 Hey, hello and welcome to stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii, Stan Osterman coming to you live and direct from beautiful Kailua, Hawaii. And it looks like we're starting to open up a little bit. So maybe we can get some tourism going that when you tourists come over here, if you like stand energy man and all the other shows here on Think Tech Hawaii, we're having a fundraiser this fall here to try and pay the folks that do all the real hard work like Eric and the studio there and Haley to keep these shows going. And there's some really great shows on every kind of topic you want to look at and especially energy. I think we have probably four or five energy shows here on Think Tech. But if you can contribute, we'd appreciate it. Thanks for all your support over these years. This is going into year number seven for stand the energy man, which boggles my mind completely. Anyway, today's show, we're going to do part two of what I call the bane of hydrogen, which is compression. And last couple of weeks ago, and go and gave us a appetizer or a teaser on compression and how we can make it better. He's going to enlighten us a little bit more today, probably not to the point where everybody will be happy because he's got proprietary stuff he's got to keep under wraps. But I'll tell you a spoiler right now is I'm going to I'm going to expect him to come up with a piece of hardware that I can come look at and say it really works so that so that we can go to market and solve the biggest problem in hydrogen today, which is compression. So then we'll come to the show again, and we can get started with your presentation whenever you're ready. Sure, sure. So if I get slide number one place up there. So I'm just making another pitch for the company. Thank you, Stan, for letting me come on your show to talk about these issues. Oh, it's great. I love having you on. I'm sure the when we do the after action, the audience will love what you and I are going to talk about also. It's kind of a serious issue. But in any case, so I'm just putting our pitch up there to the company. So if I get slide number two, so and all I'm talking there is just to just to refresh everybody's thinking about, you know, all the issues with with the current mechanical compressors. And that is you're you're building a wall of bowling balls to hold back sand. And that's just to give you an idea of how small the hydrogen molecule is that the bowling balls happen to be the iron atoms and the sand happens to be the hydrogen atoms and that the gap between a piston and the cylinder wall is the grand canyon for the hydrogen atom. That's that's how tiny that that molecule we can go to page number three, please. That's just another recap of hydrogen embrittlement. And if you look at our the previous video, if you want to understand all the materials that are impervious to hydrogen and the materials that are not impervious to hydrogen as and as to what causes hydrogen embrittlement. But more importantly, I talked about those huge industrial compressors, which is what that top image there is. And that's just the head of what one of those compressors. Those protrusions are valve coverings. What's inside there is a giant piston. I do a huge rod, which ties back to a crankshaft. That image there on the left hand side is what hydrogen does to one of these heads after about two years. It destroys it, literally destroys the metal, right? So they have to rebuild these things every couple of years. And if we can go to slide number four, please. OK, and this is just from from General Electric. General Electric builds these gigantic industrial reciprocating compressors. And these are gigantic machines at an LNG plant. A small they'll use sometimes use an electric motor and usually the induction motor they use to drive one of these things will be about a seventy one a seventy five megawatt induction or that's seventy five million watts per hour. If they have higher energy requirements, they'll usually use a gas turbine. And that can be an LN, twenty five hundred to an LN, nine thousand and LN, nine thousand will produce the equivalent of five hundred megawatts of power per hour energizing one of these huge compressors. And the reason why I'm talking about this is because you know, when you when I show you how little energy it really requires to compress hydrogen to to a thousand bar, that's about fifteen thousand PSI in comparison to these machines. And the first question, a lot of these people in the oil and gas business will say, well, that can't be right or it can't be possible. And my only response to them, that's because you've been doing things the hard way. Right. You're not using the physics, you know, just to kind of give some folks some perspective, and I wish I had the exact numbers in my head of the different grids on the different islands. But if I if I'm not mistaken, seventy five megawatts is probably close to the max production capability for the entire Hawaii cooperative utility or probably more than half of the power required on the big island. I mean, we're talking a lot of energy to run that one compressor unit you're talking about. Yeah. And that's at all refineries or LNG facilities. That's how much energy these machines are chewing up in the oil and gas business. You know, so when they look at this hydrogen problem, they truly think it's impossible to achieve. And it has to do it because their experience is this piece of machinery and it's been around for a hundred years from the age of steam. And I don't know if they've, you know, if they've bothered to look inside of the National Institute of Standards, Technology, their database and the data they have on hydrogen. It that data tells you right there what what materials are impervious to hydrogen, which ones are. And if they just did some more investigation on those materials to find out why they're impervious to hydrogen, they could figure out a lot of the stuff that they just have. And it has to do because their experience is with this piece of machinery, not understanding that that you're doing it the hard way that you have to do this in a different way. It's definitely not using this piece of machinery. We can get to slide number five. OK, and there I'm just doing a recap of of an effect. One is the boundary and has to do with electrons and long surfaces. But there's another thing that's going on in that picture that most don't realize. So in that picture, I'm standing I'm sitting next to a distribution transfer and the business we call it a pulpit is attached to a toflopole. But have you ever wondered why that big container looks like a bucket? You ever wondered what's actually inside that big bucket? Stan, you ever thought about that? I've heard that it's hazmat. No, the old transformers like 30 years ago were hazmat. OK, all the transformers these days, what they put in there is just mineral oil. It's refined crude oil. And so so the oil, what it does, it does two things. One is oil, crude oil, hydrocarbons. It's actually an insulator. The other is it provides cool. So the reason why there's that transformer that's actually inside there, that's why it's a tub. It's because there's there's mineral oil. There's it's oil. It's highly refined crude oil. That's what's in there. And it's an insulator. And so what I'm describing as is carbon can be a conductor and also be an insulator. And the same thing with hydrocarbons, it can be a nectar. It can be an insulator. And it really all has to do with the structure of the molecule. So you'll find there's a lot of things in nature just by the shape of how things are put together, gives it different physical characteristics. OK, and that's one of the ones right there attached to a telephone that was to be inside that distribution. Slider six. Here's where we get into the good stuff. OK, so back in 2015. After looking through all that data that I had from this and took me about five years to put all the pieces together. So what is that? Well, that is taken from an engineering blueprint that I put together and I had to take it to a machine. And what I started out with was a piece of the Stenix stainless steel, three 16 stainless steel. The billet was six inches in diameter, 12 inches tall. That upper chamber there is four inches in diameter. The bottom chambers, four inches in diameter. That center area where the two colors come together, that boundary area, that is two inches in diameter. Now, the largest boundary I've built was 10 feet in diameter. OK, and the maximum amount of pressure with that boundary has been able to withstand so far is 57,000 psi. So what is that? What it is is whenever your hydrogen is compressed greater than one hundred eighty eight cosine, it turns into that super critical fluid. It starts taking on some other characteristics, right? It starts taking on characteristics that are a lot closer to being a semiconductor. So there are different forms of hydrogen at that in the form of molecules when you're dealing with hydrogen that's been compressed to the point to where it acts like a fluid, right? That that super critical fluid. So to give you an example, if you take oxygen, if I take two atoms of oxygen, I bind them together, that forms O2, that's that life breathing stuff we all need and love, right? But if I take three oxygen atoms and I attach them together, that forms ozone. And ozone has an effect that's a lot like chlorine. You can disinfect water with it. You can bleach your clothes white with it. Ozone, if you breathe in concentrated amounts of ozone, it will burn your lungs. It's a lot like chlorine. In fact, chemically, it reacts a lot like chlorine. And all that is the difference between two atoms of oxygen attached to each other versus three atoms of oxygen attached to each other. Well, you have the same similar structures inside of hydrogen and these are probably closer to metastates of hydrogen. And that those metastates exist whenever you can when hydrogen is compressed to greater than one hundred eighty. It gives up. I first started encountering this and it had to do with the fact that most of the electrolysisers that you can you can get today. There's actually like a fuel cell story where I used to be where I used to buy my original electrolysis proton exchange member on electrolysis. And one of the things I noted was that most of those electrolysisers when they output hydrogen, that hydrogen usually come out coming out of about 20 bar pressure with 20 bar pressures, about two hundred ninety psi. So the hydrogen that was coming out of the electrolysis or the pressure was coming in at two hundred ninety psi. So it was a super critical fluid. And that's when I started seeing these effects. So one of the. So you've got there. There is an N type hydrogen and a P type high. And it's a type of molecular hydrogen that only exists when hydrogen is in the super critical state. And when those two boundaries come together, what if that boundary that forms there, the hydrogen molecule can only pass one way through the boundary. It can only pass from the N type region to the P type region, but it cannot go from the P to P region to the N region. It's just not possible. And if you want to know how not possible it is, fifty seven thousand psi is a heck of a statement to say it's not possible. The other thing is to think about the fact that this surface is dynamic, meaning is it'll fill up the entire cavity that that this thing is inside of. OK, now, how is that useful? Well, first of all, in that device right there, the boundary is stationary. It doesn't move in twenty nineteen. I had a sort of an idea, sort of a, you know, one of those accidental sort of ideas, right? Like, I wonder if I could do that kind of thing. And it has to do with that. And the question was, is it possible to move that back? That was the question. And that was March of twenty nineteen when I asked that question, and I was able to answer. So if I can get you to pay a slide under several. So this boundary, if I can interrupt, is the boundary is a physical thing? It's a difference between anti hydrogen and P type hydrogen. When those two come together, it forms this boundary. It's a lot like a diode or some kind of diode. Electrons can only pass one way through the device, right? Well, this is a boundary where the hydrogen molecules can only pass one way through the bound. It can't go the opposite direction. It can only pass one direction. And the reason why it occurs is because hydrogen is one of these materials that set a boundary between the atomic world and the quantum world. Is what's passing through that boundary? Is it a whole atom or is it just the protons? See, I'm going to get it again. It's sort of like the proton exchange membrane. What actually passes through that membrane? Is it the entire atom or is it just a proton? Well, we know the proton exchange membrane is just a proton. Well, this boundary is the same way. It's just probably just a proton. I don't know exactly. All I know is is that the laws of physics at that boundary don't work normal. OK, there is definitely a different place in physics. And I don't know how else to describe. I bounced laser beams through the boundary, microwaves to try to figure it out. And what I can tell you is a lot of the laws of physics don't work the same at that boundary. But what I can tell you is the hydrogen molecules can only pass one way through the bound. So I think it gets you to show slide seven up again. So if you if you do have hydrogen migrating from the end to the P and they're a different construct of hydrogen, are you pressurizing a proton only or are you pressurizing a full hydrogen atom? It's compressing a full hydrogen. So well, so if I use if I use if I use my check valves for gas going in and gas going out, check valve for gas going in and check valve gas going out and only worry about gas going into and out of the top of the tank. Now, if I move the boundary from the top of the tank to the bottom of the tank, right, that really doesn't do anything. OK, the only thing I'm really doing is I equalize the pressure with my electrolysis, or in other words, the electrolysisers will fill up the tank with hydrogen all the way up to 20 bar, right? That's all that really accomplishes. Where things get weird is when I move that boundary from the bottom of the tank to the top, right? When I do that because the hydrogen can't pass from the end from the P type area to the entire. You can't pass the boundary. It has a tent that compresses the gas. Now, normally when you compress a gas, you get browning motion. The amount brought the molecules vibrate, everything gets really hot. Well, that process of moving that boundary dampens browning motion. In the easiest way I can describe it, it has to do with how I move the boundary. And I'm not going to explain the details, but the easiest way I can describe it is sort of like having two waves and the waves crash against each other. When they crash against each other, they cancel their energy. So by moving that boundary from the bottom of the tank to the top of the tank, it symmetrically cools and compresses the gas. And it's not permeable anywhere along with on the edges. Because like you say, you're not dealing with bowling balls anymore. You're dealing just with the atomism of self. Yeah, well, think about I'm dealing with it. I'm really dealing with the fluid. It's a fluid on a fluid. Right. It fills the entire cavity because you're dealing with the fluid. It's a fluid on fluid boundary. It's what it is, right? Two different types of hydrogen having different molecular structures, but it's molecularly tied at the bottom level because it's a light fluid against a light fluid. It's just that there's a slight difference between one type of hydrogen versus the other. And it just so happens when they come together that boundary that the hydrogen, the molecule, however that works, can only pass one way through that boundary. Could you make a corollary between fresh water and salt water that would kind of that would be that would be a good analogy or maybe the difference between oil and water might be another, you know. So there are some examples of maybe different ways that could happen for different types of material. It's just so happens that this is an effect that happens with hydrogen. Yeah. OK. So what do you know why I've got that analog if I can get you show slide 70? The reason why that's there is because when I first did this, my only goal was to move that to move it, move that boundary by 24 inches. The first time I did this, that little analog pressure meter right there went from zero to 5000 psi and exploded and happened in seconds. It requires a very small amount of energy to do this. That was probably the more surprising thing about this. I actually being a dummy that I am actually went down and bought another one of those things, thinking maybe defective or something. I blew up the second. So by the time I did the second one, Stan, I decided, you know what? I can't use those analog pressure meters that max out at 5000 psi. Actually, I had to go out and get a pressure chance used from the digital meter. And when I measured the pressure, then it was closer to 15000 psi. And that was just moving it 24 inches up inside of a six inch standstill drill pipe. So that's how this was discovered. Nothing to get ahead of things, but could could you just kind of give us a rough order of magnitude of the difference in getting your system to get to 15000 psi and getting a traditional compressor to get to 15000 psi? In other words, how many kilowatt hours of energy or no? Well, if you're if, you know, as far as the numbers like a lend or offer, I don't know those guys keep that under wraps. I know as far as the hydrogen refueling stations, it's not unusual for that equipment to run for almost 24 hours, 24 hours just to compress the gas up to 700 bar or 10,000 psi. And that's 24 hours to generate the gas, but probably doesn't take any amount of time at all. But it's taking most of that 24 hours just compressing it all the way. Exactly. The 10,000 psi. Exactly. So I have a way of compressing this gas that you go from zero to 5000 psi, you know, in 10 seconds is probably astounding, considering that those machines spend, you know, hours, if not days trying to do the same thing. Exactly. You know, that's and that's probably what you you probably have more experience. We kind of couldn't most of my experience has to do with me going over and talking with Chris, Chris McWhitney and watching him fill up his Toyota Mirai car. And he had to let that refilling station run for 24 hours just to generate enough gas to refill his car. You know, so Chris and several of us talk all the time about, you know, how are we going to solve the compression thing? And I don't know if I shared with you, but back when I was working at Hcat, I led a contract out to an individual who claimed he could get 30,000 psi off of an electrolyzer stack. And he is a smart guy, he had well over 100 patents and hydrogen. And so I found some money, and I contracted him to build a electrolyzer that would come off the stack with 3000 psi. I'm still waiting for the prototype. And I saw some videos where he kind of got the pressure up there, but he couldn't he couldn't show me a whole system that did it. And, and he had problems with, you know, getting bubbles to separate from the from the membranes and stuff. And it's like, so a compression is a is just a it's going to be the tough thing to get past an hydrogen. You know, I'm glad you brought that up, because I know, I know, I know Chris was involved around a lot of that stuff, too. And I know some of the people over at the Department of Energy were part of it. And I was watching a lot of reports were going because there's a lot of good indications that she should be able to do this with electrolysis, right? The problem is, is when you start getting those pressures up in the materials that you have to use to build the electrolys either. And then what happens is that the combination of the temperatures of the hydrogen, the materials hydrogen embrittlement, and what happens is the amount of current and amperage just goes skyrockets right through the roof, right? So you quickly figure out that a combination of all these things that do electrolysis, combined with compressing hydrogen that it should work in theory. But when you put all the parts together, it just doesn't. And even if you built your electrolyte, I mean, you couldn't build your electrolysis are out of the materials that are produced hydrogen, because those materialists are here's the list for making the electrolysis are here's a list for making the materials that are produced hydrogen, they're on the not on the same list. That's what gave me the clue how to do this was basically I had to sort of separate. I mean, there were a lot of things in electrolysis are that sort of led you down this path, but you couldn't do it with electrolysis, that it had to be a completely separate thing. And what I had to do is focus on like I said, that boundary, that boundary exists a lot of different things like you said, fresh water versus salt, oil and water, it exists in it, but it exists in that fluid state, and it only exists under high pressure conditions. And so for example, what one of the things I know that plagues like the hydrogen refueling business, because Chris and I talked about it, is that whenever your pressure is real high, it's hard for you to close the hydrogen for through those tubes. And the reason why is the tubes are too small. Why? Because what's actually inside the tube is a fluid, not a gas. I mean, you used to thinking of the hydrogen at 700 bar burning car, but that's a gas, it's not. What's going in your car is a fluid, a super critical fluid. So you need larger diameter tubes to get over that resistance or because you're dealing with the resistance of a fluid being passed to the tube. And it goes back to just understanding you're not dealing with the gas, you're dealing with the fluid. And that's sort of where it led me to figuring out I had to use this fluid boundary thing to make this work. Okay. So if I can get you to go to page eight, okay. So on that page right there, that'll tell you how much energy it actually takes to do this. So prototype equipment. So that power supply right there, it's a prototype, it weighs 5200 pounds. I have to move it around with a pallet check. Okay. I wish I could put that in the back of my pickup truck, but I can't. That ASME certified pressure vessel right there, so 3000 liter tank, and I don't know how many tons it weighs. Right. But the power supplies on the right and the pressure vessels on the trailer on the left. Right. And so the scale that that that's a huge trailer and and probably not a very big power supply, size wide. Yeah, yeah, that power supply there. I mean, so the equation is an understand that that is not the maximum amount of pressure that that power supply actually is capable of pushing. So there's an equation and I'm not going to talk about the equation, but the easiest way to understand this is it's 0.038 watts, 384 watts times 1000 bar. That's the pressure times liters per minute times 60 minute. We'll tell you how many watts per hour that device will consume. Now that 3000 liter tank at 20 bar pressure will hold five kilograms of hydrogen gas. And if I compress it to 1000 bar, that'll that'll basically compress the hydrogen, which is occupying 3000 liters, it'll actually compress the hydrogen down into three liters. So five kilograms of hydrogen being compressed into three liters of volume, equal to three one liter, you know, bottles is what it's equivalent to. So. But but that actual device, the top end of the device, well, it should be 60,000 PSI. I was only able to drive it up to 57,000 PSI before a couple. Oh, you total failure. Oh, yeah, it's just 50,000 PSI. Oh, 57,000. I was going for a sex day. And you know, but anyway, my my CO got mad. He said, damn, stop risking your life until we would get you the proper lab that you need. OK, well, I tell you what, we're getting really close to the end. Do you want to just keep going on? Let's keep going and I go to page number eight and then we can we can sort of try to finish this thing up. So that there, if you were going to match a megawatt grid steel electrolysizer, that that'd be the tank you would match that electrolysizer up that that tank would hold 13,200 liters of gas. So that's that's a fracking tank, right? Right. That's that fracking tank we're talking the 15,000 liters. And what the idea being is you would probably spend your first hour filling the tank up with 13,200 liters of hydrogen. That's one to two kilograms. You would probably spend the second hour actually compressing it to a thousand bar. So the power supply for that tank doesn't exist yet. That's something I haven't built yet. So so everybody understands I'm at the lab stage. So let's go to page number 10. So I built a model just to give everybody an idea. And that's two tanks of redundant, redundant power supplies. The idea there is basically you're filling one tank up with hydrogen. How long the electrolysizer to fill up one tank? The second tank, you'd be compressing the gas. And when the second tank, the gases was compressed and the first tank was filled up with gas. And those two tanks would swap states and you'd be compressing the gas and tank A and you would be filling tank B up with gas. So there'd be a system that would be generating 22 kilograms of hydrogen per hour and compressing it and pushing it along to like a gas well to pressurize that gas at the thousand bar. So that's where we are right now. Are you actually in the process of building a model with a larger power supply and a little bit, you know, a little bit more of a prototype you can actually demonstrate with hydrogen gas? Well, the issue is as I really don't, I actually don't have a reason to build it. I mean, my prototype power supply is more than enough to perform the experiments I'm doing right now, right? But as far as a 15,000 liter, I just, I don't have the reason to build it. So part of this is a capital issue. And in the environment we're in right now, venture capital, hopefully some venture capital certain to clear up and we can finish taking this out of the lab and then industrializing it. Hopefully we can get there. But right now I just don't have a reason to build that, you know, the next one. I mean, what I'm doing right now fulfills all I need with the experiments I'm doing right now. So hopefully somebody with an industrial need for megawatt plus scale green hydrogen will be interested in building something a larger scale to take care of this and work with you on it. So if we succeed in nothing in this discussion except furthering the discussion and getting it to the next level, I'm happy with the discussion. Well, just so everybody understands this video that the target market for this really isn't the transportation sector. What I'm actually proposing is actually a really large change to the power grid. That means that the people I'm targeting is the mayor of your town. It's your sheriff. It's your state congressmen and senators as the governor of your state, right? Understand that even if you're a Elon Musk you probably couldn't get this accomplished. This has to come from, like I said, a governor of a state because your public utility is a regulated monopoly controlled by your state government. And what I'm proposing is a huge change to the infrastructure, the energy structure of your state, of any state, right? So this is really something that can only be handled at the political level. All right, well, we wanted to get into a little bit more general discussion of a worldwide energy situation. And shoot, if we wait till next week it may already come to fruition but let's go on and have a new back next week. Well, we know it again next week and we can talk about these bigger energy pictures and I'm pretty sure that it won't play out by next week's stand. Yeah, but it'll certainly show some trends, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, we'll have that much more trend data that we know what path we're working on but I'm pretty sure it will be resolved by then. All right, Dan, well, thanks for the discussion and enlightenment today. I think you've given a bunch of really smart people some things to think about and some ways to solve a really serious issue with hydrogen, but it's gonna have to be solved at that grid scale. I mean, it really will be. You were talking salt domes and stuff before for storage. That's the scale we're talking about and we don't even think about producing that much hydrogen right now but that's to replace the fossil fuel industry that's in place right now. That's the scale we gotta work at. Well, not only that, not only that Stan but if you look at the machine that I'm proposing, this is the machine that will solve this issue. I'd be different if we could solve it a different way but from the physics I'm seeing it's not solvable. This is the only way to really do it. You can't, what's old saying? You can't solve a problem by doing the same thing you've been doing. We gotta do it different. Well, Dan, we've gone a little bit over time but I'd like to thank you and we'll have you back next week and we'll talk a little bit more about the macro energy economics and what's going on in the world. Thank you, Stan. Well, until next week, Stan Energyman signing off and we'll get some exciting discussion next week. Bye-bye.