Adam Zuckerman
Here we are today for an episode of the Energy Impact podcast. I'm your host, Adam Zuckerman, and I am here today with Dave Parkin, the Director of Progressive Energy. Dave, it's great to have you.

Dave Parkin
Hi, good afternoon, Adam. Good to be with you.

Adam Zuckerman
Thank you. So where are you joining us from today?

Dave Parkin
I am based in Stratford-upon-Avon in the Midlands of the UK. Some of you all know it as William Shakespeare's birthplace.

Adam Zuckerman
Alright, a little bit of history. Now, let's chat about your background. Have you always been interested in clean energy?

Dave Parkin
No, so quite a different background actually. I guess you go all the way back to high school days and I was good at maths and physics. That's the route most engineers took. But I didn't really think much about engineering until I guess when I was about 17. My dad said, Well, look, no one's gonna pay you to go to university to do maths or physics, so why don't you consider engineering? But I was never one of these kids who took cars to pieces and bumbled about in the garage doing sort of engineering stuff. For me, it was all about putting numbers into equations, getting the right answer, doing sort of doing well on exams. When I got to go to university, studied engineering, first subject I really got a feel for was aeronautics, fluid dynamics. I really got an engineering feel for that. So I got into building aircraft for the first 8, 10 years of my career, aerospace sector, fast jets. I spent a year out in Fort Worth in Texas working for Lockheed Martin, amongst other things. And it probably wasn't until - when was it - probably around 2006 that I started to become aware of this thing called climate change. You cast your mind back to 2006 and it was Al Gore, Inconvenient Truth, if you remember that. It was this young up and coming British politician called David Cameron who was sort of out there doing the "hug a husky" and it was all about this green agenda. But for me, the big seminal moment was a report which came out by an economist actually called Nicholas Stern. He basically put a very simple equation on the table. He said, You spend 1% of GDP now, or you spend 20% of GDP in 20 years time, take your pick. And it suddenly turned climate change from an emotive issue into a real tangible, economic, rational- and yeah, that was the point I decided I needed to get into the energy sector. So from 2006, 2007, that's when I moved across from aerospace to energy.

Adam Zuckerman
Alright, so let's talk about that transition. You're working on fast jets. You go from fast jets to fast climates and trying to make a difference. It seems like it would be a difficult shift. How are you able to make that jump? And how did you go from Lockheed Martin to where you are today with progressive energy?

Dave Parkin
It's been a bit of a journey, you're right. But I think a lot of the skills you develop in the aerospace world in terms of large engineering project delivery are equity transferable. And in many respects, aerospace and the energy sector are not dissimilar. They're capital intensive. They've got long gestation periods as projects. They're environmentally sensitive. There's a range of things. You don't just sit down and engineer a product. You need to do it within that wider ecosystem. So I moved into the energy sector as an engineering consultant. Did a little bit of work in the nuclear sector, finding my feet around what consultancy was and what energy was, but spent most of my time in offshore wind, so six years in offshore wind. That was amazing. I mean, that was at the very early stages of offshore wind in the UK. And now offshore wind is the backbone of the UK energy system. It's phenomenal what that has achieved and I was hugely proud to be part of it over that time. We went from sort of fairly small turbines and fairly small wind farms to huge great big sort of world class size projects. I did that for a few years and then back in 2014 I got an invitation to join National Grid, the utility has got a presence in the US, but in the UK they own the main transmission system infrastructure for both electricity and for gas. That was an interesting transition, because I went from being a consultant to being an asset owner. And I made a bit of a mistake at that point, because I thought I knew all about clean energy. I knew about renewable electricity and that was all fine, but I ended up in a gas business, natural gas. And I thought, whoa, this isn't commensurate with climate change. I'll do a couple years in that dirty gas business and then I'll get into the proper stuff, the clean electricity. But it was only then that I realized, actually, that natural gas does a huge amount of the heavy lifting in the energy sector in the UK. And the big climate challenge which we face in the UK is not how do you decarbonize electricity, but how do you take the carbon out of heat, in particular? Heat in industry. So probably around 2014, 2015, I started to look at how do you decarbonize the gas network in the UK. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Yeah, quite a journey.

Adam Zuckerman
It's a wonderful story. The UK has significantly reduced its emissions in the electricity sector to the growth of renewables and reduction in coal fired generation. But what a lot of people don't know is that electricity is only around 1/5 of the country's total energy use. And exactly what you just said: to reach net-zero, you really need to remove emissions from industry, from transport, and from heat. And that's really what progressive energy is about right now. If we talk about the hashtag, so to speak, it's really cutting edge stuff. It's CCS, carbon capture and storage. It's hydrogen, it's net-zero clean energy, future facing technologies here. Explain why are hydrogen and CCS so important to what you're working on?

Dave Parkin
You hit the nail on the head. I mean, the UK has done phenomenally well in tackling climate change. We set the world's first sort of statutory binding targets on climate change back in 2008, with the Climate Change Act. We've led the world in in decoupling emissions growth from GDP growth. So in the last 25 years, we've reduced emissions by 50%. We've increased GDP by 70%. But we're running out of road. As you say, we've largely decarbonized electricity. We've actually offshored a lot of industry. Big heavy industry has moved out the UK. And we're now left with the difficult stuff. And the difficult stuff exactly to say, it's heat, it's industry, it's flexible power generation - so when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, how do you generate the power - and it's heavy transport. I guess where I came from on the hydrogen story - and we'll start with hydrogen - it's a little bit different from what other people have sort of connected with hydrogen. Because I think a lot of people look at hydrogen at the small scale. They say, We want to hydrogen transport, we'll produce a small amount of hydrogen, we'll do a hydrogen car or hydrogen bus. We looked at it from the other end of the telescope. We said, How do we use hydrogen in the same way that we use fossil fuels today as a reliable and flexible fuel - but a low carbon fuel - to fundamentally move the needle on some of these hard to reach sectors of the economy? We looked right from the start not to take a technology approach or project approach, but essentially to try and create a new energy vector in the UK. And that needs a new system and a new market. HyNet, which is a project I'm going to talk about today, which is what we've been working on for the last five years, is as much about creating that new energy system and that new energy market as it is about developing a particular technology. What we're trying to do with hydrogen is introduce clean flexibility into the energy system. When I talk about flexibility, the energy system is becoming increasingly more complex. A large amount of our supply in the UK is driven by intermittent renewables. And when the wind doesn't blow, where do you get your power from? A large amount of our demand comes from domestic heat and that is really, really flexible. One of the things the gas system does today, which is really, really helpful for the energy system is it can flex up to deliver a lot of energy in a short period of time. So at times to peak, the gas system is delivering four or five times as much energy as the electricity system. And I'll just give you a case in point really. You go back a few years, we had a big storm in the UK back in 2018, which is called Beast from the East. And on that particular day, our peak electricity demand was 50 gigawatts. Our peak heat demand was 200 gigawatts. I was really part of the gas network. I was running the equivalent of seven nuclear power stations in central London just supplying heat. And so what we need is an energy system which can supply that peak amount of heat when you need it. And for that you need - I think you need - a chemical store of energy. And that's hydrogen.

Adam Zuckerman
Let's talk about that. There are a bunch of listeners that are across the technical spectrum. When you consider a gas-fired plant or coal-fired plant, it almost intuitively makes sense. You're burning gas, you're burning coal. But a lot of people don't understand where hydrogen actually comes from. How do you get the fuel source and then integrate into the system? Let's start foundationally and work up from there.

Dave Parkin
Yeah, and that's absolutely key. Because when you look at a whole new system as we're trying to do with our project HyNet, it's no good just in production. You need production. You need transportation, so pipeline. You need storage, so you can act as a battery to buffer supply and demand. And then you need end heat. So if we start right to start that chain, where do you get the hydrogen from? Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe. But it ain't here on planet earth in a way that we can use it, which is problematic. So you have to manufacture it. There are various methods. The method we're using on our project is known by the moniker blue hydrogen. We're making hydrogen from natural gas. So it's a fossil fuel. It comes into the process - it's called methane reforming - and essentially you're reacting natural gas, which is methane, a hydrocarbon, you react it with steam and you produce two outputs: a clean stream of hydrogen and a clean stream of carbon dioxide. You have to capture and store the carbon dioxide. To produce the hydrogen which we're producing on a project, you have to have carbon capture storage integral with the project, or you don't have low carbon hydrogen. But what's fundamental about our process, we're using a technology developed by a company called Johnson Matthey. They're a British technology company, major global chemicals and process company. It captures 97% of the carbon which goes into. So it's not net-zero. We get that. The attraction of blue hydrogen, we'll say, Well, it's not a net-zero solution, we recognize that, but it allows you to produce very, very low carbon hydrogen at scale quickly and cheaply. So we do that. We produce the clean hydrogen. That then gets pushed into our new hydrogen pipeline for end use. We capture and store the carbon dioxide and lock that away in perpetuity.

Adam Zuckerman
So 97% is relatively clear and it's almost as close to you can get as pure clean as you can get. What are the other colors of projects that people are pursuing? You're focused on blue. What else is there?

Dave Parkin
Yeah, sure. I mean, what I would say, actually, just so I get everything out on the table, end to end we're not 97% reduction, because with methane there are upstream emissions as well. And you'll be familiar with this and many of your listeners will be, that you get fugitive emissions from exploration and production of natural gas. If you look at our full lifecycle analysis, end to end, we're about 85 to 90% reduction. But given that natural gas is around a third of final UK energy demand, we think if we can take 90% of the carbon out of that, that's got to be a good thing. That's absolutely our target. Other colors on the hydrogen spectrum. You've got gray hydrogen, which is just fossil fuel production of hydrogen, which is 99% of the world's production today, using methane reforming with no carb count, no carbon capture. That's a very carbon-intensive process. We've got to eradicate that around the world. Then there's green hydrogen. So green is made from electrolysis. It's an electrochemical process and essentially using electricity to split water atoms. You get hydrogen and you get oxygen. You've got clean electricity that is 100% carbon reductions. That's the holy grail. That is where we're wanting to get to over many decades. The challenge with green electricity is A) the cost base. But I guess more to the point is you need lots of electricity. You need lots of low carbon electricity. And we already have lots of demand for low carbon electricity in the UK, so producing lots more is hard. And then you've got other colors in the spectrum - and I won't go through all of them - but one of the more emerging ones is pink, which is kind of exciting. That's electrolysis coming from nuclear energy. It's low carbon, it's good baseload. And that's sort of starting to gather some momentum as a viable option in the UK, because what it allows you to do is get maximum utilization out of electrolysis assets and so you get a good low cost of production. I think what's really exciting in the UK at the moment is the UK issued the national hydrogen strategy in August this year. It's one of the few countries in the world which is pursuing a color agnostic approach to hydrogen. They say we're pursuing low carbon hydrogen and if you can meet a standard, then it doesn't matter if you're green, your blue, your pink, your turquoise, your yellow. Whatever color you want to be, you need to hit the standard. And we think that's a really good way of doing it and the British government has done really well.

Adam Zuckerman
It definitely is a walk before you run approach and you're certainly on the right track. What are some of the challenges that you're focused on? If you're beginning with an input of methane, is there a potential that methane might run out? How is your supply? Does the cost of methane impact the the operational outlooks for the facility as well?

Dave Parkin
Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a lot in there. I think the long term security supply from within the UK is good. We get good supply from the UK continental shelf. We have sort of good inputs. But clearly, I mean, look at what's happening at natural gas prices around the world today. It is clearly a challenge. I think the long term fundamentals are sound. But equally in the UK, the gas price is driving the electricity price, which is driving challenges with green hydrogen as well. I think the short term shocks are impacting every aspect. Yeah, that's an issue. But I think what's really important for our project is we need to be able to demonstrate low carbon credentials all the way through the chain. For us, it's really important that we can source low fugitive emission methane. For that, we want to use North Sea, so Norwegian gas or British continental shelf gas. And we've got a good long term supply of that. I think that's not so much an issue. I think some of the other challenges we have to get round on is on the carbon capture storage side of the project. Now, carbon capture storage isn't for everyone. It's got its detractors. But I think overwhelmingly now in the UK, both from government and the independent committee on climate change, there's a very strong view that we don't get to net-zero without carbon capture storage in the mix. So we have to make it happen, but clearly demonstrating the cost effectiveness of that technology, safety of that technology, that's a really important part of our high net protect.

Adam Zuckerman
Let's assume - and I think that you're on the right track - that you will hit the safety requirements, that you will hit the cost effective requirements. What actually happens with the carbon after it's sequestered?

Dave Parkin
It's being stored in perpetuity in depleted oil and gas reservoirs. The HyNet project which I keep talking about is a large scale infrastructure project in the northwest of the UK. It's anchored on blue hydrogen production at scale. Our rollout plan produces sufficient clean hydrogen to displace about half of natural gas use across the entire region by 2030. This is a big infrastructure project. It's not a demonstration. It's not a trial. It's not a pilot. This is the big stuff.

Adam Zuckerman
Straight delivery.

Dave Parkin
Yeah, absolutely. We've been working on it five years. It's had a long gestation. So on the carbon capture storage side, what we're doing is we're taking the carbon dioxide as the waste stream from the hydrogen production. We are also collecting carbon dioxide from industrial manufacturing processes where carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the manufacturing. Cement, fertilizer production, aspects of oil refining, they're all going in our pipe as well. Our carbon capture and storage system is designed to take about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is a material amount.

Adam Zuckerman
Really, it's game changing levels. That's the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road.

Dave Parkin
Yeah, it's exactly that. I mean, it is a absolute game changer. And it's tackling bits of the economy for which there are no other routes forward. With cement production, the chemical process of producing cement produces carbon dioxide. So either you utilize that carbon dioxide in some way shape or form - but that's not at a scale of readiness yet to be effective - or you store it, or you don't make cement. So what we're going to do with carbon dioxide is it's going into existing oil and gas infrastructure. One of the benefits of the HyNet program is we're essentially taking decommissioned oil and gas infrastructure - pipelines, platforms, wells, reservoirs - and we're reversing it. Instead of natural gas coming in from offshore, we're putting carbon dioxide out, goes deep underground. We've got big reservoirs there which have held methane at pressure for millions of years. And we're essentially going to repressurize that reservoir with carbon dioxide. In our storage field, we've got storage capacity for 20 years. And then we move further up the coast, we've got storage capacity for several 100 years beyond that. Now, carbon capture storage is not an in perpetuity solution for- we can't capture storage forever. But in terms of tackling climate change now, while we get more advanced technologies, we absolutely need it over the next few decades. And that's what we're ready to deliver.

Adam Zuckerman
And that is exactly the right approach. We can't keep waiting for solutions to come down the road that are better than what we have today. We have to work with what we can develop now. And then as we improve, we embrace those technologies and solutions. Now, the HyNet project. Let's really dive into the nuances of it. You said we earlier. And it is not just Progressive, it really does take a village. Can you speak to the coalition that you've assembled and how did the idea come together?

Dave Parkin
I think this is one of the things that we're proudest of, actually, because Progressive Energy, we're a small clean energy project development company with 30 people. We can do many amazing things and we have done and we've taken HyNet from a twinkle in the eye five years ago to this huge sort of capitalized cross sectoral, fully engineered project. But you're absolutely right. We can't do it by ourselves. I guess we had the vision originally with National Grid. And then, over the last few years, we've done exactly that. We've built a coalition, as you talked about. I'm not going to give a shout out to all partners, I'll be here for too long, but some of the key ones we've got on board. Our carbon dioxide capture storage partner is Eni, the Italian global oil and gas company. They're a $50 billion a year revenue company. They are oil and gas major. They currently own and operate the gas fields. They understand offshore engineering. They're doing all the technical work around reservoir integrity, pipelines, injection. Massively technically competent and good delivery capability. And they give the government real confidence that we can deliver this infrastructure project. We're also partnered with a company called Cadent. They own and operate the gas distribution network in the northwest of England. They're going to build our hydrogen pipeline for us, which is great. We're partnered with a chemicals company called INOVYN, one of the world's biggest chemical companies, part of the INEOS group. They're going to build our hydrogen storage facilities. Hydrogen storage is really important so we can match supply and demand. That's going to be the salt cavern underground. We're going to brine mine in salt huge great big sort of Cathedral-like spaces where we're going to store the hydrogen. And then we've got any number of industrial partners: Hanson Cement, they're part of the global Heidelberg Group; a Indian conglomerate called Essar, they own and operate the oil refinery which we're going to decarbonize through HyNet; CF Fertilisers, which is part of CF Industries, a US-based company, one of the world's biggest ammonia and fertilizer production companies. And then on the downstream end, we've got agreements with about 25 of the biggest manufacturing names you've heard of who all want to use low carbon hydrogen to decarbonize their processes. Companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Unilever, NSG Pilkington Glass - they're all going to be taking hydrogen from HyNet. We've now got a coalition of around 35 to 40 companies who are reliant on the HyNet infrastructure to decarbonize. It's a fabulous story and, as I say, it's what we're proudest of in terms of what we've achieved.

Adam Zuckerman
And so much of what you've achieved has been during the lens and the framework of COVID. I mean, international pandemic right now. How has that impacted the progress and the approach? Has COVID made things easier, in some ways, because you can connect digitally over Zoom, or have you faced some challenges?

Dave Parkin
Yeah, I mean, that has been a challenge. But we've been at a stage in the project where we've been transitioning from desktop to sort of actually boots on the ground work. And what we've been able to do is, as we start to come out of the pandemic, we've now accelerated the- so we're into ground investigation surveys. We've got drill rigs out now on the pipeline route. We're sort of doing ecology surveys. And all of that has been mobilizing over the last six months as we started to lift restrictions. I think what's worked really well - and this might be somewhere we want to go in the conversation - is one of the big challenges with a project like HyNet is the commercial model. How do you fund it? How do you finance it? And we have to work all of this very closely with government. And actually, we've had more engagement with government through the digital world where we can just sort of set up working groups really quickly and easily, rather than previously, we all had to jump on a train all the time, get on to London, have a face to face. The development, I think, of the commercial and regulatory framework has actually accelerated during the COVID time will be my view.

Adam Zuckerman
What is the cost of a project of this nature?

Dave Parkin
Yeah, it's a real challenge to sort of compartmentalize that, because you got lots of different bits of it and we're going to build that over time. By 2030, about 5 billion pounds. What's that, sort of six to $7 billion? What that will buy you is your carbon capture storage pipeline infrastructure - a lot of that's asset reuse, so it's refurbishing, repurposing - it will build you four gigawatts of new build hydro production capacity, it will buy you a hydrogen pipeline of 80 kilometers to take that hydrogen across the region, and it will buy a hydrogen storage. It's a big capital cost. The real challenge is working out who pays for it. And is that energy consumers? Is it taxpayers? Is it particular subsections of industry? Can industry pass those costs on to certain sort of consumer bases? And that's a lot of what we're working through with government at the moment. But the key point we try and look at is what's the cost of doing nothing and the cost of doing nothing in many respects is higher. And actually, industrial decarbonisation is one of the cheapest routes to decarbonize the economy of anything. We have to be doing these things and we actually think it's a very cost-effective way for UK Treasury to fund decarbonisation.

Adam Zuckerman
So if things go well, you fund everything, 2030 CapEx is done on the spend, you're now shifting over to the OpEx perspective. Do you have your sights on a second location?

Dave Parkin
Wow. People sometimes say, What are you going to do in your career after you're finished building HyNet? Well, I'm going to be doing HyNet for the rest of my career, because it's sort of, it's an ecosystem as much as a project. But sure, yeah, I mean, we do. There's probably a couple which I'll mention. There are a number of these, what we call industrial cluster projects being developed across the UK: there's a couple on the East coast, there's one up in Scotland, one down on the South coast. And we're all sort of working with each other, slightly in competition, to get government funding, but it sets a nice environment. What the UK hasn't worked out how to do yet is decarbonize what we call our dispersed industrial sites. There are big industrial emitters which are nowhere near the coast, which are nowhere near an industrial cluster. We're starting to work with a cluster right in the heart of England, which does a lot of mineral products - they have cement and lime production - so how we can decarbonize those and connect those into HyNet. We're also looking to develop further storage fields in sort of the Irish Sea between Ireland and the UK, where we can start shipping carbon dioxide in from other areas in Northern Europe. Because what makes the UK quite special is that our geology and geography is ideally suited for carbon capture storage. We're going to compete with the Norwegians, and that's going to be fun, but we've got more storage assets probably than France or Portugal or Spain or Ireland and the like. So if we could start funneling some of that carbon dioxide, we've got a really good UK market opportunity here.

Adam Zuckerman
From your experience, is it easier to put together relationships and agreements and partnerships with individual companies and organizations? Or are you really trying to find those industrial zones and parks where there are several that are co-located together?

Dave Parkin
Yes. I think what's gone really nicely in the UK in the last few years is this sort of concept of a cluster has built momentum. And I was interested to see actually just recently that a group of companies in Texas got together to say that they're going to do sort of an industrial cluster project. I think this concept of a cluster is now growing around the world. And clusters can be defined by geography, usually by geography or industry type. We've largely defined our own geographic cluster and then we've gone out and engaged with all of the major carbon dioxide emitters in that region and essentially built that cluster initially bilaterally. And then when everyone starts to look each other in the eye and get that sense of common purpose, then you get a sort of real momentum, which is bigger than any one individual company or an individual relationship. And that's what we're gonna get. Because once you've got that, you get your regional political stakeholders to get behind it. And they see this as a way of differentiating their region from other regions in the UK. And when you start getting that, you start attracting investment from other companies who want to come to that region, because they can build a plant in the midst of low carbon infrastructure. We've just attracted investment from a new sustainable aviation plant. They could go anywhere in Europe. They've chosen HyNet land, if you will, because they can connect to our CCS system. And that's great. And we've got others potentially in the pipeline.

Adam Zuckerman
That is unbelievably great to hear. And it makes sense why the politicians would support the project. We're now talking about the economy and job creation as well.

Dave Parkin
Yeah, it's exactly that. And I think what- a lot of people sort of when they think about job creation, they think about the construction jobs. And yeah, that's a part of it. And absolutely, there's the ongoing sort of operational costs sort of jobs part of it. But a couple of areas people sometimes don't think about are the new investment opportunities I've just alluded to where industries come to the region. But the other one is, what we're doing here is enabling existing high end high carbon intensity manufacturing businesses to transition to a low carbon green economy. And that retains existing high value manufacturing jobs, which otherwise wouldn't be viable as the world moves to low carbon. There's actually a lot here about job retention and skill retention and actually changing skills as well through that sort of green transition. You put all that together and it becomes a very compelling sort of economic proposition.

Adam Zuckerman
That makes sense. Ambitious projects, especially in infrastructure and energy are notoriously challenging, which is almost why they're ambitious by definition. Have there been any surprises along the way that you went, You know what, that was just completely unexpected, and what have you learned from those surprises?

Dave Parkin
We've been at this for five years. We've seen quite a lot. I think one of the big surprises for us has been five years ago, we were kind of out there. We were way out there on a limb, sort of saying, Let's do hydrogen at scale. And the other industrial clusters, they were starting to form. And then suddenly, three years on, they're all anchored on hydrogen. This sort of twinkle in the eye which we had suddenly become mainstream. And that's been kind of gratifying, I think. That's been quite a surprise. I think the other surprise - and it's on a similar vein, really - when we started talking about this three, four or five years ago, we were putting out there this sort of cross sectoral nature of hydrogen. We're talking about we can use hydrogen for flexible power generation. We can use it for heat. We can use it for heavy transport. And then 2, 3, 4 years later, sitting in conferences with senior politicians in Whitehall and you hear your words coming back to you, and you're like, Wow, we've really landed something here. To have created this whole concept and ethos and ecosystem, I think that surprised us really. I don't think we ever felt we were going to get quite as much momentum. I think we always had confidence in what we're going to do. But yeah, the surprise really is in the momentum which has gathered. And that has manifested itself, not just in politicians saying, Yes, we support the concept, but really putting in place the commercial and regulatory support frameworks to make all of this happen. Yeah, hugely gratifying and pleasing.

Adam Zuckerman
Dave, last question for the day for you. You have conversations about HyNet. You have conversations about your background and all the wonderful accomplishments that you have achieved working throughout your career and transitioning into clean energy. What's one thing that you wish people asked you more about that they typically don't? Share some knowledge.

Dave Parkin
I think the fundamental question is, Well, why am I doing this? Why am I not still building fast jets? I had a great career in aerospace. I still get hugely excited when I see a fast jet going overhead. I still got to ask why did I not get to the top of that profession? And I think it's a question of legacy, sort of a sense of family and duty. I got out of the aerospace industry and into clean energy when my first daughter was born and I could see the world changing around me. I think I felt I had a duty to use the skills that I have and the knowledge I had to make a fundamental difference to climate change. And I feel like I'm doing that. And I think what's particularly exciting about where I am is I spent 20 years of my career in large corporates. I'm now working for a small company, there are 30 of us. We're employee owned. We do what we want to do. And what we want to do is take material amounts of carbon dioxide out of the economy. If we make some money as we go, great, but that's not what we're in business for. We get out of bed to take lots of carbon dioxide out. And I think being a small entrepreneurial company that can lead big projects to do this is hugely exciting. But the day that we lose sight of why we're doing it is a time for us to retire. We're doing it to - and I don't want to be trite about this - but we are doing it to make the world a better place. And we feel very proud doing it. I wish I could talk about that as much as I do about the engineering.

Adam Zuckerman
Well, with that answer, I hope that we see you never retire and you make an impact for many, many decades to come. Dave Parkin, Director of Progressive Energy, thank you so much for joining on today's episode of the Energy Impact podcast.

Dave Parkin
Thanks so much.