Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

It's four hydrogens and a carbon.

That's a better way to store hydrogen.

So one, we'd always known that the performance of hydrogen would be a lot worse than like Viper, which runs on like jet A. That was actually never the goal.

The really interesting thing about hydrogen is you can actually make it in the field.

So if you imagine a world where all your ships are getting shot, where the grid is down,

where all your oil storage drums are being blown up is actually quite useful to have a source of combustion that you can generate in the field.

That principle is still true.

So we were able to make hydrogen from water through electrolysis.

And then we also had this aluminum fuel that was a lot more energy dense than gasoline.

Aluminum fuel?

Yeah, you like coat aluminum so that when you put it in water, it creates hydrogen.

So we actually built an aluminum reactor that would make a bunch of hydrogen way back in the day.

All that being said, we did it, and the performance was what we expected it to be, and it's difficult to manage.

It wants to explode, it wants to escape, it wants to break all your metals.

Yes, you can't, you can't.

Especially a lot of them.

Really what it came down to was I think the timeline that matters, and I've thought this for a while, is like 2027, 2028.

One could make hydrogen make sense for those applications.

You can solve the safety problems.

You can solve the cost problems.

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