A solution for hydrogen storage and transportation

Lisa Raitt: Welcome to the Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focused on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape. I’m your host, Lisa Raitt. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing issues with special guests that will give you some new perspective and help you make sense of what really matters.

Natasha Kostenuk: Today, hydrogen is transported and stored at high pressure or cryogenically liquefied. You freeze it to liquefy it, and both of those are somewhat dangerous and not really practical for broad use, and so what we’ve developed is a proprietary process to store hydrogen in a liquid carrier that can transport hydrogen no differently than gasoline.

Lisa Raitt: Welcome to our multi-part series, profiling female entrepreneurs enabling Canada’s Energy Transition. Our guests in this series represent innovation led clean energy start-ups incubated through the University of Calgary’s Energy Transition Centre. Now CIBC fosters the energy transition ecosystem through strategic investments in academia, including the University of Calgary, to enable a more inclusive and sustainable economy. And today I’d like to introduce Tasha Kostenuk, founder and CEO of Ayrton Energy, a Canadian hydrogen clean tech company. Tasha is a professional engineer with over 20 years experience in the energy service industry, and she’s built her career around bridging technology and business, working in the early stage of many new technologies. On today’s episode, we’re going to get into the opportunities and the challenges of hydrogen storage and transportation, and how new technology can enable clean distributive energy generation. Hey, Tasha, welcome and thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of The Sustainability Agenda.

Natasha Kostenuk: Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Lisa Raitt: I am, too. Okay, let’s start with a bit of your background first. What made you want to pursue a career in the energy service industry? How did that come about?

Natasha Kostenuk: Honestly, I kind of stumbled into it. So I’m a mechanical engineer by training, and I started with an energy service company as a summer student working just through the summer and really loved what I was doing, loved the industry and ended up turning that into a part time job while I was going to university and into a full time role after that, and I stayed with that same company for a total of 19 years. And I was really lucky, I was given some advice early that your career shouldn’t be a ladder, it should be a jungle gym. Sometimes you need to go down and around to get up, and I really took that to heart. So while I was in that one company for 19 years, I took along a lot of different roles engineering, field operations, project management, sales and even business development. And I also have a strong belief in saying yes to opportunities, which also helped me shape my career by finding new passions I didn’t know I have. I had a really good career there and did lots of different things, and I ended up leaving the energy service company that I worked for in 2019 and then started working with early stage tech companies and also found a passion for that, especially because most of the companies I was working with are in the energy transition space and really enjoyed learning from them.

Lisa Raitt: So how tough was it you leave in 2019? You’re starting to work with early start-ups and COVID hits. Were you a little bit nervous?

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I was more of an advisor at that time to some companies, and really what we tried to do is think of every negative like that, Covid had a ton of negatives and it was harmful to a lot of people, but there’s usually something you can take out of every opportunity like that. So we were really focusing on that, like, what can we do to turn this into an opportunity? And so we tried to work with every one of our companies and really trying to leverage it into what you could do and how you could be better from the opportunity.

Lisa Raitt: Yeah. And you’re working with early stage tech. What surprised you the most?

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, I think the biggest surprise I had was the ecosystem. You know, I knew that our early stage companies and starting an early stage company was going to be really hard, but I was really surprised at how amazing the ecosystem is that supports this. You can see support at every level of government federally and provincially, even locally. And there’s just so many accelerator programs and people who’ve put together these amazing programs to help you find advisors, to help you find resources, and also to help meet other founders that are on the same journey, and I don’t think I was expecting that level of support. And it’s there, as long as you reach out and contribute back to the ecosystem. I think there’s a lot of support for you.

Lisa Raitt: Okay, honestly, I mean bridging from giving advice to companies to becoming a founder of your own clean tech company. That is, that’s a big leap. That’s a really big leap.

Natasha Kostenuk: Super hard. Yeah.

Lisa Raitt: Tell me a little bit about the thought process around taking that final step to becoming a founder, because there may be a lot of folks out there who are doing exactly what you’re doing right now, which is giving advice to other people working within a company, working outside of a company, but really have a great idea and they want to pursue it themselves. How and why did you finally get it all together so that you made the leap?

Natasha Kostenuk: Well, I want to be clear that this looks like success, but success is often a lot of failures along the way. And so I had other ideas of companies I wanted to start or other ideas of something that I wanted to create. And what I stopped to kind of start vetting those ideas or start figuring them out, they hit a dead end and I would abandon them, and so Ayrton looks like, Hey she came up with an idea and here she is doing it, but there’s really a lot of work in between that of other failed ideas. And so I just want to encourage people to not give up, if some of your ideas are kind of dumb. I had a lot of dumb ideas and I think they all lead you to the right place.

Lisa Raitt: Don’t think ideas are dumb. It’s not the right timing, right?

Natasha Kostenuk: True.

Lisa Raitt: Not the right timing.

Natasha Kostenuk: True.

Lisa Raitt: I’m very curious to know the name, Ayrton . Where did it come from?

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, so we named the company Ayrton after Hertha Ayrton. She was a UK scientist in the early 1900s that studied electricity as a pioneer in the field, and we just wanted to pay homage to some of the women who carved the path ahead of us. So that’s what inspired us.

Lisa Raitt: And what in particular was it about her? Other than the fact that she was a scientist in the early 1900s, mean her and Marie Curie, probably, that’s about it. But what was it about her that really caught your attention and made you to want to be reminded of her in your company name?

Natasha Kostenuk: I think I felt like I really resonated with her. She was known to support women’s rights and women’s rights to vote. She was active in her community as a volunteer and a supporter of other women. And she also was a working mom. And as a working mom, you know, she was very vocal about the challenges of being a working mom in the early 1900s, like I think that term wasn’t even coined then, and she was a pioneer in so many different ways. And I just when I heard her story, it just so much of it resonated with me.

Lisa Raitt: Amazing. So tell me a little bit about the company itself. What is the sweet spot or what’s the area that Ayrton’s trying to address in the market?

Natasha Kostenuk: So I usually like to tell the story of how we kind of got started. And so in 2021, I met a woman who complained that she couldn’t charge her Tesla and run her home air conditioner at the same time. You could choose A or B, and I thought that’s ridiculous, there’s no way that’s a real problem. And I did a bunch of research to prove her wrong, and I ended up proving her right because we can add more power generation to our system as a whole to the grid, but it’s the transmission and distribution centres of our grid that are failing us and they need massive amounts of upgrades, billions and billions of dollars of upgrades to be able to handle the growing, electrify everything shift that’s happening today, and so I really think that hydrogen is a good way for us to provide auxiliary energy to support power needs above grid capacity. And when we did our research, we learned that today’s methods of storing and transporting hydrogen don’t enable hydrogen to be used broadly for power generation. Today, hydrogen is transported and stored at high pressure or cryogenically liquefied. You freeze it to liquefy it, and both of those are somewhat dangerous and not really practical for broad use. And so what we’ve developed is a proprietary process to store hydrogen in a liquid carrier that can transport hydrogen, no differently than gasoline. So it’s room temperature room pressure safe and it can be stored and transported in existing infrastructure.

Lisa Raitt: And then when you deliver it, it’s up to the acceptor of the hydrogen to convert it into whatever use it’s going to be.

Natasha Kostenuk: So our process stores it and releases it. And so it’s a two step process, and when we release the hydrogen from our carrier fluid, we do so at a low temperature and low pressure. So it’s like 50 or 60°C and we can remove the hydrogen from the carrier fluid, and the carrier fluid can be recycled and reused thousands of times.

Lisa Raitt: That’s really interesting. Who should be interested in this?

Natasha Kostenuk: We’re talking to lots of different utility companies. You know, they’re mandated to provide energy for a low cost and reliably we’re getting a lot of interest from utility companies that are looking at hydrogen and using hydrogen as a way to create excess energy or more energy to meet this growing demand, and energy companies, of course, are getting into the hydrogen space quite a bit. And so we’re really excited to be working with different groups and also municipalities. There’s been different cities that have reached out to us that are also trying to provide communities with the energy needs that they have. So municipalities are really another great option for us because they’re looking to provide energy for the community above their current capacity without extra infrastructure costs.

Lisa Raitt: Yeah. So what you’re talking about mainly is distributed energy production.

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, and using hydrogen to provide the distributed energy, but to do that you need to safely transport and store hydrogen to a broad customer base.

Lisa Raitt: Got it. That’s why municipalities.

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, and being able to do that in a in a carrier fluid that’s no different than gasoline and people are used to handling is a great way to do that.

Lisa Raitt: Okay. So tell me this, does it matter what kind of hydrogen you’re using?

Natasha Kostenuk: No, it doesn’t. We’re hydrogen agnostic, we can take hydrogen from any source. Obviously, we prefer clean hydrogen, so hydrogen that’s produced without emissions, and we can take any hydrogen into our system and transport it to where it needs to be.

Lisa Raitt: Maybe not a lot of people understand the difference in terms of colours. You know, there’s a lot of colours assigned to hydrogen in Canada, although I will note that the Minister of Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, has often said that he is agnostic in terms of what kind of hydrogen is coming along. But, maybe you can give us a little bit of an overview, Tasha, of the different types of hydrogen. 

Natasha Kostenuk: For sure, and there’s too many different colours. To be honest, there’s a lot.

Lisa Raitt: There is.

Natasha Kostenuk: There is, but I’m super excited because Canada has really embraced hydrogen. Canada has expressed that we want 30% of our energy and power to come from hydrogen by 2050, and we’re really poised as a country. We have the right skills and the right resources to really make that happen. So we have a lot of hydro in Canada that can be used to produce what’s called green hydrogen. So that’s used to make green hydrogen, and then there’s some new technologies that are being developed here in Canada that is using natural gas as a feedstock. So typically, if you use natural gas to make hydrogen, it’s called grey hydrogen, which releases CO2. If you capture the hydrogen that’s called blue hydrogen. And so the newest technologies are turquoise hydrogen, which takes the natural gas as a feedstock and turns it into hydrogen and solid carbon, and the solid carbon has a lot of different industrial uses also in the clean tech space, and so it’s quite interesting. And Canada, of course, has all the right infrastructure and resources and people to be leaders in hydrogen.

Lisa Raitt: And have one more colour for you, because I’m here in Ontario, but there’s pink hydrogen as well.

Natasha Kostenuk: Yes. Pink from nuclear.

Lisa Raitt: That’s right.

Natasha Kostenuk: For sure, yeah.

Lisa Raitt: There’s all kinds of different colours. It’s not actually coloured that colour (laughes).

Natasha Kostenuk: (laughes) No, sometimes people think it is when they hear it that way, but yeah.

Lisa Raitt: Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Let’s talk from a business perspective for Ayrton. What’s the risk and what’s the opportunity for the next 12 to 24 months, do you think?

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah. So I think one of our largest risks is building an emerging company along an emerging market. As the hydrogen market develops, we’re managing that risk by developing partnerships, and we’re partnering ourselves with utility companies and hydrogen producers, as well as municipalities that are committed to producing hydrogen. So that helps reduce our risk, and we also believe that the hydrogen economy is being supported by all different levels of government. So we can see clean distributed energy, you know, powered by hydrogen growing over the next few years that are going to continue to support the growing renewable energy demands that Canada needs.

Lisa Raitt: That’s amazing. One last question before I let you go, Tasha, and thank you very much for all your time today. Looking back in your career for the last 20 years in the energy service industry, what would your advice be to somebody out there listening in who is a representative of the next generation of clean tech entrepreneurs? Where would you send them in terms of resources?

Natasha Kostenuk: I think you need to reach out to the ecosystem and ask for help and use all of the resources that are available. There’s IRAP advisors, it’s federally funded depending on which province you’re in. Everybody has their own provincial innovation teams that provide advisors. Here in Alberta, we use Alberta innovates, and then there’s lots of accelerator programs that are spread across Canada. As well as globally, if you want to join a global accelerator, but there’s just so many here that provide really great access to advisors and access to different resources and can really help you along your journey. So I highly encourage people to reach out and use these resources. 

Lisa Raitt: And there’s a lot of hustle involved. You are doing lots of pitches, you are out there talking a lot, trying to figure out where it is that you can raise money for your company and taking advantage of things, Invest Ottawa Capital, Angel Network, Mars Discovery District. If there is an opportunity for you to go in and pitch to somebody, you’re there. That must be an important part.

Natasha Kostenuk: Yeah, you’re kind of always on, you know, trying to always find the right connection. Every connection you make, you can ask for another connection that leads you to another one. So I always encourage people to ask for help and ask for the next connection. But yeah, you’re always kind of hustling. You’re always kind of talking to different people and there’s so many different places that you can get help from. So when you pitch yourself, it’s pitching for money or pitching for help hiring people or pitching people to join your team. You are kind of always, you know, selling yourself and selling your company.

Lisa Raitt: Well, I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. I wish you all the best as you continue to grow. Ayrton Energy and looking forward to seeing more successes coming your way. Thanks a lot, Tasha.

Natasha Kostenuk: Thank you so much. It was great to meet you and great to be here. Thank you.

Lisa Raitt: Please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Lisa Raitt, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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