think about taking, I mean, true waste products, something that’s being burnt or just plowed under, and converting it into hydrogen that you might use as fuel or into fertilizer to put right back on the ground. At a community level, that community component is really cool too.

Louise Brown 28:03
Yeah, for us, it’s about decentralized manufacturing. So it is the future that we see. It’s about having security of supply of chemicals. We will always need chemicals for, you know, processes such as fertilizer. We can’t electrify everything. There is that component where we need those green molecules. And this idea, the way the world operates today, we know, doesn’t work well. Of supply chains, you know, we make it in one place and then we try and ship it. There’s a carbon footprint with that. So the future has to be about decentralized manufacturing. Has to be about providing or value adding to materials that we have, if it’s byproducts or carbon above the ground. So it’s a biomanufacturing future where we’ve got better tools available to us today to be able to work with organisms to make molecules in a cleaner way. So it is futuristic. It is we call it the new bioeconomy. It is biomanufacturing. We want to value add as well, and it’s important that we, you know, we pay farmers for feedstock input. You know, waste is not a free commodity. It’s valuable, and we have to make sure that the value is provided to those that are growing that feedstock. We’re not trying to encourage energy crops to be grown. We know that works? Well, we want to start to work with other residues that have traditionally been difficult or have no value in the bio economy, and find new ways to work with organisms, where we can now start to unlock those sugars and use them for chemical manufacturing. So absolutely futuristic. There is, yeah, that the across globally, there’s a big push from the US government with in the bio economy space. We’re encouraged by that and the funding that is going into bio manufacturing. So that’s the that’s the world we fit in. But we’ve got it, yes, the technology driving these new market opportunities. Opportunities, but it’s important we can engage with the right off taker or the farmer to make sure that what we are building in the laboratory will work. You know, on a day to day operations on farm, I’m

Jon Paul Driver 30:13
looking for a quote, and it’s one of my favorites. In 1899 a newspaper columnist said that everything that can be invented has been invented in 1899 and I always like to keep that in mind as we talk about futuristic things, there’s a whole world of things that haven’t been invented yet, and we just can’t conceive of them because they’re not normal to us. So we’re not talking about horses and buggies anymore. We’re talking about hydrogen powered tractors, and this is just the next iteration, and it’s so fascinating to me. Yeah, I

Louise Brown 30:50
agree. I think it is the next generation. But going back to a quote of Has everything been invented? I think it has. And a lot of the answers come from biology. It’s just, do we have the right tools to be able to unlock what biology has taught us? So if I go right back to the beginning of our story, we looked at another organism that could make hydrogen, which was green algae, and that’s where we got the DNA code, or the footprint, the blueprint for how we were going to do it in a more economical way that we could take it on farm? So in some ways yes, the answer was in biology. So it had been invented. We just didn’t have the tools until sort of 1020, years ago, for being able to work with organisms and DNA like we do today. So synthetic biology, this new field is just an enabling technology, and maybe it leads to new inventions of how we can do things in other ways. But I’m a big believer that biology always has the answers. And, you know, biology has evolved to solve problems, and we can always find, you know, find really interesting organisms that make lots of interesting things, but can we do it in a better controlled way? So that’s what sort of Biomanufacturing is about. Is looking to biology for inspiration?

Jon Paul Driver 32:08
You just argued that biology already has all the answers. We just have to figure it out. Yeah, I like that. I like that biology is complex. Yes. Do you have any closing thoughts.

Louise Brown 32:21
We see a massive opportunity for the ag industry, for this transition to, you know, the green future, Global Green hydrogen economy that we need to reach and reach soon, there are benefits that go beyond just making green chemicals, But it’s going to go into our food production systems. It’ll go into energy security. And I know the pressures from farmers to reduce their carbon footprint is is here today, but it’s going to intensify. We need to still increase our food production, and we still got to do it with a lower, lower carbon footprint. So the green hydrogen transition should not just be owned by those that have wind and solar and lots of it, and can make lots of hydrogen in those renewable rich areas, there is an opportunity to use biomass for manufacturing and bring the benefits back to those regional agricultural communities. So that is our mission. Is Trying To value add and support the industry, but get farmers to think differently about some of their residues, and how can they value add? Very interesting conversation. Jon Paul, I didn’t know where we were going to go with it.

Jon Paul Driver 33:41
When you get a farmer, he’s going to ask farm questions. I have a modicum of science background. I did terribly in chemistry. I was an economics major, so all of the practical chemistry that I have today is hard earned on the farm, learning how fertilizer works, learning how soils work, learning how bacteria that live on the plants of Lucerne have a symbiotic relationship with the Lucerne plant and and provide the nitrogen that it needs. All of these things I’ve learned out of necessity. And it sounds like you’re not very far off. I’m trying to relate here. Of course, you’re not very far off of what farmers deal with all the time.

Louise Brown 34:23
Yeah, our farming partner that we work with closely, I was talking to him last week, and he came into it our facility, and he actually said the same things. He says, what you do is very similar to what we do on the farm. It’s about getting that additional 1% out of the everything we do, because it adds up and it’s the same in the technology space, we’re trying to improve the efficiency of our microbes all the time. We’re trying to improve how we can extract sugars at that lower cost. So, you know, I think we’re all scientists in our core, we take in information and we make informed decisions from it to continue. To improve things by incremental amounts, which all add up. So I think we’re very aligned. I love working with farmers because I know that they’ve got a very similar mindset. It’s the awareness of everything and gathering information and data and processing it to make a single decision. It’s an inspiring sector to engage with, and we’ve learned a lot from our the last sort of two years working with the ag industry. Louise,

Jon Paul Driver 35:26
Thank you very much for your thoughts today. This has been educational, if nothing else, but also a little inspiring to think of the green fertilizer that’s coming down the pipeline that’s exciting to me. Again, I’ve been joined by Dr Louise Brown, CEO and founder of Hydgene Renewables. This podcast is proudly bought to you by Feed Central. Stay tuned in for upcoming episodes. You.

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