 Hey, aloha, and welcome to another super exciting Stan Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm Stan Osserman, and believe it or not, we've been doing this for, boy, almost five years now. And again, coming to you live and direct from my very messy office in Kailua, Hawaii, famous for where President Obama spent all this Christmas vacation with his family. The beautiful little town, quiet little town, you can even hear my roosters and stuff in the backyard if you listen carefully. And today's show is a little bit different. I, with all this COVID stuff and hanging out and doing extra reading and things, I went over a book that was written by a friend of mine, a PhD from Oregon, who is one of the most unassuming PhD, burriniac that you'd ever want to meet. His name is Toby Kincaid, and he wrote a book called The Water Battery. And I'd read it a long time ago, but wanted to reread it again. And it really surprised me because I saw things there that suddenly clicked that hadn't clicked before. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. And it's basically the fact that, you know, today we're all worried about climate change and things like that, but the energy crisis isn't new. And when you really think about it, it gets back to fundamental energy. I'm talking electrons and I'm talking chemistry and physics and you'll get it as we start going through this. But anyway, the world is obviously a really amazing place and we're on this planet. The planet spins around the sun. What holds it in? What heats it up? What cools it off? It's just everything's in motion, constant motion. And if there's one thing that you really have to have an appreciation for in energy is the first law of thermodynamics, which says that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes form. And that fact, if you really sit there and meditate on it, really think about it, it's really, it's just amazing. So why am I saying that the energy crisis isn't new? It's 3000 plus years old. Well, in Toby's book, he talks about how back in the earliest civilizations, back when man first started living in caves, socializing, getting together, hunting, gathering, doing all those things, he realized that if he made a fire, he could stay warm. And that's like holy mackerel. What a concept. No matter whether it's winter or cold at night, or he could always make a fire to keep warm. And that was, you know, we take that for granted right now, but that was an amazing revelation to him. But how did he take, how did he get fire? How did he, how did he stay warm, making a fire? Probably had to learn how to rub two sticks together. Maybe when some big fire would happen, a lightning strike or something, he'd save the fire and keep it going and never let it go out. You know, there's stories like that in almost all the ancient cultures that you hear. But the reality is that once man started to use, especially fire, but a lot of different things, he started depleting the planet. And that's why we're talking energy crisis. Now you may not think that that's really relevant 2000, 3000 years ago, but in actuality, this man developed more and more civilized society and living together and started raising animals, using animals for labor and using their energy to help him be more productive. And living in farming and communities, there was more and more energy requirement. So when you're farming, what do you have to do? You have to clear the land. You have to have places to grow. And so you cut down all the trees. What do you use the trees for? Use the trees for building with and use the trees for that fire that we talked about. So you've got this fire and you got these trees and you got a bunch of land that's now empty because you cut down all the trees. And that was the start of the first energy crisis. Believe it or not, in some places trees were so, so rare when society started chopping them all down that they became so valuable that there were war spot over trees. And if you look at places like Easter Island, yeah, Easter Island down in the South Pacific where they have all the standing heads and Galapagos, all those areas, they're pretty much denuded of trees. And of course, if you have places like Iceland and Greenland, it's just so cold all the time there's no trees anyway. But trees are taken for granted by all of us. And the reason I want to focus on trees is they contain so, so much energy. But how do they get so, so much energy? Well, you know, when you think about it, the sun and the motion of the earth and all the moon and the planets create way more energy than we could ever capture and use. In fact, we never would want to capture or harness all the energy that the sun and the planets and the oceans could produce. You know, we couldn't harness all the tides and change that. We couldn't harvest every bit of sun from solar panels and blanket the earth with solar panels. But think of the energy that just happens every couple of minutes falling on the earth, the sun. And if, if you just took the half of the globe that the sun illuminates and could capture all that energy, you could probably provide all the electricity for years on this planet that everybody uses. And we just don't think about it. Now, relate that back to trees. What do trees do? They take that CO2 that we breathe out or our factories belch out and they turn it into oxygen using water, photosynthesis, sunlight and minerals from the ground, little straights minerals to help them, little fertilizer and, and they just keep growing and they grow molecule by molecule year by year for hundreds and hundreds of years. In other words, trees pack tons of energy more than you could ever imagine because they stand all day long in the sunlight and in the rain and they keep taking in CO2 and they keep making oxygen for us to breathe and they keep that cycle going. What happens when there's a drought and you have a forest fire or a big wildfire? Have you ever seen pictures like California when they have the Santa Ana winds and they have a big fire and how fast that fire can move and how the trees literally explode when they, when they start burning? There is so much energy in trees because it's stored up year after year after year, but it's built atom by atom by atom by spinning electron, spinning electron by spinning electron until those trees are so, so full of energy that if you set a match to them, they can give you tons of heat. Now a lot of people used to ask me, you know, you say the internal combustion engines are really inefficient compared to electric motors, you know, how do you, how do you know that? And I go, well, the easiest thing to do is measure how much heat the internal combustion engine pushes out because if it's putting out heat, it's not putting out torque or horsepower. It's taking some of that energy and turning it into only heat and not horsepower or torque for, for your car to move. An electric motor puts out a lot less heat but gives you the same kind of horsepower, so it's much more efficient. That's just an easy way to look at it. But, you know, horsepower and torque and all that stuff is great, but when you, when you try and capture it and store it, it's tough and that's really the conundrum we have. In the olden days, they denuded forests because that's where they store their energy, in wood, in trees. And somewhere along the industrial revolution, where most people think we started our energy crisis, we discovered this thing called fossil fuel. And I hate to tell you this, but fossil fuel is not dead dinosaurs. And that to me is a revelation. Some people just got to get their head around. It's trees. It's dead trees. It's dead vegetation. That's what makes all the oil that we use and the natural gas that we use, all the methane, it's trees. It's not dinosaurs. So we call it fossil fuel, but it's really not fossils. It's not, not animals that have died away. It's all the trees. That stored up energy is still there in the form of oil and gas from the tree. And that's really kind of the focus of what I wanted to get people's head around is, you know, we've take, we take trees for granted. I mean, aside from the fact that they make our oxygen for us, they store so much energy, but wood is also beautiful, makes great musical instruments, makes great furniture, makes beautiful houses. It's lightweight. It's inexpensive. It's all over the place. We can use it and it's so full of energy, but we can't keep tapping into trees, whether they be live trees, whether they be coal, whether they be oil or natural gas. We have to start looking at our energy as it falls on the earth from the sun and be able to store that energy in something other than trees or oil or gas. And that's where I really, I really get a great appreciation for hydrogen because when we come back, we're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, I'm going to talk a little bit about the atomic side and, and how hydrogen takes the energy that the sun makes and stores it very efficiently and we can turn around and use it to run our world instead of tapping into dead trees, live trees, coal, oil, all the fossil fuels. I'm going to think of a better word than fossil fuels like arbor, old arbor fuel or something like that. Something that's easy to say, but you know, trees are, trees are it, but I want to, I want to get us off of trees and into hydrogen. So after we take a quick break, we'll be back and we'll talk a little bit about how that happens. Aloha. I'm Keisha King, host of Crossroads and Learning on ThinkTech Hawaii. On Crossroads and Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich and liven and educate. We are streamed live on ThinkTech bi-weekly at 4pm on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Staten Energy, man. We're talking about the energy crisis that's 3,000 years old. So to recap, you know, man has been around and organizing himself and becoming better and better at living in communities and using resources around them and animals to help them be more productive. And eventually using resources like coal, oil and things like that to help do the work for them and do work. And we talked about the first law of thermodynamics being energy is either consumed or made. It just changes form. And that's a really profound thing, like I say, to meditate on for a while, but just think about it. Here in Hawaii last night, we had a pretty lively thunderstorm, just like they had some tornadoes and stuff in the southeast on the mainland. And it's just absolutely amazing how much energy is stored in a weather system like a thunderstorm. Now, what's a thunderstorm? It's basically a bunch of warm air being lifted up away from the earth, lifted, lifted, lifted and getting up into on the mainland, not here in Hawaii, we get up to about 25 or 28,000 feet for our thunderstorms. So we didn't get a whole lot of hail generally. But on the mainland, you guys get thunderstorms and get up into the 40,000 foot height. And by then you can have moisture that's condensing and dropping out of the sky as hail and things like that. Now think about that. How does all that water get from your lakes and your streams and your ocean desalinized by the way, and get up to 40,000 feet? How do millions and millions of gallons of water do that? They do it one molecule at a time. They take water and turn it into mist and steam and you see it visibly by the time it gets up in the air in the form of clouds, and then the clouds get together and it rises high enough and the temperature makes it so that the moisture can't stay in its gaseous form. It has to turn, it turns into liquid just like when you have a cold glass of iced tea on a hot day, you see the moisture condensing on the outside where the air releases its moisture when it gets to that cold surface and it just precipitates out. But what happens when that moisture is moving up, it creates friction. When the moisture drops out of the sky and starts falling, it creates a huge downdraft. You have all this movement going on, friction, falling, temperature changes. Then you have lightning, the discharge from the static electricity in the sky. And just it goes, you hear a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning. You can see it for 30, 40, 50 miles and it's deafening. And if it hits a tree or makes contact near you, I mean it could kill you if it hits you, but it obviously can damage trees and all kinds of things. There is so much power that's around us all the time and we need to learn how to harness that power. Now, why do I keep going back to hydrogen? Well, if you know anything about me, I'm all about hydrogen. Why hydrogen? Well, if you look at all of the fossil fuels that we talk about, if you look at trees in their natural form, if you look at they all have carbon in them, but they get their energy mostly from converting that those molecules that have carbon and hydrogen into heat, into static electricity and clouds and things like that, they almost always have a hydrogen component. Why? Because hydrogen A is the most common element in the universe and B, it likes to connect to everything. It's such a simple atom. It has a proton and neutron and two electrons. And so it's always attaching to water, to oxygen to make water. It attaches to other compounds and other atoms to make compounds, all kinds. Every human being is full of hydrogen. Everything that has water in it is full of hydrogen. It's so common and there's so much of it, just like all the energy that we have coming into us from the sun. But how do we store that energy? Well, we figured out, in fact, this is not new science. The Greeks coined the word hydrogen and in Greek, hydrogen means water, basically water burner. It means if you burn hydrogen, you will make water, water maker. So hydrogen was understood even back in the times of early Greece to store energy and give you water when you burned it. So our scientists have come a long ways in a lot of different respects. But hydrogen is one of those things that is not new. It's been studied to death. It's understood well. It's in spite of all the stories of the Hindenburg and stuff, it's actually very, very safe. There are very few accidents with hydrogen, which is amazing because hydrogen is so energy dense, that's why they use it for rocket fuel. Liquid hydrogen is what they put in liquid fuel rockets to lift huge, huge rocket ships into space and off to the moon and the other planets. It's that, that energy dense. In fact, compared to regular batteries, which may be somewhere between 50 amp hours per kilogram and up to 300 or 400 amp hours per kilogram, maybe your lithium batteries gets up to 600 amp hours per kilogram, hydrogen is 26 thousand amp hours per kilogram. So what I'm trying to weave in talking about all this stuff is the sun and the motion of the planets and the moon give us so many opportunities to harvest energy. They make so much energy and release so much energy, we should be able to collect it. And how do we do that besides collecting it in dead trees or live trees and burning them? We collect it in hydrogen. We take the hydrogen atoms, we split them into oxygen and hydrogen, we take water and split it into oxygen and hydrogen, release the oxygen back in the air just so we can breathe it, store up the hydrogen, save it, use it in a fuel cell. What does a fuel cell do? It takes the hydrogen, takes the oxygen, puts them back together to make water and the byproducts are heat and electricity. So when you separate water into hydrogen and oxygen it takes electricity and you lose a little bit of energy and heat and when you put the hydrogen and oxygen back together in a fuel cell you make water and you get a little bit of heat and you get a whole bunch of electricity. And how does that happen? Well in a fuel cell what happens is when you put oxygen on one side of a fuel cell and hydrogen on the other side they try and meet to make, they naturally want to attract, hydrogen always wants to attract to something because you don't find hydrogen just floating around by itself. So what it wants to do is it wants to, when it sees oxygen, it wants to make water. So it tries to make water but in the fuel cell there's a membrane in between that the oxygen can't get through and the hydrogen can't get through. But what it can do is the hydrogen's center, the proton and the neutron can get through this membrane but the electron can't. It's spinning in a much bigger circle and it can't get through this membrane. So what the fuel cell does is it allows the neutron and the proton to go across the membrane to the oxygen side and then the electrons go through a wire and the wire creates a circuit to make sure electricity. So if we just take the solar energy, the wind energy, the wave energy, the hydroelectric energy that we get from nature use it wisely and store it in hydrogen in liquid form and you can store hydrogen and ammonia as a matter of fact hydrogen. If you make a ammonia out of hydrogen you can use ammonia for fertilizer and you can also store the ammonia and ship the ammonia because it's a common chemical that we use in industry and the safety protocols are already there. It's very hydrogen dense as a liquid that you can ship at ambient pressure, ambient temperature, unlike liquid hydrogen which has to be super, super cold down in the minus 260 degrees celsius type range and put in big doers or big hydro flasks that are super, super cold. You can ship them, you can ship it safely. NASA has been doing it for years and you can store all that energy and use it to produce electricity on your grid. You can put it in your electric vehicles as a much lighter fuel than batteries and use it in a vehicle that has a little bit of batteries and a lot of hydrogen in a fuel cell so it's much lighter than the equivalent energy storage of a battery and gets you a lot further mileage than a battery electric car would get you compared to hydrogen car. So the other thing you have to think about when you're storing energy, especially all this energy that but nature that the cosmos gives you, you have to also think about how do I make this storage entity you know like trees or whatever or you know they're great so is coal and so is oil for for you know compacting the energy. Batteries however aren't efficient but they're also expensive, they're also heavy and if you haven't learned anything from this corona virus is that you have to be able to have control of the materials you make the batteries from otherwise you could find yourself back in the 70s with OPEC controlling all the oil prices and us not having any oil and paying four dollars and five dollars and eight dollars a gallon for gas because we don't control it anymore. So the last thing we want to do is get into a technology that requires us to go to other countries for huge quantities of cobalt or lithium or whatever we're doing to make batteries using gimmick batteries. So we have to use those kind of assets very frugal, we have to be really careful how we source those things. So to wrap it all up just think especially if you're around when a thunderstorm and want to generate a tornado really get your attention. Think about that energy in motion, think about how much nature really gives us an energy that we just take for granted that we sit and on maybe are inspired by but we just don't do anything with and instead we take the easy route and burn some logs or suck oil out of the ground or gas out of the ground and use it for our vehicles. Let's start thinking how we can use the nature given energy that's falling around us in huge quantities day after day store that energy and save the trees and other things for better purposes than just burning and that's kind of the cycle I wanted to bring out today. Thanks to Toby Kincaid for a great book, the book's called Water Battery and I recommend it, it's a quick read, you can read it in a couple hours, you just sat down and zoomed through it, get some great stories in there that you probably never really heard before or had taught you in your history classes. So read Toby's book and look him up online, he's a really sharp individual, he's been on my show a couple of times and I'm sure to have him back again. So I think that's going to do it for today and stand energy man and get well, wash your hands, stay healthy, don't forget to wear your mask when you go out but I think we're getting through this thing and being in the highly vulnerable category that I am, I'm counting on you to take care of yourself so you don't make me sick. So until next week, Tuesday at 3 p.m. white standard time or on Think Tech and YouTube, stand energy man signing off, aloha.