WEBVTT
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If you look at global CO2 equivalent emissions, building heating and cooling is the biggest slice of the pie.
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And that's taking into steel production, agriculture, aviation, and all these other industries that people see as really dirty, you know, in terms of the emissions.
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Building heating and cooling is where the problem is.
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Hello everyone, I'm Dan Smith, and I have to tell you, you're on Thin Ice again.
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Fortunately, you're in good company because I'm here with my co-host Robert Swan and our special guest, Richard Blackburn, with a company called Exogen.
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You may recall in the first episodes of Thin Ice, we've told stories from the wild to encourage preservation of the wild spaces that are left on Earth.
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But in our last episode, Robert and I talked about technology and how many advanced technologies can help solve the environmental threats of modern civilization.
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And we were quite frank that many technologies come with upside benefits and downside risks.
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And the key is an intentional sense of responsibility in how technology is used.
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Which brings us to Robert, who is in Antarctica right now, where his ice station expedition is demonstrating and testing various responsible technologies.
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Our guest Richard and his company, Exogen, are doing some amazing work in heating and cooling, for example.
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And that's an incredibly big deal, as I learned about preparing for this episode.
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So, Robert, before we get to our guests, how is it being back in Antarctica?
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What are you up to?
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And how's your weather?
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I just have to ask.
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Dan, it's uh extraordinary to be back.
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I always get sort of flashbacks of walking to the North and South Poles and sort of panic at night that I'm still doing it.
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But no, we're here at Ice Station.
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We're 600 nautical miles from the South Geographic Pole, and we are so proud of what we've achieved in the last 10 days as a team.
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Uh, we have communicated live for the first time in history to just short of 1.8, 1.9 million young people all over the world, in I think 27 countries, we're counting it at the moment, as far afield as Russia to Kenya, to South Africa, Australia, all over the world, with two messages.
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You know me, Dan.
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One is the 2041 message that we need to leave this continent alone for science and peace, but also showing that renewable energy can really work here.
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So all of our broadcasts have been powered.
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Uh, as I speak to you now, we're being powered by renewable energy, a great team of very different people from lots of different places, team of 11, and uh, we're really proud of our achievements here in Antarctica, and the weather has been bizarre, absolutely bizarre.
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Uh, people came, I gave the usual speech.
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You've heard it, Dan, right?
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You need to do this, you need to wear five pairs of gloves, four jackets, you need two sleeping, but you know, the whole Rob speech.
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And then after night one, everybody sort of came out of their tents saying they were too hot.
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And we have had staggeringly hot weather here in Antarctica for the last 10 days, and of course, we're planning to leave Antarctica tomorrow, and as luck would have it, the weather's changed, so our flight may or may not be uh happening because the weather's turned, but again, like everywhere, Dan, that we go and we talk about we've hit more records here, even in the heart of the Antarctic.
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So we've seen some interesting weather.
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Richard, I would like to introduce you to our audience now, um, Richard Blackburn.
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You are a technical fellow with Exorgen.
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Your company is based in Ireland, but you live in Australia.
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You're a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and you have over 25 years of experience.
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You take designs and products and you go from prototypes to high volume production.
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I I also know that you've had some really cool past employers.
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You've worked in aerospace engines at Rolls-Royce, you've done high-performance engines at McLaren.
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I've always waited somewhere.
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And then a few years ago, you left space and speed behind to focus on heating and cooling.
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How did you get into it?
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Yeah, well, first it's great to meet you, Dan.
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Thank you for inviting me onto the podcast.
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I did my degree in mechanical engineering at Brunel University in London, and I went straight from there to work for Rolls-Royce Aero Engines, which was an amazing experience as a new graduate.
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Unfortunately, the department I was working in after a few years, they it actually got closed and people got disbanding into other areas of the business as part of a restructure.
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And I I didn't want to go out of where I was, I was actually really enjoying it.
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I was I was in manufacturing research.
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So I moved into automotive and I enjoyed that, you know, particularly with Nissan, and I lived in Japan for a year with them, which was an amazing experience.
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A lot of things changed when I came back from Japan, and it allowed me to look for something else.
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And I actually built a wind turbine to make my in-laws' home off-grid, and this was 25 years ago, which was, you know, with hindsight a stretch, let's say.
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Uh, and we built a wind turbine based on uh a book and some modified plans that I I changed on the internet, and we designed the whole thing you know, the blades, the generator, the control system, linked it up with a whole bunch of car batteries, an inverter, and we ran that house most of the time off-grid, which was just unheard of.
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And that really got my interest in renewable energy.
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So I thought I want to do this, I want to do this full-time, and decided from that point onwards I would concentrate all of my effort and work onto technologies that would benefit the planet, uh, and that's what I've done for the last 20 years.
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Um, done wind turbines, done solar sterling systems, doing wave power devices, doing concentrated solar.
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And that led me to exogen, which at the time was waste to energy.
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You you you can you can engineer and do science for good things or not so good things, and um if if more people concentrated on stuff that's going to benefit the planet, then we'll all be in a better place in the future.
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Before we get to the technology, I'm really interested in your impressions.
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Robert has been to Antarctica many, many, many times and all the way to the South Pole.
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I've been to Antarctica once, to Union Glacier, where you are now.
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How was it for you coming in and what's your experience actually being on the continent now?
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These discussions started six months ago based on almost a uh a throwaway comment um about testing and showcasing some equipment here.
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Uh oh, by the way, Robert Swans going, you should meet him.
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And I started talking with Robert and the team and explained our mission and technology and what we're doing, and they were fully on board.
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And here we are five months later, sat together doing a podcast in the ice station.
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So this has all happened very quickly.
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I've never been to Antarctic before.
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I flew down, I've never been to South America even.
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So I flew to Punta Arenas, um, spent two or three days with the team there.
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I'd never met anybody on the team.
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Uh, we've got a team of 11 people in total here that have uh Rob's assembled.
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Uh we all met up in Punter.
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Uh, we've had two or three days there.
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And as Rob said, you know, we got the lecture, you know, no cotton, eight layers, lay all your gear out.
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We've got to tick it all off, make sure you've got everything we have.
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Very excitedly, we all got on the 757 in Punter, and we took off in pretty bad weather there.
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It was very windy, cloudy, raining.
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You could see the storms coming in across the airport, and we're thinking, you know, we're just gonna turn around and come back.
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So we flew three quarters of the way just looking at solid cloud, and I was excited, thinking, you know, I want to see the coast of Antarctica.
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And just as we started getting over there, the cloud thinned out, and all of a sudden you're looking down through the plane window and you see these enormous glaciers, which I've never seen in my life.
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And we had fields and fields of those as we're flying over them, and some of them, I mean, they look big from the plane at 30,000 feet, so I can only imagine what people like Shackleton saw.
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Then we got over the mainland and the sky had completely cleared here, and of course, we land on the ice runway.
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I've never landed on an ice runway.
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I didn't even know you could stop an aeroplane on ice, but it turns out you can.
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You could see the camp as we were coming in and landing, and you just think this is just a totally alien landscape.
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I think amazing is a word I've nearly worn out this week.
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Let's shift gears from talking about the wild to something that's important for preserving the wild, and that's heating and cooling.
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And on first blush, you might think heating and cooling, well, that's pretty boring.
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But it turns out, as you shared with me uh in a conversation, Richard, that heating and cooling for buildings accounts for more than 15% of all CO2 emissions worldwide.
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And so, you know, a cynic could say that, well, global warming will fix the demand for heating, but rising temperatures are causing demand for air conditioning to explode.
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I read a stat from UNICEF that the demand is going to triple for air conditioning by 2050.
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And that means from now until 2050, one new air conditioning unit will be sold and installed every 10 seconds.
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That's according to the International Energy Administration, IEA.
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What's your view on that, Richard?
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And why do we really need to care about heating and cooling?
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Well, you're right.
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Uh, for decades, there's been uh a lot of discussion and action and focus on things like emissions from aviation.
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You know, that's always been the poster child of CO2 emissions and climate change, and aviation is less than 3% of global CO2 emissions or CO2 equivalent.
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And here we are with building heating and cooling, it's over five times that, and nobody's talking about it.
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If you look at our world in data, which is a great website for looking at at statistics like this, uh, if you look at global CO2 equivalent emissions there, building heating and cooling is the biggest slice of the pie.
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And that's taking into steel production, agriculture, aviation, and all these other industries that people see as really dirty, you know, in terms of the emissions.
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Uh, building heating and cooling is where the problem is, but nobody talks about this.
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Uh, and this is part of you know what we've been doing here and working with Robert and the team this week is raising awareness that, hey, you know, we need to work on these big slices of that pie and not be making poster trials out of the small ones.
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Uh, yes, we need to work on them all, but this is a major problem.
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And if we work on this and we focus on this and we apply good engineering and policy and everything else that we need to, we can significantly reduce global CO2 emissions.
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And I think there's there's a dual challenge actually.
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There's the energy consumption, but also the the that most cooling and and I guess even heating, I'm I'm not sure, but they they also depend on these gases.
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Um used to be chlorofluorocarbons and those were replaced, but now it's hydrofluor carbons.
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Don't make me say that again.
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Um but what what it what is the difficulty in addition to the energy required to run these systems?
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What's the difficulty about the the way that we do it using gases today?
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Well, I mean, Robert's got first hand experience.
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You know, the the pain and the suffering that he had walking under the ozone layer 40 years ago because CFCs had created that huge hole over the southern the South Pole, which really nobody was aware of at that time, led to the the banning of CFCs, which is where we are now, and that was the Montreal Protocol that brought that in.
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A quick sidebar here for some important context.
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Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, were first synthesized in the late 1920s as a safer and non-toxic refrigerant.
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Freon is one of the brand names from those days.
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Before CFCs came along, the main options for refrigeration included ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide, all of which were dangerous.
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People literally died for their refrigeration.
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So CFCs solved a huge problem at the time.
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By the 1970s and early 1980s, CFCs were everywhere, in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol sprays, and foam insulation.
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But, as often happens, a solution becomes a problem.
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In the case of CFCs, they worked great on Earth's surface, but they caused havoc in the ozone layer.
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Ozone layer is a band within the stratosphere, roughly 9 to 22 miles or 15 to 35 kilometers above Earth's surface.
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This ozone layer functions as planetary sunscreen.
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It absorbs most ultraviolet radiation and thus protects us and all the things we love from skin damage, eye damage, immune suppression, ecological disruption, and other assorted disasters.
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CFCs, as I said, save lives on the surface, but they tear ozone molecules apart.
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And nowhere was this effect more extreme than over Antarctica.
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In 1985, as Robert Swan, Roger Muir, and Gareth Wood were completing their unassisted 900-mile march to the South Pole, they did not realize they were walking beneath a hole in the ozone layer.
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And the physical consequences for the team were severe, as Robert will tell you in a moment.
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To fight the consequences on a global scale, something remarkable happened in 1987.
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Nations came together.
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Let's say that again.
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Nations came together and signed the Montreal Protocol.
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It was an unprecedented global treaty to phase out CFCs and other ozone-destroying chemicals.
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It's one of the most successful international environmental agreements in history.
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Ozone destroying emissions plummeted, and today the ozone layer is slowly but steadily recovering.
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Let's get back to Richard now.
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CFCs, in terms of refrigeration and heat pumps and heating and cooling, they've been replaced by HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons.
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And they do not have an effect on the ozone layer.
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But they have very, very high global warming potential, as we call it.
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And that's a measure of how much global warming a gas causes compared to CO2.
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So in that respect, a a kilogram of CO2 has a global warming potential of one.
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Um any value of uh of CO2.
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So that's the baseline is one.
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And these HFCs range from a few hundred to a few thousand.
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So a kilo of, let's say, R134A, which is a really common refrigerant gas that's used in the system, does the same environmental damage as one ton of CO2.
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One kilo is the same as one ton.
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You know, this this isn't a bit worse, but it's three orders of magnitude worse.
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And the Cigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol has worked to reduce some of those gases and ban the very, very high GWP gases.
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To put a timestamp on it, the Cigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol was adopted in October of 2016 and went into effect in January of 2019.
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But the lower ones are being phased down, and it's going to take many, many years to do that.
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And of course, the problem is that these gases are still being manufactured, that they're still being put in systems, they're still out there, but they leak into the environment and the damage that they're causing, you know, it's done.
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You can't undo that.
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Um and the answer is to stop putting them out there in the first place.
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It it's almost 60%, I think, of the gases that are used are replacing gas that has leaked out of systems.
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Does that ring a bell?
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Yeah, and and let's take an example of anybody that owns a car that has an air conditioning system in it.
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You've all heard about regassing the air con, or your air con's not getting cold anymore.
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And the simple reason is that over time these gases escape from systems, either through damage or through the seals drying out over time.
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And these gases, when they leak out, go straight into the atmosphere.
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If the seals are 10 years old, it's leaking, they leak a few percent a year, and that's why after 10 years, usually any vehicle would need regassing because it'll have gone below maybe 50% of its original gas fill, then the air con just doesn't work.
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And that's the vehicle example, but exactly the same thing happens with systems that are used for refrigerators in your house, or heat pumps that are used for heating and cooling, or even big industrial systems.
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So regassing an aircon, which I hope is a term that um a lot of listeners will be familiar with, is basically putting back in what has leaked out.
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And what has leaked out has probably done a lot of damage to the atmosphere when it did it.
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Robert, you could tell a story that Richard had referred to about being one of the first people to really encounter the effects of loss of the ozone layer.
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But you also use that as a story of hope because it shows that humanity on a global scale can get together and do something about a problem.
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What Richard's talking about is something that we've moved on from that.
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It's 40 years since we walked under the hole in the ozone.
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You know, my eyes changed colour, our faces all got torched off.
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It wasn't much fun, and we had no idea why.
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And after that, when I first got back, people sort of you know looked at the ceiling or said, Well, whatever, but eventually people took it seriously, and they took it seriously because without an ozone land, nothing would grow on the planet, nothing, no trees, plants, nothing.
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So it would be game over.
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So very quickly, governments got together, banned the use of CFCs, and that's where Richard's story comes in.
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Because what was the the next gas, and that next gas has served us all very well.
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People have cooled in their buildings, warmed in their buildings, but you know, enough's enough.
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What Richard's doing here in Antarctica is really pioneering uh an entirely new technology that hopefully, fingers crossed, if it all works, which it will, because I've seen it, will mean that our air conditioning systems have virtually no effect at all in putting out gases, no effect on CO2 emissions.
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And I think being here for uh eight days with Richard, I've learnt things that in many ways I'd rather not have learnt.
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How because of climate change, more and more people rightly, rightly, if I lived in a house in the middle of Bombay and it was plus 45, I'd really like to have an air con.
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Because of we're warming up the planet, more and more air conditioning systems are being put into action using what Richard's talking about.
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So this is a hugely urgent issue, and you know what I've seen from Richard's technology here is that it can and will work.
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Let's talk about the technology now.
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And let me begin with just a very quick example.
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I live in North Texas, it gets blazing hot in the summer.
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We cannot live, well, we think we cannot live without an air conditioning.
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We certainly don't want to live without air conditioning.
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And anybody who lives around air conditioners knows that pop you hear when your air conditioner kicks on.
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It's called a compressor, and sure enough, it does what it says it's what its name says it does.
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It compresses these gases, these hydrofluorocarbon gases, or whatever gas you're using, and it's the compression and the releasing and the compression and the releasing, which is how the system cools the air.
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I don't speak math, I don't understand exactly how that happens, but Richard does.
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But compressing and releasing is something that you figured out, but instead of using gases, you're using solid materials.
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How is this different?
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Why does it matter?
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I started off with exogen 12 years ago now.
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And at that stage, as a company, a couple of the co-founders had identified the shape memory alloys, which are they're pretty much a 50-50 blend of nickel and titanium.
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And this material was sort of discovered by accident, or the properties of it discovered by accident by the naval ordinance laboratory in America.
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So nitinol is nickel-titanium naval ordinance laboratory.
00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:26.000
That's where the name comes from.
00:21:26.400 --> 00:21:30.400
In case you're ever on a quiz show with a million dollars on the line, you're gonna want to get this right.
00:21:30.559 --> 00:21:38.880
So I turned to Merriam Webster, and the definition of nitinol is a non-magnetic alloy of titanium and nickel.
00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:44.319
And they were looking at different materials for naval use and military use.
00:21:44.640 --> 00:21:47.680
They were putting various blends of anything together to see what happened.
00:21:48.400 --> 00:21:56.400
And they did this and realized that this material did very strange things that no other material did that they had in certain blends.
00:21:56.799 --> 00:21:59.200
If you heat steel, for instance.
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:01.920
It gets longer, it expands.
00:22:02.079 --> 00:22:08.799
But you've got to heat it over maybe two, three, four, five hundred degrees so it's something you can actually measure or see with your eyes.
00:22:09.119 --> 00:22:20.400
Shape memory alloys do it over a very narrow temperature range, and you can see it, and the temperature range is very narrow, you can do it over a few degrees.
00:22:20.559 --> 00:22:25.839
I've been doing it here, I've been putting shape memory alloy in the snow and saying to people, pick it up in your hand.
00:22:26.079 --> 00:22:27.359
It gets shorter.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:30.079
It's a negative thermal expansion material.
00:22:30.319 --> 00:22:33.279
There's not many materials that get smaller as you heat them.
00:22:33.440 --> 00:22:34.640
But there's there's two here.
00:22:34.720 --> 00:22:37.839
One is nitinol and the other one is water.
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:41.279
If you heat ice, it gets smaller.
00:22:41.519 --> 00:22:50.079
Which is why, I mean, I'm sure we're familiar if if you put water in an ice cube tray and put it in the freezer, when you take those ice cubes out, they're bulged up on the top.
00:22:50.319 --> 00:22:55.359
And that's because as it got colder, the material has actually expanded in volume.
00:22:55.440 --> 00:22:57.039
And shape memory alloy does it as well.
00:22:57.119 --> 00:22:59.039
That's a negative thermal expansion material.
00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:01.039
Make it colder, it gets bigger.
00:23:01.359 --> 00:23:02.960
Very unique properties.
00:23:03.200 --> 00:23:11.680
So with shape memory alloys, if you do this over a narrow temperature window, you can get quite a big distance of movement with very high force.
00:23:11.839 --> 00:23:16.160
So originally exogen was set up to do waste heat to energy.
00:23:16.559 --> 00:23:32.480
And if you put 20 degree water over the uh the wire, because it's usually it's in wire form, so you put 20 degree water and change it over to 90 degrees, you will get that phase change and you will get the material changing length with very, very high force.
00:23:32.559 --> 00:23:42.160
Like in and we built machines that will work to hundreds of tons, and when you do that, you can use the movement to generate power, which you can use then to generate electricity.
00:23:42.240 --> 00:23:43.759
So that's how the company started.
00:23:44.240 --> 00:23:53.440
But we realized if we reverse that, and if we uh stretched or squashed the material, we could actually make it hot and cold.
00:23:54.000 --> 00:23:59.119
So instead of using hot and cold water to make electricity, we could use electricity to make it hot and cold.
00:23:59.599 --> 00:24:03.599
And by reversing the cycle, we realized it was far more efficient than what we were doing.
00:24:03.920 --> 00:24:17.519
So six or seven years ago, we completely pivoted the company than what we were doing, totally reversed that, and since then we've been working on developing materials that are higher performing in that regime.
00:24:18.079 --> 00:24:21.200
So you squash the material, it gets hot.
00:24:21.680 --> 00:24:25.279
You let the material go, you release the material, it gets cold.
00:24:25.599 --> 00:24:35.759
And it does it with an amount of energy absorption and release that is enough to be able to create ultimately hot and cold water, which is what you can use in a heat pump system.
00:24:36.319 --> 00:24:38.079
How are you testing that in Antarctica?
00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:40.240
We came here for a couple of reasons.
00:24:40.319 --> 00:24:48.640
Uh one is that we can showcase uh these shape memory alloys with relatively small energy input that we can create heat.
00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:55.839
Like we can heat a tent, we can heat a house, even if the external temperature is minus 10, minus minus 20 degrees.
00:24:56.079 --> 00:25:04.880
So it it enables us to display the performance and the opportunity of the product and the material in these extreme environments.
00:25:04.960 --> 00:25:12.640
Yeah, if it'll work in Antarctica, it'll sure work wherever you are, because we're in the coldest place on the planet here.
00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:28.400
And the other side of it is unless we do something looping back to the CO2 emissions, unless we do something as a whole about reducing these in every way that we can, is that this environment that was stood in testing this will not be here in the future.
00:25:28.799 --> 00:25:31.599
We want to look at the the business model for this.
00:25:31.920 --> 00:25:38.720
Robert, I know one of the inspiring things I first heard you say was that sustainability is good business.
00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:46.480
I mean, there there are inherent reasons to care about sustainability, it's also a good business.
00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:49.759
You deal with business leaders all around the world.
00:25:49.920 --> 00:25:51.680
How does this fit in with that model?
00:25:52.160 --> 00:25:52.960
It's very simple.
00:25:53.039 --> 00:25:55.039
That if you do the same, you get the same.
00:25:55.119 --> 00:26:03.200
So people are going to still churn out these air conditioning systems every 10 seconds, and they're going to use the old technology.
00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:13.599
So, in order to change that, exogen people like Richard are going to have to say, Well, look, there's a business reason to do this, and it's got to make financial sense.
00:26:13.680 --> 00:26:20.319
Now, maybe to begin with, it's going to be, you know, easing it into the market, but it has to happen.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:26.640
And I think that there is a very good business sense behind it as well as an environmental sense.
00:26:26.799 --> 00:26:35.279
Otherwise, it's just not going to work because people keep doing the same old stuff and churning out more and more and more air conditioning systems using the old system.
00:26:35.440 --> 00:26:40.720
So, what I've seen here with Richard is you know unbelievable things.
00:26:40.799 --> 00:26:47.519
Like he rolls up a piece of this shape memory alloy stuff, puts it in my hand, and says, Right, watch what happens.
00:26:47.680 --> 00:27:07.359
And the heat from my hand creates this twirly bit of wire to go to a straight, entirely straight, like looking at it and going like what so I think that testing it here, and we're also going to go somewhere hot, too, very hot, to show that it works in extreme environments.
00:27:07.599 --> 00:27:23.039
But the other thing is that I think that it's all about being in the right place to get the message across, as Richard just said, if we don't, this place is going to melt, the Antarctic, and everybody's going to be swimming on a global basis.
00:27:23.200 --> 00:27:34.559
So it's a it's a great story, and we've enjoyed very much telling people that story and working hard with Richard to make sure that people understand what he's doing.
00:27:34.880 --> 00:27:38.079
I didn't understand a word he was talking about when he first arrived.
00:27:38.240 --> 00:27:51.359
You know me, Dan, but now I do, and that's one of the reasons that this has been such a success at iStation for me to understand, the team to understand the technology he's talking about.
00:27:51.759 --> 00:27:56.160
One question that all of our listeners have is how do you take this to market?
00:27:56.400 --> 00:28:04.720
Does Exrogen envision becoming a manufacturer that that builds these units, or or how how are you going to bring this to the world?
00:28:05.200 --> 00:28:19.519
Exogen is primarily a specialist shape memory alloy materials company with a lot of application experience for you know thermal transfer and heat pumps, which is ultimately what we need.
00:28:19.759 --> 00:28:22.240
The company at the moment is around 50 people.
00:28:22.400 --> 00:28:24.240
We have a headquarters in Dublin.
00:28:24.400 --> 00:28:32.319
We have another facility in Rugby in the UK, which is a build and test facility, and we have our materials laboratory in Prague.
00:28:32.559 --> 00:28:35.519
But overall, that's around 50 people.
00:28:35.759 --> 00:28:40.240
And yeah, we have limited funding, limited space, and limited resources.
00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:51.839
So we've concentrated very much on developing the materials and how we can apply those in the systems engineering for heat pumps because we can't just make a material.
00:28:51.920 --> 00:28:58.480
But what we're doing with the materials doesn't translate directly into replacing just the gas in an aircon system.
00:28:58.640 --> 00:29:02.960
We have to re-engineer the whole system in order to make it work efficiently.
00:29:03.279 --> 00:29:08.400
And to do that engineering, we have the capability to do that and the development of that.
00:29:08.559 --> 00:29:10.559
And we've built many, many prototypes.
00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:25.039
Like, for instance, a few years ago, a lot of the prototypes of shape memory olive materials and heat pumps and refrigerators were they were in the like the the one to a couple of hundred watts sort of scale.
00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:29.680
Um, your refrigerator at home is probably around 150 watts.
00:29:29.759 --> 00:29:31.440
That's the standard size for that.
00:29:31.920 --> 00:29:36.880
And we decided to make sure we could validate this technology at scale.
00:29:37.359 --> 00:29:40.640
So we built a 63 kilowatt system.
00:29:40.880 --> 00:29:47.680
To put that in context, it was kind of two orders of magnitude, like a hundred times bigger than anybody had ever done.
00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:52.880
That system would be big enough to run an office block or a hotel or something else like this.
00:29:53.039 --> 00:29:56.000
It's it's a case of, you know, will this system work for me at home?
00:29:56.160 --> 00:29:59.759
And the answer is, oh yes, you know, and it'll do the shopping mall as well.
00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:08.400
So we did that to prove that this technology was scalable at industrial scale, not just at domestic scale or commercial scale.
00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:17.119
But realistically, if you want to bring these systems to market, I'm gonna say we're competing against a technology that's been around for over 100 years.
00:30:17.279 --> 00:30:24.000
So this is like battery cars going up against internal combustion engines or internal combustion engines when it started going up against steam.
00:30:24.160 --> 00:30:30.640
You know, steam was over 100 years old when the internal combustion engine came along in cars, and it took two decades to catch on.
00:30:30.799 --> 00:30:33.039
They were still making steam cars in the 20s.
00:30:33.279 --> 00:30:37.920
Although it ended up being the go-to technology and lasted a century.
00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:42.400
We, as a new technology, were going into a market that is extremely mature.
00:30:42.559 --> 00:31:02.400
It has very mature supply chains for the gas manufacture, distribution, the manufacture and design of the um, you know, the systems, the condensers, the compressors, and all of these parts that go into heat pump systems, uh, and even the people that just install them in office blocks or in houses and do the maintenance.
00:31:02.640 --> 00:31:09.839
Is there's got to be a lot of work and education for our technology to be able to go in and replace that.
00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:17.519
And as a small company of 50 people, we've got to be realistic and say that you know that's that's not gonna be possible without billions and billions and decades.
00:31:17.839 --> 00:31:47.599
So the the obvious way to do that is to partner with some companies or a company that's already in that space as an original equipment manufacturer, partner with them, have them embrace what we're doing, support it, and then help us take that through to production design, production, distribution, service, maintenance, and you know, ultimately where we all end up with everything on here, which is end-of-life destruction of it, you know, to support the circular economy.
00:31:47.920 --> 00:31:53.119
The great thing is that we've got very good interest from OEMs in the industry on this.
00:31:53.359 --> 00:31:58.400
Really, that's uh a key enabler to get this, get this out there in the billions.
00:31:58.559 --> 00:32:03.279
This isn't small numbers here, as opposed to you know a few lab prototypes.
00:32:03.680 --> 00:32:14.960
It's a circular economic solution because these materials are are recyclable, they're long-lived, whereas current gases leak out and have to be replaced, these can be reused again and again.
00:32:15.359 --> 00:32:21.119
Thank you for sharing your story, Richard, and and telling us about exrogen and what's going on there.
00:32:21.440 --> 00:32:25.279
Robert, do you have closing thoughts, things that you would like to leave us with?
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:34.319
Well, Dan, you and I have talked often, you know, we're out to preserve wild places, and obviously Antarctica is very important to me.
00:32:34.559 --> 00:32:47.920
And what Richard's doing and his team is doing is a big part of making sure that we preserve Antarctica as it is, that we don't melt it and people start swimming around the world because of sea level rise.
00:32:48.079 --> 00:33:01.839
But you and I have often talked about this, and that's why I feel really proud of Richard and proud of Exogen, is that you've often said to me, Rob, why are you the only person talking about 2041?
00:33:02.160 --> 00:33:06.640
Why aren't other people getting behind the preservation of the Antarctic?
00:33:06.720 --> 00:33:12.000
And I sort of look at you and say, Well, I suppose it's us, you know, it's it's me that's got to do that.
00:33:12.160 --> 00:33:15.039
And you kind of think, Well, surely there should be other people.
00:33:15.200 --> 00:33:28.480
Why is Richard and his uh amazing team of 50 people doing something that is going to deal with you know 15 of the entire global CO2 emissions?
00:33:28.559 --> 00:33:30.000
It it's it's insanity.
00:33:30.079 --> 00:33:45.680
If somebody came from another planet, they'd seriously wonder why a small team of people, uh, just like we're trying to preserve Antarctica, that Richard and his team are doing their very best to come up with technology that can save us.
00:33:45.920 --> 00:33:48.640
With that in mind, what are we?
00:33:48.799 --> 00:33:56.720
Well, we're explorers, and I've said to you before, Dan, the last great exploration left on Earth is for us to survive on Earth.
00:33:56.799 --> 00:34:02.160
And it's people like Richard and his team who are the heroines and heroes of that journey.
00:34:02.240 --> 00:34:09.760
And I'm proud and really happy that he's come to Antarctica, shown us the technology, and we should all get behind it.
00:34:10.079 --> 00:34:24.400
My own takeaway is that it's incredibly inspiring to hear Richard's story and to learn about how cool and cooling innovations that Exergen offered real solutions to the biggest challenges.
00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:30.400
And Exergen is one of many companies that care across the spectrum of challenges that we face.
00:34:30.559 --> 00:34:36.960
And if you care about the planet, it's it's easy to think you're alone and it's even easier to lose hope.
00:34:37.199 --> 00:34:41.280
But don't, because we need you to do what you can do.
00:34:41.440 --> 00:34:47.280
And this doesn't mean you have to go develop a new technology that saves the planet, although in Richard's case that's true.
00:34:47.519 --> 00:34:53.599
Or, you know, Rob Swann talking to two million kids about the importance and the preciousness of Antarctica.
00:34:53.840 --> 00:34:59.119
But there are a lot of companies stepping up, and as individuals, let's do what we can do.
00:34:59.199 --> 00:35:03.039
Uh, small steps from lots of people add up to great things.
00:35:03.679 --> 00:35:10.800
So I want to thank Robert, as always, and thank you to Richard and the entire exogen team for everything they're doing.
00:35:10.960 --> 00:35:17.519
Uh, I wish you both Godspeed and hope the weather's fine on your flight back and that you make it back safely and smoothly.
00:35:17.760 --> 00:35:22.000
And to our listeners, we're so happy to have you here with us on Thin Ice.
00:35:22.159 --> 00:35:23.840
Let's get this snowball rolling.
00:35:24.079 --> 00:35:28.079
Until next time, keep Earth wild, be kind, and chill out.
00:35:35.599 --> 00:35:38.639
Thin Ice is a production of Robert Swan and Dan Smith.
00:35:38.800 --> 00:35:44.320
Special thanks to Bernadette de Seattle for keeping things on track, and Etienne Roussel for this year's theme music.
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:50.639
The show's official name is thin ice.earth, and this was our sixth and final episode of the 2025 season.
00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:56.239
It's been kind of a soft launch as we learn the ropes and figure out what we want Thin Ice to be when it grows up.
00:35:56.480 --> 00:35:59.280
Rob and I are deep in conversation about that right now.
00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:05.920
But the show's purpose is simple to help preserve Antarctica as a reserve land for science and peace.
00:36:06.079 --> 00:36:11.920
And we believe the best way to protect Antarctica is to achieve sustainability in the civilized world.
00:36:12.079 --> 00:36:18.559
We believe in common sense, common decency, and common courtesy as the surest ways to achieve the common good.
00:36:18.800 --> 00:36:22.559
If you like the show, please follow along and leave a review to help spread the word.
00:36:22.800 --> 00:36:27.840
From Rob and me to you and yours, happy holidays, and thanks for listening, everyone.
00:00:07.519 --> 00:00:13.039
If you look at global CO2 equivalent emissions, building heating and cooling is the biggest slice of the pie.
00:00:13.279 --> 00:00:21.519
And that's taking into steel production, agriculture, aviation, and all these other industries that people see as really dirty, you know, in terms of the emissions.
00:00:21.920 --> 00:00:24.480
Building heating and cooling is where the problem is.
00:00:26.719 --> 00:00:31.519
Hello everyone, I'm Dan Smith, and I have to tell you, you're on Thin Ice again.
00:00:31.760 --> 00:00:39.600
Fortunately, you're in good company because I'm here with my co-host Robert Swan and our special guest, Richard Blackburn, with a company called Exogen.
00:00:40.479 --> 00:00:48.960
You may recall in the first episodes of Thin Ice, we've told stories from the wild to encourage preservation of the wild spaces that are left on Earth.
00:00:49.119 --> 00:00:57.920
But in our last episode, Robert and I talked about technology and how many advanced technologies can help solve the environmental threats of modern civilization.
00:00:58.079 --> 00:01:04.400
And we were quite frank that many technologies come with upside benefits and downside risks.
00:01:04.560 --> 00:01:10.319
And the key is an intentional sense of responsibility in how technology is used.
00:01:10.560 --> 00:01:20.319
Which brings us to Robert, who is in Antarctica right now, where his ice station expedition is demonstrating and testing various responsible technologies.
00:01:20.480 --> 00:01:26.400
Our guest Richard and his company, Exogen, are doing some amazing work in heating and cooling, for example.
00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:30.879
And that's an incredibly big deal, as I learned about preparing for this episode.
00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:35.280
So, Robert, before we get to our guests, how is it being back in Antarctica?
00:01:35.439 --> 00:01:36.319
What are you up to?
00:01:36.400 --> 00:01:37.519
And how's your weather?
00:01:37.599 --> 00:01:38.560
I just have to ask.
00:01:39.040 --> 00:01:40.879
Dan, it's uh extraordinary to be back.
00:01:41.040 --> 00:01:47.920
I always get sort of flashbacks of walking to the North and South Poles and sort of panic at night that I'm still doing it.
00:01:48.079 --> 00:01:50.079
But no, we're here at Ice Station.
00:01:50.400 --> 00:01:59.680
We're 600 nautical miles from the South Geographic Pole, and we are so proud of what we've achieved in the last 10 days as a team.
00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:24.080
Uh, we have communicated live for the first time in history to just short of 1.8, 1.9 million young people all over the world, in I think 27 countries, we're counting it at the moment, as far afield as Russia to Kenya, to South Africa, Australia, all over the world, with two messages.
00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:25.280
You know me, Dan.
00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:36.960
One is the 2041 message that we need to leave this continent alone for science and peace, but also showing that renewable energy can really work here.
00:02:37.280 --> 00:02:40.800
So all of our broadcasts have been powered.
00:02:40.879 --> 00:03:00.479
Uh, as I speak to you now, we're being powered by renewable energy, a great team of very different people from lots of different places, team of 11, and uh, we're really proud of our achievements here in Antarctica, and the weather has been bizarre, absolutely bizarre.
00:03:00.639 --> 00:03:03.680
Uh, people came, I gave the usual speech.
00:03:03.840 --> 00:03:05.439
You've heard it, Dan, right?
00:03:05.520 --> 00:03:13.120
You need to do this, you need to wear five pairs of gloves, four jackets, you need two sleeping, but you know, the whole Rob speech.
00:03:13.280 --> 00:03:18.080
And then after night one, everybody sort of came out of their tents saying they were too hot.
00:03:18.319 --> 00:03:47.120
And we have had staggeringly hot weather here in Antarctica for the last 10 days, and of course, we're planning to leave Antarctica tomorrow, and as luck would have it, the weather's changed, so our flight may or may not be uh happening because the weather's turned, but again, like everywhere, Dan, that we go and we talk about we've hit more records here, even in the heart of the Antarctic.
00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:49.520
So we've seen some interesting weather.
00:03:50.639 --> 00:03:54.960
Richard, I would like to introduce you to our audience now, um, Richard Blackburn.
00:03:55.280 --> 00:03:57.840
You are a technical fellow with Exorgen.
00:03:58.080 --> 00:04:01.039
Your company is based in Ireland, but you live in Australia.
00:04:01.280 --> 00:04:08.080
You're a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and you have over 25 years of experience.
00:04:08.319 --> 00:04:12.240
You take designs and products and you go from prototypes to high volume production.
00:04:12.400 --> 00:04:15.759
I I also know that you've had some really cool past employers.
00:04:16.079 --> 00:04:21.120
You've worked in aerospace engines at Rolls-Royce, you've done high-performance engines at McLaren.
00:04:21.600 --> 00:04:22.800
I've always waited somewhere.
00:04:23.360 --> 00:04:28.079
And then a few years ago, you left space and speed behind to focus on heating and cooling.
00:04:28.240 --> 00:04:29.199
How did you get into it?
00:04:29.439 --> 00:04:31.439
Yeah, well, first it's great to meet you, Dan.
00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:33.759
Thank you for inviting me onto the podcast.
00:04:34.079 --> 00:04:46.160
I did my degree in mechanical engineering at Brunel University in London, and I went straight from there to work for Rolls-Royce Aero Engines, which was an amazing experience as a new graduate.
00:04:46.480 --> 00:04:56.160
Unfortunately, the department I was working in after a few years, they it actually got closed and people got disbanding into other areas of the business as part of a restructure.
00:04:56.240 --> 00:05:00.399
And I I didn't want to go out of where I was, I was actually really enjoying it.
00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:02.480
I was I was in manufacturing research.
00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:13.680
So I moved into automotive and I enjoyed that, you know, particularly with Nissan, and I lived in Japan for a year with them, which was an amazing experience.
00:05:13.839 --> 00:05:19.360
A lot of things changed when I came back from Japan, and it allowed me to look for something else.
00:05:19.680 --> 00:05:31.199
And I actually built a wind turbine to make my in-laws' home off-grid, and this was 25 years ago, which was, you know, with hindsight a stretch, let's say.
00:05:31.360 --> 00:05:52.480
Uh, and we built a wind turbine based on uh a book and some modified plans that I I changed on the internet, and we designed the whole thing you know, the blades, the generator, the control system, linked it up with a whole bunch of car batteries, an inverter, and we ran that house most of the time off-grid, which was just unheard of.
00:05:52.720 --> 00:05:55.519
And that really got my interest in renewable energy.
00:05:55.680 --> 00:06:09.839
So I thought I want to do this, I want to do this full-time, and decided from that point onwards I would concentrate all of my effort and work onto technologies that would benefit the planet, uh, and that's what I've done for the last 20 years.
00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:19.120
Um, done wind turbines, done solar sterling systems, doing wave power devices, doing concentrated solar.
00:06:19.680 --> 00:06:24.079
And that led me to exogen, which at the time was waste to energy.
00:06:24.240 --> 00:06:36.639
You you you can you can engineer and do science for good things or not so good things, and um if if more people concentrated on stuff that's going to benefit the planet, then we'll all be in a better place in the future.
00:06:36.959 --> 00:06:40.959
Before we get to the technology, I'm really interested in your impressions.
00:06:41.199 --> 00:06:46.079
Robert has been to Antarctica many, many, many times and all the way to the South Pole.
00:06:46.240 --> 00:06:50.240
I've been to Antarctica once, to Union Glacier, where you are now.
00:06:50.720 --> 00:06:55.680
How was it for you coming in and what's your experience actually being on the continent now?
00:06:56.160 --> 00:07:06.800
These discussions started six months ago based on almost a uh a throwaway comment um about testing and showcasing some equipment here.
00:07:06.879 --> 00:07:10.879
Uh oh, by the way, Robert Swans going, you should meet him.
00:07:11.120 --> 00:07:20.319
And I started talking with Robert and the team and explained our mission and technology and what we're doing, and they were fully on board.
00:07:20.399 --> 00:07:24.879
And here we are five months later, sat together doing a podcast in the ice station.
00:07:25.120 --> 00:07:27.120
So this has all happened very quickly.
00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:29.600
I've never been to Antarctic before.
00:07:29.839 --> 00:07:32.639
I flew down, I've never been to South America even.
00:07:32.879 --> 00:07:38.319
So I flew to Punta Arenas, um, spent two or three days with the team there.
00:07:38.399 --> 00:07:40.240
I'd never met anybody on the team.
00:07:40.319 --> 00:07:44.720
Uh, we've got a team of 11 people in total here that have uh Rob's assembled.
00:07:44.800 --> 00:07:46.560
Uh we all met up in Punter.
00:07:46.639 --> 00:07:48.399
Uh, we've had two or three days there.
00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:53.600
And as Rob said, you know, we got the lecture, you know, no cotton, eight layers, lay all your gear out.
00:07:53.680 --> 00:07:56.399
We've got to tick it all off, make sure you've got everything we have.
00:07:56.720 --> 00:08:04.399
Very excitedly, we all got on the 757 in Punter, and we took off in pretty bad weather there.
00:08:04.480 --> 00:08:06.639
It was very windy, cloudy, raining.
00:08:06.800 --> 00:08:12.319
You could see the storms coming in across the airport, and we're thinking, you know, we're just gonna turn around and come back.
00:08:12.639 --> 00:08:20.319
So we flew three quarters of the way just looking at solid cloud, and I was excited, thinking, you know, I want to see the coast of Antarctica.
00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:30.480
And just as we started getting over there, the cloud thinned out, and all of a sudden you're looking down through the plane window and you see these enormous glaciers, which I've never seen in my life.
00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:41.120
And we had fields and fields of those as we're flying over them, and some of them, I mean, they look big from the plane at 30,000 feet, so I can only imagine what people like Shackleton saw.
00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:47.039
Then we got over the mainland and the sky had completely cleared here, and of course, we land on the ice runway.
00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:48.720
I've never landed on an ice runway.
00:08:48.799 --> 00:08:52.559
I didn't even know you could stop an aeroplane on ice, but it turns out you can.
00:08:52.799 --> 00:08:59.759
You could see the camp as we were coming in and landing, and you just think this is just a totally alien landscape.
00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:03.120
I think amazing is a word I've nearly worn out this week.
00:09:03.519 --> 00:09:11.039
Let's shift gears from talking about the wild to something that's important for preserving the wild, and that's heating and cooling.
00:09:11.279 --> 00:09:16.000
And on first blush, you might think heating and cooling, well, that's pretty boring.
00:09:16.159 --> 00:09:28.799
But it turns out, as you shared with me uh in a conversation, Richard, that heating and cooling for buildings accounts for more than 15% of all CO2 emissions worldwide.
00:09:29.039 --> 00:09:38.639
And so, you know, a cynic could say that, well, global warming will fix the demand for heating, but rising temperatures are causing demand for air conditioning to explode.
00:09:38.879 --> 00:09:46.960
I read a stat from UNICEF that the demand is going to triple for air conditioning by 2050.
00:09:47.120 --> 00:09:55.039
And that means from now until 2050, one new air conditioning unit will be sold and installed every 10 seconds.
00:09:55.200 --> 00:09:58.559
That's according to the International Energy Administration, IEA.
00:09:58.879 --> 00:10:00.960
What's your view on that, Richard?
00:10:01.039 --> 00:10:04.720
And why do we really need to care about heating and cooling?
00:10:05.039 --> 00:10:05.919
Well, you're right.
00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:14.559
Uh, for decades, there's been uh a lot of discussion and action and focus on things like emissions from aviation.
00:10:14.720 --> 00:10:24.080
You know, that's always been the poster child of CO2 emissions and climate change, and aviation is less than 3% of global CO2 emissions or CO2 equivalent.
00:10:24.320 --> 00:10:31.039
And here we are with building heating and cooling, it's over five times that, and nobody's talking about it.
00:10:31.360 --> 00:10:43.519
If you look at our world in data, which is a great website for looking at at statistics like this, uh, if you look at global CO2 equivalent emissions there, building heating and cooling is the biggest slice of the pie.
00:10:43.759 --> 00:10:52.000
And that's taking into steel production, agriculture, aviation, and all these other industries that people see as really dirty, you know, in terms of the emissions.
00:10:52.080 --> 00:10:56.639
Uh, building heating and cooling is where the problem is, but nobody talks about this.
00:10:56.720 --> 00:11:10.720
Uh, and this is part of you know what we've been doing here and working with Robert and the team this week is raising awareness that, hey, you know, we need to work on these big slices of that pie and not be making poster trials out of the small ones.
00:11:10.799 --> 00:11:14.720
Uh, yes, we need to work on them all, but this is a major problem.
00:11:15.120 --> 00:11:25.600
And if we work on this and we focus on this and we apply good engineering and policy and everything else that we need to, we can significantly reduce global CO2 emissions.
00:11:25.919 --> 00:11:28.720
And I think there's there's a dual challenge actually.
00:11:28.879 --> 00:11:40.480
There's the energy consumption, but also the the that most cooling and and I guess even heating, I'm I'm not sure, but they they also depend on these gases.
00:11:40.720 --> 00:11:46.399
Um used to be chlorofluorocarbons and those were replaced, but now it's hydrofluor carbons.
00:11:46.559 --> 00:11:48.159
Don't make me say that again.
00:11:48.399 --> 00:11:55.360
Um but what what it what is the difficulty in addition to the energy required to run these systems?
00:11:55.519 --> 00:11:59.919
What's the difficulty about the the way that we do it using gases today?
00:12:00.240 --> 00:12:02.720
Well, I mean, Robert's got first hand experience.
00:12:02.879 --> 00:12:21.759
You know, the the pain and the suffering that he had walking under the ozone layer 40 years ago because CFCs had created that huge hole over the southern the South Pole, which really nobody was aware of at that time, led to the the banning of CFCs, which is where we are now, and that was the Montreal Protocol that brought that in.
00:12:22.559 --> 00:12:25.039
A quick sidebar here for some important context.
00:12:25.279 --> 00:12:32.480
Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, were first synthesized in the late 1920s as a safer and non-toxic refrigerant.
00:12:33.039 --> 00:12:35.600
Freon is one of the brand names from those days.
00:12:36.320 --> 00:12:44.639
Before CFCs came along, the main options for refrigeration included ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide, all of which were dangerous.
00:12:45.039 --> 00:12:47.840
People literally died for their refrigeration.
00:12:48.080 --> 00:12:50.720
So CFCs solved a huge problem at the time.
00:12:51.120 --> 00:12:59.120
By the 1970s and early 1980s, CFCs were everywhere, in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol sprays, and foam insulation.
00:12:59.360 --> 00:13:02.960
But, as often happens, a solution becomes a problem.
00:13:03.200 --> 00:13:09.039
In the case of CFCs, they worked great on Earth's surface, but they caused havoc in the ozone layer.
00:13:09.440 --> 00:13:16.000
Ozone layer is a band within the stratosphere, roughly 9 to 22 miles or 15 to 35 kilometers above Earth's surface.
00:13:16.240 --> 00:13:19.759
This ozone layer functions as planetary sunscreen.
00:13:19.919 --> 00:13:31.600
It absorbs most ultraviolet radiation and thus protects us and all the things we love from skin damage, eye damage, immune suppression, ecological disruption, and other assorted disasters.
00:13:31.919 --> 00:13:37.759
CFCs, as I said, save lives on the surface, but they tear ozone molecules apart.
00:13:37.919 --> 00:13:41.840
And nowhere was this effect more extreme than over Antarctica.
00:13:42.080 --> 00:13:54.879
In 1985, as Robert Swan, Roger Muir, and Gareth Wood were completing their unassisted 900-mile march to the South Pole, they did not realize they were walking beneath a hole in the ozone layer.
00:13:55.039 --> 00:13:59.600
And the physical consequences for the team were severe, as Robert will tell you in a moment.
00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:05.759
To fight the consequences on a global scale, something remarkable happened in 1987.
00:14:06.080 --> 00:14:07.279
Nations came together.
00:14:07.440 --> 00:14:08.559
Let's say that again.
00:14:08.799 --> 00:14:12.720
Nations came together and signed the Montreal Protocol.
00:14:12.879 --> 00:14:18.559
It was an unprecedented global treaty to phase out CFCs and other ozone-destroying chemicals.
00:14:18.799 --> 00:14:23.360
It's one of the most successful international environmental agreements in history.
00:14:23.679 --> 00:14:29.279
Ozone destroying emissions plummeted, and today the ozone layer is slowly but steadily recovering.
00:14:29.519 --> 00:14:30.879
Let's get back to Richard now.
00:14:31.600 --> 00:14:42.480
CFCs, in terms of refrigeration and heat pumps and heating and cooling, they've been replaced by HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons.
00:14:43.279 --> 00:14:47.200
And they do not have an effect on the ozone layer.
00:14:48.159 --> 00:14:53.120
But they have very, very high global warming potential, as we call it.
00:14:53.679 --> 00:14:59.759
And that's a measure of how much global warming a gas causes compared to CO2.
00:15:00.480 --> 00:15:06.320
So in that respect, a a kilogram of CO2 has a global warming potential of one.
00:15:07.120 --> 00:15:09.840
Um any value of uh of CO2.
00:15:09.919 --> 00:15:11.279
So that's the baseline is one.
00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:16.960
And these HFCs range from a few hundred to a few thousand.
00:15:17.759 --> 00:15:28.240
So a kilo of, let's say, R134A, which is a really common refrigerant gas that's used in the system, does the same environmental damage as one ton of CO2.
00:15:28.879 --> 00:15:30.559
One kilo is the same as one ton.
00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:35.039
You know, this this isn't a bit worse, but it's three orders of magnitude worse.
00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:44.559
And the Cigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol has worked to reduce some of those gases and ban the very, very high GWP gases.
00:15:45.039 --> 00:15:54.960
To put a timestamp on it, the Cigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol was adopted in October of 2016 and went into effect in January of 2019.
00:15:55.600 --> 00:16:02.080
But the lower ones are being phased down, and it's going to take many, many years to do that.
00:16:02.799 --> 00:16:16.399
And of course, the problem is that these gases are still being manufactured, that they're still being put in systems, they're still out there, but they leak into the environment and the damage that they're causing, you know, it's done.
00:16:16.799 --> 00:16:18.080
You can't undo that.
00:16:18.480 --> 00:16:22.480
Um and the answer is to stop putting them out there in the first place.
00:16:23.279 --> 00:16:30.399
It it's almost 60%, I think, of the gases that are used are replacing gas that has leaked out of systems.
00:16:30.720 --> 00:16:31.919
Does that ring a bell?
00:16:32.480 --> 00:16:37.360
Yeah, and and let's take an example of anybody that owns a car that has an air conditioning system in it.
00:16:37.519 --> 00:16:42.480
You've all heard about regassing the air con, or your air con's not getting cold anymore.
00:16:42.720 --> 00:16:52.960
And the simple reason is that over time these gases escape from systems, either through damage or through the seals drying out over time.
00:16:53.279 --> 00:16:57.360
And these gases, when they leak out, go straight into the atmosphere.
00:16:57.679 --> 00:17:11.759
If the seals are 10 years old, it's leaking, they leak a few percent a year, and that's why after 10 years, usually any vehicle would need regassing because it'll have gone below maybe 50% of its original gas fill, then the air con just doesn't work.
00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:24.160
And that's the vehicle example, but exactly the same thing happens with systems that are used for refrigerators in your house, or heat pumps that are used for heating and cooling, or even big industrial systems.
00:17:24.319 --> 00:17:33.039
So regassing an aircon, which I hope is a term that um a lot of listeners will be familiar with, is basically putting back in what has leaked out.
00:17:33.119 --> 00:17:38.000
And what has leaked out has probably done a lot of damage to the atmosphere when it did it.
00:17:38.559 --> 00:17:47.119
Robert, you could tell a story that Richard had referred to about being one of the first people to really encounter the effects of loss of the ozone layer.
00:17:47.279 --> 00:17:55.359
But you also use that as a story of hope because it shows that humanity on a global scale can get together and do something about a problem.
00:17:55.680 --> 00:17:59.119
What Richard's talking about is something that we've moved on from that.
00:17:59.200 --> 00:18:02.960
It's 40 years since we walked under the hole in the ozone.
00:18:03.039 --> 00:18:06.559
You know, my eyes changed colour, our faces all got torched off.
00:18:06.720 --> 00:18:09.680
It wasn't much fun, and we had no idea why.
00:18:10.000 --> 00:18:28.319
And after that, when I first got back, people sort of you know looked at the ceiling or said, Well, whatever, but eventually people took it seriously, and they took it seriously because without an ozone land, nothing would grow on the planet, nothing, no trees, plants, nothing.
00:18:28.400 --> 00:18:29.920
So it would be game over.
00:18:30.160 --> 00:18:37.759
So very quickly, governments got together, banned the use of CFCs, and that's where Richard's story comes in.
00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:44.799
Because what was the the next gas, and that next gas has served us all very well.
00:18:45.039 --> 00:18:50.160
People have cooled in their buildings, warmed in their buildings, but you know, enough's enough.
00:18:50.319 --> 00:19:12.160
What Richard's doing here in Antarctica is really pioneering uh an entirely new technology that hopefully, fingers crossed, if it all works, which it will, because I've seen it, will mean that our air conditioning systems have virtually no effect at all in putting out gases, no effect on CO2 emissions.
00:19:12.319 --> 00:19:20.799
And I think being here for uh eight days with Richard, I've learnt things that in many ways I'd rather not have learnt.
00:19:21.119 --> 00:19:33.440
How because of climate change, more and more people rightly, rightly, if I lived in a house in the middle of Bombay and it was plus 45, I'd really like to have an air con.
00:19:33.839 --> 00:19:42.480
Because of we're warming up the planet, more and more air conditioning systems are being put into action using what Richard's talking about.
00:19:42.640 --> 00:19:51.599
So this is a hugely urgent issue, and you know what I've seen from Richard's technology here is that it can and will work.
00:19:51.920 --> 00:19:53.839
Let's talk about the technology now.
00:19:54.000 --> 00:19:57.519
And let me begin with just a very quick example.
00:19:57.759 --> 00:20:00.880
I live in North Texas, it gets blazing hot in the summer.
00:20:01.039 --> 00:20:04.640
We cannot live, well, we think we cannot live without an air conditioning.
00:20:04.720 --> 00:20:06.799
We certainly don't want to live without air conditioning.
00:20:06.960 --> 00:20:13.839
And anybody who lives around air conditioners knows that pop you hear when your air conditioner kicks on.
00:20:17.359 --> 00:20:21.839
It's called a compressor, and sure enough, it does what it says it's what its name says it does.
00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:35.279
It compresses these gases, these hydrofluorocarbon gases, or whatever gas you're using, and it's the compression and the releasing and the compression and the releasing, which is how the system cools the air.
00:20:35.440 --> 00:20:39.359
I don't speak math, I don't understand exactly how that happens, but Richard does.
00:20:39.599 --> 00:20:47.839
But compressing and releasing is something that you figured out, but instead of using gases, you're using solid materials.
00:20:48.319 --> 00:20:49.279
How is this different?
00:20:49.359 --> 00:20:50.319
Why does it matter?
00:20:50.960 --> 00:20:55.759
I started off with exogen 12 years ago now.
00:20:56.559 --> 00:21:10.079
And at that stage, as a company, a couple of the co-founders had identified the shape memory alloys, which are they're pretty much a 50-50 blend of nickel and titanium.
00:21:10.400 --> 00:21:19.759
And this material was sort of discovered by accident, or the properties of it discovered by accident by the naval ordinance laboratory in America.
00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.799
So nitinol is nickel-titanium naval ordinance laboratory.
00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:26.000
That's where the name comes from.
00:21:26.400 --> 00:21:30.400
In case you're ever on a quiz show with a million dollars on the line, you're gonna want to get this right.
00:21:30.559 --> 00:21:38.880
So I turned to Merriam Webster, and the definition of nitinol is a non-magnetic alloy of titanium and nickel.
00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:44.319
And they were looking at different materials for naval use and military use.
00:21:44.640 --> 00:21:47.680
They were putting various blends of anything together to see what happened.
00:21:48.400 --> 00:21:56.400
And they did this and realized that this material did very strange things that no other material did that they had in certain blends.
00:21:56.799 --> 00:21:59.200
If you heat steel, for instance.
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:01.920
It gets longer, it expands.
00:22:02.079 --> 00:22:08.799
But you've got to heat it over maybe two, three, four, five hundred degrees so it's something you can actually measure or see with your eyes.
00:22:09.119 --> 00:22:20.400
Shape memory alloys do it over a very narrow temperature range, and you can see it, and the temperature range is very narrow, you can do it over a few degrees.
00:22:20.559 --> 00:22:25.839
I've been doing it here, I've been putting shape memory alloy in the snow and saying to people, pick it up in your hand.
00:22:26.079 --> 00:22:27.359
It gets shorter.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:30.079
It's a negative thermal expansion material.
00:22:30.319 --> 00:22:33.279
There's not many materials that get smaller as you heat them.
00:22:33.440 --> 00:22:34.640
But there's there's two here.
00:22:34.720 --> 00:22:37.839
One is nitinol and the other one is water.
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:41.279
If you heat ice, it gets smaller.
00:22:41.519 --> 00:22:50.079
Which is why, I mean, I'm sure we're familiar if if you put water in an ice cube tray and put it in the freezer, when you take those ice cubes out, they're bulged up on the top.
00:22:50.319 --> 00:22:55.359
And that's because as it got colder, the material has actually expanded in volume.
00:22:55.440 --> 00:22:57.039
And shape memory alloy does it as well.
00:22:57.119 --> 00:22:59.039
That's a negative thermal expansion material.
00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:01.039
Make it colder, it gets bigger.
00:23:01.359 --> 00:23:02.960
Very unique properties.
00:23:03.200 --> 00:23:11.680
So with shape memory alloys, if you do this over a narrow temperature window, you can get quite a big distance of movement with very high force.
00:23:11.839 --> 00:23:16.160
So originally exogen was set up to do waste heat to energy.
00:23:16.559 --> 00:23:32.480
And if you put 20 degree water over the uh the wire, because it's usually it's in wire form, so you put 20 degree water and change it over to 90 degrees, you will get that phase change and you will get the material changing length with very, very high force.
00:23:32.559 --> 00:23:42.160
Like in and we built machines that will work to hundreds of tons, and when you do that, you can use the movement to generate power, which you can use then to generate electricity.
00:23:42.240 --> 00:23:43.759
So that's how the company started.
00:23:44.240 --> 00:23:53.440
But we realized if we reverse that, and if we uh stretched or squashed the material, we could actually make it hot and cold.
00:23:54.000 --> 00:23:59.119
So instead of using hot and cold water to make electricity, we could use electricity to make it hot and cold.
00:23:59.599 --> 00:24:03.599
And by reversing the cycle, we realized it was far more efficient than what we were doing.
00:24:03.920 --> 00:24:17.519
So six or seven years ago, we completely pivoted the company than what we were doing, totally reversed that, and since then we've been working on developing materials that are higher performing in that regime.
00:24:18.079 --> 00:24:21.200
So you squash the material, it gets hot.
00:24:21.680 --> 00:24:25.279
You let the material go, you release the material, it gets cold.
00:24:25.599 --> 00:24:35.759
And it does it with an amount of energy absorption and release that is enough to be able to create ultimately hot and cold water, which is what you can use in a heat pump system.
00:24:36.319 --> 00:24:38.079
How are you testing that in Antarctica?
00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:40.240
We came here for a couple of reasons.
00:24:40.319 --> 00:24:48.640
Uh one is that we can showcase uh these shape memory alloys with relatively small energy input that we can create heat.
00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:55.839
Like we can heat a tent, we can heat a house, even if the external temperature is minus 10, minus minus 20 degrees.
00:24:56.079 --> 00:25:04.880
So it it enables us to display the performance and the opportunity of the product and the material in these extreme environments.
00:25:04.960 --> 00:25:12.640
Yeah, if it'll work in Antarctica, it'll sure work wherever you are, because we're in the coldest place on the planet here.
00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:28.400
And the other side of it is unless we do something looping back to the CO2 emissions, unless we do something as a whole about reducing these in every way that we can, is that this environment that was stood in testing this will not be here in the future.
00:25:28.799 --> 00:25:31.599
We want to look at the the business model for this.
00:25:31.920 --> 00:25:38.720
Robert, I know one of the inspiring things I first heard you say was that sustainability is good business.
00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:46.480
I mean, there there are inherent reasons to care about sustainability, it's also a good business.
00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:49.759
You deal with business leaders all around the world.
00:25:49.920 --> 00:25:51.680
How does this fit in with that model?
00:25:52.160 --> 00:25:52.960
It's very simple.
00:25:53.039 --> 00:25:55.039
That if you do the same, you get the same.
00:25:55.119 --> 00:26:03.200
So people are going to still churn out these air conditioning systems every 10 seconds, and they're going to use the old technology.
00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:13.599
So, in order to change that, exogen people like Richard are going to have to say, Well, look, there's a business reason to do this, and it's got to make financial sense.
00:26:13.680 --> 00:26:20.319
Now, maybe to begin with, it's going to be, you know, easing it into the market, but it has to happen.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:26.640
And I think that there is a very good business sense behind it as well as an environmental sense.
00:26:26.799 --> 00:26:35.279
Otherwise, it's just not going to work because people keep doing the same old stuff and churning out more and more and more air conditioning systems using the old system.
00:26:35.440 --> 00:26:40.720
So, what I've seen here with Richard is you know unbelievable things.
00:26:40.799 --> 00:26:47.519
Like he rolls up a piece of this shape memory alloy stuff, puts it in my hand, and says, Right, watch what happens.
00:26:47.680 --> 00:27:07.359
And the heat from my hand creates this twirly bit of wire to go to a straight, entirely straight, like looking at it and going like what so I think that testing it here, and we're also going to go somewhere hot, too, very hot, to show that it works in extreme environments.
00:27:07.599 --> 00:27:23.039
But the other thing is that I think that it's all about being in the right place to get the message across, as Richard just said, if we don't, this place is going to melt, the Antarctic, and everybody's going to be swimming on a global basis.
00:27:23.200 --> 00:27:34.559
So it's a it's a great story, and we've enjoyed very much telling people that story and working hard with Richard to make sure that people understand what he's doing.
00:27:34.880 --> 00:27:38.079
I didn't understand a word he was talking about when he first arrived.
00:27:38.240 --> 00:27:51.359
You know me, Dan, but now I do, and that's one of the reasons that this has been such a success at iStation for me to understand, the team to understand the technology he's talking about.
00:27:51.759 --> 00:27:56.160
One question that all of our listeners have is how do you take this to market?
00:27:56.400 --> 00:28:04.720
Does Exrogen envision becoming a manufacturer that that builds these units, or or how how are you going to bring this to the world?
00:28:05.200 --> 00:28:19.519
Exogen is primarily a specialist shape memory alloy materials company with a lot of application experience for you know thermal transfer and heat pumps, which is ultimately what we need.
00:28:19.759 --> 00:28:22.240
The company at the moment is around 50 people.
00:28:22.400 --> 00:28:24.240
We have a headquarters in Dublin.
00:28:24.400 --> 00:28:32.319
We have another facility in Rugby in the UK, which is a build and test facility, and we have our materials laboratory in Prague.
00:28:32.559 --> 00:28:35.519
But overall, that's around 50 people.
00:28:35.759 --> 00:28:40.240
And yeah, we have limited funding, limited space, and limited resources.
00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:51.839
So we've concentrated very much on developing the materials and how we can apply those in the systems engineering for heat pumps because we can't just make a material.
00:28:51.920 --> 00:28:58.480
But what we're doing with the materials doesn't translate directly into replacing just the gas in an aircon system.
00:28:58.640 --> 00:29:02.960
We have to re-engineer the whole system in order to make it work efficiently.
00:29:03.279 --> 00:29:08.400
And to do that engineering, we have the capability to do that and the development of that.
00:29:08.559 --> 00:29:10.559
And we've built many, many prototypes.
00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:25.039
Like, for instance, a few years ago, a lot of the prototypes of shape memory olive materials and heat pumps and refrigerators were they were in the like the the one to a couple of hundred watts sort of scale.
00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:29.680
Um, your refrigerator at home is probably around 150 watts.
00:29:29.759 --> 00:29:31.440
That's the standard size for that.
00:29:31.920 --> 00:29:36.880
And we decided to make sure we could validate this technology at scale.
00:29:37.359 --> 00:29:40.640
So we built a 63 kilowatt system.
00:29:40.880 --> 00:29:47.680
To put that in context, it was kind of two orders of magnitude, like a hundred times bigger than anybody had ever done.
00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:52.880
That system would be big enough to run an office block or a hotel or something else like this.
00:29:53.039 --> 00:29:56.000
It's it's a case of, you know, will this system work for me at home?
00:29:56.160 --> 00:29:59.759
And the answer is, oh yes, you know, and it'll do the shopping mall as well.
00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:08.400
So we did that to prove that this technology was scalable at industrial scale, not just at domestic scale or commercial scale.
00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:17.119
But realistically, if you want to bring these systems to market, I'm gonna say we're competing against a technology that's been around for over 100 years.
00:30:17.279 --> 00:30:24.000
So this is like battery cars going up against internal combustion engines or internal combustion engines when it started going up against steam.
00:30:24.160 --> 00:30:30.640
You know, steam was over 100 years old when the internal combustion engine came along in cars, and it took two decades to catch on.
00:30:30.799 --> 00:30:33.039
They were still making steam cars in the 20s.
00:30:33.279 --> 00:30:37.920
Although it ended up being the go-to technology and lasted a century.
00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:42.400
We, as a new technology, were going into a market that is extremely mature.
00:30:42.559 --> 00:31:02.400
It has very mature supply chains for the gas manufacture, distribution, the manufacture and design of the um, you know, the systems, the condensers, the compressors, and all of these parts that go into heat pump systems, uh, and even the people that just install them in office blocks or in houses and do the maintenance.
00:31:02.640 --> 00:31:09.839
Is there's got to be a lot of work and education for our technology to be able to go in and replace that.
00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:17.519
And as a small company of 50 people, we've got to be realistic and say that you know that's that's not gonna be possible without billions and billions and decades.
00:31:17.839 --> 00:31:47.599
So the the obvious way to do that is to partner with some companies or a company that's already in that space as an original equipment manufacturer, partner with them, have them embrace what we're doing, support it, and then help us take that through to production design, production, distribution, service, maintenance, and you know, ultimately where we all end up with everything on here, which is end-of-life destruction of it, you know, to support the circular economy.
00:31:47.920 --> 00:31:53.119
The great thing is that we've got very good interest from OEMs in the industry on this.
00:31:53.359 --> 00:31:58.400
Really, that's uh a key enabler to get this, get this out there in the billions.
00:31:58.559 --> 00:32:03.279
This isn't small numbers here, as opposed to you know a few lab prototypes.
00:32:03.680 --> 00:32:14.960
It's a circular economic solution because these materials are are recyclable, they're long-lived, whereas current gases leak out and have to be replaced, these can be reused again and again.
00:32:15.359 --> 00:32:21.119
Thank you for sharing your story, Richard, and and telling us about exrogen and what's going on there.
00:32:21.440 --> 00:32:25.279
Robert, do you have closing thoughts, things that you would like to leave us with?
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:34.319
Well, Dan, you and I have talked often, you know, we're out to preserve wild places, and obviously Antarctica is very important to me.
00:32:34.559 --> 00:32:47.920
And what Richard's doing and his team is doing is a big part of making sure that we preserve Antarctica as it is, that we don't melt it and people start swimming around the world because of sea level rise.
00:32:48.079 --> 00:33:01.839
But you and I have often talked about this, and that's why I feel really proud of Richard and proud of Exogen, is that you've often said to me, Rob, why are you the only person talking about 2041?
00:33:02.160 --> 00:33:06.640
Why aren't other people getting behind the preservation of the Antarctic?
00:33:06.720 --> 00:33:12.000
And I sort of look at you and say, Well, I suppose it's us, you know, it's it's me that's got to do that.
00:33:12.160 --> 00:33:15.039
And you kind of think, Well, surely there should be other people.
00:33:15.200 --> 00:33:28.480
Why is Richard and his uh amazing team of 50 people doing something that is going to deal with you know 15 of the entire global CO2 emissions?
00:33:28.559 --> 00:33:30.000
It it's it's insanity.
00:33:30.079 --> 00:33:45.680
If somebody came from another planet, they'd seriously wonder why a small team of people, uh, just like we're trying to preserve Antarctica, that Richard and his team are doing their very best to come up with technology that can save us.
00:33:45.920 --> 00:33:48.640
With that in mind, what are we?
00:33:48.799 --> 00:33:56.720
Well, we're explorers, and I've said to you before, Dan, the last great exploration left on Earth is for us to survive on Earth.
00:33:56.799 --> 00:34:02.160
And it's people like Richard and his team who are the heroines and heroes of that journey.
00:34:02.240 --> 00:34:09.760
And I'm proud and really happy that he's come to Antarctica, shown us the technology, and we should all get behind it.
00:34:10.079 --> 00:34:24.400
My own takeaway is that it's incredibly inspiring to hear Richard's story and to learn about how cool and cooling innovations that Exergen offered real solutions to the biggest challenges.
00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:30.400
And Exergen is one of many companies that care across the spectrum of challenges that we face.
00:34:30.559 --> 00:34:36.960
And if you care about the planet, it's it's easy to think you're alone and it's even easier to lose hope.
00:34:37.199 --> 00:34:41.280
But don't, because we need you to do what you can do.
00:34:41.440 --> 00:34:47.280
And this doesn't mean you have to go develop a new technology that saves the planet, although in Richard's case that's true.
00:34:47.519 --> 00:34:53.599
Or, you know, Rob Swann talking to two million kids about the importance and the preciousness of Antarctica.
00:34:53.840 --> 00:34:59.119
But there are a lot of companies stepping up, and as individuals, let's do what we can do.
00:34:59.199 --> 00:35:03.039
Uh, small steps from lots of people add up to great things.
00:35:03.679 --> 00:35:10.800
So I want to thank Robert, as always, and thank you to Richard and the entire exogen team for everything they're doing.
00:35:10.960 --> 00:35:17.519
Uh, I wish you both Godspeed and hope the weather's fine on your flight back and that you make it back safely and smoothly.
00:35:17.760 --> 00:35:22.000
And to our listeners, we're so happy to have you here with us on Thin Ice.
00:35:22.159 --> 00:35:23.840
Let's get this snowball rolling.
00:35:24.079 --> 00:35:28.079
Until next time, keep Earth wild, be kind, and chill out.
00:35:35.599 --> 00:35:38.639
Thin Ice is a production of Robert Swan and Dan Smith.
00:35:38.800 --> 00:35:44.320
Special thanks to Bernadette de Seattle for keeping things on track, and Etienne Roussel for this year's theme music.
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:50.639
The show's official name is thin ice.earth, and this was our sixth and final episode of the 2025 season.
00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:56.239
It's been kind of a soft launch as we learn the ropes and figure out what we want Thin Ice to be when it grows up.
00:35:56.480 --> 00:35:59.280
Rob and I are deep in conversation about that right now.
00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:05.920
But the show's purpose is simple to help preserve Antarctica as a reserve land for science and peace.
00:36:06.079 --> 00:36:11.920
And we believe the best way to protect Antarctica is to achieve sustainability in the civilized world.
00:36:12.079 --> 00:36:18.559
We believe in common sense, common decency, and common courtesy as the surest ways to achieve the common good.
00:36:18.800 --> 00:36:22.559
If you like the show, please follow along and leave a review to help spread the word.
00:36:22.800 --> 00:36:27.840
From Rob and me to you and yours, happy holidays, and thanks for listening, everyone.
