 Hello and welcome to Stand The Energy Man here, coming to you live from Honolulu, Hawaii on the 8th of March 2019 and then on YouTube forever and ever and ever and ever. Got an interesting different kind of show today that's kind of focused specifically on something that's near and dear to the folks that live here in Hawaii, the ocean and using energy technology that's never been used on the ocean before. And so to start off I'd kind of like to talk to you just a little bit about boats in general for those of you that don't know much about designing boats and most people don't realize this but I've actually built several boats for the ocean including ocean going canoes and an ocean going power catamaran and a 33 foot fishing boat vessel that's designed for the ocean and actually have a picture of that vessel, that's the first image I have so we'll throw that one up on the screen. This is a boat I designed and I built it's plywood and epoxy I couldn't find any of the construction of photos of it in my office I have them all at home but just some things to think about when you think about a boat or anything that goes on the ocean it's a lot different than transportation on the land for several reasons. Number one transporting things on the land you don't have a whole lot of resistance in air I mean there's some certainly but nothing like the ocean for example when I'm driving that 33 foot boat and I'm doing 10 or 12 knots and I pull the throttle to idle the boat comes almost to a stop within a few feet it just stops almost instantly because that non compressible water is a little bit more work to push through than a car going through air on a level surface so it's different things in the water different so that boat for example is extremely fuel efficient and it's extremely fuel efficient because it's got a long narrow hull it's got a very steep entry it's kind of got a large tall bow and what we call a sponsor to help knock down some of the waves and spray that hit it so the boat is actually fairly dry has a very low center of gravity so that it stays really stable in the ocean and it actually gets extremely good fuel economy but when I tell you extremely good you're gonna go that doesn't sound so good Stan that boat burns two gallon two and a half gallons an hour of gasoline at 10 knots and you you might say oh okay well that's like five miles per gallon so you're like holy mackerel that's you're only doing 10 10 15 miles an hour and and you're and you're getting five miles per gallon in a car that would be terrible but that's just some of the differences you have when you're dealing with maritime applications for energy and terrestrial you know transportation on the ground or in the and in the air you have a whole different set in boats a lot of times you want the boat to be heavy especially to keep it stable and to keep it driving through that non-compressable water but in most transportation they have you in the vehicle the more fuel you need to push it through whatever you're driving through so there's no perfect boat there's no perfect airplane and there's no perfect car that does everything you can't have a super fast boat or a super fast car that doesn't give you other problems like pounding itself to death in in heavy waves or getting lousy fuel economy so there's always compromises in design and today's guest we have with us is Dr. Joe Pratt I met him when he worked at Sandia National Labs and we're going to talk about a couple of the projects that he worked on while he was at Sandia and then we're going to talk to him about a project he's got going now where he started up a new company that's doing hydrogen fuel cell technology in the maritime world so Joe welcome to the show I appreciate you coming on yeah well up to do this more often especially as your your your ferry boat gets into a more solid state and gets into use but I'm going to throw up a slide here that's one of the first projects that that Joel did it's a it looks like a pretty plain container a nice pretty blue container but what this project was and I'll let Joe describe it it was a project at Sandia Labs done in conjunction with young brothers Hawaii a local barge company here where they put I believe is a hundred kilowatt fuel cell and some storage tanks in a container to provide electricity for refrigerated containers on the barges that go between Oahu and Maui and so Joel could you tell us Joe could you tell us a little bit about a number one yourself and then let's get into that that container and the specifics of that thing yeah sure Stan it looks a little bit about me to before we get into that project I started working on hydrogen fuel cells are looking at them actually looking at this the other day go back more than 20 years when I was a undergraduate and one of my first projects at fuel cells was looking at fuel cell tour boats at Crater Lake National Park so I think I can legitimately say I've been working on hydrogen fuel cells in marine for more than 20 years although a little a few gaps in the middle there I attended a graduate school at the University of California Irvine studied at the National Fuel Cell Research Center went to work at Sandia National Laboratories focusing on applications of fuel cells hydrogen storage systems and spent about half my time actually working on hydrogen fueling stations for vehicles and the other half was really focused on maritime so through all that work looking at the landscape out there the use case for hydrogen fuel cells in maritime and the demand that was actually pretty surprising going through these projects decided last January to leave Sandia and start this new company Golden Gate zero emission marine which provides hydrogen fuel cell power trains for all types of boats and ships that's a quick background Stan great and how about the project with the young brothers give us a little a little bit short clip a little bit on that because actually you're on my show probably two years ago and and talked about that but get everybody up to speed that wasn't familiar with that project well yeah so if I was on your show talking about it then everybody already knows about it everybody watched your show yeah that was a great project it was a great project it like you said a hundred kilowatt fuel cell fuel cell in a box we called it so it had the fuel cell and the hydrogen all together powering reefers it I don't know if you know this it actually won a Department of Energy Award for outstanding advancement of hydrogen and fuel cell technology in the early market through the world's first pure side maritime fuel cell power system I didn't know that we got that award congratulations yep so it was a it was a team effort you know the whole project involved as you said young brothers H&E I was getting there H&E I H cat really a team effort I was just kind of putting everything together but all the work was done by everybody else so we got that fuel cell working on the dock we got it that was the first exposure the Coast Guard had with hydrogen and really getting them up to speed on what it is and and how to use it safely next to the water and even getting into on the water so it was I think a real landmark project and you know DOE even recognize that yeah and it's really you know people have to understand that you know this technology is is not new hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades and decades but bringing them into the marketplace and putting them into applications is new to firefighters and Coast Guard and a lot of other folks so that project with the yes the maritime fuel cell was an eye-opener for Coast Guard folks that attended the training that we gave and the firefighters that attended the training that was put on by was at Northwest National Labs and some of the stuff that we demonstrated so people have a different appreciation a lot of the stereotypes for hydrogen went out the door when they got their training so that was the right that's that's a real great project because it broke the ice a lot of people who had no idea what a fuel cell was and how it would work and then later on in you know one of the interesting oh sorry Stan I was just gonna say what one of the real point arts that came out that project was one of the one of the workers at Young Brothers when it first got there they said oh I don't want a hydrogen bomb on the dock yeah okay you know what what are their concerns and so we talked through them and showed in the system and really got into the details there and all the different safety checks and everything and by the end of the project he was the biggest advocate you know this technology is great we no longer need to bring imported oil in here we can make our own hydrogen and empower everything with it and in terms of safety it's safety upon safety upon safety it's never gonna have any problem so that that was an example of just the kind of outreach effect that I guess that project had which was as important as anything technologically that we did I think you're right you can't overstate the learning curve that we that are in the industry and understand hydrogen kind of take it for granted because we know it but there's some real fears out there in the community most of them not well founded in fact and when they finally get to learn about hydrogen and see the equipment and use it hands-on touch it and use it their thoughts change and they're really pretty surprised the firefighters especially are by the time they finish the firefighting training virtually every single one of them we've ever dealt with whether it was for vehicles or for a year project say hey we'd rather deal with hydrogen than than regular gasoline or propane or just about anything else and I know in the maritime industry there's there's a lot of diesel use and in the bigger ships bunker fuel but in smaller vessels a lot of diesel engines for a couple reasons they're really reliable they last a long time and the fuel is relatively inexpensive still but it also is not as flammable as gasoline or other fuels so a lot of the boats like diesel because the one thing you don't want on any boat is a fire a fire is like the biggest scariest thing you can have on any kind of vessel even if it's made of steel you don't want fires on board boats so hydrogen when you first talk to maritime people about hydrogen the first thing they do is look at a Hindenburg picture and and freak out and say I don't want that on my boat but the advantages of hydrogen and and we'll talk about this when we get to your fair is your your hydrogen if it ever escapes its tanks or whatever is going to go straight up in the air at 45 miles an hour and not accumulate you know and we design the boats and stuff so that hydrogen won't accumulate any place where it could be a detriment on board or a cause for fire so the second project I have a image for is the Scripps Institute vessel that you worked on with some other folks at Sandia or at least Sandia worked on and you're familiar with can we throw that slide up it's the blue yeah that one it's the zero zero v and this is a like a I would call it a trimaran or a high-speed hull that is really popular with the military right now believe it or not the army has this style hull in some of their high-speed inner island vessels that they use out here and can you can you talk a little bit about the vessel in fact I'm looking at the image right now I know you can't see it but the one thing it has a liquid hydrogen tanks on the top of the boat and can you talk about that concept a little bit and the safety aspects of doing it that way yeah sure so this boat was a next step there was a boat in between this one and the container project that was a small ferry that was operating in San Francisco Bay a study and then we wanted to see could we use hydrogen to power a bigger vessel and one that had a longer range multiple days so this vessel if it ran from Scripps in Taniego could make it all the way to Hawaii with a single fill up of hydrogen in Taniego and that's about 2,400 nautical miles I think at a 3,000 mile range so we were able to show that you can build a vessel that has much longer range and endurance than just a small ferry it can be an ocean-going vessel have all the sea-keeping properties and in this case the tanks are up on the deck that's one of the reasons we have a trimaran here to give it a little bit more stability rather than a monohull which most research vessels are so the trimaran gives us some space down in the hole and also stability to have things up on deck the coast guard and the international maritime organization regulations don't prohibit putting hydrogen down in the holes so we could have done that it's basically following in the footsteps of what LNG how they use LNG today they put that down in the holes of cruise ships and other vessels and so we can follow the same path but in terms of as you mentioned safety if hydrogen leaks it goes straight up in the air and having it on open deck simplifies some of the safety systems that we put on board and that was liquid hydrogen on that vessel correct so it's a little bit more dense and heavier than the compressed hydrogen that we have in cylinders so it has some weight to it but I guess putting it up high didn't make it a destabilizing factor on a trimaran as much as it would on a monohull or if it was raised way up high on a higher deck yeah that's right and then one of the interesting things about this vessel is the researchers love the concept of it because you're really taking advantage of a lot of the properties of hydrogen fuel cells and they're doing a lot of measurements out there sonar measurements air quality water measurements you know they bring up organisms from in the ocean and when you have a power plant that doesn't emit any pollution the only exhaust is water you're not worried about sample contamination you're not worried about noise from your engine interfering with your sonar measurements and you can even use the water coming out of the fuel cell that deionized water for your experiment so they really love this vessel from a research perspective not just in the environmental one yeah and if you have a it's got a really clean electric signal when it comes out of a fuel cell versus a spinning generator so that there's a good quality there too but we're going to take a quick break here Joe and we've got 60 seconds we'll be back to talk to you some more about your current project hey loha my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on ThinkTech Hawaii live from the studios I'll bring you guests I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe your co-workers safe your family safe to keep our community safe we want to teach you about those things in our industry that you know may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because security matters aloha aloha and welcome to at the crossroads I'm your host Keisha King I'm live at five every Wednesday where we have entertaining and educational conversations that are real and relevant both here in Hawaii and across the globe I'll see you at the crossroads aloha hey welcome back to stand energy man Stan Osterman here talking to Joe Pratt PhD researcher that used to work at Sandia National Labs and now is on his own doing maritime fuel cells and we're talking about some of the vessels he worked on and projects he worked with at Sandia including the next image that I had to throw up on the screen is that intermediate ferry that that he talked about in San Francisco so this was kind of the the step between some of their other projects and that stationary fuel cell and then the big research vessel they were doing for Scripps and it's really a really handsome boat and what I I kind of wanted to stay on on this image a little bit to talk about something else that that runs parallel to what we do whenever we're doing energy savings or clean energy projects like before you put solar on your house you need to really make your house as energy efficient as possible in other words you seal up the the leaks from your air conditioning so that you're not pushing cold air outside you insulate the house properly so that you're not heating your house too much when it's cold outside or or cooling your house spending too much energy on cooling because you're efficiently insulating your house and then you know so you always go for the efficiency first and when it comes to maritime the ancient Hawaiians and ancient Polynesians had it right twin hulls are very efficient and multi-hulls in general are very efficient and that's because over the waterline you're with width of the waterline to the length of the waterline that ratio is really critical to how efficient your fuel is so when you have two hulls basically moving in parallel the the vessel is more stable and it gives you much more efficient fuel economy than you get with a model hull generally speaking it's it's the ancient Polynesians traveled all over the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand all the way to South America and the and the west coast of the U.S. and of course to Hawaii on twin hull canoes so they've been around for a long long time and i can tell you that the boat that i did the power cap that i did went from Honolulu to the island of Kauai twice and that was actually for me one of the biggest accomplishments of my life because that same channel that i made across twice in a boat that i've built and designed destroyed two of King Kamehameha's fleets and made him decide not to try and attack the island of Kauai he just negotiated a piece with the king over there because that channel is really really nasty in my 22 foot catamaran made it over and made it back he took about two days to fix it because it's it's a pretty rough channel but those twin hull boats are really efficient so Jo tell us a little about about your current project and what's going on in San Francisco there with your your current project yeah okay stan so the current project is called the water go round that's a it's also a catamaran it's 84 passenger 70 foot long that's i'm not sure what you have on the screen now but it's the blue one the red and white one this project is being funded partly by the california air resources board climate mitigation fund where they're giving us a grant that we applied for last year the purpose is to demonstrate whether or not hydrogen fuel cell technology works on the water and that is primarily directed at harbor craft to clean the air in at california harbors so the vessel is as i mentioned a catamaran it has hydrogen tanks gaseous hydrogen up on the top deck the passengers are in a cabin which has wrap around windows for high visibility and then the fuel cells are um passed in on the main deck we have 360 kilowatts of hydrogenic fuel cells and then in the holes we actually have 100 kilowatt hours of lithium on batteries as well it's a twin shaft so each hole has a 300 kilowatt electric motor when we combine the power from the fuel cells and the batteries for full power out of both shafts we can get up to 22 knots oh that's pretty impressive and and so that hydrogen storage you have with that power setup oh what's the estimated range or duration time that you can you can drive with one fill up of hydrogen and what what pressure do you put it in that yeah so the pressure on these tanks these are these are pretty large tanks two feet in diameter and about 20 feet long i mean so it's 250 bar and then depending on how you run the boat you know you gave really good explanations earlier about the just amount of power and energy it takes to put a push a boat through the water so depending on how you run it at high speeds you use a lot more energy per mile than at low speeds um we can run for day sorry two or three days at low speed they around 10 knots and if we're running high speed all day um we'll refuel every day and you said that the fuel cells are actually are they above above deck or above the uh the holes on the and how are they protected from the elements so there's a that's correct they're on the main deck just after the passenger cabin and they're in a dedicated fuel cell room where we have filtered air that gets in so it keeps any of the you know salt and humidity out from any of the electronics so it's got a dedicated room in the app again we could we could have we have the space and we could have put everything down in the hole but just from doing the first one we wanted to make it as easy as possible from many different ways so this was the choice for this boat yeah that makes maintenance a whole lot easier and i don't know my son has twin diesels in his fishing boat and when it comes to doing maintenance on twin diesels below deck um my son's a pretty big guy he's six two and almost 300 pounds and ain't a whole lot of room for him to score around on their working on engine so yeah i'd say putting them up there it makes a lot of work on them and um and you know i know that we learned from the the um sandia project with young brothers that you know the corrosion on the ocean is is something to be reckoned with and you know we the one thing about the fuel cells are they do have i don't want to call it sensitive electronic components but you certainly don't want to not protect your electronics in a fuel cell system you're using electric motors to drive your props and your fuel cell has to be breathing pretty much contamination free air and um and be protecting the circuits and stuff from all the salt air exposure that you get on the ocean and i can tell you that in san francisco may not be too bad most of the time but here in hawaii holy mackerel it almost any boat that spends more than 30 seconds outside the harbor is getting pummeled by 15 to 20 knots of wind and four to six foot seas and splashing uh salt air all over so um how are you filtering that air is it got multi-filter layers or uh is there actually dedicated air conditioning around your fuel cells yeah that's a good question stan and it kind of points back actually to the first thing you mentioned the first project we did in hawaii with the container because we learned a lot of lessons from putting fuel cells in the marine environment and a challenging one in hawaii from that project that we're still using today have applied to this vessel so we there's a multi-stage filter system where we bring air from the outside into the room that gets like i said the humidity and salt gets knocked out so the the room air is drying clean and then we have another set of filters for the air that goes into the fuel cell for the reaction to eliminate eliminate any kind of contamination or chemicals that might be in the air one example would be if this vessel is sitting next to another one that's running regular old diesel and all the diesel fumes are coming off of that vessel we don't want that to get into the fuel cells so we have that second set of filters to knock out anything like that did those diesel vessels did they put out any sulfur if they're using high sulfur fuel or is that pretty well knocked down by the emissions control systems on those diesel boats oh no all the sulfur goes right through you know they might have particular filters on there or something like that to capture some of the particles but sulfur in is sulfur out and that's not good for fuel cells i know that exactly yeah okay so um you know you've got a really great project and we're really excited to see it come up come to fruition when do you plan to start construction on this vessel over there in san francisco uh we already did so we laid the cue we had a big ceremony for that a lot of fun back in november and then construction really started in earnest at the beginning of february so we've got we've got pieces put together that's awesome yeah we're about ready to wrap up but there's one more question i had to ask you you know fuel cells do put off some heat and i know in san francisco in the winter time it can get a little bit chilly around that bay do you use the heat for um heating the vessel as well uh we we've talked about that many times and we haven't settled on how we're going to do that yet um but there's a perfect opportunity there to use the heat from the fuel cell to heat the cabin absolutely great well believe it or not joe we've pretty much blasted through 30 minutes and it just doesn't seem like enough time to talk about this and i have almost as much passion for boats as i do for hydrogen so um i could always just keep talking for hours perfect mix yeah i'll have to come to california sometime and check out your project and and look it over okay we're gonna it's gonna be on the water in september stan so come on up and take a ride i will i'll i'll be there trust me okay joe thanks for being on the show today and to all the viewers out there thanks for joining us thanks to robert and cindy in the studio for making all the magic happen with all the images and everything and uh we'll see you next week on stan energy man aloha