 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here today on Think Tech Hawaii, Stan Osterman coming to you from a kind of a soggy Hawaii. It's definitely wintertime here. We had our first big low pressure system come through and Maui got flooded big time in downtown Honolulu without power so our studio is actually operating on alternate power right now. But today is also a special day, especially here in Hawaii, but especially also for our country. It's December 7th, the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And the story that I've got today for this Think Tech, excuse me, really does tie back into that lesson, lessons learned from December 7, 1941. And so there were a couple of things that history teaches us about that day and what led up to that day. And two of the issues were number one, Japan was trying to keep us out of their plans that they had to take over most of Asia and the Pacific. And they were certainly capable of doing it. They were a very disciplined, very solid military. And that ties into energy because the second reason I want to talk about relating back to the bombing of Pearl Harbor was the United States held back our sale of oil to them so they could still prosecute their operations in Asia and in the Pacific Islands. And that I think was really what set off the war. And one of the things that kind of ties back to my discussion on critical analysis is, you know, is something worth fighting for? Is it really worth the nation going to war over? And December 7th teaches us, yes, energy was something that the Japanese felt was worth going to war over. And we see that lesson repeated in the Middle East today. Energy is important. Energy is valuable. Energy is a precious commodity in the industrial age. And therefore, when we talk about energy, and we deal with energy and how we use it, where it comes from, we need to think about that critical analysis I talked about last week and really think our way through. So first it was coal. We had coal that powered steam ships that took the place of sailing ships. And then oil. And then oil took over diesel engines, big engines on ships. And we had a war over it. So when will we learn? Industrial revolution drove high speed change through the world. First it was coal that needed to be used for the heat and steam and then natural gas and oil. So today we've woken up from that industrial age that we've worked through with a, I call it a pollution hangover. We have a hangover from the bad side of energy, the bad side of oil, the bad side of coal. And we seem to have settled on electricity as the answer. And it certainly could be the clean answer if we do solar and wind and hydroelectric and maybe even the newer version of nuclear power, nuclear fusion, which is supposedly getting refined pretty well now to where it's really safe and can be scaled to a fairly small scale, maybe even to an individual home and give us clean power for many years without the after effects of spent fuel, spent radioactive fuel. But energy comes in many forms. And my early shows I talked about the physics term for energy includes basically the energy, the first law of thermodynamics. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes forms. And energy comes in many forms. Sometimes you need heat energy. Sometimes you need light energy. Sometimes you need mechanical energy or sound waves. And it turns out that electrical energy is one of the best forms of converting different kinds of energy like heat from coal and gas and things into electricity that can convert to do work that drives our society today, that runs our TVs and our computers and our washers and dryers and even our cars nowadays, our electric cars. And we're getting to a point where pretty soon you're going to see electric aircraft, you're going to see electric ships, submarines are already into a great degree electric ships. And it's fairly easy to make. But what if you make too much of too much electricity? You know, electricity has one characteristic that you got to use it when you make it or you got to store it. So how can you store it? And so when you find clean ways to make electricity, how do you store it so you can turn it back into clean electricity efficiently and safely? In other words, how do you best store electricity or maybe even a better way to look at it is, how do you best store electrons? I'm going to differentiate just pure electricity for electrons for a reason today. I think if you looked at storing energy in the form of the electrons that electricity comes from in all the atoms, you'd begin to see my point. Right now, we choose batteries as one of the first things that comes to mind when we do electrical storage because they're very efficient at storing and releasing energy on demand. But only the best answer. Batteries certainly have a lot of positive attributes. They're portable. They're safe. They're not super expensive and they're reliable. I mean, they're there when you need them. Unless you, of course, put three or four of them in a diesel flashlight and don't use a flashlight for two years, then they probably don't work too well. But, you know, they're generally speaking pretty darn reliable. The car battery in your car last years and it's great. You know what I mean? Batteries are awesome technology. And mainly, though, they're made of heavy materials. And so what you're really doing, again, getting back to the electron theory is you're storing electrons, which are pretty much weightless. I mean, literally a little packet of energy. But when we're storing it in the batteries, we're storing it in metals often or combinations of metals that we can retrieve those electrons and then push them back in and then retrieve them and push them back in. So if you're making it, if you're making batteries out of metals, where do the metals come from? Do they come? Do we have them here in the U.S. or do we have to import them? Do we mine them from the ground? And if it's several different kind of metals, are all the metals available? Do we have safety issues with mining the materials? Do we have ecological issues with mining the metals? So we have to keep looking at all those components of, you know, critical analysis I talked about last week when it comes to storing electrons. So we know how the, why batteries work best, but what we really, really want to do is store the electrons. And as many as we can store in the least amount of space and the least amount of weight. And that's it. So how do you store one of the smallest particles, if you even call it a particle, it's just a packet of energy. How can you store that smallest particle known to man and get that energy back out to do its work and do it cleanly, efficiently with all the good attributes that you could take away from the clean critical analysis theory we talked about. So let's think about it this way. If you were a scuba diver, air would probably be a really important thing you'd want to take with you diving. So you could go down below and you could breathe for 20 minutes, half hour, depending on how deep you're going. But you couldn't just put a balloon on your back with air in it because you'd be so buoyant, you'd be floating at the top. So although scuba divers need air, and theoretically you could take air on your back and go scuba diving, laws of physics don't let you do that because air is kind of, let's use a real technical term, fluffy compared to iron or something. So what we have to do is we have to compress that air and put it in a scuba tank. And that lets us store a bunch of air as a compressible gas in a scuba tank and put it on her back so we can go underwater and swim around freely and be pretty much neutrally buoyant as we go underwater. And that's kind of the concept I want to start thinking about when I talk about storing electrons. Why are we storing electrons in a really heavy instrument, a battery, because we're going to need a lot of electrons. If you're talking about the grid or you're talking about electric airplanes or electric trains or boats, you're going to have to store Boku electrons and you're not going to be able to do it if your metal storage capacity in batteries is weighing 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds, tons, depending on how big this thing is. So we want to think of using that scuba analogy as how we store our electrons. How would we store billions of electrons? Do we need big steel, heavy steel tanks? Well, maybe we do, but maybe not the way you think. Batteries are great at storing electrons, but the metals we use they wear out after a while. Sometimes the metals are hard to get. They're valuable and sometimes even poisonous. So what are my alternatives? There's other ways to store electrons. You can use flywheels. That takes energy and puts it into motion. But flywheels and spinning flywheels in motion, they store energy and they give it back to you really quickly, but they're even bigger and heavier than batteries. And while they're spinning, they're not even usable in transportation because they have so much centrifugal force in them that it would actually stop a vehicle from turning or it's the same thing that keeps the motorcycle upright. The wheels that are spinning, it's the same thing as a flywheel. They keep the bike from tipping over. That's how come bikes are so much more stable when they're moving. So the more energy you want to store, the heavier the flywheels would be. So let's go back to the scuba diver. Are there lessons that we can take away from that model? What would storing electrons look like? In the first place, it'd have to be simple molecular structure. If you were going to store electrons, where would you pick that electron from? Electrons are just parts of atoms. So what would you look for these things? All the undesirable elements that are in fuels are from atoms that you don't really need to use to get the electrons out. The carbon, the byproducts from burning fossil fuels and stuff, they give you carbon and other gases and CO2 and CO. So we don't really want to just pick any atom that has a bunch of electrons on it. We'd want to pick one that's non-toxic and environmentally friendly. We'd want it to be safe to transport. And by definition, it should be very light because all we want is the electrons. It should be made up mostly of just electrons. So what's the simplest, lightest and most plentiful element in the universe? I mean, if we're going to pick one, let's be idealistic. Let's pick which is probably the best one to use. How about the very first element on the periodic chart? How about hydrogen? How about green hydrogen, hydrogen made from clean electricity? Almost every country that has a water source or a solar available or wind can make a pretty good amount of their own electricity. And if we could make that electricity in abundance and we could store it in hydrogen, then we'd probably have a pretty clean solution. But what's the rest of the story on hydrogen? Hydrogen is always found attached to other atoms. So you can harvest hydrogen from a lot of different things. I mean, gasoline has hydrogen in it. Oil has hydrogen in it. People have hydrogen in them. But the simplest way to make hydrogen is to break that hydrogen oxygen bond in water. You know, good old H2O. Two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. That's water. How much water is there on the planet? There's lots of water. And you don't need to use all that water to make electricity, to make hydrogen. Because even when you use a hydrogen in a fuel cell, it gives you most of the water back. And the difference is there's some heat involved. So I'd like to put up a picture right now that shows you what a basic electrolyzer looks like. This is a real simple electrolyzer. And I did it. I used to actually have one of these when I worked for HCAT. And we'd always take it out when we do displays for schools or in public awareness things. Because most people just don't realize how simple it is to make hydrogen. Hydrogen, all this container consists of is, let's say, Donna's cookie jar from the big island. Of course, without the cookies because I ate them all. And if you look at the image again, on the right hand side, you see a steel wool pack on the end of a piece of copper with a connector on top connected to a black wire. And the same on the left is a steel wool with a copper wire connected to a red wire on the top. And there's water in that container filled up right almost to the top. There's a little airspace on the top there. And that is a basic electrolyzer. You can put other things into the water to make it more conductive. This one has a little bit of sodium hydroxide in there that I mixed in. Not very much because if you mix too much in, it's real caustic, but a little bit of sodium hydroxide. And that's a basic electrolyzer. So let me show you, not only is it simple, but this thing works basically, you can run it off of solar panels, you can run it off of DC batteries, you can run it off of wind turbines to make hydrogen. So if we can roll the video, this video shows what the hydrogen looks like coming off of your little electrolyzer. The left side has got a connector to the positive terminal on the battery and the right side is your negative terminal. And when you put the negative terminal on and get it connected, what happens is it'll start producing hydrogen. It looks like the image again. Can we show the video? There we go. So the video starts going. You can see that there's more bubbles coming off the right side because that's the hydrogen side and less bubbles coming off of the left side, which is the oxygen side. And of course, H2O, one oxygen bubble for every two hydrogen bubbles. That's why there's more bubbles coming off the right side. But you can see I have a little tiny 12-volt battery off on the side and that's all I'm doing is just connecting it to the terminals. And all an electrolyzer does, a commercial one, is it has a barrier that goes right down the middle between those two electrodes and it lets the current go between the two. But it keeps the bubbles separated left and right. They don't get all mixed up like they do in my little simple electrolyzer. And the hydrogen comes off. It's scrubbed and kept, keep most of the water and any oxygen flows over the hydrogen side. They turn it back into water and get it out of the electrolyzer. Then they run the hydrogen through what they call a desiccant that takes any more humidity out of it. And after that, they compress it, they store it, and it's ready to go into cars or industrial uses, or you can even cook with it. So as a word of caution, if you want to make one of those little electrolyzers like I had demonstrated there, you can. But I often use one word of caution. Hydrogen by itself is not flammable. But the gas that comes out of my little home-built electrolyzer is flammable because the oxygen and the hydrogen gas are mixed together. That's hydroxide. And what happens is that's flammable. Pure hydrogen is not flammable, but if you mix it with an oxidizer, it is flammable. So you don't want to put on that electrolyzer and get it going and crank out a bunch of hydrogen and oxygen atoms and have them floating around the top of that container and have a little spark in it, or it'll get your attention. It'll probably cover you with all the sodium hydroxide in that container and bust open your container, your little electrolyzer. So it's not to be fooled with, but I just wanted to show you how easy it is to make the hydrogen. And if you're going to make an electrolyzer like that, you should probably go into some books and do a little bit more studying so you can keep it safe and don't make too much of it either. So let's talk about safety compression and turning it back into water. When you do have the hydrogen in commercial use and you put it in a fuel cell, all you have to do to get it back into water is run it through the fuel cell. The fuel cell has platinum in it or something like platinum that's a catalyst, and the catalyst doesn't take part in a reaction or it doesn't get involved in making a new element. It just accelerates the hydrogen and oxygen getting back together into making water, but it doesn't actually turn into anything in the water. It just accelerates the reaction. So when we do have a fuel cell vehicle, basically the only thing that's coming out of the exhaust pipe is water. And the only thing coming off of the motor or the engine is some heat, which is a by product of that fuel cell, putting the hydrogen and oxygen back together to make water. It's a exothermic reaction. So it makes a little bit of heat, makes a little bit of water and gives you plenty of electricity. A lot of people also don't know that there's cars on the road today, production cars, not test cars, although there's plenty of those. There's test airplanes and test cars and test boats that all have hydrogen fuel cells in them, but there are production cars by Toyota and Hyundai that are on the road today, mostly in California because they have hydrogen stations, but they're going to be coming to Hawaii pretty soon and we're working on that. There's some here on Oahu that serve co-services and we're going to look at those later. So let's talk a little bit about what we do to match the hydrogen and the way of storing electrons versus just storing electricity, but storing electrons using hydrogen. Let's take that critical analysis theory and I'd like to put it in a kind of a format that I call sustainability. Sustainability is a real popular concept nowadays because sustainability means you can keep it going forever and ever. You don't run out of the sources, they're compatible with life, you don't put out pollution and things like that. So I kind of overlaid my critical analysis on sustainability and I broke them out into a couple major areas versus the origin of the source materials. You know those batteries that you're making, where the materials come from, the aluminum and the cars that you drive, where does that material come from? Whenever we're using critical analysis and we're talking sustainability, we have to make sure that the materials are number one. There's enough of them around that we can actually make all the stuff we want and not run out of the materials because as we all know, once a material gets scarce, it also gets expensive and it drives the price up. And on the other end is the material that we're using recyclable. At the end of life, can we turn it back around and remanufacture a newer model, maybe a more up-to-date model, using the same materials over and over again like glass, aluminum, and other metals and stuff that we can easily get like copper, we can recover from wires and pipes and things. Number two on sustainability and origins is how is it environmentally safe? One of the components in the current technology in batteries is cobalt. And you know, lithium is actually felt relatively rare. I mean, there's probably enough of it to do a lot of batteries, but you know, for another 50 years or so. But cobalt is actually fairly rare. Last time I checked with the US Geological Survey, the current rate we're using cobalt, it's only going to last us about 13 to 15 more years unless we find some sources that we haven't found already. And that's really kind of spooky. If we're looking at turning the millions and millions of cars, you know, in the United States into electric vehicles, and you only have 13 years worth of cobalt left and you're using cobalt in the batteries, and that's not too good. That's going to make it awful tough to be sustainable. Environmental factors, when you do mining for these metals and stuff, is it safe? Is it environmentally safe? Are you polluting streams? Are you putting trace metals down into your water table, your drinking table? Are you doing all this in some other country? Are you subjecting the laborers that maybe don't have OSHA or don't have federal regulations to protect them? Are you subjecting these other foreign laborers to serious health hazards just because their country isn't as conscientious as ours about taking care of our employees and the folks that work in our industries? So that comes into human rights violations, you know, when you would you want to buy something just because it's cheap in a country, but it's abusing the people that work there? I don't think in today's society that's acceptable. So that comes under the origin of materials and sources for these products. Next is the manufacturing process. When you do get your raw materials and you have to make them into tanks or batteries or cars or trucks or whatever you're making, computers, does the manufacturing process also end up being sustainable? Is it affordable? Is it affordable in terms of all the materials you got to put in there? And is there any waste? You know, most of the farming industry has a good motto for it in like when you raise pigs, use everything but the squeal. I mean, they use every part of that pig that they can because that's how you have to do things to be sustainable and keep prices where they need to be. So in the manufacturing process, it's got to be affordable. You have to have very little waste. Also has to be safe. Again, we don't want to be doing things in our manufacturing industries or other countries that's not good for human rights or the people that are working in our factories. It's also got to be clean. We don't want to have materials that are going to hurt the environment and introduce any kind of byproducts from the manufacturing process into our environment. How about using this product, whatever it turns out to be? Are there health issues with it? We talk about maybe RF energy from cell phones or we talk about radiation from microwave ovens or TVs or from radar sets and airplanes. When we use it, are we creating health issues or health hazards? And again, is it affordable? If it's something that only the rich people can afford, that creates some issues in society as well. And if it's sustainable, it's probably going to be affordable because we've kind of built that into the manufacturing and the materials process. Another thing on the use side is transportable. I come from an aviation background and in the aviation world, if it's heavy, it costs you. A big C5 or C17 military airplane can haul an incredible amount of cargo and you usually fill the airplane up before you'll keep it from taking off. But the problem is the heavier that airplane gets, the more fuel it uses to get where it's going. So although it can take a real heavy load, it costs you a lot of money and fuel to get it in place. So if what we're making can be transportable, it'll be cheaper to ship. It'll be cheaper to use if it's in our transportation sector. That's why Ford built their F-150s with aluminum because aluminum is lighter, makes the whole vehicle more transportable, which saves you on fuel. And again, there's always a safety factor. And the last components that I have in here are end-of-life disposal. So at the end of life, you have a couple of issues. Number one, if it's materials that are hazardous to begin with, you have to make sure that they're handled properly. And in a lot of cases, like I mentioned CFL lightbulbs last week, that's not the way to do it because if you're just mass producing things that people are going to throw in the trash, you just take that hazmat and throw it in the landfills and end up polluting your own water. So we should always look towards end-of-life, either to have a system to recover hazardous materials that's reliable, like a turn-in process, like recycling cans or recycling glass. You should have to recycle batteries in a convenient way, not a way that you have to go pay for. You have to go find somebody that'll take it, like oil. There's people that charge you to recycle oil. That's crazy. So that's the discussion on on critical analysis and life cycle, but getting back to storing electrons. And I've been studying energy stuff for probably over a decade. And people know that I'm a hydrogen person. And I have a hard time putting in a short elevator speech, why? But it's like that scuba tank. For me, hydrogen is critical. It's really abundant. It's recyclable. It's non-toxic. It does everything that we talked about in today's show. And it stores an awful lot of those electrons to be turned back into electricity. And that's why I think we should be doing it. Because just like today's December 7th, and we don't need to be fighting any more wars over oil or other energy or metals to make batteries out of even, we need to be reminded by history that everything that we do has a consequence. And when it comes to energy and energy storage and the kind of vehicles we drive, we need to take our time, make good decisions with critical analysis, and do what's right. And I think hydrogen's the right thing to do. That's going to wrap it up for Stanley Energy Man this week. And we'll be talking to you next week, Tuesday. Until then, Allah.