 Welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And I'd like to start off the show today by telling, not stories, but just kind of giving you what's been on my mind this past week particularly, because I've been getting some blogs and things from friends and it just amazes me how much misinformation is out there about hydrogen. So I want to start off though with telling you a little bit of a story just to set the context for this discussion. And that was about maybe 15 years ago, I was on jury duty in a civil case, which is kind of interesting rather than a criminal case. And lo and behold, when it came time for the expert witnesses to show up on the stand and give their testimony, some guy showed up on the stand for the guy that was suing the car driver. And I go, I know this guy from some place, but I couldn't figure out where. And so of course the first thing they have to do as an expert witness is establish their credentials. So it turns out that this guy was my physics professor when I was in college. So I'm going, oh my goodness, the guy that's doing the expert testimony is somebody that I went to school and learned from. He was my professor teaching me physics. And so I was kind of interested in how he would present his side of the evidence and things. And as he went into his case, I just said, oh my God, he's not doing what he should be doing legally. I mean, as a former police officer, I've been to a lot of motor vehicle accidents. And he was telling us how this car was doing 45 miles an hour and hit this guy and did all kind of damage to his knee. And I'm going, in my mind, if you got hit by a car doing 45 miles an hour, it'd be devastating. You'd be lucky to survive, let alone have a leg left, not just a couple bruises. So one thing interesting about a civil case versus a criminal case is you can actually ask questions, the jury can. So I asked him to basically talk about how much energy was imparted at the point of impact on that bumper on the individual's leg based on a 45-moner collision with a 3,000-pound car and a 150-pound guy crossing the street. And he hemmed and hobbled a little bit and did a little bit of math in his head and said, oh, it's about. And the number he gave was in material, but it was really low. And it wasn't accurate. So the next time the expert witness came up for the other side, I asked the same question. And the answer was in close to a million foot-pounds of energy. In other words, an average rifle bullet has maybe 2,000 foot-pounds of energy, maybe. And this was in the hundreds, multi-hundreds of thousands of foot-pounds. In other words, that guy's leg would have been ripped off. He would have been thrown through the windshield and he would have been dead. So bottom line is, here's a guy that I trusted as my physics professor in school, but when it came time to testify in court, you should be able to trust him as an expert witness. But it was obvious that he let something pull his judgment some other way and he was trying to make some outcome out of something that wasn't there. And this troubled me and it really impacted the way I look at testimony by quote-unquote experts. To this day, I just don't take things for face value. I mean, look at it, take it seriously, but I'm always going to do a bunch more homework. And that's kind of how we got into this discussion today. I was looking at a bunch of blogs from a friend that sent them to me from the mainland talking about hydrogen and hydrogen stations. And here's some of the stuff that was on the blogs that just really got my attention. It costs a lot of money to cool down the hydrogen after you produce it and put it in a 700-bar storage compartment. And I'm like, well, yeah, we do chill it a little bit, but it really doesn't add that much. The compression adds a little bit of cost, but we've pretty much figured out what those are. And it doesn't massively elevate the cost. So that was just a little bit off. And I'm going, well, that's not right. Then it says that when you put the fuel into a car like a Toyota Mirai or something, that over a period of a day or two, you lose half the fuel from leakage. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You can't be leaking a half a tank of fuel every day out of any car and have a company sit there and still keep producing it. That would be ridiculous. That's just insane. But the person actually said that. Then he followed up with hydrogen is dangerous to the ozone layer. Excuse me, but hydrogen and oxygen make water like clouds. That's all you get when you get hydrogen leaking from something. It eventually mixes up with oxygen and you make clouds. Well, if clouds are dangerous to the ozone, we're in big trouble. But that was part of it. And then they talked about how expensive it was to truck around hydrogen. Well, it became apparent by the time I got to this point in the blog that this individual had read something on liquid hydrogen, which does boil off from liquid as it's in a gas state. And you do lose a small percentage, depending on how efficient your canister is holding your cryocooler, how well it's designed. You do have boil off from liquid hydrogen. So in a tank like that, you do lose some. But it's apparent that these people are taking liquid hydrogen things and applying it to gaseous hydrogen, and they have no idea what the numbers are when it comes to estimating costs of production of hydrogen and where the money, the electrical costs come from go to and what it's for. So we're going to talk a little bit about hydrogen today. And some of the facts, because at the Hickam, Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, I run a 65 kilogram a day hydrogen electrolyzer. And I even have a small electrolyzer on Cook Street that I actually do maintenance on myself. So we have a fair amount of experience with electrolyzers and making hydrogen and putting them in fuel cell vehicles. So first, let's talk about hydrogen in its basic form. Hydrogen is an element on the periodic table. It's the very first one. It's the most common element in the universe, not on earth in the entire universe. And it's not found naturally in its pure form because it's attracted atomically to other atoms to form molecules. So hydrogen has to be separated from other molecules like water to make it pure hydrogen. Hydrogen is 14 times lighter than air. Therefore, when you release it, it travels straight up at 45 miles an hour or 60 feet per second. So if you let some hydrogen go into the air, it's going to go straight up 60 feet in one second. Six stories high within a second of being released. It's awful hard for the hydrogen mix with air and become flammable when it's traveling that fast through the air. Most of air is nitrogen, about 75 percent. And oxygen makes up about 20 percent of air with other gases like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other argon and things like that making up the last 5 percent. Pure hydrogen doesn't burn until it's mixed with oxygen. So in air, between 4 and 75 percent by volume, you'll get flammable hydrogen. The flame is nearly colorless when it's being burned in daylight, but it has a blue color in dark or shade. And this is kind of disturbing to people because they think they can like walk into an invisible flame of hydrogen and get incinerated. Again, it goes straight up at 45 miles an hour. So even if there's a leak coming sideways, it's going to turn like that and go straight up. Hydrogen flames are very directional. They're like a torch. If it's high pressure leak, it's going to follow that high pressure stream until the buoyancy takes over and the hydrogen starts going straight up. And hydrogen also does not radiate any heat because there's no carbon inside of it. So in practical terms, hydrogen is stored at pressure and it's stored as pure hydrogen. It's very difficult to ignite once it gets out in the open air because it tends to stream through the air faster than it can mix. If it does mix well enough and it does ignite, the flame itself will be moist and hot and very directional. But you could hold your hand an inch or so from the side of that flame no matter how big it is and you won't feel much heat because the heat does not radiate laterally or down from the flame itself. And the sound of the gas escaping, especially from a high pressure vessel like you'd find in a car or a truck, is very audible. And when I say audible, I mean almost deafening. You'd be hard pressed to walk into a hydrogen flame without hearing it first. So don't forget, we have five senses just because you may not see the flame doesn't mean you're going to walk into it. So hydrogen mixed with air or oxygen in a confined space is very flammable. So the key to working with hydrogen safely is good ventilation. Hydrogen is odorless, tasteless, colorless and non-toxic. Period. So let's talk about the first boogaboo that I always run into and I talk to people who are bent against hydrogen. And that is the Hindenburg. First of all, hydrogen did not start the fire in the Hindenburg but certainly did fuel the fire once it started because it was started by a flammable coating on the zeppelin that was ignited by some static discharge from weather and just static electricity that builds up when two bodies pass like when you rub a wool thing in an air conditioner room. So hydrogen was used in most airships from the mid-1800s up into the point of the Hindenburg because it's lighter than helium and it's much more available than helium. So hydrogen was used in airships for several decades and hundreds of thousands of miles between Europe and the Americas, not just North America but down in South America to move passengers and cargo in airships just tons before they had the accident with the Hindenburg and they switched to helium in all the airships. So virtually all the fatalities that happened during the Hindenburg crash were caused not from the fire but from people jumping from the gondola when it was way above the ground. Those who stayed with the airship and you can watch the film on this and evacuated when it got to the ground or near the ground were not injured or injured seriously. Remember, hydrogen doesn't radiate heat and the heat wouldn't go down, the heat goes up. The flames went up at 60 feet per second and the film demonstrates this. Hydrogen is used in a wide range of industrial applications and maintains an enviable safety record compared to other fuels and energy carriers including gasoline, propane, compressed natural gas and even lithium cobalt batteries. So let's talk a little bit about batteries or hydrogen for energy storage. Many people dismiss hydrogen as a serious energy storage and electrical generation system because they have not actually thought much about the fully burned cost of the alternatives. They have also listened to many quote-unquote experts, thus my story about my physics professor, who focus on round-trip efficiency of electricity which is one dimension of the logic of energy storage that people focus on. But people forget that as brilliant as Elon Musk is, he is fully invested in selling batteries, not hydrogen. So if he starts pitching the benefits of hydrogen, it could threaten his new factory in Nevada which makes batteries. And I don't think you'd like that competition because it's the largest factory, not the largest battery factory, the largest factory period in North America. So let's get things straight. Currently, the most efficient power train in transportation is electric, period. Battery electric, hybrid electric, fuel cell electric, battery electric is close to 90% efficient. But if you're charging your car from a grid that is burning coal, you're not really being clean and green. And hybrids are great. They're electric cars that have batteries, but they also have a small internal combustion engine to run on and that generates electricity and they get up to about 35% efficiency over a regular internal combustion engine which gets 20 to 25% efficiency as a point of reference. But fuel cell electric vehicles are about 45 or 50% efficient and when you use renewable energy, renewable electricity, like from wind and solar, and use electrolysis to make your carbon-free hydrogen from the beginning, you have a cheaper, rather than using the cheaper steam-reformed hydrogen that many of the plants in California make as part of their industrial process, you're getting clean hydrogen, cleaner than coal and diesel and gas. But you're in the same boat as a plug-in car when it comes to dirty electrical sources. So at this point, batteries are looking pretty good as a good choice for transportation, but let's look at the other factors. Let's look at lithium in particular because it's the most popular battery used by Tesla and other technology companies that are in transportation. The best technology we have today in transportation for storage is lithium-based, lithium cobalt generally speaking. Currently, the world's reserves of lithium should last us about 350 years according to most experts. If we harvested lithium, most of the lithium was harvested is found around Central and South America, and less than half is used for batteries. Unless we find a better battery technology than lithium as we ramp up production to meet the demand for hundreds of millions of tons of batteries, we will deplete the Earth's ability to supply this metal in a couple of decades, not 350 years. And along the way, the law of supply and demand will kick in and that will drive the price up so that it will be expensive as the demand goes higher and the supply gets smaller. Batteries lose power even when they're not in use, and lithium is a very unstable metal as its source. It must be stored in oil or some other liquid to keep it from spontaneously combusting and if it's exposed to water, lithium actually burns. Rapid charging and discharging of lithium batteries cause well-documented events known as thermal runaway, and this is a problem in the Boeing Dreamliner commercial jet as well as Tesla cars and many other systems. You may also recall that lithium batteries other than small ones in your cell phone and computers are restricted on aircraft and by the way any Navy submarines. And because they can have the thermal runaway each can catch fire and the fire is very hot and difficult to extinguish. So remember, don't use water on the fire if it's a lithium fire. It will also cause because if the battery is damaged. So several Tesla cars have been destroyed when the vehicle ran over a sharp piece of metal that penetrated the underside of the car where the batteries are and the batteries caught fire. So let's take a break now. It was a long stretch. I'll let you guys' ears cool down and we'll take a quick 60-second break here and be back in 60. It's having a job I can be proud of. I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Staten Energy Man on my lunch hour. And we were getting into a long tie rate about the differences between batteries and hydrogen and transportation. So we talked a little bit about lithium batteries but let's talk about all the other batteries so of course lithium is not the only kind of batteries. But other batteries including lithium in general are heavy. You may have noticed that there are not a lot of 18-wheeler tractor trailers that run on electric power and this is because if you put the required number of batteries on board to give you even 150 miles of range and your ability to pull your load the 18-wheeler would be too heavy to legally operate on a highway. You would exceed the axle weight rating allowed by the Department of Transportation on most public highways and state highways. In other words, you sacrifice cargo capacity and or range in favor of batteries. Also, there's a phenomenon called range anxiety that is experienced by battery-only drivers when they get so low that they're in search of a station and they can't find one and they only have a few miles left in their tank. They start to get a little anxious. The same can be said of hydrogen vehicles of course at this point because we don't have that much infrastructure. But the bottom line is when it comes to transportability batteries come up short in many respects. To give you a comparison we can use the amp hours per kilogram. A classic lead-acid battery renders about 55 amp hours for every kilogram of weight. A nickel cadmium battery gives you 165 amp hours per kilogram much better and a typical lithium battery gives you 685 amp hours per kilogram pretty impressive. In comparison, a hydrogen fuel cell which is basically a self-charging battery gives you 26,000 amp hours per kilogram. So when weight is a factor hydrogen energy density is hard to beat but truth be told you won't see hydrogen stored at that density and anytime soon the current technology isn't there. But hydrogen energy storage will outstep battery energy storage as all the nanotechnologies are applied to both of these types of batteries. The case for hydrogen is, so here's the case when I talk to people take people to see my 65 kilogram a day station at Hickam the main takeaway I want them to leave with is that all of that capability all that production of our station sits in a single 20 foot long iso-container and we also have in the compound two compressors nearly 400 kilograms of hydrogen storage at stores between 3,600 psi and 12,000 psi and we have two dispensers a 350 bar and a 700 bar to go with cars or big trucks and a chiller that we do use to cool our 700 bar hydrogen before it goes to the dispenser and all that fits in the basic footprint of a regular quicksups dies gas station that's 5,000 square feet of space that is your oil field if you compare it to gasoline that's compared to an oil field an oil pipeline an oil tanker ship an oil refinery and the tanker truck delivering your final gasoline or diesel product to your gas station all in the space of a gas station the fact is that if we did not have such a huge investment in oil infrastructure and if the US did not subsidize that industry and we paid the fully burdened cost of oil products hydrogen would win every business case over oil and natural gas or even coal every time if you have clean electricity and water you make it on site no transporting this is where I usually have the Ph.D. start arguing with me about opportunity cost of electricity and how expensive it is to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen stop already as the world looks at renewable energy sources to attain clean sustainable energy for our grid they will look to solar and wind in many locations particularly places without geothermal or hydroelectric and wind and solar power are characterized as intermittent renewables meaning that they do not have constant power outputs and with more than 20% of those intermittent renewables on your grid you must have storage to maintain that power for times when you are not making enough power from your intermittent renewables batteries will always be part of this mix but if you scale up to utility size and utility scale hydrogen or other storage such as compressed air or pumped hydro must be a significant part of your system what all this means is that as we look to the future not only will your house run on electricity but so will your car or your truck and the grid storage system needs to take into account transportation requirements so at large scale hydrogen will outpace batteries and the energy storage role will be hydrogen centric so here are some of the figures to mull over and these are figures that are pretty standard for the industry we use 65 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce each kilogram of hydrogen in an electrolyzer and that includes compression I've also been told by folks who run large wind farms that they can build commercial scale wind and sell the power at 4 cents a kilowatt hour and they say they make a respectable profit now that's on the mainland so let's take 7 cents a kilowatt hour amount to buy your dedicated power and run your electrolyzer and compressors that gives us hydrogen at $4.55 a kilogram and that's about $2.05 per gallon equivalent of gasoline so I applied there a 45% efficiency rate to hydrogen in a fuel cell over an internal combustion engine if you add all the capital costs for your hydrogen operation you're approaching about $2.50 gallon of gas equivalent without any government tax credits or any subsidies for hydrogen production the way that the gasoline industry gets all these credits and it's carbon free so now if you just put the convenience store into the mix you're making money and if you can get curtailed power even cheaper from some wind farm that's nearby or solar you can drop the cost even more and if the technology is going to make economies of scale make hydrogen capital costs go down and efficiency improve you make more money and the fact that you don't have to import water from the Middle East like you do have to import oil means that you can count on a stable feedstock yes even salt water and grey water can be used to make hydrogen your prices go down are you seeing a trend here so in closing this discussion let me just say that there are a lot of moving parts to this discussion but few people look at the cradle to grave fully sustainable, fully burdened cost of current technologies when they compare them to hydrogen let alone talk about the technologies that will impact in the future as I indicated earlier electrical requirements will go up energy storage will be critical component in adding intermittent renewable energy sources and the most likely technologies to improve battery performance and cost will have an even greater positive impact on hydrogen storage as well the fuel cell technology the hydrogen will stay ahead of pure battery but will always need some batteries in the electrical system you always have to have some batteries but the focus shouldn't be on competition between hydrogen and batteries it should be on moving hydrogen hybrid technologies forward as quickly as we can using CNG as a bridging fuel particularly for large vehicles and taking on an all of the above approach to reducing fossil fuels and burning fossil fuels and burning fossil fuel like you're burning money so that's my talk about hydrogen and a quick one-on-one on hydrogen and what the real numbers are what I'd like to do now is introduce you to a couple things I don't know if we can get a picture of this this is a good little book it's actually kind of old and I'll give you the ISBN number because it's worth looking at if you can find one 9622359-0-3 0-9622359-0-3 and it's basically a little pocket reference book I use this thing a lot because it's got everything in here from Julian calendar dates to what the little numbers mean on the top of your bolts and nuts to how to find the amp hours per kilogram for your battery storage to how to convert horsepower to joules or horsepower to calories or back and forth it's a ton of information and it's all science based and it's all fact you can get a lot out of the books like this I suggest you look at it finally I've got a couple things out of the news lately and this kind of talks to the future of hydrogen and batteries and it's about nano alloys 10 times as efficient as pure platinum in fuel cells so basically it says a new type of nano catalyst can result in the long awaited commercial breakthrough for fuel cell cars research results from Calmers University of Technology and Technology University of Denmark so that it's possible to significantly reduce the need for platinum which is a key element in fuel cells and electrolyzers but also very rare by creating nano alloys using new production techniques and these technologies are also well suited to mass production so remember when I said in my opening part about battery technology when it improves using nano technologies and so will fuel cells with both those technologies what we're trying to do is get the metal layers thinner and thinner and thinner so you have more surface area to react in your electrical reactions so this nanotechnology they've already broken through in hydrogen eventually will help the battery folks too but I think hydrogen will always stay out of the curve in nanotechnology we have another quick story here about Toyota launches a very affordable fuel cell vehicle for two bucks and it's yours and it's really just a quick advertisement because Toyota this year has come out with two great products that we won't see here in Hawaii for a while but one is a hydrogen fuel cell truck and the truck basically it out accelerates a diesel 18 wheeler like two to one it's amazing to watch how much torque and speed this thing has fully loaded but this particular article is about hydrogen fuel cell buses and you're going to start working in Japan and you can ride on a hydrogen fuel cell bus for two dollars that's why they say it's a two dollar deal there's another oh this is the Toyota truck one I don't know if you can find it on the website but the Toyota truck video is really great because it shows in the screen two trucks taking off at the same time one's diesel and one's a Toyota truck with the fuel cell and the fuel cell truck just walks away from the diesel truck so anyway I hope that this show gave you a little bit more insight into the real numbers the real facts about hydrogen as we see them from the side of people that work with hydrogen every day it's not just me I have my team at H-CAT the flukes from Blue Planet Research on the Big Island, Paul Pontio and his folks Alex over there Mitch Ewen from UPH and the University of Hawaii and the team that works on fuel cells just down the street from my office that focuses on fuel cells for the Navy we've had Steve Samansky on the show and his boss talked about making hydrogen fuel cells hydrogen electrolyzers they're so safe that they are used on Navy submarines, which says a lot if you've ever looked at what it takes to get something put on a Navy nuclear submarine, you just can't compare the rigors that those things have to go through so in closing, I'd like to thank our production engineer Robert McLean and our furlough manager Cindy Monofkai and hope you'll join us next Friday at noon for Stanley Energy Man and until then, aloha and think hydrogen