Episode 295: Hydrogen and the Future of Decarbonization in Public Safety with Paul Medwell

Episode notes

Hydrogen is often called the fuel of the future, but what does it really mean for public safety?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.

Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Conference in Perth, Australia.

In this episode, Dr. Paul Medwell from the University of Adelaide shares his insights into hydrogen research, fire safety, and the standards shaping the next generation of energy systems.

From early lessons in combustion science to leading efforts in hydrogen safety, Paul discusses how research and collaboration can help prevent past mistakes while preparing first responders and communities for what comes next. He also explores the delicate balance between innovation and safety, reminding us that progress requires planning, understanding, and respect for the risks we face.

If you work in fire services, emergency management, or energy transition, this conversation offers a grounded look at how hydrogen could become part of our daily lives — safely, thoughtfully, and with the lessons of history in mind.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share.

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources.

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro, live from Perth
2. 0:55 Tim Tams and Vegemite
3. 1:32 Life in Adelaide
4. 2:31 Hydrogen and the Hindenburg question
5. 3:06 Where hydrogen shows up today
6. 4:29 Lessons from EVs and lithium batteries
7. 6:34 What the Hindenburg taught us
8. 7:54 Writing the hydrogen standards
9. 10:23 Hydrogen over the next 25 years
10. 12:58 How Paul got into hydrogen
11. 14:08 Words to live by: if it can go wrong, it will

Questions answered in this episode

How is hydrogen used in daily life today?

Paul Medwell says that as a consumer at home you probably don't see hydrogen much. It's used extensively in industrial processes, often as a chemical feedstock rather than as an energy source, such as in ammonia manufacture for fertilizer. Adelaide had Australia's first hydrogen blending project, putting about 10% hydrogen into the natural gas network.

Hear it at 3:10

Where is hydrogen likely to be used in the future?

Paul Medwell says hydrogen is likely to appear in road vehicles, especially heavy vehicles, rail, and shipping that aren't suitable for battery technology. Buses running on hydrogen are already on the road in Adelaide and other places. There's also talk of bringing it into people's homes through gas networks.

Hear it at 3:10

What can the hydrogen industry learn from lithium battery adoption?

Paul Medwell says lithium battery fires are a massive problem to put out and kind of snuck up on the community without fully realizing the risks. The slower pace of the hydrogen industry is giving time to build understanding, do research, and write standards before it kicks off, unlike batteries which were quite unique to deal with.

Hear it at 5:21

What is Paul Medwell's work at the University of Adelaide?

He sits on the Standards Committee writing new hydrogen standards. When gaps in understanding appear, his research team does simulations to understand things like separation distances, such as how close a hydrogen refueling station can be to a school, to make sure standards are both safe and practicable.

Hear it at 8:20

What advantage does hydrogen have over electricity for energy storage?

Paul Medwell says hydrogen can be pumped into a network and taken back out, used as a buffer, which is a massive advantage over electricity. Electricity is hard to store and batteries provide only short term storage, whereas hydrogen storage is one of its beauties.

Hear it at 10:49

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 295 transcript

Hydrogen and the Future of Decarbonization in Public Safety with Paul Medwell

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Dr. Paul Medwell

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to our podcast mini-series, recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers 2025 Conference in Perth, Australia, alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Conferences. With eight conversations with fire chiefs, engineers, researchers and innovators, we explored how the fire and emergency community is was designed for the field, to the importance of mental health, diversity, and global collaboration, Adelaide, and the one and only Mick Conway, the one of the few guys' good to meet you as well. Good to be here. It's great to have you here and thank you. Please if you are hungry at any time we have Tim Tams. I would expect nothing less especially from the American visitor to bring the Australian Tim Tams. I - I really I heard you're supposed to put a little of Vegemite on the Tim Tam.

[1:28] Dr. Paul Medwell: I think someone's giving you a thumbs tea there.

[1:30] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, probably not. So, University of Adelaide, I hear everyone in Australia kind of take jokes with each other talking about their own cities being the best and I've heard many people from Adelaide talk about Adelaide being the best, I'm not sure if this is true or false but University of Adelaide, you're in Adelaide, tell me about first Adelaide in general and then let's dive into a little bit your role with University of Adelaide.

[1:52] Dr. Paul Medwell: Well, Adelaide's a beautiful city to live in as a tourist might not be the most exciting place to visit but in terms of living there I've been there all my life and have no intention

[2:01] Kevin Sofen: You're saying it's close to the beach and districts all around it, what else do [inaudible 2:10]

[2:31] Dr. Paul Medwell: particularly attractive fuel. The investment and the way in which it looks like in the future is probably a bit hard to predict, but there's certainly ebbs and flows, and I think we will see hydrogen in some way, shape or form in our daily lives. And then obviously hydrogen, as soon as you say that word, Hindenburg, kind of also comes to mind. So there is some genuine safety concerns around hydrogen. That's not to say it can't be used safely, just that we really better understand what that would look like in practical terms, especially if we're going to bring it into people's homes or into their vehicles.

[3:06] Kevin Sofen: How is hydrogen in our daily life today, if at all?

[3:10] Dr. Paul Medwell: At the moment as a consumer in your own home, you probably don't really see it all that much. In industrial processes, it's used quite extensively, often as a chemical feed stock, rather than actually as an energy source, or if it's used internally within industrial processes. So, for example, ammonia manufacture, which gets turned into fertilizer. But in the, there's a lot of strong talk about bringing it into people's homes. So, for example, in Adelaide, we had Australia's first hydrogen blending project. So we're putting a 10% hydrogen into the natural gas network at about 10 That's a way then of at least contributing some of the decarbonisation efforts and I'll be happy to talk more about that later. I guess the other way in which hydrogen is likely to be used is in road vehicles. I think there's a growing interest in that. So out of all the electrification efforts, heavy vehicles, rail shipping are probably not amenable to battery technology at this stage for those large-scale vehicles. And so I think there's a potentially real future there where you'll be driving down driving down the road next to a hydrogen vehicle. Certainly in Adelaide, as well as other places, we do have buses on the road quite extensively that running on hydrogen. So I guess at the moment, that's probably the main way people would negotiate, would negotiate it on a daily basis, potentially a lot a more in the future too.

[4:29] Kevin Sofen: We hear a lot about this term decarbonisation stuff. It's continued to become commonplace within micromobility and electrical vehicles but you also I've heard from certain people that all clean energy starts dirty and while there's a lot of benefits from EVs there's also the dark side of it from the extraction process to then the recycling process to then what happens when they explode and the impact of first responders. How maybe just maybe we're a decade behind with hydrogen but what are some lessons learned from what we've done with EVs and lithium that we can, hopefully, crawl, walk, running more effectively with the introduction of hydrogen within daily life.

[5:21] Dr. Paul Medwell: Yes back to the batteries, putting on the fire engineering hat the context of the conference we're at here. There's obviously, a lot of concern about lithium battery fires because they're a massive problem to put out. I think one of the things that maybe the community can learn from that is the rate at which they kind I kind , kind of just snuck up on us without really fully realizing what those risks actually going to look like. Whereas maybe this is a blessing in disguise. If the hydrogen industry's going a bit slower than expected, it's giving us time to build up the understanding, do the research, write the standards, which is perhaps a different so that if and when this hydrogen industry kicks off, we've got those safety mechanisms already rolled out. We know what we need to deal with and I guess unlike battery fires, even though hydrogen has some unique differences, fuel. We're familiar with that for natural gas. We're familiar with that with petrol gasoline. So it's not something we're completely unfamiliar with. Whereas I think that's probably batteries are a bit different because they are quite a unique base to deal with.

[6:34] Kevin Sofen: You brought it up. Hindenburg, what a long time. How did that a change the inclusion and use of hydrogen within different aspects of human society? And again, how have we hopefully learn from what happened with Hindenburg to move us on the path towards effectively using hydrogen in a safe manner.

[6:53] Dr. Paul Medwell: So I'm certainly not an expert, per se, on Hindenburg, just to be clear. That's a bit before my time. Just a little bit. Yeah. So the point there, I guess, would be is that people are now familiar, there's an association between hydrogen and explosions or easily ignitable fires. And I think if we've learned something from that is that there is that public awareness that hydrogen does ignite quite easily. From my understanding, a lot of the issues with Hindenburg were probably not directly as direct result of the hydrogen, per se. There's probably some other contributing factors in there. At the very least, one of the things we have learned from that is the need for electrical earthing of equipment. If we've learned nothing else, it would probably be that point. I guess where we run the risk, though, is people will look back at it and go, because it's so long ago, surely our understanding has evolved since then, and it certainly has, but that's not to say we have all the solutions, right? And I guess fundamentally that's where research comes in and we need that research to make sure that our codes and standards are really up to scratch these days, so we don't get into everything.

[7:54] Kevin Sofen: So tell me more about some of your day-day, week-to-week, month-to-month at University of Adelaide with the work that you're doing within the combustion of understanding these risk profiles, and translating that into whether it's driving the standards to education, to the fire services, to all the different players that are trying to figure out how to work with hydrogen. Tell me about what are you specifically doing, and how is that translating into action?

[8:20] Dr. Paul Medwell: Sure. So putting on a personal hat here, so I sit on the Standards Committee, so writing a lot of these new hydrogen standards. And so whilst we're writing these, often we come across gaps in understanding it. Unlike other industries like LNG, so liquefied natural gas or LpG, where there is that industry experience and we can draw on knowledge of what's gone wrong in the past and implement that in the standards and they kind of get evolved and improved over time and for hydrogen we're largely starting on a clean slate even though it is used quite a lot in industry really just trying to do that crystal ball gazing as to what the future is going to look like and then starting to do that research to understand what preemptively mitigation strategies we might need to start looking at implementing. So one of the examples of on a contentious issue, it relates to what we call separation distances, and that would include a range of different factors, but one of them would be if you have a hydrogen refuelling station, how close can you put that to a school? That's not really something we want to find out the hard way that we got it wrong, and so we do a lot of research and simulations and trying to understand a lot that would look like in the real world, that makes sure it's practicable, but also safe. As I say, we're all familiar with petrol stations at the moment, and you don't think anything to it turning up to them. If there were one with hydrogen bl both from the actual risk profile, but also the perceived risk profile. And from the standards, from the standards perspective, we need to kind of balance a bit of both of those things. So yes, I think research certainly has a played a role in that from a technical perspective, but also from the social sciences, which is certainly not my area, but it is something that we as a community do need to be very cognizant of.

[10:23] Kevin Sofen: So you mentioned as well this crystal ball gazing, please Paul tell us what's going to happen. I'm curious in terms of the research and where you're at right now and how this is going to translate over the course of the next 1, 5, 10, 25 years. Where do you see the role of hydrogen within the consumer space, within the industrial space, the commercial space? Will we see hydrogen being a key part of everyday life?

[10:49] Dr. Paul Medwell: That's, it's a $64 billion question. Please, tell me Paul. If I had the answers, I wouldn't be here. No, so I think it's often talked about as being a fuel of the future and we've got to see it everywhere. And we, I think it comes in waves. I think this is probably before my time, but I think we've had it in decades in the past. I think more recently, there was a lot of announcements around projects that were going to happen. And for reasons which I'm not entirely sure. A lot of those projects actually haven't come to fruition. And so I think we do run a bit of a risk now of going into a bit of a lull, but I don't think it's going to go away completely. I think the reality of finding alternatives to fossil fuels. There's probably too much emphasis at the moment, in my opinion, on electrification. And if you, there's certain processes you just can't electrify, simple as that. Hydrogen is an ideal substitute for. A lot of those processes and even the ones that perhaps not as suitable for either electrification or hydrogen. So for example aviation, a lot a lot of the sustainable aviation fuels will have hydrogen as a key component to the manufacture of that synthetic fuel anyway. So I think we're going to see it exactly when and in what form. It's very hard for me to judge. I've heard all kinds of crazy theories. I'm not saying this is the craziest one, but so one of the things that I remember hearing a while ago now, was all the gas pipelines were going to get replaced. You wouldn't need electrical grid, you'd just get hydrogen pumped to your house, and you'd have a fuel cell that would convert that hydrogen into electricity on your own property, and then you'd also have solar panels on your roof. When the sun's shining, you'd produce hydrogen, and you can pump that back into the grid. One of the great things about hydrogen, unlike electricity where you have batteries, but it's fairly short term storage, and it's very hard to store electricity whereas hydrogen is one of the beauties of it is you can pump network, you can take it back out, kind of use it as a bit of a buffer. And so that's something which has a massive advantage over electricity. So I think there's certainly scope 400 in the future. Exactly what that looks like.

[12:58] Kevin Sofen: So two final questions. One, I'm curious, how did you get into hydrogen? Did you wake up one day and you? And you're like, this looks like an interesting opportunity. I'm going to jump in full two feet. What was it about hydrogen that got you to be in this sort of niche that you're in?

[13:13] Dr. Paul Medwell: Okay, well, so I started my career in combustion research about five years ago. The work that I really started out with was using lasers to, shine lasers at flames to the chemical species within an actual combustion system. So that was actually for steel processing furnaces. For a lot of those laser techniques, we need to manipulate the fuel in various ways, which are probably irrelevant for this purpose, but we would add hydrogen into the fuels to tailor them for the optical diagnostics perspective. So we've continually used hydrogen throughout my career. Over time, obviously, as there's been more and more investment and more and more interest in hydrogen as the fuel itself, not just as an additive, we've kind of adapted and used that depth of knowledge of burning hydrogen, of plumbing hydrogen, of storing hydrogen. We've got that familiarity, and then we can transfer that across to using it purely as a fuel.

[14:08] Kevin Sofen: And the final question is kind of a random out of the left field, but is there any quote or words of wisdom that you live by or something that you think about in regards to your work? You know, it could be from a movie or a famous poet or any sort of final thoughts or words of wisdom that applies to your work or just something in general.

[14:27] Dr. Paul Medwell: Maybe this is my pessimistic streak comes out now, but I think in terms of, especially for this community and for safety, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong and it will go wrong at the worst possible time. And I think it's not recognising that as a problem. It's just recognising that you need to be planned and prepared for it. And I think that's where a lot of the research we do, a lot of the work that this AFAC community do, the work that the fire engineers do, means that when that unfortunate event does happen, we're as best prepared for it as possible.

[14:59] Kevin Sofen: Well said, yeah, we cannot take safety for granted. We need to continue, no cutting corners, continue to be very diligent. And that's part why we're here. Paul, it's a pleasure. Thank you very much. And Nick, thanks for bringing us in.

[15:11] Dr. Paul Medwell: Thank you, appreciate it.

[15:16] Kevin Sofen: And that's a wrap this episode of the Smart Firefighting Podcast. If you found value in this conversation, hit like, leave a comment, share it to someone, and tell us what you enjoyed most. Take care, and thanks for listening.