The Exchanges

Q To a stupid person like me, how would you explain what your PhD is in? One line.

A Very simple. Um, I just engineered a few microorganisms to break down agricultural waste, basically crop residue, which continues to remain a problem. Five years after I finished my PhD and converted to ethanol. So ethanol as a fuel additive. Um, it was at the center of energy biosciences and, and, uh, the key skills I developed was once again, how do you create a community of microorganisms to do What do you want them to do? But the problem we were solving was how do you prevent crop burning instead of coming up with ways of disposing of the crop in more meaningful ways? Suppose you could convert it to something more useful, which in our case we thought was ethanol. The government was making a heavy push for something known as second generation cellulosic ethanol, which is basically to use non-food sources as a feedstock for making ethanol as a fuel additive.

AI assessment note: “I just engineered a few microorganisms to break down agricultural waste”

Q How did you go from your PhD in this to starting to create Hydrogen and Aussys your company?

A Oh my God. Um, I had finished my PhD, and, um, I was working for my professor, my advisor's engineering company. It was an engineering procurement and construction company. That's what chemical engineers do. Technologies out of our lab needed to be pitched to, and we were heavily working with the PSUs. So you need to go out and talk about what value the technology can bring, and that was me in the business development role. Um, in between all of this, I had my professor's friend, Who is very wealthy, but not formally educated. He has a sort of sugar mill, which runs one half of the year producing ethanol and the other half making sugar. And one day his plant was shut down and he didn't quite understand because for some bizarre reason, the notification was in English, not in Marathi, as you would expect coming from Maharashtra. And he came, came to my professor and he said, what is going on? And he said, you've been illegally dumping your wastewater. Effluent, as it's called, and he said, I have no idea. I give a dude money to sort of take it away from my side. This man who has been collecting money from my professor's sort of friend has been going around the block and dumping it right there because, hey, somebody paid me to take care of it. I took care of it. Um, that's when my professor gave me a sort of brief to say, what do you think are the pathways, as it's called in sort …

AI assessment note: “finished my PhD, and, um, I was working for my professor, my advisor's engineering company”

Q So how much are you selling now in terms of sales as a company?

A It's not much. It's, it's our largest plant. It's with another starch sorbitol manufacturer in Ahmedabad. Um, our maximum capacity currently is 250 kilograms per day. And we use only 18 cubic meters or 18,000 liters of, uh, this particular effluent to do it. That's our largest sort of plant so far. We have an offtake agreement that we're really scared of for about one tonne per day, uh, for another certain client in the steel industry. But the idea is that the active working operation is two 50 kilograms. It's a drop in the ocean for you to hit five, Million tons per year, you need about 10,000 tons per day. Fortunately for us, we, we know that we need only about 35 sites. Where there is enough density of organic matter in the wastewater. But once again, we can't really wait until 2030. So a few months down the line, we will have to start, ah, dumping the hydrogen on the open markets. It's basically spot trading. Exactly the way LNG is traded. And you use the same sort of LNG route. Go from Australia, Japan, South Korea, and onwards. Because there's a detailed pipeline for hydrogen that exists. But that's grey hydrogen. The idea here is to sort of, uh, bust the market by selling it at such low values.

AI assessment note: “It's not much... our maximum capacity currently is 250 kilograms per day.”

Q What is OSIS doing now? How much have you scaled to? Uh, who is this feasible for today to use OSIS?

A So anybody who has, um, wastewater at their site and also requires green hydrogen is obviously our beachhead market, because then we don't, you're doing away with the distance problem, which is, which is honestly what people talk about when it comes to green hydrogen. Um, you would much rather produce green hydrogen as a storage molecule during renewable energy production, which is a whole other can of worms I'm about to open now. So anytime there's surge, So you have all of this power that you can't put in the grid, whether it's wind or solar. Um, you can use pumped hydro, and there's other sort of strategies for storing that excess power, otherwise you're having to scale back, or worse, completely stop production. If you use that excess energy to split water, voila, you have hydrogen gas that has industrial use, et cetera, et cetera, but it's basically used to store energy that you couldn't Otherwise put onto the grid. The problem with all of this that no one will talk to you about is that for producing one kilogram of hydrogen using by splitting water, you would need, depending on who you speak to, nine kilograms of water, which is nine liters, going all the way up to 30 liters of water if it requires treatment. Treatment is basically making it desalinated water. In a country where five hundred million people Don't have access to drinking water. India's target of five billio…

AI assessment note: “anybody who has, um, wastewater at their site and also requires green hydrogen”