Innovation Fall 2024

them," said Mérida. "Impact happens in the real world, so we want to move our ideas out as soon as possible." The challenge to design low-carbon fuel infrastructure, primarily through hydrogen, continues to motivate Mérida Labs' research. Added Arulnathan, "Water electrolysis is still very energy intensive and costly. So, there's still a lot of innovation there to increase the supply of hydrogen and reduce cost, to further increase adoption." For Mérida, the shift to meaningfully decarbonizing the energy system is inevitable, but active exploration is needed to accelerate that change. "If you look at the history of the energy system, moving from wood to coal and oil, at every transition, you have been decreasing the relative amount of carbon. The energy system, of its own accord, has been decarbonizing itself," he said. "The challenge is that with climate change, we don't have 100 years to make this transition; we have decades. And that's what makes this work meaningful. We don't have much time, and there's a lot of work to be done.”

The SHED's research focuses on various topics related to its facilities, from producing and using clean hydrogen to deploying energy-management systems and analyzing the economic or socio-political factors involved. Said Arulnathan, "It's not just about the physical assets but also all the data that's being produced. We want to provide a low-risk platform for research and industry to develop these technologies." Education is another cornerstone of the lab's work and a part of SHED's role as it begins operations. "Every morning, many people walk to work to UBC on our path so that they will walk right through the project,” said Mérida. “We spent time making it a very open project, and we want to create a systematic, professional program for everyone, from politicians to children, to see the project. We want to understand the questions and concerns and feed all that back into the research processes so that our solutions have outside input from the beginning." The team seeks to clarify the technology and safety standards involved in working with hydrogen in the current BC environment. "As a society, we now have decades of experience handling hydrogen at high pressures and high temperatures," said Arulnathan. “There are definitely challenges and costs associated with designing such a facility and implementing all of the mitigations, but our focus is on ensuring that we operate the facility safely." Determining hydrogen’s feasibility The Mérida Lab's research into hydrogen production has already produced several spinoff startups, including VulcanX, which focuses on extracting hydrogen from heating natural gas in an oxygen-deprived environment. "We started doing some of the assessments into how we can make hydrogen economically feasible and with as low emissions as possible," said Dr. Omar Herrera, a former program manager at SHED who co-founded the spinoff company with Mérida and fellow Mérida Labs researcher Dr. Amir Sharafian, P.Eng. "We found that reaching targets for hydrogen would be difficult without free electricity. So, we started looking into other source fuels that could share infrastructure with 'green' hydrogen.’" The team hopes to commercialize many of its technologies across research fields. "We're going to ramp up the speed of our spinoffs, and we want to repeat

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