 Hey, Aloha and welcome to Stand Energy Man, Stan Osterman here on ThinkTechAway, and we're getting to one of my very favorite subjects besides hydrogen. I mean, if you got to make a favorite subject besides hydrogen, it would be hydrogen and both. And so we're going to talk about both of those things today because our guest is actually, he's been on before, but it's been a few years, I mean, actually several years. And last time, he was working for the Department of Energy at the National Lab, Stanley and he was actually out here in Hawaii doing a project with Young Brothers, and we got to work with him on some hydrogen and some, what we would call a stationary fuel cell, but it's actually a fuel cell that went on the barges to provide electricity for refrigerated containers. And it was all hydrogen powered. And so we've been tracking my guest for a couple of years now, and he mysteriously disappeared from the National Labs and started working on other maritime hydrogen projects. I would consider him one of the most knowledgeable individuals on applying hydrogen technology in the maritime world on the planet. One of the, probably maybe out of three or four people that I'd really go to to talk about the subject. So welcome to Joe Pratt. He's a longtime hydrogen fanatic, probably like me, but a lot more brainy than me and has worked with a lot of hydrogen systems. So Joe, welcome to the show. And could you could you introduce yourself a little bit about me, a little of your background because you haven't been on for a while, and then talk a little bit about what you've been doing the last few years in California in the hydrogen maritime world. Yeah, sure, Stan. Thanks so much for having me. I love being on this show and talking to you again. It's been a long time, like you said, too long. I really appreciate it. Yeah, let's see. I am a hydrogen technology person at the core. I've been involved with hydrogen energy since back in graduate undergraduate school in the late 90s. And actually one of the first projects I had to do with hydrogen was looking at hydrogen for boats at Crater Lake National Park. So that was a long time ago. I've been involved with hydrogen ever since then, and mainly from an application's perspective. So where are the places where fuel cells make sense and hydrogen makes sense to be used? I looked at hydrogen for airplanes in grad school, really high altitude airplanes, you know how they work up at high altitude. As you mentioned, I was at Sandia National Labs from 2010 to 2017, can't remember, a while, almost eight years. And there I was focused on hydrogen deployment, fuel cell deployments in the market. And the Department of Energy is very focused on like duty vehicles, but there are many other places where fuel cells can be applied. And so a lot of the questions that I was answering was could hydrogen work in airplanes, in construction equipment, in maritime boats, all kinds of places, and doing that through studies and also demonstrations. As you mentioned, Stan, the portable port power system we had at Young Brothers is one result of that big effort there. So that kind of started the maritime focus of hydrogen from my perspective and actually kicked off Sandia's zero emission maritime program. One of the first studies we did with hydrogen on the water was called the SF breeze. And we set out to answer the question, could you power a ferry using only hydrogen fuel cells? And this was around 2015, 2016 when we asked that question. And at that time, it was a little bit crazy because we were really only looking at hydrogen for forklifts and cars, you know, five kilograms of storage, 100 kilowatts of power. And then people were asking the question, well, could we do a megawatt of power? Could we do a ton of storage or two tons? And it seemed like, no, you can't do that. Of course not. But the more we looked at it, we found absolutely we can. It made sense from the study standpoint. And so, you know, following that thread a little bit, we found out it was technically possible. The regulators were OK with it. The economics would pencil out. And we found through that study where we engaged over 200 people in trying to get the fact straight that there was a real demand in the market for zero emission hydrogen solutions on the water. But there was nowhere to get it from. So that's when I decided, OK, I want to help show that this is possible, not just do a study and also provide a solution for the people out there who want this. So started a company called Golden Gate Zero Emission Marine in early 2018. And we were kicked off with the grant from the California Air Resources Board to build the passenger ferry powered only by hydrogen fuel cells. Been working on that project. We announced a few weeks ago with our partners that it just launched to hit the water. It's undergoing commissioning right now. And in the meantime, we've looked at other marine markets. So we want another grant in earlier this year from the California Energy Commission to do smaller boats, small harbour craft like patrol boats and also applicable to things like recreational boats, water sports boats and things like that. We're really excited. And just because I think of a lot of the work we've done in hydrogen fuel cells, we're getting a lot of interest from other markets outside of Marine too. So we decided to rebrand to a more generic zero emission industries where we do still have a marine focus. But we also are taking care of people in other areas who really want people who know about hydrogen and approach it from a solid technical foundation and are able to supply solutions. So that's awesome. Kind of a long story short. Yeah, there's there's got to be at least a half a dozen or more aviation companies that I know are getting ready to F.A. certify their hydrogen and fuel cell powered electric plane. And, you know, you mentioned, though, that you were looking at a pure hydrogen powered very, but it does include some battery to most of the hydrogen systems that I'm familiar with have some kind of battery system. And it's usually in fact in the vehicles we used to make for the Air Force. We consider them either fuel cell dominant or battery dominant, you know, and so there was always like a ratio of which one had more of a play in the power power train. And we use the batteries a lot of time to smooth the power out or to give you extra boost here and there. But so actually we have a video of the sea change ferry that you sent us. And could we run that video now and give people a look of it's it's not being in the water yet. You sent me one with it in the water, but I just wanted people to see the scale of this thing and some of the details on the boat. So if we could run that video, there it is. And you can see it's a pretty impressive boat. It's not a tiny, tiny boat. Yeah, I can't remember this video was taken maybe in the springtime. So before it got on the water, but it's mostly complete by then. It's about seventy three seventy three foot long ferry, about a twenty five foot beam that's across its catamaran. So two holes you can see right here, the hydrogen tanks up on the top deck. There's eight long, about 20 foot long tanks there. And then two little ones. The little room there on the back deck was where the fuel cells are. Yeah, so it's circling around again. And then down in the holes, we have the electric propulsion system, two three hundred kilowatt motors, one in each hole. And there is roughly 50 kilowatt hours of battery in each hole also with the MION. But the holes are actually mostly empty besides a few things we eventually would want to get all the tanks down in the holes. And there's really no reason we couldn't according to the regulations. But as the first one in the US, we wanted to make it really easy. And as everybody knows, who's been watching your show, Stan, the best way to not have to worry about any safety issues with hydrogen is keep it in the open air. So that was the approach we took on this one. Future ones definitely want to get that hydrogen down in the hole and let people enjoy the sun up on the top deck though. That'd be good. And I noticed because you did send a bunch of other videos of a lot of the details down in the in the fuel cell and in the battery storage compartments. And I wasn't sure that would really carry over good in this format. But I did notice that for the batteries, there was a pretty significant cooling system. It could get a glycol cooling for the batteries. Are those lithium cobalt battery? You know, I don't remember the cathode composition. I want to say they're NMC. So is the C for for I'm not a battery guy. Yeah. But because and, you know, I was I was because I work with Paul Poncho, a blue planet in the big island. They use lithium ferrous phosphate, which has much a much better safety record. And when even Elon Musk is switching from his lithium batteries that he's been having car fire problems with switching over to lithium ferrous phosphate. So all of his his next generation cars are going to have a different battery technology, which it actually performs similarly. But it has actually better cycle characteristics. It's a much more recyclable and end-of-life product. And it has very little thermal issue, a very little few thermal issues at all. In fact, in the ones that use stationery at home, they can be completely discharged and completely charged. And the temperature in the cabinet goes up two degrees. And there's no cooling system with it. That's just and most of that temperature changes from the computer in the top. It has a fan cooling it down and that drives some of the temperature change. So you might want to think about maybe looking at those batteries to add an extra margin of safety on the boat. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, what you talked before about batteries and now, you know, one of the on a boat, there's no way to regenerate or unless you have a sailboat, there's some extra cases there. But on a car, you want a battery so you can recapture that braking energy. But on a boat, you don't do that. So the need for a battery on a boat is really different. And if you have a hydrogen fuel cell, which is your emission, then you really don't need batteries unless you want to use them to smooth out some of these really high frequency transients, which could be done with a very small battery or even in some cases capacitors. When we look at safety, in some respects, feel strongly that hydrogen is even safer than lithium on batteries. And one reason for that is if you have a battery fire, now the the the systems today are very good. They protect against the fire getting out of the cabinet. But if you have a battery fire, you can't do anything about it. It sits there. And if you're on a boat, you can't get off. It didn't get away if you're in the middle of the ocean. With hydrogen, if you have a fire, you exhaust the hydrogen and it's gone. And you don't have to worry about it anymore. The only way to do that with a battery would be to somehow rig up a system where you could eject it over the side of the boat. Otherwise, you're stuck with all that energy on board. I agree. And as a boat owner and a boat designer, I can tell you that on board fires are your biggest concern. That's why a lot of the commercial boats will go either diesel or bunker fuel as their fuel of choice, just because of the flammability issues. Gasoline is so flammable and has so much energy in it. If you get a fire going with gasoline in a plastic tank, it melts the tank, it fills the hull, you're up in flames. It's really not good. Hydrogen is much, much safer than gasoline for sure and propane for sure. And probably on par with diesel, maybe even a little safer than diesel. Yep. I agree with you, Sam. Yeah. So that countermaran, I'd really like to give you, you chose a counterman for the design. And can you give us some ideas on why you chose that? And the general purpose, this is a boat that's used in protected waters. So it's not ocean going, per se. You do have some fairly rough water in San Francisco ban stuff. But can you describe the design, the designing of the hull itself and the purpose purpose built, why you picked that hull? Yeah, sure. From some of the studies that we did at Sandia, you know, I learned a lot about boats. I wasn't really a boat person before then. Part of the main reason we chose a catamaran was simply because of the speed. If you want to do a monohull, there's kind of a cut off somewhere in the in the 20 to 25 knot range, where it doesn't make sense to stick with a monohull and try to push that through the water at those speeds. So naturally, you transition to a catamaran, which is more slender holes and gives you less resistance. So it's more effective at higher speeds. So that's really the main reason for the catamaran is this vessel has a top speed of 22 knots and we wanted to have any as efficient hole as possible. When you have really cheap diesel, you know, let's say back in the 20 years ago or so, when it was less than a dollar a gallon, something like that, you didn't really care how efficient your hole was. You just burn a lot more fuel. But if you're burning a fuel that at least today is more expensive than diesel, then every little point in the efficiency of your system counts a lot more than it does if you burn a diesel. So high efficiency hole was the main reason for catamaran. The side benefit of that was that we could put the tanks up on the top deck and still maintain fantastic stability because the holes are so spread out. It's such a wide vessel, but that wasn't the main reason. Yeah, it's really important to like you see the boat behind me. That's my 33 foot monohull. I had a cat before and it was much faster, much more stable in rough water. But if I burn all my fuel out, that boat behind me becomes a little top heavy and has a fairly big sail area with that cabin. So I have to worry about stability with that boat, like you say, because when you put all the weight up high, now you have stability issues on a monohull where you don't have them on a twin hull. So Stan, I'm thinking we should throw a few hydrogen tanks in there because that will give you the ballast to keep her upright. And the fuel doesn't weigh much. And there you go. Yeah, actually, I'm looking at moving to the big on it possibly. In fact, my plans are getting a little soft right now. But the first thing I would build after I get the house then would be a twin hull boat to go fishing over in Kona. And it would be an electric boat, most likely hydrogen fuel cell electric boat. I might have to start off with some batteries, but I definitely want to go to hydrogen. But that's a good transition point. You talked about the sea change ferry being one of the boats you're looking at designing, but you're also looking at designing different classes of boats, a little smaller, a little bit more like the one behind me. What what's kind of driving that thought? Yeah, there's a few things there. So let me back up one little bit. We're not a boat builder or a boat designer. We provide the power system, the end to end hydrogen fuel cell power system, hydrogen tanks, fuel cell integrated safety systems, which is the McGill and Marine, as you pointed out, all together in one package that anybody without any hydrogen experience can drop into their boats. So what we've found is that the commercial it's it's more of a market influence on why we're looking at the small boat market. For larger boats, they're almost always unique. You might have similar looking boats, but every boat is a project and they are usually long timeline. And that business is very difficult in as your only business to be supplying engines into, which is basically what we're doing. If you look at any marine diesel engine company, marine diesel is only a very small portion. There are supplying engines for other industries and they put some over to marine. So it's not really a sustainable market on its own. The small boat market is different. It's more like the car market where you can make a single powertrain and it can be deployed into tens of thousands of vessels. The same exact powertrain over and over again, because it's going in the same exact boat over and over again. So from just pure business standpoint and us as a high growth venture back startup, that's really important that we have this opportunity to scale very easily. It's also a big demand in that small market. We're seeing not just in the commercial side, like for harborcraft, where regulations are getting much more strict on the kind of fuels you can burn in the harbor and the emissions. But also recreational. There are a lot of areas where we have lakes and rivers. The regulations are saying you can only run electric motors, no more gasoline, no more diesel. So we can provide a solution for that, where batteries don't have enough range to be able to meet the demand. I think people who aren't familiar with boats stand, you know, they look at a car and they think, well, that's a battery electric car. It works. Why do we need fuel cells? It's a lot less resistance to put a car that rolls on wheels through the air than it is to push a boat through water in batteries. Even very large battery banks won't last very long on even very small boats. So there's a very big opportunity in boats of all sizes and a very near term opportunity that we really like in the in the small market. The you began explaining the difference in the halls and one of the differences in a monohull and why you can't go more than 25 miles an hour is the boats that the single hull boats that go over 24 miles, 25 miles an hour are usually planing hulls. They actually get up on a plane and skim across the top of the water. Well, it takes a lot more power to do that. And get that speed. Then you could you can't even push like a boat like mine is a displacement hull, it actually is a little bit of plain in characteristics to it. But I'm basically pushing through a non compressible thing called water and a car drives through a very compressible thing called air. And you're right. As soon as I pull the throttle back on that boat, it stops. I mean, it slows down really quickly just from the water. So you have different dynamics in a boat and it takes quite a bit of different engineering and thought that goes into your efficiency and the size of motor and the speed you're going to work at. And I'd say even even compared to cars, every boat is a compromise. It can either go fast and use a bunch of fuel or it can be really fuel efficient and you're going to probably have to go slower. I mean, it's it's a constant trade off, just like airplanes are a constant trade off and hydrogen always seems to help out because energy density by by weight is hydrogen's got everybody beat. You just can't beat it. So I think that's one place where you guys have a big advantage. Yeah, and that's a big attraction of the marine market, you know, back going back five years or more and looking at this market and saying there is a real need here if you want to go to zero emission, there is a real need for a solution because batteries physically can't do it. So, yeah, that's that's why we're working in here. And batteries are much too heavy to have the amount of energy you need to push that boat through water. And if you want to go faster, you add more batteries and then your health is heavier and then you need more energy to push the boat. You know, it's a it's never ending. You just can't never get ahead of the of the curve on that. So hydrogen has a lot of advantages. And I think it's I think you're in the right market. It may take a while to take off, but I think you're there. Yeah, I think it's going to take off a lot faster than any of us think, including me. But there's a lot of people interested out there who really want this stuff. So were you able were you able to visit the energy observer when it came through San Francisco? Yeah, yeah, we got was lucky enough to get on board and walk around and get a little tour there. Did you see their Toyota fuel cell? I I ducked my head down into the hole. I don't think I could see into the next compartment, but they pointed out where it was. OK. Yeah, Paul, punch you over in Kona when they stopped in Kona, got to really climb in there and get a look at it. But they have some videos on their website that look at the they basically took a Toyota Mirai fuel cell and everything it took to make it into a drivetrain. And they put it into a pallet size package that they forklifted into the side of the energy observer, hooked everything up, and that's their fuel cell for transportation. Yeah, it's one hundred and fourteen kilowatts. So and they actually have a small electrolyzer so they can either fill up with hydrogen at the dock or, like you say, it is a sailboat. It doesn't have sails that have spoils that give it the propulsion, but they can actually charge their batteries and make hydrogen by using the sails to move the boat forward and use the propellers to generate electricity, either make hydrogen or charge batteries. So it's a pretty neat system. And they get water, too. Yep. Yep. I remember talking to them about, you know, they have the sails so they don't always, a lot of times, they don't really need the battery or the fuel cell system to move around. I was talking about when they came over to North America, it was right around the time when covid hit and everything shut down and nobody would let them into port anywhere. I think they were up kind of on the northeast, maybe into Canada. And so they said, you know, they really realized not only hydrogen fuel cells, kind of paraphrasing here, so don't quote them on this, but this is my impression. Hydrogen fuel cells, of course, have this green advantage. But during those month or so where they had to sit on the water, they really appreciated the resiliency and the independence that you get from being able to create your own energy and then use it right on board and to use the water as well. I thought that was a really good illustration of sometimes people look at hydrogen and they only think about the green benefits. But as you pointed out on your show several times, there is an energy independence aspect to it that could be much more important, actually, than the green aspects. Yeah, in fact, you know, when you think about it, what do you need to make green hydrogen need electricity and you need water? They're sitting with water all around them and they've got solar panels to make electricity and they could even make electricity from their motors if the wind is pushing their boat forward and it's turning their motors and making them generate power. So they could literally be making their own energy and storing it on board electrical energy to be used for their instruments, for their computers, for their cooking, for everything that they needed to do. And, you know, when you think about it, OK, if you can do that on a catamaran, well, then you certainly could do it for an island that could support a much bigger fuel cell and a much bigger power generation system. Much more solar energy or you have choices. You have hydroelectric, you have solar, you have wind, you have geothermal, you have all kinds of electrical sources you could be generating and storing power from instead of fossil fuels and it's all zero carbon. So yeah, you're right. It's it's you know, they were they were forced into a situation where they realized the real benefits of hydrogen. And I think more people should to take a lesson from that because it's really critical. And, you know, there's when we were when we had a lot of publicity around what we were doing with the with the sea change watered around Ferry, we would get calls from all over the world, really, asking about technology and fuel cells and hydrogen. And the idea that you could transform your, say, island state or country from being an energy importer to not just being energy independent, but an energy exporter is really powerful for a lot of countries around the world. And they saw another tie in here and marine as they saw marine as a key enabler for that because ships use so much fuel. You could build a hydrogen infrastructure around a port around a maritime use case with immediate positive business case and then be able to support kind of branch out from there to support your larger ecosystem. So it all kind of came together in some really interesting ways. Well, I agree and some homework for our audience. Just go and look up how much bunker oil it takes to move a container ship from California to Hawaii and then start saying, I wonder if we could apply hydrogen in a big ship like that and make it a lot greener. So we're about in the last few seconds here, Joe. And I'd like you to wrap it up and finish it off for us. And give us the last two words on hydrogen. Stan, I love one of your old shows. The title was Hydrogen is the answer. Now, what's the question again? Yeah, so that that kind of sums it up. I think hydrogen can do hydrogen is the key to kind of a new world we're looking at here. I look at it as the oil age from 120 years ago, starting up. There's so much opportunity there for people who had the foresight. And that's where we are with hydrogen. We're at the beginning of a new age here and it can do a lot more and has a lot more benefits than people think or realize. You're a wise man, Joe Pratt. You're a wise man. Nothing like this. Thank you for for being on the show again today. It's been way too long and in all fairness, I have to say you couldn't be on because while you were building those great, you know, that great ferry and stuff, you couldn't say much because it was all proprietary. So I couldn't have you on the show, but I'm glad we finally got the project done and we can get you back on the show. So we'll have to have you back on again in a little while and get caught up on some of your technology. Now look forward to it. Thank you, Stan. All right. And so until next week, Stan enters your man signing off and we'll catch up with Joe a little bit later. I think he's going to come up with some more really cool stuff for us to look at. Aloha.