Hydrogen and Hammer Throws
Of all Clarke’s endeavors, Universal Hydrogen may be the biggest swing. The company secured $85 million in funding last year. Clarke is the chief innovation officer of the company, which is developing hydrogen fuel cell retrofit kits for small commercial aircraft and aims to launch its first hydrogen-powered flight by 2025.
Clarke says the idea for the company was born out of a mutual desire between the executives to decarbonize commercial air travel. Global aviation is responsible for 2% of all human-created carbon dioxide emissions, per the Air Transport Action Group, and approximately 12% of transportation emissions.
Hydrogen is a good candidate for alternative aviation power, Clarke said, because of its abundance and specific energy. But, there is not a lot of infrastructure for transporting hydrogen, so not only will they have to figure out how to power airplanes with it, they also have to figure out the best ways to get it to the planes.
“That led us to think about if we could produce green hydrogen wherever it makes sense and be able to transport it using the intermodal freight system, and then just place it into the plane like a battery,” Clarke said. “That way, we wouldn’t need a new distribution system, could minimize the losses that come when you transfer hydrogen from one vessel to another and we could decouple the production from the consumption because the mode of transportation would also be the mode of storage. So, we are basically trying to solve all of that in one fell swoop.”
Aviation is not Clarke’s only passion. In his spare time, Clarke is a track and field official and serves on the World Athletics International Technical Officials panel for North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
A hammer thrower in his youth, Clarke has carried his love of track and field throughout his life, attending numerous Olympic Games as a spectator. There’s a common theme here of Clarke finding ways to turn the things he is most excited about into his career pursuits.
“I’ve done a lot of seemingly random stuff,” Clarke said. “I do what’s interesting to me. It’s one of my rules in life – do fun and challenging things.”