 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Hey Aloha and welcome to Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Stan Osserman and anything that goes with hydrogen punk that, oh excuse me, hydrogen, I'm the hydrogen punk that thinks he knows everything about hydrogen and never stops talking about it except when I can't read the teleprompter. So but today we have a hydrogen exception because we're going to be showing you the biggest, baddest electrical vehicle you probably will ever see, at least on this show. And as usual, the West End gets bragging rights to this bad-ass machine. Hey, don't beat me out there. I said S is in Stan. You're a filthy mind. You get raised by mongooses or what? So today my guest is a man with literally the dirt on this equipment, Mr. Steve Joseph from PVT Land. So welcome Steve. Good to have you on this show. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you hold the honor of being my very first guest on Stan Energy Man over two years ago. So thanks for coming out and being back to catch us up on what's going on. So how's things out and why? And are you still cranking along? Oh yeah, we're doing well out there. Okay. What I'd like to do is get started by showing a quick video to get people caught up on exactly what PVT Land does out on the West Side. So we can roll that video. The PVT recycling system can handle about 1,775 tons of debris a day. That much debris yields about 900 tons of feedstock. Enough to produce electricity for up to 12,000 homes. PVT has made a substantial investment in equipment and added 15 new jobs to bring this new recycling system online. An excavator grabs large pieces of wood and plastic too large to pass through the system. These will be processed separately. Concrete and asphalt are separated and will be crushed and reused as cover on roads. Large pieces of metal, including specialty metals, are pulled for off-site recycling and reuse. What remains, a mixed load of construction debris, is loaded into a vibrating taper screen. Pieces of debris smaller than six inches in size fall through the screen onto an under's conveyor. Debris over six inches, which is about 60% of the total debris, continues to the over's conveyor. A magnetic separator pulls anything magnetic, hinges, nails, bolts and other metal pieces from the conveyor and drops them into a metal spin. A secondary taper screen separates dirt, rocks, broken glass and other pieces of debris that are less than one inch in size. What is left is prime feedstock material. This debris continues on to the sorting line. Here workers clean and separate, pulling remaining pieces of rock, metal and other materials from the feedstock debris stream. Up to 42 tons of metals are pulled for recycling by PVT every day. Meanwhile, on the over's sorting line, a team of 10 sorts debris six inches and larger, pulling pieces of metal and other materials from the debris stream. These are dropped into bins below the sorting line for recycling. Debris suitable for feedstock is ground and shredded into pieces of uniform size and piled for pickup. By now, all that remains is wood, plastic, paper, cloth and other materials suitable for bioconversion. Some pretty slick equipment you got out there and pretty nice looking. It's a pretty nice looking operation. If I was an industrial manager, I'd be proud of that area. It looks really good. Yeah, it's constant cleanup on it, maintenance, but it does. We can keep it really looking nice all the time. It's a clean operation. So for those of you that might have missed it, this is basically set up so that anybody that has construction debris, whether it's concrete, rebar or combustibles, takes it out to PVT land. And PVT land takes it, sorts it, recycles it if possible. And the combustibles? Yeah, the combustibles are going out and have gone out in the past for fuel for different energy sources at HICM, at AES, a couple of others. And then we already have contracts, agreements in place to continue to produce wood that will allow them to do anaerobic digestion and produce methane for Hawaii gas, can actually produce power out of it for HECO or private. Yeah, methane has a chemical composition of CH4. That means one carbon atom and four of my favorites. You probably were wondering how I'd sneak hydrogen into this discussion, didn't you? But let's throw up some of the pictures of some of the other equipment that you have out there and we just kind of talked through them. People see these at several different landfill operations, big heavy equipment to move things around. So what do we got here? Yeah, this is part of our excavation. We're in the process of recycling four million cubic yards of material that was placed in the 80s. So we're digging it all back up and recycling the metal out, recycling the concrete out, recycling the wood and combustibles out. And so we're left with about 10% to go back in. And by doing this, we've increased the compaction by about four times greater than it was the first time through. And we recover all this dirt that got lost in the mix, which then gets recycled as our cover. We just have to get cover. Now we have excess cover. Just for comparison, because later on the show we have another bulldozer. What size bulldozer is this? That's a D8 bulldozer. That's the typical landfill package bulldozer. You notice it's got a real high blade in the front and the grates up. And that's what's called the landfill package. Yeah, because I'm holding the teaser for the end of the show where we get to talk about the good stuff. But everybody watching, just remember that. That's a D8 bulldozer. What's the next photo we got coming up here? That's part of our screening operation. We have three screens on site. We pull the material out of the old landfill. We run it through the screener separating the dirt and some of the others. We take most of it. About 60% goes down into that system we saw in the beginning to go through that for the fine pick coming out. Because there are some things that we need to still pick out of that. Apparently, we're faced on the East Coast with a bunch of disasters right now. People say, what do you do with all that stuff that's on the side of the street after a big disaster? Does the city of the state talk to you about that when it comes to mitigating disasters and how they get rid of all that refuse? Yeah, we were on the first disaster plan 14 years ago. And I can tell you it's probably the scariest committee I've ever sat on. Now we're redoing it again this year. So what we're doing is taking some of the key personnel. Because most of what you see in Houston sitting on the street would come to us. And then what FEMA requires is that as much be recycled as this can. And that's exactly what we do. We head close to 80% recycling on material like that right now. So I mean that all becomes either aggregate, the metal goes out for recycle, where the wood and combustibles go out to produce energy. So what's the next picture we got, Robert? Let me fill that one up and see what we got there. And of course we do have a lot of dust and stuff that gets picked up when you're doing all this earth moving. So that's probably a pretty important aspect of what you do. Yes, we even have a couple of pieces out there now called the dust destroyer. It throws 10 to 25 micron water about 300 yards. Wow. So it really knocks down everything. Keep the neighbors happy? Keep the letting but dust blow in their house? Yeah. It keeps all the dust down. What's the next photo we got up? This is actually one of the more, it looks not like a real interesting picture, but this is one of the subjects that really when people do recycling, they go, how do you make it all work? And isn't it labor intensive? So this is your labor piece. This is where probably a big chunk of your labor goes. Right here because you've got to pick through. There are some systems now that are coming into play. We've seen them on the mainland where they actually have automated pickers. Automation is where a lot of this stuff is going. And the automated pickers can go through and make 8,000 picks an hour. Wow. But these folks are like on that oversized parcels or particles and they're separating out the metal concrete glass. Did they actually sort the metal like by copper, aluminum, steel? Yes, we do. And including, we recycle one thing that nobody else recycles on the island and that's all the interior wiring. Nobody will ever go into a building and pull the interior wiring out. But when it comes down our pick line there, we pull all the interior wiring out and it looks a little like Tony Roma's onion loaf and it goes to Oregon for recycling. And that's because it's probably too labor intensive to pull all the insulation off the skinny little wires to make it worthwhile. Exactly right. They do it over there. But that is something that nobody else is recycling. So you've been doing this for how many years now? About 13, 14 years now. And your vision at the start was to be self-sufficient energy-wise and maybe just run yourself. But what's your vision now as you look forward in the future to Hawaii's energy, especially now that we're supposed to be all renewable by 2045? Yeah, no. I think the future really looks bright on the energy side because there is a number of different things that are coming on from the energy side. We can take a lot of this stuff that used to go into the ground and now that we're digging up the old landfill and recovering a lot of that stuff, it frees up landfill space, but it also gives us all this material that can go out to reduce energy instead of just being cost in the landfill. And then of course the rest of the recycling, the metal, the concrete, the rest of it. So I think it helps us to be far more efficient and we can produce a lot of energy out of what would be otherwise waste. And it also sets us up if there is a disaster that hits us, we can also use a lot of that material that becomes energy for us as well. Well, I'm glad we're not letting the methane go out in the air because as a carbon, a greenhouse gas, it's probably 14 times or so worse than putting CO2 in the air and other greenhouse gases. So the methane is a really nasty thing to let go. But what's kind of a struggle for me is I go to Kailua landfill or the waste treat transfer station and drop off my green waste and right behind me are a couple big flaring towers burning off all the methane from the old Kailua dump and I just go, wow, that all could be energy and we could be making electricity off of that, but it's not working. On the industry scale, why is it we're not doing more with the methane that we have right now? The problem with it, well, ideally if we capture and use the methane in there, the way it's always been done in the past, it comes out into a generator. The problem always is that you have a tail on the front and a tail on the back end of it. So you scale your unit to match your peak energy out. So you have to flare the front end because you just don't have enough to run your generator. When it peaks at the top, you've got a top that you can't run through the generator and you've got to burn it, it's too much. And on the back end, you've got this long tail where it isn't enough to run the generator. Ideally you'd need three separate generators to max out that kind of deal and you know what happens to the capital cost when you do that. You have to have a baby generator and a mama generator and a papa generator. Exactly. It's a three-dera scenario. I have looked at this in landfill gas issues a lot, trying to figure out ways to solve. Well, I mean, using the same analogy that we do with my favorite thing, hydrogen, why don't we store some of that methane so that we can push it all through the right size generator and just use all of it instead of flaring any of it? Is that a possibility? Yeah, no, that is a real possibility. But the problem always has been it's more, all of this goes in mainly to get rid of the gas, not with the idea of actually producing power more than what you've designed into that part of the system. What kind of pressure does the landfill actually off gas at? I mean, if you didn't have to compress the gas, if you just like vented it and put it right into a tank, at what point would the tank kind of be pushing against the landfill on the pressure? It only comes out at about five pounds. Five psi? Yeah. So, I mean, the problem is the pressure is so low on it and you kind of have to pull it. With those systems, you have to put a slight negative pressure on it. What you're trying to do is capture it all so it doesn't go out in the neighborhood. Right. So you have a little negative pressure on it to pull in. Like vacuum it in. Yeah. And it just, at that point you could compress it. Okay. For us, because we don't have any methane, because our stuff doesn't break down, we actually sequester CO2. We pump CO2 into the landfill to get rid of the oxygen out of it so that we don't have a fire or something else. Ah, okay. So, I have, somebody was telling me the other day, well, you've got to check into the credits for sequestering carbon. I hadn't even looked at it. Yeah, you might have tax credits you're missing already. I hadn't even thought about that part of it. Okay. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in 60 seconds with Steve Joseph from PBT Lab. Ted Rawson here, folks. You're a host on where the drone leads our weekly show at noon on Thursdays here on Think Deck. We talk about drones. Anything to do about drones, drones, remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, whatever you want to call them, emerging into Hawaii's economy, educational framework, and our public life. We talk about things associated with the use, the misuse, technology, engineering, legislation with local experts as well as people from across the country. Please join us noon on Thursdays and catch the latest on what's taking place in the world of drones that might affect you. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. Stan Engelman here with Steve Joseph from PBT Land. And we're talking dirt, why not dirt to be specific and construction debris and all good things that happen out on the west side, to be out of nothing at all. In fact, that should be a song. We should write a song. Talk to Gaby or somebody and we'll make a song on this thing. Anyway, let's look at some more of the photos that we have of your operation out there and you can tell us about them. Yeah, we crush a lot of concrete out there and that gets recycled for our roads or the other thing we're doing is crushing concrete and using it for ballast on photovoltaic panels. Right, so you have to drop piles and put foundations down. Yep. So it's important for the viewers to look at the... and I'm showing these pictures for a reason. I want you to see all the different kind of equipment that he has out there because we're going somewhere with this. So throw another photo up there, Robert. This is actually some of the feedstock and I'll let Steve talk about where it went. Yeah, this feedstock went actually out to Hickam to power the unit that's outed the Hawaii Air National Guard. This also, some of this went out for a couple of other test burns with people for use, AES, a couple of other ones. Yeah, so the reason that we actually looked... this is a project that HKAT does out at Hickam. We did specific recipes of landfill material to run in our gasifier and it was way more cost-effective for you to do the sorting and get us the right recipes and for us to do it on-site. And so this was destined to go into our gasifier at 10-10 a day and I saw a lot of this material being processed while they did their last 30 days of testing. So, next picture. This gets into the good stuff that we wanted to talk about for the community, but... Yeah, this is part of the picture we're in the process right now of closing out a portion of the landfill and re-landscaping it with a lot of native Hawaiian vegetation in there so that actually when we get it all done it won't even look like a landfill. Let's look at the next picture. I think that shows us like a current or a before picture. That's a before. The after picture. And that's the after picture. So you see all the landscaping that was in between the lower portion and the upper portion is what they're going to put in there. So from the roadways and the community not only do you not have any dust now you have nice landscape to look at. What are some of the other plans as you expand? Because you've actually got more land out there and probably expect more volume. What are some of the other things you're doing with the community out there? Yeah, we're working with the community and we're actually looking at the possibility of doing some things with the schools maybe in either hydroponics or in aqua culture out there. And then we're planning, we're looking at putting about 1,400 photovoltaic panels on the landfill to power everything you saw in the first video without going to Heco at all for it. So you're going to be an off-the-grid operation? Okay. So that means in a disaster when Heco's down we will still be working? Great, you can still absorb all that all the stuff that needs to be sorted and saved up and recycled and made into energy. Made into energy. Let's do the next photo. This actually gives us into a good part of our discussion. This is, we showed you the picture earlier of a D8 which is kind of like the standard land moving equipment for a landfill operation and so tell us about why this is so different. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things. This is a D7 electric. This will come in, I think, the third week of this month. It'll be delivered to us. It is an electric bulldozer. And it is one of the smartest things I think we've done. This thing, it runs like my, I own a Chevy Bolt. It runs like the same as a Chevy Bolt. It's got a small diesel engine in there running a generator supplying electrical power. So it has no torque converter, no transmission, no driveline. It's all electric. So it's less to maintain. That bulldozer will push as much as the bulldozer you first saw. So a D7 electric will push as much as the D8 diesel. And it operates at 50% less fuel usage. So it's easier to operate. Batteries are, electric energy is much cheaper than burning diesel. Yeah, and it's, you know, the torque on it allows you to take a smaller piece of equipment and just get much more torque out of it and push. And it's easier to operate. I can teach my secretary to operate that. Okay, don't say that. My secretary will be at that looking for a job. Okay, so, I mean, this really demonstrates in a real way the advantage to electric drive trains on almost everything. Cars, heavy equipment. And you have diesel, electric, hybrid, essentially. But what's the future hold for this piece of equipment when the warranty's out? We've talked about that one. That's why you're on my show. Yeah, Stan and I both love this one. Once the warranty's out, then we can yank the engine out, generator out, drop fuel cells into it, power it with fuel cells, and make the hydrogen on site using photovoltaic panels and water. Yeah, or anaerobic digestion even. You might steam or form your own hydrogen out of your own landfill. That'd be awesome. But every, you know, what's really important is when you take a look at the future, this is where the future is going. When you look at John Deere equipment, they're going to hydrogen. A lot of the cat and a lot of the others are going electric. And Hitachi, who makes the large excavators we use, are going to hybrid excavators. They've been working on perfecting that for the last seven years. So this is where the direction that heavy equipment is going because it's more efficient. And in fact, the model that you just described with your D7 is exactly what I'm trying to show the Air Force. That if you want to start off by saving fuel, you start off by going hybrid. Go with a smaller engine that runs a generator at its peak performance, best energy efficiency on that carbon fuel, and gives you electricity, it gives you a superior drivetrain. And then the next step is just wean yourself off the hydrogen, or the fossil fuel base and put in the fuel cell and go with renewable, solar, wind, and steam reform off of methane to get your hydrogen. And now you don't need to bring in fuel from anywhere. You don't have to buy it from Saudi Arabia or Indonesia or anyone else. You just make it on site and you make it from what you've got on base. And that saves the Air Force logistics costs. It means you don't risk people in convoys driving fuels to bases overseas when you're deployed in a combat zone or fly airplanes into a combat zone to deliver 55 gallon drums of fuel. You make it where you're at because all you need is sunlight, wind, wastewater, waste and you're off and running. And for us on the island it's so important because every drop of oil that we import that dollar we pay for leaves the island. If we're using the material that we have that goes out for generation we're using photovoltaic and water to generate power. All of those jobs, all that does is create jobs on the island and keeps the money in our economy instead of those dollars leaving. Well as a businessman you probably can appreciate that better than I'd say a bunch of the legislators we have in our government and a lot of people that work in government. They don't make that connection but the economic piece and losing that. I mean if you look at, here people talk about the domestic product and trade deficits and things this is our big trade deficit. We're at a loss because we're sending money out of the state to bring in something to burn and that just doesn't make sense to any of us so that's a huge huge piece. To kind of give you an idea on the bulldozer that electric bulldozer which will push as much as a bigger one is $180,000 less cost and 50% fuel savings on it easier to operate less costly to maintain. It is a smart business decision all the way down the line with that piece of equipment. Just for a second because we're getting close to the end of the show let's talk about tier 4 diesel engines and that may be a big reason why you're saving money on electric bulldozer today and into the future. Yeah the tier 4 engines are for us and our heavy equipment you know a regular truck driving if it goes 45 miles an hour for 20 minutes burns off all the carbon. The tier 4 engines hold that carbon until you can do that. Well none of that equipment you've seen in the pictures is ever going to be able to do that. So we have to pull out that converter but for lack of a better term of carbon get her and send it out for bake out for a lot of money. If the stuff the blue planet's been working on where you can inject in hydrogen into it so in other words if you change your timing to top dead center pull in less diesel fuel inject the hydrogen in at the end and fire it you get maximum compression and total burn of the diesel clean and more power out of it and I've kind of played with the numbers on hydrogen production I think we're down around less than $2 or close to $2 per gallon equivalent on diesel. I'd like to hear those numbers. Oh I'd love those numbers too. I'm looking at this, I'm going you know I hope the blue planet is successful with the engineering they're doing. I'd convert every piece of equipment over. Well we're coming up on the show here and we're glad that you can come and share all this and I feel like I'm right at home talking to you because we've had the mind meld for a quarter of a few years now but all of those other vehicles we showed the potentials there for those to go to electric right? Yep, every one of them. And I think you know I think really that's the way it's going to go just from cost and efficiency ease of maintenance on it because all that heavy equipment is very costly to maintain. Alright Steve, well thanks for being on the show today and I'll have to have you back sooner than two years from now under my next show. But thanks for being with us on Stand Energy Man I hope you like visiting the west side and seeing what we do like our leftover stuff and recycle it and turn it into energy. So be with us next week with Stand Energy Man where Rachel James will teach you all kinds of things about energy because I'm going to be in DC. Aloha.