Innovation titan Bill Gates got a good taste of Texas earlier this year when he traveled throughout the Lone Star State, embarking on what could be described as an energy transition tour.
Among the stops on the tour, Gates said, were Infinium’s Corpus Christi plant, which he described as "the world’s first eFuel plant taking hydrogen and CO2 to make fuels."
Gates also spent a lot of time with Occidental and its 1PointFive direct air capture subsidiary, in addition to a stop in Kingsville "which will be the site of a lot of their sequestration," he said.
Taking in a visit to Shell’s Technology Center in Houston, Gates witnessed work toward making acrylonitrile "cheap and green as an input to using carbon fiber throughout the economy more," he said.
Later was a stop at Air Liquide’s hydrogen production facility in La Porte, Texas, he said, that aims to "get carbon sequestration added to the green hydrogen plant."
"I’m learning a lot as I go out and see some of these projects that are scaling up innovation that’s going on at the lab level," Gates said. "But the hard part is going to be building these plants."
Speaking at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston, Gates noted a certain irony in the fact that "so many of the capabilities to embrace these new innovations are strongest in Texas," despite Texas’ reputation as the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry.
Bill Gates lauds Texas as leading energy transition state
From left are Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and Bill Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy and TerraPower at CERAWeek by S&P Global. Photo courtesy of CERAWeek by S&P Global.
In 2015, Gates founded Breakthrough Energy Fellows, a company that aims to accelerate innovation in sustainable energy, as well as in other technologies, to reduce GHG emissions.
"Breakthrough Energy has about 100 companies all over the country — on the coast, more than anywhere else," Gates said. "But when they come to the point of saying, ‘Okay, I want to build this pilot plant,’ a few of them relocate completely to Texas. A lot of them say, ‘Okay, we’ll continue doing our lab work at this other location, but the big investments — the approval, the capital, everything — will be down in Texas.’ So there’s really a strong critical mass here of the big industry players and a lot of the policies that allow things to move quickly."
"There are a lot of things that have to happen for these projects to go ahead," Gates admitted. "It’s far, far more difficult than anything I worked on at Microsoft."
Specifically, getting deployment to scale is "a huge problem," he said.
"If you ask a normal infrastructure investor what their checklist is when they look at a plant, they will say, ‘Do you know what it is going to cost to build this plant? Do you know how efficient it would be? Do you know who is going to buy your output, and at what price?’" Gates continued. "The answer to every one of those questions is no, we don’t know. We’re still figuring this out. We have proven it can be done, with solar and wind and lithium-ion batteries, but now we have to do that for green hydrogen and a dozen other things."
Asked by vice chairman of S&P Global and session moderator, Dr. Daniel Yergin, if he envisions the energy transition happening in an orderly way while the industry continues to maintain its existing energy system, Gates was predictably philosophical, yet optimistic.
"There are all sorts of ‘non-numeric’ things that people say about how quickly we can transition. We live in a world where some people think it’s so hard, it’s not worth the time. Some people think it’s not important. Some people think you can change consumption," he said. "It just comes with the territory."
Gates referred to "the International Energy Agency (IEA) numbers" that indicate the necessity of a global hydrocarbon-driven economy "across all these emissions."
"The amount that we’ve dented that is rather modest, despite installing solar at a very good clip," Gates said. "And as a percentage, EVs are very small. These two right here are the most mature parts of this entire picture. The other things like, when do we get fusion or when do we have a really large steel plant that makes things these new ways — that’s much tougher. But the amount of IQ and interest and policy work — we’ve easily made eight years of progress since 2015."
"We’re looking for good ideas from anywhere in the world," Gates concluded.
