 and welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osserman here on Think Tech Hawaii to talk about my favorite subject hydrogen. And if you haven't been watching the show before, you probably don't realize that about 80% of my shows are on hydrogen. And a friend of mine actually had a published as a industrial publication on hydrogen. And in there, he has a quote from Jules Verne who claims that water making hydrogen will be the fuel of the future. And that's from Jules Verne from, you know, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea history. This is this is turn of the century writing from last century. So, you know, this is no surprise that hydrogen is such a great candidate for the fuel that we should be using instead of fossil fuel. But one of the problems that we have with fossil fuels nowadays, especially in the transportation sector as we try and get hydrogen adopted in electric vehicles, is something we call the chicken and the egg. It seems like if you don't have the cars, nobody wants to build a hydrogen infrastructure. And if you don't have the infrastructure, nobody wants to bring the cars. So getting past the chicken and the egg conundrum is always a big topic of discussion and hydrogen transportation. Well, a good friend of ours, and he's been on the show several times, Chris McQuinney, he has a little different slant on how we break that cycle of chicken and egg. And he put together a really great presentation. So I asked him to come on the show today. And he's coming to us from Dayton, Ohio, and he's going to give us a presentation on how we actually start growing hydrogen transportation infrastructure to fuel hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Toyota, Mariah on the Clarity to Hyundai hydrogen fuel cell cars and a whole slew of others that will be coming online in the not too distant future. So Chris, welcome to the show. And thanks for agreeing to do this presentation. I think it really came out really well. Well, thank you, Stan. Appreciate the opportunity to show people maybe a different pathway to try to build hydrogen infrastructure. I'm going to share my screen here. I have a presentation here to help people understand this. What we want to talk about, like Stan said, is the chicken or the egg. Millennium Rain Energy is the name of our company. And we believe we're a hydrogen and energy technology company for the new millennium here that we're in. Let me introduce you to the chicken. The chicken is the fuel cell car. And that's because chickens move around and so do the cars. The egg is the station. Stations are usually in the stationary position. And so that makes sense that they'd be the egg because the egg always is sitting still. So what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Well, in the hydrogen space, the age old challenge has been do you manufacture and sell hydrogen cars and only to have your customers not have any place to fuel? Or do you build and install hydrogen infrastructure only to have customers with cars, no cars to sell hydrogen fuel? So it's really a big conundrum that's plagued the industry for a while. And the current pathway that's being utilized and executed in the industry is expensive and it relies on government subsidies to make it work. For instance, the California model, the state put up $200 million in a fund and they can fund up to in some cases, 80% of the station cost with that. So to win the awards from the pool of funds, stations must serve over 100 cars a day to be qualified to get in. And then they have to use a pre-chilled hydrogen station. It needs to be J2601 as to have fast bill, has to have communications with the cars, and all these things make the stations expensive. Multiple organizations compete for the state funding and install the stations and several auto manufacturers sell fuel cell cars. And Toyota, who's really taken the lead, they've been building and selling cars and they've also put millions of dollars up for infrastructure to help in that effort. And the stations cost up from three to four million dollars depending on how much they dispense today, but the average station to qualify has to be up to 100 to 200 cars a day that it has to be able to handle. And they're usually only 10 or so cars in an area when they open a new station. So in a new area, there isn't a lot of cars to buy all of the fuel that they can produce and sell. So without subsidies, it's clear to me that this model will eventually fail because there are not enough cars to sell all the hydrogen to. And in eight years, only 50 stations have been deployed and are a little bit more now, maybe. And there's 8,000 fuel cell cars in California, maybe a little more, 11,000 all together in the world. So California is definitely leading the way and the government model is definitely helpful. And we're all thankful that they've done that because we've learned so much, but because station providers are getting subsidies and thereby they're just making their money on installing the stations, they've really had no incentive to make the stations in a way that could create a business model that could self-perpetuate. And so the question is, how long will the subsidies last to keep this going? And so recent developments have occurred that has created a paradigm shift needed to solve the chicken and yet question. In MRE's case, we've patented trademarked and received certificates of attestation from third-party internationally recognized testing laboratories on 16 products that'll build the hydrogen fueling infrastructure in a manner that will dramatically make a change in putting these stations out. And we're going to be dynamically matching the supply with the H2 demand. And that is from our scalable hydrogen fueling appliance. It provides scalability to start small inexpensive at 120th the cost of the California model stations and grow each station to the next factory produced level with three consecutive sizes to scale up to. And then a final level of utility scale hydrogen production from renewables to be distributing gas into the network of stations that you build from big wind farms and solar farms that are producing hydrogen and your truck and hydrogen into the network of stations that you've set up in. And the last really key issue is the first commercially available fuel cell cars have now become then returned to dealers at the end of their lease period or purchase period. And a lot of these cars from different companies can be purchased and shipped into locations outside of California because they've been through their first, you know, they've gotten the carbon credits and all that stuff off of them. And there's such good costs savings on the new vehicles with the free gas card in all of the state and federal tax credits that people buy the new cars and the used cars are kind of getting stranded at the station. So this gives an opportunity for the station and the cars to be sold together. So the best pathway that we found is to have the chicken and the egg in the same nest. And you know what happens when the chicken lays on the egg, it eventually hatches. The key is you need to hatch a rooster. And we think that any company that does both is like a rooster because now they can control and grow more chickens and eggs. And so that is what we're trying to do at MRE. And building infrastructure that dynamically matched the demand is really the key. The same company can control the demand by controlling the car sales and developing a membership structure to allow only those members to access the station. So if you look at a side-to-side approach between the current model and let's say it's one of the bigger stations at 500 kilograms a day and it's a $4 million station, it's pre-chilled, has communications with the car, does 10,000 PSI fueling. And they're centrally located to maybe 10 or 20 cars in an area. And they need 1,000 cars to be profitable. And usually they site these so like when a 5-mile radius to where the majority of the cars are, any big cities like LA could take an hour to get to the station if you're on the outside of that 5-mile radius. And how long is it going to take to get 142 cars a day filling there to make the station pay off? And then usually there's one or two nozzles filling the car. So when it does take off, it ends up being long lines. And so the part about being able to have a 5-minute fill kind of goes away when you're 10th in line and it's each one of them is doing a 5-minute fill. Well, that's 50 minutes all of a sudden that you're sitting there waiting for gas. So the MRE approach is to put out a station that would be one eighth of the size and would do like 64 kilograms a day. And then by putting eight stations in the same area and adding those in as the market grows instead of putting the whole thing in once before there's enough cars to actually buy it, theoretically you can grow the demand. You can grow the station's supply with the demand and end up with people being only 7.5 minutes from the station and you have eight nozzles in an area. And because the stations are cheaper, you can sell the fuel for less and provide better savings to people. And the eight nozzles makes for shorter lines. So we think when you look at these two things side by side, MRE's approach and the products that we have to make that approach possible are a real game changer. So the markets for our products right now is number one in transportation with fuel cell cars and trucks, and then number two, retail material handling, and number three for storing renewable energy on a large scale because we also have megawatt scale products. So what MRE's going to do is build the U.S. Transcontinental Hydrogen Highway infrastructure with 27 stations coast to coast from LA to New York and we'll be trying to locate these at big box stores and car dealerships and gas stations. So the blue line in this map represents the route that we intend to take from LA to New York City and we've already put out two of those stations and in the state of Ohio, Millennium Rain Energy already has a triangular highway that goes 135 miles from Dayton down to Portsmouth, Ohio from Portsmouth 95 miles up to Columbus, Ohio and then back over to Dayton, so you can drive all the way around in that area on hydrogen already with these systems and we're doing that. So the scalable hydrogen fueling appliance gives MRE a better pathway to consumer adoption we believe and we've established ourselves as a leading hydrogen infrastructure company by making hydrogen cost effective for consumers. We start out with our locator station and this is what helps us be able to dynamically match the supply and demand. The locator station just does four kilograms a day and the stations will have about 32 kilograms of storage altogether collectively and it's all a self-contained unit and in large quantities of more than 25 stations at a time we can get this station down to a cost of $110,000 so and then add the storage to it and then once that station becomes overrun with you know the demand is higher than the supply then we can bring in our 12 kilogram a day station. In all of these products these two products right here already have the certificate about testation from CSA group meeting all the codes and standards necessary to fuel these cars safely and then we'll have our 64 kilogram a day product come in after that. So as you can see we have three phases and at this level at 10 cents a kilowatt hour for the input cost for the electricity to make hydrogen from water like we do with our patented electrolyzers we have $3.89 a gallon of gas equivalent in California that's cheaper than gasoline and in Hawaii is cheaper and in Europe it's cheaper so there's a lot of places that this will work and not have to just only be selling the aspect of it being green but you're also able to be cast gasoline and get people an economic reason to make the switch. Hey Chris could you comment a little bit about how important that certificate of attestation is in terms of citing these stations and being able to move them and getting permits and things like that. Yeah well our theory was when we've started our three and a half year venture to get these things get the certificates of attestation and we spent over a million and a half dollars during that time to do it um was that if we can get the product derated because we make it so safe and employ many different things that we can get it derated to an appliance level and we were successfully able to do that and then that gives you a five foot setback limit so it helps you be able to get you know not have to have as much real estate to put out a station because they're so small to begin with and then you can be five feet from something else then also um by being an appliance in two states so far we found that they accepted that and they uh you don't have to have a permit uh you have to have a permit to put in your concrete pad your electricity your water that kind of thing but that's something that's done on a regular basis and is simple to get but and then you put the hydrogen station in and um it it's treated as an appliance so for instance here in Lafayette uh this is an example along the hydrogen hideaway and picking Denver Colorado is one of the cities that will be opening up in hydrogen um up at the top of the screen up here you see that we've got the hydrogen station which is the four kilogram a day with uh 32 kilograms of storage and we can handle four cars a week with this station um so the car with the cars start coming in and we've kind of got an idea for we go in there who wants cars and so the cars start coming in and when they when we get four cars coming out of there and we know we have a fifth one coming in then it's time to move that station since it's already been paid for there's no more capital costs to open up a whole new territory and find another hot spot for demand and then we bring in the 12 kilogram a day and then down here between Idaho Springs and Evergreen we thought that was going to be a good site but it didn't take hold so rather than waste all that money just in one day we can pick that up and move it to a new site and then we can we can just we just won't put anything else there meanwhile down around Aspen Park we've got this one it's taken off and people are just bringing it buying more cars and filling up at that station they're happy and it keeps on growing they keep telling their friends and the station gets to seven cars and we find out we're going to get an eight and nine and a 10 and it's like okay let's move that station open up a new area and bring in our 64 kilogram a day system now in this case all the stations before have been 5000 psi so the people are only getting a half a fill they're going to half the distance this station now is our 10,000 psi so they can go get the full fill and do the full distance that the manufacturer you know says they can get in the vehicle which is about 300 to 350 miles average so anyways now these other stations that you've got located in new places they can continue and start to look get cars at them so this is kind of a way to time elapse and see how our products work in developing infrastructure starting small and growing big so then once you get a station that works that up that's where our mega harvester comes in and we can build a system that the 3d system that you're looking at there is actually the same stacks that you saw real picture on the page before of our system that is our 64 kilogram a day electrolyzer so those are already in production and they work great and you hook these up to a megawatt scale wind farm or solar farm or both and now you can produce hydrogen much cheaper because the cost of renewable energy at utility scale can be as low as two cents a kilowatt hour and with that you can drive the hydrogen cost way down and then you truck that hydrogen in through the existing systems and the other thing that opens up then when you do that is now you can store utility scale renewable energy in the form of hydrogen and our numbers show that this could be as much as 73 percent less cost than using battery according to a department of energy study published in 2017 that shows lithium ion battery storage costs in as if you have to get to 60 megawatts to get this level but 30 $380 per kilowatt so with mre's mega harvester products and our super tanker storage vessels that we're building we can get down to 99 dollars a kilowatt hour for storage and so this is a really big deal we believe it's going to revolutionize the energy storage methods when you know and the world's already found out about this in some areas and there's right now over 60 gigawatts worth of hydrogen production from electrolysis in demand and deals in the works in 32 different countries around the world so it's incredible what's happening and mre is going to play in that game as well hey christ you know you you bring up an important point here and i know you try and you focus on transportation but and that um comparison between batteries and hydrogen for massive energy storage that it doesn't that mean there's a place for hydrogen on the grid as well absolutely so um you you use a fuel cell and put that energy back on the grid or you can use that like we're going to use it uh and put it into transportation so hydrogen makes it a way for you to diversify the electrons that can't be done with just battery storage only great so um we have a growing and robust IP portfolio we have nine patents and one pending we have four in the united states three in european union and two in canada and one more pending in the us we have three trademarks on the auto art name the h2 with the leaf and the green banner around our stations and we have two certificates of attestation from csa and again this is what i said earlier where it's important to have the shorter setback limits and to call it an appliance and this is our factory that we produce our products in in Dayton Ohio this was an old Cadillac dealership so it's got a beautiful marble showroom with spotlights in it and fancy furniture and all that kind of stuff in the showroom where you see the glass in the front and then it's got a second floor and the third floor and you can drive vehicles on all three floors so we've got about 40 000 square foot of space and we're debt free except for what the company owes me and um it's a really exciting opportunity that we have and we've got a great team of people and we're getting ready to expand and do some pretty magnificent things so um thank you for your time and we really appreciate the opportunity to show it show this to you you can find out more about our company at www.mreh2.com so chris thanks thanks a lot i mean that presentation when i saw it the other day just really it says it all and and it explains it in such a clear way for people who really don't understand the chicken and egg conundrum you know it gives them a real clear picture of how to go forward and develop hydrogen infrastructure in a reasonable um self-sustaining and even redundant you know you're when you commented that now you have like eight nozzles instead of just one at that one station and how many cars you can refuel that also means that if that one station went down and you only have the one station only macro you're you can't do anything with all those hundred hundreds of cars you have eight nozzles and two of them go down you still have six nozzles left to be fueling you know all the other cars and they're only a couple miles apart you know instead of you know being one within a five miles radius the the flexibility that the redundancy the it just it just makes so much sense so i really appreciate you a putting that presentation together and b bringing it to us today because i i think it explains a lot yeah it really does it's been one of my biggest struggles for since i've i've been doing this since 2003 and i've been part of the codes and standards committees since uh 2014 and um one of the biggest things that everybody has problems dealing with is how to solve the chicken and egg but in my case it's been really difficult to explain to people why our way of doing hydrogen infrastructure is an alternative that deserves the attention of the people to make it happen and um so i think this is i've been struggling with it for a while and how to explain it i've been playing around with this presentation now for about six to eight weeks and i've given it four times now since i finished it a week ago and first showed it to you and um if and people are really getting it instantly you can give this to somebody who knows nothing about hydrogen or like oh i see what you're doing yeah that makes sense you know instead of struggling with all of the details you know and they even kind of laugh a little bit about the chicken and the egg and having roosters you know it makes it memorable and and that's part of the whole thing is you know we've all recognized all of us that the education piece is critical for us with hydrogen there are so many um so much misinformation based on hindenberg and h bombs and everything that people don't understand that hydrogen is actually really safe um well understood and it's been used by nasa for decades and decades to go into space and even the u.s navy uses hydrogen under hydrogen electrolyzers on their sub to make oxygen and they're throwing the hydrogen away and to get that equipment certified on a nuclear submarine is no small small feat and but it's on there and that means it's been tested explosion proof all kinds of testing has been done to make sure that that's good safe um technology to put on a ship where you know people's lives are at risk if if anything happened to a submarine you know a couple miles under the ocean uh you just can't put any old equipment on there it really has to be put through the ringer to make sure it's safe and hydrogen's met all those things so only they stand but dependable their life depends on it because they're breathing the oxygen exactly it's their life support system so that that just gives people the idea of how how dependable the systems are and um and so what we've really done is we've driven the costs down because of some of the way our stuff works and the way it's patented and our electrolyzers are just really super cost effective and rugged and durable and so um yeah it's it and in the safety you know we have had no incidents and we've been having stations out in the field since 2010 I know I have zero number two of your two two kilogram a day stations and it just like you say it's pretty much bulletproof it's easy to maintain and it's reliable and the navy and the army have both looked at my station that I had at Hickam and on Cook Street in Honolulu and that's what sold them to get stations from you also and start moving in the hydrogen direction that's right and it's it's really fun to watch the Department of Defense get excited about hydrogen the way we are and uh so I really appreciate it they're such great people and they've got great ideas and it's been really a pleasure working with them as well all right well Chris thanks again for the presentation today and I really appreciate you coming on and staying up a little late from uh after dinner over there in Dayton to be with us and I hope you get to come over to Hawaii pretty soon and spend some actual FaceTime with us and on the Big Island with Paul and Mitch and uh we appreciate your time today and thank you again thank you for the opportunity sure so that'll wrap us up for Stan the Energy Man today on Think Tech Hawaii and I hope you'll check out the other shows on Think Tech and if you can maybe don't need a little bit of money to think tech uh we're keeping us our shows on the air we really appreciate it until next week Tuesday this is Stan Osterman Stan Energy Man standing up Aloha