Seifi Ghasemi was born to be an energy industry leader. His schooling began in the 1950s in Iran where he earned his stripes in a refinery, which is why he “knows the oil and gas business pretty well,” he told Fortune in a recent Leadership Next podcast.
Ghasemi got his undergraduate degree from the Abadan Institute of Technology in Iran, where the “purpose of that school was to train people who knew enough about the refinery to become future managers,” Ghasemi told Fortune. He then left Iran in 1966 to earn his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University before marrying his New Yorker wife, Ellen, in 1971. They’ve been married for 55 years—and he hasn’t taken a vacation since their 35th wedding anniversary.
“I love what I’m doing,” Ghasemi said. “I do not have any other hobbies.”
Now, the 79-year old serves as the chairman, president, and CEO of Air Products, an energy company founded in 1940 that engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world’s largest industrial gas projects. Air Products reported $12.6 billion in fiscal 2023 sales and employs 23,000 people, a company spokesperson told Fortune.
Despite being nearly two decades past the average U.S. retirement age, Ghasemi stays in motion in the name of the hydrogen energy revolution—a push toward cleaner energy sources by 2050.
“Believe me, I have more energy, and I travel more, and I work harder than when I was 40 years old,” Ghasemi said. “ I don’t think just the numbers tell people’s age. I really enjoy doing what I’m doing.”
How and why Seifi Ghasemi is so passionate about hydrogen energy
Not just anybody could go to the coveted Abadan Institute of Technology at the time Ghasemi did in the late 1950s. He was one of 6,000 high school students participating in the entrance exam and fighting for 30 open spots in 1959 when he applied for admission to Abadan Institute of Technology, according to a biography by Lafayette College, where he was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree in 2017.
At 15, Ghasemi was one of the youngest students in his cohort, yet won a scholarship at the institute that trained Iranians for oil industry leadership positions. He graduated at the top of his class, and went on to study at Stanford, where he specialized in aeronautics and astronautics. Ghasemi and his wife then returned to Iran where he was put in charge of steel production by the Shah, “which was a very exciting job,” he said. But Ghasemi decided to leave the country with his wife, who is Jewish, when the 1979 Islamic Revolution began and the subsequent exodus of Iranian Jews followed.
“That wasn’t a place for me and my wife to live in because my wife happens to be Jewish, and it wasn’t the kind of environment that we wanted to live in,” Ghasemi said. “And then I left everything behind. I came to the U.S. with nothing, and we started from scratch.”
Ghasemi went on to work for Lear Motor Co., where he focused on alternatives to steam-propulsion systems for cars and trucks. But things really changed when he went to work for Rockwood Holdings, a company that produces lithium and advanced materials for electric vehicle manufacturing. Ghasemi was an early believer in EVs and their power to stymie climate change, and served as Rockwood’s chairman and CEO from 2001 to 2014.
“I believed very strongly that the first phase of energy transition [would] be the easy one, which is [drive] electric cars—that [would] immediately solve the pollution in the cities,” Ghasemi told Fortune. “Therefore, we got in the business of creating the world’s largest lithium company, and it turned out to be a very, very successful business and everybody who invested in that company made a lot of money. So that was my conviction.”
In 2015, speciality chemicals company Albemarle Corp. acquired Rockwood, which left Ghasemi to decide his next move. He “was looking for something to do, and had a lot of different options.” But Ghasemi knew he wanted to go for the top job at Air Products, despite it being only about one-fifth the size of other companies that had offered him a role because “I knew that Air Products has the core competency of hydrogen, and I was convinced that hydrogen is the only solution for the future.”
At the time, Air Products’ market cap was less than $20 billion, but he knew as chairman and CEO he could “push the agenda” to develop both “blue” and “green” hydrogen products. Blue hydrogen captures CO2 and stores it in the earth, whereas green hydrogen is made using renewable energy such as solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, with no CO2 byproduct.
“We think that in business, if you never take a risk you never do anything,” Ghasemi said. “So you have to make a judgment. You have to have a vision, and then put your resources [behind it] and make it happen.”
Ghasemi wholeheartedly believes all hydrogen production can be green by 2050, despite doubts from other industry leaders such as Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who also happens to be an Air Products client.
“I do have a lot of respect for Exxon and especially for them as an individual and as a customer of course, our biggest customer,” Ghasemi said. “But fundamentally, the fact is that we do have the technologies and we do have the ability and we can build the infrastructure to meet that date. It all depends on how fast the government wants to push that.”
