 the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter for the show is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is now a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guests. Coming back again after several multiple appearances, Toby Kincaid. Toby is the publisher for his newest adventure, Green Hydrogen Today magazine. So today, we're going to discuss the logic of green hydrogen and why it's the key to decarbonizing our energy system. So, Toby, welcome back to the show. Hello, Commander. Good to be with you. So, let's get a little bit of your background. So, you know, I get your monofinis out there. Why are you qualified to talk about hydrogen? So, you know, how long have you been in the hydrogen game? Well, about 30 years. I think 27 to 30 years, something like that. I have a solar company, Solardyne, and I joined the National Hydrogen Association in the early 90s. I think that's where I met you, in fact, at the Board of Directors meeting in Washington, DC. Yeah, you know, it was very exciting, the idea of using solar energy to make clean hydrogen. And I remember in the board meeting, I was kind of pitching this, and a lot of people in the room were kind of chemical companies and air products and sort of things like that, fossil fuel guys, and they literally kind of laughed me out of the room. I said, no, they didn't want anything to do with that. So, that kind of set me into a course of, hmm, okay, well, we'll see about that. So, in recent times, just this last year formed Green Hydrogen Today. It's a magazine, but I built it as an app, so it would be available all over the world through the Apple App Store and Google Play. And this magazine has been really interesting. We're in a dozen countries, people are responding, they realize that there's something afoot here, that we're in a very special moment in history that will never get back. And so, you know, from being a little kid and growing up and looking at the world and knowing more about the world, you know, this is a tough place. And our energy system is toxic. And if we keep spewing as we have for 300 years, eventually some generation is going to have to pay the piper, and that day has come. Right. So tell our audience, so, and let's just pull up that first slide. What's driving the interest in hydrogen today? Well, the world has spoken up. Now, the IPCC, this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It started 26 years ago in 1995 in a meeting in Berlin, where climate change was starting to be discussed. And the idea of the IPCC is they come out with an assessment every five or six years and kind of it's designed to help policymakers make policy. Now, this report that came out in August is a stunning assessment because it's bad news. We are in trouble, big trouble. And so, what they've reported is that, you know, we're now at 1.1 degrees average surface temperature increase. And we're on a road to 1.5. They're pointing out if we do not make aggressive changes in decarbonization, if we just want to play around, then you've got about eight years left in terms of the carbon budget. So if we don't, what they're saying is if we don't actually actually decarbonize, not just talk about it or do little things, but actually approach the big questions that we're going to see keep domes and polar vortexes every summer and winter. Now, in Portland, in June, we had the heat dome. And in my zip code, you know, we're a city that zip codes are very large. We lost 40 neighbors dead. So climate disruption ended their life. It's real enough to them and to their families. And that's just the microcosm of what we're facing. So this code read by the IPCC is saying it's unequivocal anthropogenic carbon. That's what we're doing is not only causing climate change. It's really climate disruption. And what was alarming in this language is they're talking about tipping points. They're talking about the Amazon now becoming a net carbon producer, not a heat, not a carbon sink. 15 to 20% of all the carbon in the natural world is absorbed by the Amazon. Not anymore. It's been deforested, it's been cut down, it's been burned up. And we're at a tipping point. And the really alarming thing that they talked about was compound extreme events. This is where, like in Oregon, we had drought, we had high temperatures, everything dried out, and then we get dry lightning, and now you have wildfires. And when we get an east wind event, it's faster than you can run. You know, it takes centuries to grow a forest in about 38 minutes to see it burn down. That's horrible. And on the west coast, we've been just burning up. And this is at 1.1. What the IPCC is saying to the policymakers of the governments around the world, look, this is code red. We've talked about it, but now this is it. It's unequivocal. We are trashing the place. Half a degree doesn't sound like a lot. But it's only gone up, it's like, is it reaction? Oh, gee, it's only gone up one degree or 1.1 degree. Why should I be worried about that? Well, you're exactly right. You know, when the scientists talk about these numbers, you know, for the entire volume of the ocean to go up one degree is so much energy. So that's what's misleading. A lot of people are hearing everything from everyone, all the special interests. Oh, we can wait. It won't be a problem. Well, it's a problem. The last storm hurricane that with the United States has estimated $80 billion in damage, you know, over a week. So if the world faces a bad growing season, if we have a crop failure, we're going to see major disruption. It's going to be terrible. It is becoming terrible. So it's a wake up call to the world that we can't talk anymore. It's not a talk fest. We need to get moving. And what they did is they outlined a couple of scenarios. Well, if you take it kind of lightly, here's what's going to happen in 10 years. If you take it seriously, here's what we could do. But what's scary about it is they said our carbon budget is only eight more years. Now, what's really startling about this is that for the last 50 years, we've lost 80% of the species around freshwater bodies, lakes, streams, rivers, 80, they're gone. You're never getting them back. It'll take who knows how long if the earth ever could recover. So we are, you know, we're in a free fall. And everyone has to remember it's not the fall that gets you. It's the sudden change of direction. So we're in a crisis as real as any world war could be, but we're not mobilizing. We're still talking about it. And you have a lot of entrenched interests that want to delay. And this is what the problem is becoming. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about all the colors of hydrogen. This is kind of really confusing. You know, I've heard discussions that this is all like putting all these colors in is just on purpose to actually confuse people so that they don't focus on the real hydrogen that we want, which is green hydrogen. So, but I don't want to take the words out of your mouth. That's, that's, that's right. And for example, I, you know, I monitored because I published a magazine I'm monitoring, monitoring at media all over the world. I attended a sustainable energy Europe conference a few weeks ago where they, by the way, never mentioned lithium ion. We'll get to that. They're all talking about hydrogen. But what was a little bit disturbing was actually an American speaker high up in the federal government in the energy department. And they were saying, look, let's just forget about these colors. Hydrogen is hydrogen. Do you make it with nuclear? That's fine. If you make it with gray, which is the fossil fuels way whatever. It's not the color. And I was struck by that horrified. Because that to me, that's like saying, well, you know, there's weak bread. And then there's like leached white bread, but they're both bread. Why concern yourself with ingredients? What? Now folks, ingredients matter. How you produce hydrogen matters. So the color really is important. And what we have on this little diagram is kind of going from black hydrogen, which is just burning fossil fuels. And the energy is not in the carbon, it's in the hydrogen stuck to it. We call that black hydrogen, purple or pink sometimes called as when you use nuclear energy to make hydrogen. Well, but that's the most expensive way to do it, because nuclear energy is the most expensive energy on the world on the planet. So that's really not an economically viable idea. And then you get to the other colors brown, where you're going to gasify coal. It's kind of an older style. And then you get to gray. Now, gray is the color of the world right now, because 97% of all the hydrogen produced is made from fossil fuel. And it's a terrible process, very dirty. You're going to produce 10 tons of CO2 for every one ton of hydrogen. Now, this is a huge industry already, we've been making hydrogen for 100 years this way. So that is what we need to change. And now they've come up with some other colors. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky, because now the oil industry, the fossil fuel business is saying, okay, okay, okay, you don't like the gray heart. How about blue? Now, we're going to still stay keep our business, we're going to still make it out of fossil fuel. But we'll, you know, stash it somewhere. Yeah, that's it. We'll hide the CO2, we'll stick it in the ground. And I've heard engineers come up and say, well, you know, for 1000 years, it'll stay safely under. Well, how do you know when if there's a seismic event that breaks it open, and then what we're going to leave toxic time bombs for future generations, where billions of tons of CO2 will suddenly erupt? Okay, now, so what's happening politically, and especially in this European conference, is that it started out when you look at the EU policy, they're all for green hydrogen, because they know that means clean energy, making clean fuel. But there's a lot of political and economic influence by the oil industry, which wants to keep their business, they don't want to change. It's just the way it is. So they're pushing for blue. And what I'm beginning to see is that public resources designed for clean energy, so called, are going to be hijacked by the industry who's connected with these funders, and with the government officials, because they all work together. And they're going to say, give us the billions and we'll figure out blue hydrogen. Oh, that's a, that's a disaster. What we have to do is keep the focus. If we lose that focus, and there's no way we can, we're going to solve this problem. And what the IPCC said is if we don't solve this problem this decade, there's nothing you can do. We're going to hit 1.5. And then the earth requires about 30 years to recover. So even if we stop today, which won't happen. But if we did, we still have a problem. So this is actually, you know, I don't know, everyone knows the word suicide. I don't know if there's a word for civilization, suicide to it's a civicide. We need new words. But we are about to lose it. And it's very important that we realize where we are in history. You know, many times in my life, I've been at the right place at the right time and never realized it at the moment. It's only in hindsight. I wish I said something different or did something different. Well, we're at the right place at the right time and we have to realize it. So this is good news because there's an enormous economic opportunity when you change the world. And it's that profit that we should focus on and the companies that are organizing, there are billion dollar projects being announced. But what I notice is that the private sector is going green hydrogen because they don't want any liability. They don't want any carbon tax future impact or any other kind of liability. But the governments and the entrenched industries are kind of pushing for the blue. So we have to go green and keep that focus is really the most important idea, I think. Let's throw up the next slide. And let's talk about the logic of that, Coby, like the logic behind green hydrogen. How do you come to that conclusion? Well, that's what it came from my frustration because I'm hearing so many things. And for example, in America, when we talked about electrifying transportation, everyone is talking about batteries, the Elon Musk Tesla kind of model. Well, there's a problem with that and it's called basic math. I looked up, I was curious, how much lithium is mined in the world? Well, not lithium, carbonate, no compounds. I mean, the actual metal, apple sap, how much? Well, it was about 84,000 tons per year. Okay. Well, how much does a large battery, all battery bank require? How much lithium is in it? The number I got, you have to dig, it's about 16 kilograms. That comes to about 35 pounds. Okay. So now let's just do a simple calculation. Take the total amount you have, divide it by the number you need per car, and that'll tell you any cars you can do. Well, if you do the math, it comes out to about 5 million. That means if we used every bit of lithium metal in the world, you could make about 5 million cars per year. Well, we have a billion cars in use today. So that's not going to cut it. We're not going to make it. So this is where I was trying to struggle with how do we communicate, how do we cut through everything? And let's just go to the logic of the situation. So let's go through this chart. Let me, let me, let's take three questions from everyone in the audience. Please answer this as you would wish, and let's see where we go. So if you zoom in, you'll see that the first question is, okay, transportation, you have two choices. Do you want to do the internal combustion engine, which we, which 98% of the world does right now, or do you want to electrify? That's the first question. So let's just take that one. Well, let's say electrify because the internal combustion engine is not very efficient. It's very expensive. And the most important problem is it spews toxicity. It really reminds me of a hippo in the savannah. Have you ever seen a hippo walk out? I haven't seen it personally, but I've seen film of it. They go on land during the night to go forage, but they mark their territory with their little tails spin like a little propeller, spraying out all of their scent. Well, that's what we do. Have you ever watched a truck go up a hill? You get this huge spewing, but we are just spinning our tails everywhere, spewing out toxicity. But it's not ethical. It's actually not profitable in the full sense because you're going to get in trouble. So the first question is, okay, do you want electric to electrify? Now, let's say for purposes of argument, the answer is yes. Okay. So now we get to the second question. Do you want that electrification to be all battery type or fuel cell type? Because they're completely different, completely different infrastructure. And before we spend billions of dollars down a garden path, perhaps we should ask the question, which way do you want to do it? Now, if you say, like Elon Musk would say probably, I assume, hey, we're going to do everything with batteries. We're going to do trucks with batteries. We're going to do power plants with batteries. We're going to do semis with batteries. No, you're not. Well, you can do a few. Maybe you could even do a million. But there's a billion cars. That's thousand times more of that figure. So we have to be careful that we ask the right questions because you never get answers better than the questions you ask. You have to ask the right question. So we went to the first question and that was do you want to electrify? Let's say yes. Now, the second question is, okay, which flavor, which type? All battery or fuel cell. Both are electric vehicles. But on the all battery type, I put a little underneath it. I said it's a dead end because one, you just don't have the materials. Folks, we just don't have 20 Earths. We got one. And the people that are mining don't really want to increase their output because it's a supply and demand. They get a higher price, the more demand. They don't have any incentive to double our output, which would be a disaster anyway because when we get the materials, nickel, lithium, cobalt, it's usually in cobalt. It's a horrible child labor issue. And in terms of nickel, a lot of it comes from Indonesia and they're not really keen on following the rules just as a matter of reality. So you have a lot of dumping and pollution and all kinds of spoiling. So there's nothing sustainable about lithium ion. Nothing. It doesn't even recycle very well because you've got all these ions infused in the matrix, very tough to break all that stuff out. It takes a lot of energy. So unfortunately, these sexy sports cars, and they're a beautiful car, Model S, beautiful car, but and it's great for a sports car, but it is not an answer for electrifying transportation. Not even close. You're not talking about construction equipment, farm equipment, mining equipment. These things take a lot of energy and the battery banks would be larger than your payload. You just can't do it. So you don't see any. But you have this company kind of enchanting the American thinking because at the European conference, they never once mentioned at three day conference, not one speaker mentioned lithium because these guys know that the Europeans and the Asia Pacific players have understood and they're they're following Hawaii's lead when Hawaii said, Hey, we're going to be clean energy. They kind of all went, Hey, you know, that's kind of a good idea given the situation. And so the first country, the keynote speaker was from this country, Portugal, was the first country in the world to follow you. You were the first state, but they're the first country that said, you know, we're going to be clean by mid century. But again, the problem here is it's very easy to promise what your children are going to do. But it's going to be a much bigger problem. They're not going to be able to solve it. We have to solve it now. So this idea of talking about the mid century to me is kind of nonsensible. We have to focus on this decade and we have to transform the entire industrial base in eight years or it's over. It's not going to be pleasant future in the case of what is coming. And that's what this IPCC assessment was so different than any other thing. In the old times, they'd say, You know, we think there's a problem. We're going to study it and get back to you. Well, they got back to us. So, oh, yeah, let's continue then. Okay, so the question becomes, are you going to go with all battery or are you going to do the fuel cell? Now let's say for purposes of argument, since we don't have enough materials to even do 1% of the fleet, let alone 5%. So do you want to put billions of dollars into a 5% solution? Or do you want to put that resource into a 95% solution? Well, I'm going to assume that a logical person would say, well, let's do a 95% solution. So again, the answer to the second question is fuel cell. So now we get to the real rub. Here's the big question. Number three, how do you make your hydrogen? Are you going to make it with gray hydrogen? You're going to make it with blue hydrogen, which is kind of a farce. Nobody knows. There's no ubiquitous technology that will sequester CO2 in all of the major industrial bases where we're pumping it out. So it's misdirection. It's really intended to take public money and enhance fossil fuel business. I'm sorry to be a little rough about it, but that's what it is. So the reason why, now question number three, you have several choices, two choices here. You can make green hydrogen, which is non-toxic, no carbon, no CO2, no greenhouse gases, no particulates, no NOx, no SOx, no mercury, nothing. It's water vapor. You could drink it. It's pure water. Or are you going to make it with all these other colors, which is incredibly polluting? So if the objective is that your children can live in a world that you recognize, the logic is inescapable to me. And I thought with this kind of logic tree, we could kind of get through all of the different private interests and bones to pick and just focus on what is going to solve our world. Because the bottom line is it takes a lot of energy to live as a modern human. A lot. Every calorie we buy from a supermarket, it took 10 calories of energy to get it there and process it and so forth. So this is a big deal. And we only have this moment right now. And when I heard the executives from BP who had very beautiful slides, I mean, it was really very polished. But they're saying, you know, we think blue hydrogen is the way to go. I immediately could see, oh, there's so much money now being put on the table for clean energy. What's happening is they're changing the language. Instead of zero emission, now the code is low carbon hydrogen. Oh, low carbon hydrogen or net zero. Net zero emission, not zero emission. There's a difference. Zero emission is zero emission. But net zero means, okay, I can make it out of fossil fuel and bury it or try and stick it somewhere so you don't see it. And even for a little while, get all the carbon credits, all the money that the governments are now making available to this kind of nonsense. And they're going to take all of the public resources and that's it. And for me, this is personal. I have two little nieces. They're four kids a button. But I realized if they're going to be my age, it's going to be 2080. So whatever we do, my little nieces are going to have to live with it. So personal now. But everyone has people we love, right? We love species. We love our earth. But we are the virus. We are consuming it. We're like locusts. We're scraping, digging, fracking, burning, blah, blah, blah, as much as you get everything you get, scream. We'll just go for it, burn it. Hey, time to grow up. We have to grow up and realize if you love your children, you have to understand the seriousness of the situation. Everyone in Oregon, at least under that heat dome, we get it. That was crazy town. 25% of us don't have air conditioning because you would never need air conditioning for maybe a week or something. But these are old buildings. We don't have air conditioning. So when everything was 116 degrees, it killed me. Yeah, it was really brutal. We had it. It was a weekend. We had Sunday, excuse me, Friday was 102. That's hot. That's warm. Hot for us. Then Saturday was 108. And that was a new record. Then Sunday it was 113. And of course, it's not cooling off at night. And then Monday was 116. Those four days killed a lot of people, my neighbors. And I was suffering myself. I could tell you that's really pretty tough. I was unprepared. I didn't know what to do, how to cool off. When you're that hot and everything you touch is too hot to handle, oh, we got a problem, folks. So the IPCC has finally come clean and finally said, look, you either fix this or you're going to perish from it. No way. It's very much like going into a drosh, turning on a car, closing the door. And you can debate how long you live, maybe five minutes, 20 minutes. Hey, maybe some people say, hey, we can last an hour. Good for you. But the conclusion, the outcome is entirely the same. You will perish. Well, we're doing that 100 million times with all the garage door opens. And we only have this thin little veil of atmosphere and ocean. We're in trouble, folks. That's what the IPCC is saying. Code red. Not A, maybe you should think about it. No, get busy. We have to do it. Now back to that logic. Let's take a look at that logic tree. On the third question, why do we want to make green hydrogen? Well, here's the reason. If you just have an all battery situation like the Tesla model, you can't make steel with batteries. You can't make cement with batteries. You can't make ammonia with batteries. Those three items are about a fifth of the entire world's pollution. Those three things come together. It's huge. And when they're making steel, they're burning coal to get the heat to work it. When you're making cement, you're actually breaking up a bunch of rocks and burning them so that they become from limestone, they get the lime. Then you add a bunch of other stuff. Cement takes so much energy. And we're just going gangbusters because the economy has grown in the last 30 years. Ever since the dot com, business around the world has been going up and up and up. And the amazing thing is in Singapore, 5% of the entire electrical production of Singapore goes to data centers. Those are server farms. Yeah, right. And it keeps on getting growing and growing and growing exponentially almost. We're coming into about our last minute. Oh, no. I'm sorry, I've took so long. Believe it or not, we're there. I had a couple of questions for you, but we don't have time to either pose them or answer them. But I want to wind up to our last slide, which is an opportunity for you to give a pitch on green hydrogen today magazine. So let's show it, throw it up. Oh, thank you. Those are our four covers. We've passed our fourth edition now. We're quarterly. We've had all kinds of neat little little features to make it as an app more useful. And the idea is this is a tool. This is where people can find each other. So I've added an industry directory, the first green hydrogen industry directory I'm aware of. And now if you want electrolyzers or fuel cells or contractors or system integrators, now I'm putting a list of those companies that do that around the world. If you want green hydrogen law, I've got the law firms that deal with these things. So if you'd like to get a copy, please do, you can download it for free, which will give you previews on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Or it's like a $15 a year to subscribe. Each issue is maybe four bucks. Yeah, it's like $4 in addition. You publish it four times a year, right? That's right. We're quarterly at the moment until we can get enough momentum to go monthly or bi-monthly then monthly and then as often as we can. But we're building our base. And I've had some great feedback. People are keen on this. And so I'm very grateful for the opportunity to share it. And it's on getting better Toby. I mean, I got your first edition and now we're on the fourth. And it keeps on getting better and better if you get better and better. So thank you so much. I highly recommend you go and look at the green hydrogen today magazine. It's really good. And you get more of Toby and Kate and his interesting angle on how he views things. So time to wrap it up. So Toby, thank you very much for coming on the show again. This is really great stuff. Very, very thought provocative, provoking. And I'm sure there's some people out there that probably don't agree with you. And if they don't agree with you or whatever, let us know and challenge us. Absolutely. You know, there's probably some things you've said in there that people like would want to challenge you on and let's have at it. Let the fur fly. Okay. So Toby, about the logic behind why green hydrogen is going to save the planet. Thanks for participating. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Mitch Ewan. We'll be back in two weeks with another exciting edition of Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy. So Aloha and thanks again, Toby. Thank you. Aloha.