 I'm Eric Kersmiths and welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stan Stenosterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies under DBED and the High Tech Development Corporation over there in Manoa and we're here to talk about energy and I'm really happy actually my guest for this week that I plan to do this week called me and said he couldn't do it until next week and I'm even more fortunate to have a guy that been trying to get on my show for ages and ages and ages because to be quite frank with you he's one of the key reasons that I am such a fanatic about hydrogen he's I met him about two and a half years ago via Paul Ponteo from Blue Planet Research I read his book the hydrogen civilization solar hydrogen civilization and just started really thinking a lot about the benefits of hydrogen what it can do for our economy as we try and grow renewable energy and sustainable a sustainable economy really an overall sustainable economy using hydrogen so our guest today is our show today is called Dr. Hydrogen I presume and I say that because I know Roy McAllister is definitely a PhD level caliber guy who's a chemical engineer by training and is just super knowledgeable about ending all things hydrogen he's he's done a couple books and translated a couple books and put a couple books on DVD and we'll show those to you a little bit later so if you want to order yourself you can but he's he's for me the be all and end all of hydrogen info so Roy welcome to the show today we really appreciate you being on from over there in Arizona we had Claude Colerson here a couple weeks ago but you know you're you're his hero too and we're glad to have you on today so thanks for joining us well thanks for having me and can you tell us just a little bit about how you got into what you're doing and what why hydrogen and what got you so fired up about hydrogen because you're pretty darn passionate well I grew up in rural Kansas and my father's business was a machine shop for rebuilding engine we remand engines of all descriptions mostly for the oil field operations and for gas compressor station operations but many of them went into communities and became a total energy system to produce the electricity and the heat that would be left over with heat town hall or school or a hotel producing emails that was useful instead of being thrown away at a central power plant and eventually I came to work on the Santa say railroad and became very interested in the rail engines and improving their efficiency and ultimately was teaching at the University of Kansas in the 1960s and I realized that I was teaching would be engineers how to burn the fossil reserve faster and even by that time we were burning a million years of fossil oil gas and cool per year million years of nature's accumulation was burned every year and since then of course we've greatly magnified our demand for the fossil fuels but what I what I realized then and have realized more so ever since is that we can make a much better economy by not burning the carbon and that's resources so ultimately anything that rots or burns anything that's renewable and subject to rotting or anything that burns including fossil fuels can be much more valuable if you turn them into carbon and hydrogen so I've developed a number of practical ways and equipment returning substances that rot or burn into carbon and hydrogen the carbon can be used for instance to reinforce equipment that can be stronger than steel and lighter than a limo and then whatever application may require it more conductive and copper so the alitropes the various forms of carbon that can be utilized or virtually encyclopedic in variations and capabilities but consider for instance a roofing material that's carbon enhanced that can collect more energy in one day in many areas of application compared to the energy you get from burning that carbon one time so well here in Hawaii we're kind of lucky to because we actually deal a lot with fiberglass and polyester resins and epoxy resins in surfboards you know that's one of our big pastimes here and so the concept of carbon reinforced or carbon fiber reinforced products is actually not very foreign to the folks here in Hawaii particularly the surfers they understand the strength to weight and and all that good stuff but there's some other great properties in carbon fiber besides the the lightness and the strength what are some of the other advantages to carbon fiber and carbon well it's amazing yeah it's amazingly more corrosion resistant than a little bit more titanium or steel stainless steel so bullying has already proven that through the use of carbon reinforcement in a 777 787 that you have a much greater durability against the tag and corrosion for longevity and much more return on investment and that's coupled with the fuel savings so it's an exponential value in time as you save a lot of fuel but you also save a lot of maintenance as it goes on in service and and for like you know vehicles nowadays for those that work on vehicles and understand the direct current electric system 12-volt system in cars virtually the whole chassis and body is the the negative terminal and all you have to do is touch the negative terminal to the negative side of an appliance and then hot wire to the battery and you've got a current flow and so so you have that advantage with carbon as well don't you do and you have further advantage in optics you can make it a transparent like a diamond is transparent coating diamond like coatings that greatly improve the longevity and durability of optics of all kinds and then also can be a network of other colors but mostly by with enough depth can be black for collecting a wide spectrum of radiation or blocking it if you want to have protection against electromagnetic pulse damages I see but vast variety of better than burning applications but what are some of your current projects that you're working on that you'd you'd like to tell us about that you know can help us move towards that carbon and renewable sustainable economy well given that you can make a bet much better economy by not burning carbon and instead turning it into durable goods and what I'm working on more currently than is how to make hydrogen much more convenient and a product called Metro MET ROL is a net hydrogen liquid fuel that you can store at ambient temperature and pressure in existing gasoline or diesel or jet fuel tanks and so in use however it's the same as if you just use hydrogen even though you can carry it as a dense liquid with an energy density that's on par with gasoline or diesel so you have the ability to distribute this hydrogen as Metro use it for the purpose of operating a fuel cell or a heat engine or for that matter to cook your supper and have the impact on the environment as if you only use hydrogen I know that a lot of folks have tried to use hydrogen and internal combustion engines and just basically replaced the the fuel in the system without doing any compression or anything and it just didn't seem to work out very well you know what's what's the key to really getting the performance out of an internal combustion engine using just hydrogen because as Paul Pontio points out and I know you probably told us to many people we've got a probably a couple billion internal combustion engines running on this planet and by the time we get fuel cell electric vehicles out there it's going to be a couple decades before we have them out there in mass just by the sheer volume that the industry has to start producing but you have some technology that you're looking at converting internal combustion engines to run off hydrogen and use this metro fuel and clean the air and then you don't lose any power can you explain that process well Paul's right it's really important to deal with the 1.2 billion and growing population of heat engines that run the industrial revolution for us and the way that I've learned to do it and actually make more power and much more range for energy efficiency out of the same engine by not traveling the air so the engines allowed to take in as much air as it can possibly get during intake and after the combustion chambers closed I directly inject the hydrogen and ignite it and for the large part it can be done after top-dead center so whatever pressure is in the injection is added to the torque production from the engine so you get better than diesel torque and better than diesel fuel efficiency out of a net hydrogen impact on the environment when you use a device that I called the smart club to provide that injection and we it enables the engine to last longer is because it burns that hydrogen within surplus air because you admitted more air you have more air and thus you can burn more fuel or burn whatever fuel is admitted as a stratified charge so it's insulated by air there's air on the piston and they're on the cylinders they're on the rig and they're on the valve so forth so that the hydrogen combustion produces steam and then the exhaust is condensable water you absolutely take away what is now wearing the engine by particles that are produced from fossil fuels or hydrocarbon fuels and you take away the assets they produce so you don't have corrosion on the variants of other critical surfaces from the acid that develops okay but you can have so the stratified charge part is I think something that is critical for people to understand that you know in a regular internal combustion engine you basically have a carburetor that mixes a fuel in the air injects it in well below top-dead center sucks it into the combustion chamber compresses that homogenized mix that that mix of air and fuel and then compresses it and then ignites it but your system you're saying you're basically just compressing all the air as much air as you can get into the cylinder compressing it and at a near top dead center you're injecting hydrogen into the middle of that air mass so what's the advantage to doing that well the advantage is as you suggest you burn on a surplus air basis and that air insulates the combustion of the hydrogen so the engine doesn't get as hot yeah so you're clean okay engine doesn't have blow by of the fuel air mixture of the homogeneous charge neither does it have the velocity that's immediate and large to the piston into the cylinder and incidentally by the aerosol production of the lubricating film so you don't lose your lubricant you don't lose the heat and you are able to complete the combustion much more rapidly than the typical hydrocarbon fuel hydrogen burns round numbers five to fifteen times faster higher the compression the faster it burns so you can do most of the injection after top dead center and add whatever pressure that you've delivered to purge development of the engine great and what does that do to the to the NOx release from the engine well you can absolutely prevent outside the nitrogen by the smart plug that watches the combustion and prevents the fuel rate from causing the peak combustion temperature to exceed about twenty two hundred degrees C above which you get outside of nitrogen and below which you do not and that's a big important factor when you when you do talk about air pollution and and contaminants in the air the things that everybody's concerned about is is carbon monoxide carbon dioxide and NOx and well and a lot of times and NOx is the real bugaboo to try and get rid of that's quite right but once you handle that question and do so for every mode of operation for recital or acceleration or cruise or full power your engine becomes an air cleaner for whatever you shouldn't have in your lungs it'll it'll eliminate pollen, entire particles and diesel suits and peroxyacetyl nitrate in the smog of a community as you operate you can do the public service drive and clean the air as you use hydrogen in retrofitted engine that's quite a concept that you'd actually use your internal combustion engine to clean the air I think that's what we really need to be focusing on nowadays to catch up because we've we've pushed the limits on internal combustion engines you know it's about time for us to take a quick break here Roy and I'm gonna break away for a second so we can talk about so many other shows and we'll be right back with you to talk a little bit more about Metrol and maybe get into your book hi and thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii my name is Justine Espiritu and I host the Hawaii Food and Farmer series with my co-host Matthew Johnson of Awaku Fresh every week we bring on farmers as well as all the other individuals and organizations that help support a thriving sustainable food system in fact it's interesting to learn what others are doing so you don't have to be a Hawaii resident or producing food on Hawaii to be featured on the show like today's guest Wyatt Bryson of Jewels of the Forest and Michael Labs Solutions aloha thank you it's been a pleasure being on the show I love seeing what you guys do and I really support your mission and it's really nice being back in Hawaii and thank you again it's an honor so you can see guests like Wyatt every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii thank you hey welcome back to my lunch hour stand the energy man here talking to Roy McAllister from Phoenix Arizona and Roy has been doing hydrogen since probably I was still trying to learn how to spell my own name this guy is is like the guru gurus in hydrogen and we've been we've been talking quite a bit the first half of the show about a process that he's developed called a metrol and a way of changing the timing and the injection of fuel into a regular internal combustion engine that can not only help give us a great performing engine but actually clean the air of pollutants that are that are in the air right now but the whole genesis he started with was the fact that he realized that you know his work around the railroads and things like that he was just basically teaching engineers to burn more carbon fuel and he wanted to make a difference in the world and you know a lot of people have a couple patents here and there you know one or two maybe five or six Mr. McAllister has over 200 patents in hydrogen and I think he has a challenge for everybody and I'd like to to start off right why don't you talk a little bit about you know what you'd like people to do you know this is your your chance to sit there and challenge everybody with what to do and move us all towards that that carbon emission free future and sustainable future the reason for the patents is to enable communities to have new ventures I envision 10,000 new communities around the world and so these new ventures can license that technology and I'll provide the technology transfers so that they can make a much more profitable outcome for carbon than to burn it and this is furthermore an opportunity for those communities to produce water think they can actually take bad water such as wastewater and electrolysis in the hydrogen and oxygen and use the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell to make new water so you make clean water out of bad water in the operation and the metro can be used as an energy storage medium for storing any surplus wind or silver or moving water energy as the community saves for a rainy day so to speak or for a diurnal cycle during the day when they need energy in the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing you've been out here to Hawaii did you got to see blue planet research on the big island didn't you? Oh I'm really pleased with the progress I'll tell you what Hawaii has really good talent capabilities and examples of what to do blue planet research is really doing it both you and Hank Rogers are really doing the right thing in helping the public see hands-on in the sense of experiencing the use of hydrogen hands-on hydrogen at blue planet yeah I agree he's he's been my spark plug in my super ejector there for getting me going in hydrogen and firing me up with them when especially when I'm having a particularly challenging day I just call Paul he gets me all excited again about the kind of work we're doing it's it's just a joy to go over and spend some time on that ranch and work with them on the hydrogen projects so what are some of the well let me first of all talk about the solar hydrogen civilization book that you have out there it's been out and actually I don't know where my copy is because I think I've loaned it to somebody I never got it back so I may have to go on Amazon and buy a bunch of them to give out to folks and and get them up spinning up to speed on on your work there but that's kind of the genesis of your book right the getting the economy going and getting communities on board and making this an economic advantage them not just say environmental advantage them correct well it's very true in fact you know the idea of the book is to say that if you like civilizations you think civilizations worthwhile and I think it's the greatest invention of mankind on earth humans haven't had a better idea than to have civilization but if you want it to be successful more successful we need to have sustainable economic development in virtually every community so what the book is about is is how to do that how to take substances that are widely available that rot or burn and turn them into carbon as a durable good use the hydrogen as the energy currency for fuel cell and we have enough to carry the load and for engines in the meantime that make them able to carry more loads and do so much more endurance and return on investment okay you also have another DVD out there and one of the books that that you kind of worked on when you're with that one DVD was making hydrogen and what what should intrigue a lot of folks especially you folks that are a lot more technical chemical engineers chemistry majors physics majors into higher engineering stuff right is a great job of talking about the technology of making hydrogen and the surprising thing is the book he's using I think was published first in 1919 and the technology this hydrogen technology that that we're working with is not new technology it's been around for at least 150 years and the safety aspects the the benefits the electrical benefits I mean everything you can imagine about hydrogen has been studied so deeply and and Roy's kind of like the the font of all that knowledge compressed into one human being that's why it's so great to sit down and listen to him talk about it because he can approach the subject from strictly an engineering chemical engineering and and physics perspective or an economic perspective or a personal commitment and environmentally sustainable perspective and so I'd encourage everybody out there we've thrown up a couple of images of the that that book that I talked about which is chemistry and manufacture hydrogen the book is actually by Lithaline Teed in 1919 and you can get the DVD version where Roy actually has a discussion and explains the chemistry and explains the the processes but it must have been fun actually looking through that book Roy and and interpreting for us as regular folks all the things in that book but it's pretty amazing what what did you like most about that book by tea well first of all I really like to give credit to the pioneers of hydrogen and in my book the solar hydrogen civilization I devote quite a bit of print to the to the pioneers and you know you come to find Teed's work as really a worthwhile reference that by 1990 the chemistry was well worked out for how to make hydrogen by a number of different techniques and how to do so including by the way the the Civil War era technique that was used to have 3,000 successful hydrogen balloon observation flights that North used to fly higher than the ability of the rifles of the times or region but to do observations and to provide a good map of who was moving where and where they were strong and not in the Civil War well let's let's talk just a little bit about that for a second you know you the Civil War was like the mid-1800s 1860-1865 time frame and yet the Hindenburg was in the early 1900s so 60 years later so there was 60 years worth of using hydrogen in inflatable lighter-than-air airships and and did they have any major safety issues with hydrogen all that time you know it's amazing that until 1937 when the Hindenburg caught fire in Lakehurst, New Jersey the dirigibles the hydrogen dirigibles had a amazingly good safety record hydrogen dirigibles that flown transatlantic flights that flown around the poles around the North Pole of the on observation flights and had proven that the fastest way across the ocean and the safest way across the ocean is in the hydrogen dirigible. What's even more fascinating in that regard was that the designers even in the 30th-lowest time in the Civil War had clearly realized that this was a very inexpensive way to have a lighter-than-air capability of having the endurance in the air with whatever else you did for propulsion just having a lighter-than-air capability was the awareness advantage compared to having a heavier-than-air aircraft used a lot of fuel to keep up to say it altitude. The lighter-than-air concept was well proven to be safe and fast for transatlantic and transporter flights. Well that's you know hydrogen has such an amazing history and you did a great job of explaining that in in that DVD talking about Teed's work even talked about World War II when the Japanese used the hydrogen lifting body to to transport a bomb that made it all the way to the continental United States. That's pretty impressive as well and things that most people don't know and I really encourage folks to take a few minutes and look up Roy McAllister's work and definitely get his book Hydrogen Civilization and also maybe check out the DVD he did on Mr. Teed's book or Major Teed's book on production of hydrogen. They're both outstanding so you know Roy we've got about 30 seconds left I'd like to leave it to you for any closing comments. Well we can have a sustainable economic development in every community with the technologies that you're free to read on those published patents you can find on Google slash patents under my name Roy McAllister. So you got a lot of homework out there everyone definitely look at Roy's patents you can check out his works on that on the book he wrote and also the DVD he did on Teed's book and I'm telling you by the time you finish that you'll have more knowledge in your head about hydrogen you could possibly imagine. So Roy thanks for being with us on the show today and I guarantee you we're gonna have to have you back because there's so much more to talk about you have so much more more that you can impart on us on hydrogen and what it can do for our society. It's a joy working with you it's an honor to know you and I look forward to having you back here on another show later on so thank you so much and we'll catch you next time I'm over there you got to come to Hawaii sometime okay. Looking forward to it. Thanks Roy and until next week Stanley energy man signing off.