Making diesel go extinct
Science fiction writer Jules Verne had a premonition of hydrogen power 150 years ago. “Water will be the coal of the future,” he wrote in the novel The Mysterious Island.
“Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.”
Replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen power is precisely what a trio of Stanford and Berkeley grads have built a business around——and it’s why they named their startup after the legendary author.
“Our goal is knocking diesel off the map,” says Ted McKlveen, MBA ’21, cofounder and CEO of Verne, a green energy startup based in San Francisco.
Initially, Verne is targeting trucking and energy storage. “We always go back to the emissions pie chart. Where are the economy’s emissions coming from?” McKlveen says, considering the nation’s greenhouse gas output as a whole.
As of 2022, the transportation sector accounted for 28 percent of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, including long-haul trucking. Since 2020, Verne has been developing high-density hydrogen storage and refueling technology tailormade for heavy trucks.
By late 2024, the venture road-tested its technology in a Class 8 truck, the industry term for what you might call a semi-truck or an 18-wheeler. Retrofitted with a Verne storage tank, the truck successfully logged hundreds of miles in Southern California, refueling multiple times using Verne’s proprietary hydrogen filling equipment.
“This demonstration is an important step forward,” says McKlveen, explaining how Verne will next pursue pilot projects, using the high-density hydrogen storage technology to deliver hydrogen to customers to produce clean electricity.
Verne is also looking to replace diesel generators with hydrogen alternatives. Diesel generators, those infernally noisy, smoggy, but highly useful machines, are everywhere—at construction sites, at concerts, at hospitals and quite possibly in your neighbor’s backyard as backup power. While hydrogen fuel cells currently are three to four times more expensive than diesel fuel for trucks, for generators, there is a clear path forward to being cost-competitive with diesel.
“We’re actually very close with diesel today. That’s why we see a lot of interest from generator users, such as construction companies and electric vehicle charging, because they could switch over to clean, zero-emission, noise-free power,” says McKlveen.
The elusive answer
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, the H in the H20 of the Earth’s oceans and waterways. Hydrogen gas is mighty, too, powerful enough that NASA has used it as rocket fuel for over seven decades. And because water vapor is all that is left behind by hydrogen gas, from the tail pipe onward, it’s a sustainability dream come true.
So, if Jules Verne was musing about this in the Victorian Era, why aren’t we all driving hydrogen-powered cars by now?
Naturally occurring hydrogen gas (H2) does exist deep under the Earth’s surface between rock layers, but it is rare and hard to source, though geologic hydrogen, as this is called, is drawing more interest and investment each year.
For now, most energy companies need to generate H2, typically from the steam reforming of natural gas, a CO2-emitting process that contributes to global warming. Sourcing truly clean hydrogen gas is possible with the use of an electrolyzer, or water-splitter, to generate H2, if the machine is powered by renewable electricity, such as wind or solar. “Green hydrogen” currently represents less than 1 percent of the commercial market for hydrogen gas. [1]
There’s also the issue that while hydrogen is extremely energy dense by weight—it’s not by volume; wrangling together enough hydrogen to make it useful can be intensive and expensive. Couple this with its combustible nature, and the time to bring the technology to consumers is perhaps slower than the author of 3000 Leagues Under the Sea would have imagined.
As the lightest element in the periodic table, hydrogen is a frequent escape artist, slipping through the slimmest of gaps. Hydrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and, ironically, because it is a such a clean-burning gas, hydrogen flames are nearly invisible to the human eye in daylight.
In other words, it’s complicated friends.
Where the startup Verne has leaped ahead is in finding a cost-effective way to condense and store the gas. Traditionally hydrogen storage is done one of two ways. Either the gas is compressed or it is liquefied.
“They both bring a tradeoff in costs,” explains McKlveen. “To store hydrogen, you have to densify the hydrogen first. With compressed hydrogen, the densification compression is cheap, but the storage is expensive. With liquid hydrogen, the liquefaction is expensive, but the storage is cheap.”
Verne has found a way to get the best of both worlds, chilling and compressing the gas using a new, dense form of hydrogen storage called cryo-compression. Verne estimates that by using cryo-compression, the startup can cut hydrogen distribution costs by 40 percent compared to existing methods.
“What we’re doing is providing cheap densification and cheap storage,” he says.
Their approach builds on decades of research led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the German car company BMW, and they even hired some of the original industry experts as consultants. By 2023, the Verne team set a world record for cryo-compressed hydrogen storage with a 29 kilogram storage tank at LLNL, tripling the volume previously compressed this way. [2]
Connecting across the Bay
Cofounders McKlveen and Bav Roy, MBA ’21, first met at Energy@Stanford & SLAC. They left the four-day orientation for incoming graduate students all fired up. Hydrogen power was the future, they were convinced. Hydrogen power was their future.
“The idea for Verne came that first week,” says McKlveen, who was so excited he phoned David Jaramillo, his freshman year roommate, also a Harvard chemistry major. “I said, ‘Hey, I think that there’s a really important problem here, which is hydrogen storage, and we need a better way to move and store hydrogen. What do you know about it?”
Jaramillo, who was pursuing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, had joined a lab focused on that very issue.
“David’s long been passionate about decarbonization as well,” says McKlveen “Even in undergrad we were talking about starting a company together someday, and this was really the perfect sequence of events to bring us all together.”
Hydrogen is often called the “Swiss Army knife of decarbonization” due to its potential wide-ranging usefulness. [4] The cofounders hope that by bringing down the costs of hydrogen fuel delivery, they can bring down the cost of the fuel itself—and simultaneously help aspiring clean hydrogen suppliers to scale up more quickly.
Fabricating the future
“The very first tank we built was with TomKat funds,” says McKlveen, about an Innovation Transfer Grant that the trio earned in 2021 from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy.
“The TomKat grant really enabled us to prototype our hydrogen storage system. It was very tangible and very awesome.”
The prototype was also entirely too large to fit in a business school dorm room. The bedrooms in Jack MacDonald Hall are 11 by 15 feet, and that first hydrogen tank was 10 feet long.
“We ended up fabricating it in this little warehouse in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood.” The Verne cofounders shared a workspace with Nitricity, another venture with ties to Stanford’s TomKat Center. “They let us squat in their space for a little while to put it together while we got our own facility figured out.”
Today, Verne is a company of 20 employees based in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco.
“We haven’t moved too far. We like San Francisco. It is great because Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is nearby, where we’ve done a lot of testing. We get a lot of interns and employees from Stanford and Berkeley, so this is a really great spot to be,” he says, mentioning how Verne has placed students from the TomKat Center’s energyStartup internship program every summer since 2021, including one intern who’s now a full-time employee.
That prototype, built with TomKat Center funding, now sits in the startup’s corner museum, a testament to the grant’s cornerstone in Verne’s five-year history.
“It really proved out the technology for the very first time and made us more than a PowerPoint presentation,” he says.
Since 2020, Verne has developed and tested 12 different versions of the company’s hydrogen storage system. While this speed of innovation might be common for software startups, for hardware companies, it’s moving at breakneck speed.
“Our central mission is accelerating the transition to zero emissions—and accelerate is a keyword there.”
From original funding from the TomKat Center to a Breakthrough Energy grant, to corporate funding from Amazon and Caterpillar, to government funding from the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), Verne has been steadily sizing up and gaining speed. In 2025, Verne will be opening its first manufacturing facility to produce its trademark hydrogen storage systems at higher volumes.
“The next chapter is really commercializing and engineering these systems out into the world,” says McKlveen.
This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.
[1]Source: International Renewable Energy Agency
[2]Source: LLNL
[3]Source: EIA
[4]Source: Understand Energy Learning Hub
