"Most importantly, it helps us keep our fingers on the pulse of what is going on in the regulatory aspects of not just hydrogen but specifically hydrogen and CO2 and really all aspects of the energy transition. We gain a lot of insights and interactions from that. The networking side of it is outstanding. It's a group that's an association that is not one of those all-encompassing industry associations where anybody and everybody that says they do anything with hydrogen is involved. This is a group that's very focused and dedicated on the movement and advancement of hydrogen as a major part of the energy transition. Therefore, we're talking about legislation and regulatory aspects of it, safety and security, and innovation and growth, and not just interacting with other people in hydrogen. The people that we do meet are highly motivated and highly invested in the hydrogen economy and, obviously, the CO2 from the offset of that side of it. So it's been outstanding from a business growth, business networking, and industry knowledge base.
I'd say we're really just getting started still. As things kind of come to fruition and materialize within the hydrogen markets, the regulation has to kind of catch up to it a lot of times. But at the same time, sometimes people are regulating things they don't understand. So, really, the roles that we play are kind of both like how do we backfill the regulation that makes sense commercially for everybody, but how do we make sure that before we make regulation, the regulators and the legislators actually understand what they're regulating?
You'll hear the word 'additionality' a lot in our conversations. I'm a firm believer that innovation is incremental, not monumental. The idea of green hydrogen is outstanding and important, but we're not going to get there by leaping over all the other steps that have to get us there. A lot of things within additionality stop that from happening, and just saying you must have green hydrogen, there's only one way to do it. Well, there are about 5,000 ways to do hydrogen, and some of them are going to be better than others, but we need to open those doors to allow that to happen and to evolve.
The differentiator between USHA and other trade associations is that it's not a trade association; it's an active legislative impact machine, really. It's helping to drive the infrastructure that's needed to build out the actual physical infrastructure of hydrogen and not just a group of people all collectively involved in hydrogen just talking about hydrogen and the availability and the product and things like that. Not that there's anything wrong with those groups; by all means, they're all very important to the industry. But this is about access to legislative bodies, writing part of that legislation, and really moving forward and moving the needle on regulation legislation to ensure that this does materialize into an energy transition."
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