Text version of keynote by Bill Gates, Founder, Breakthrough Energy, at the DOE Hydrogen Shot Summit, August 31, 2021.

Bill Gates: It's great to be with you virtually to talk about innovation and its critical role in helping the world avoid a climate disaster. I'm excited we're launching the clean Hydrogen Earthshot.

I think it's very impressive how Secretary Granholm, Secretary Kerry, and Deputy Secretary Turk have made climate change a huge priority and are working with partners all over the world to make progress on this key problem. It's great to see the whole administration setting bold goals and backing up those goals with concrete actions and funding.

The Biden Administration clearly recognizes that a huge barrier to reducing emissions is that the clean approaches that we have today cost so much more than doing it the old way. We need to reduce these price gaps. We need to scale up, get on the learning curve, and make it affordable not just for the United States but for the whole world to go clean. No country or company will adopt clean fuels or buy green concrete and steel if they are significantly more expensive than the products they replace.

And without customers we don't get the volume, we don't get the learning curve that drives all the small improvements, thousands of which coming together get us eventually to have a price premium, which I call the green premium, that's either small or actually zero. So, this driving down the green premium through innovations in policy, technologies, and markets is central to meeting the goal of zero emissions by 2050.

Clean hydrogen is a great example of a very promising technology with a high green premium. If we have cheap, clean hydrogen we can use it to decarbonize many parts of the economy where we have no other good alternatives, such as the making of steel or cement or making chemicals like ammonia. We can also use hydrogen for storage of electricity to deal with periods of bad weather. If we do get green hydrogen we can take a lot of our pipeline infrastructure and change that to work so that we have in the U.S. the ability to move this around and take full advantage of it. So, getting low-cost, clean hydrogen would be a huge step toward solving climate change.

Today we make very little hydrogen and we make it in a way that emits lots of greenhouse gases. The price of clean hydrogen is almost eight times as much as the dirty kind. And so, that green premium is what we have to tackle. That's where the Hydrogen Earthshot comes in. The goal of cutting premium by 80 percent is a fantastic and ambitious goal. We don't know which path will be followed to do this. There are many different ideas and we'll have to innovate, we'll have to try out different things, we'll have to see how things work as we scale up. All of the great lessons from the Sun Shot program apply here: partnerships with industry, researchers, innovators, and government coming together to try demonstration projects.

The opportunity to do demonstration projects that scale up this work is why Breakthrough Energy Catalyst announced a partnership with the Department of Energy a few weeks ago. Catalyst is a new model for bringing together the public and private sectors and getting involved in these demonstration projects. The goal is simply to accelerate the understanding of these technologies and bring down those high costs. Catalyst will participate in projects in four different areas: hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, direct air capture, and long-duration electric storage. Through blended finance we'll find a way to decrease the cost of these products and make them available in the market, proving they can be financed and scaled up.

Our collaboration with the Department of Energy is designed to accelerate these products into the market. As part of our partnership Catalyst aims to mobilize $1.5 billion here in the U.S. on these projects in the next three years, and that will catalyze over ten times those resources against these projects. A significant amount of resources for this work would come from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act if it becomes law. It includes $9.5 billion for hydrogen-related projects, and this will help the U.S. be the leader in that field.

The effort we're launching today is a very important milestone for the climate movement. Innovation is key to getting clean technologies to scale. And governments need to help lead the way, including thorough efforts like Earthshots. Thank you again for your partnership and leadership.