Welcome Speech to WHC 2021

I thought I would share my welcome speech from the recent World Hydrogen Congress.

Welcome my name is Nadim Chaudhry and Im the CEO of World Hydrogen Leaders. Thank you to all the sponsors who have supported us such as EY and Shell and especially thank you to Horst, Christian and the whole team at Smartenergy who have strongly supported our platform to build capacity, where in training courses alone, Dr Massey and the team have trained over 1500 people over the past 2 years. And a huge thank you to all of you, for coming out of zoom to be here, this event has been an unbelievable 3 years in production and it's great to finally be here.

Ive been creating clean energy congresses for 18 years and so Im used to debate, discord and divisiveness...from my Carbon Market days with fraudulent industrial gas projects to palm oil protestors dressed as Orangutans who chained themselves to the doors of my biobased fuels congress….I vividly remember them driving away…in their old van spewing diesel.

The vitriol has returned with hydrogen with this summer’s green vs blue debates, hydrogen should stay as "a chemical" and Ive been accused of trying to subvert the law of thermodynamics with inefficient energy exchanges.

Ive always been a solutions based pragmatist – for me it’s key to bring together government, finance with project developers to accelerate change, overcome challenges by creating investment grade policy and derisking decisions.

Sadly a lot of government and EU bodies still have international travel bans for non essential travel. I maybe biased but I would classify as being here as essential work. Work we need to speed up.

Cathedral thinking, cathedral thinking was a term I first heard from one of our former speakers President of Costa Rica, Jose Miguel Figueres and also another former speaker, Al Gore used well over 10 years ago to invoke the mentality, of generations in the past, who worked on cathedrals that weren’t finished within their lifetime.

So with climate change we need to think of future generations. As a father of 3 Ive always found that easy to do. But it is no longer about future generations… is it?

It’s about the here and now. The costs are with us today…. from the Canadian heat dome in British Colombia this summer. That beat an 83 year old temperature record not by 0.1 or 0.2 degrees but by nearly 5 degrees! Not only did it cause 300 excess deaths in 5 days….. it also destroyed the durum wheat crop, pasta prices are expected to rise by 50% as a result. And in Italy, where I live, we consume 27kg of pasta per person and spend 2bn Euros….over in Germany the initial clean up from the floods which claimed 200 lives was 8bn euros and another 30bn euros is to be spent on further flood defences…..in Greece the government has just spent 1.75bn euros on fire-fighting helicopters.

Change is here and it’s now and it’s frightening if you believe in non linear change… as I do. Speed is therefore everything, we need to decarbonise at more than 3 times the pace of the last decade. I cannot see that happening without every tool and clean hydrogen is definitely one such tool, how and where we deploy it, is clearly up for debate and I believe will depend upon deployment led innovation in both clean hydrogen and other methods for decarbonisation.

I wish you all a good Congress.