 And welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osserman here. I'm going to be live from the beautiful downtown Honolulu Pioneer Plaza. And just a reminder, Think Tech is having their fall fun drive here. And if you like the programming here on Think Tech, please consider donating a tax deductible to Think Tech Hawaii. So for today's show, I've been working in hydrogen for probably a total of 10 years now. And I get a lot of questions about hydrogen. What I decided for today's show is I'd like to just go through hydrogen as a kind of a hydrogen 101 and answer the general questions about hydrogen. So that's how I'm going to approach today's show. And I've got a couple of videos and a couple of charts that I think you find really interesting. So first of all, hydrogen, why are we talking about hydrogen? I mean, hardly anybody really thinks about hydrogen as energy storage or how do you get electricity from hydrogen? Is it safe? Is it an atomic bomb? Is it this really cosmic science? And people get really nervous or they just don't know anything about hydrogen. The cool thing about hydrogen is it's the very most common element in the universe. In fact, if you remember from your chemistry class, if you look on a periodic chart of all the different atoms that there are, the first one is hydrogen. It's a very, very light, very small atom. Hard to contain, hard to keep in pressurized containers unless you design them to simply get a hold of hydrogen because it's really tiny and it's very lightweight. That turns out to be a big advantage in a lot of cases. But being the most abundant element in the universe, you go then, why don't we just have hydrogen like all over the place? What is all over the place? The problem is it's attached to everything. There's hydrogen in everything. Most of the molecules that make up everything in your world will have hydrogen. Anything organic probably has hydrogen in it. In fact, some of the things that are made of hydrogen that you probably wouldn't think about that are real simple, number one, the most abundant one is water, H2O, one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. It's everywhere. Salt water is H2O with some sodium in it. And then you have methane. The natural gas that we pull out of the earth that some vehicles run on is CH4, one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. And then you have ammonia. Ammonia, yeah, the stuff you clean your house with is NH3. It's just nitrogen, which by the way, most of the air you breathe is nitrogen. There's only about 16 to 20% oxygen in the air that you breathe. The rest of it's nitrogen and other trace elements, or trace gases, and three hydrogen atoms. In fact, one of the cool things that people don't realize is if you make ammonia, you can use it in fertilizer, but it also makes hydrogen easier to ship instead of making liquid hydrogen or some other kind of hydrogen that's more, let's say, shipable. But anyway, hydrogen is a really, really amazing element. You can use it as a gas to cook, like natural gas. You can actually use it in burners, and I'll have a video on that a little bit later on. But you can also use it in what's called a fuel cell. And a fuel cell is basically a battery that's self-charging. It's a battery that takes oxygen into one side and hydrogen into the other side. And like I said, hydrogen is very rarely found by itself. The hydrogen wants to combine with oxygen and make it back into water. So they put it in a special thing called a fuel cell. And when the hydrogen tries to cross over from its side to the other side to make water, the equipment only lets the center part of the atom go through. It's called a permeable membrane. It's a proton exchange membrane. The proton of the hydrogen can get through the membrane. But the electrons can't when they're together. So they go through a wire to get to the oxygen side. And that gives you an electric current. It gives you a path with electricity running through it. And that's how we capture electricity out of hydrogen as it's trying to make water. So when you use that process to make electricity with hydrogen and oxygen, the only thing you get is electricity, heat, and water. And that's amazing. That's how come when you have a hydrogen car, it's totally clean. It's totally carbon-free. So if you use solar energy or wind power to make something clean to make your electricity, and then you use electrolysis, which is splitting water to get your hydrogen, and then you put the hydrogen back into a car or back into a stationary fuel cell to put electricity back on your power grid, no carbon at all. What's the other great thing about it? It's free. Every country on the planet has hydrogen. There is no buddy that has a monopoly on hydrogen. What I like to do is start off this section by showing you a video I've shown on the show before, a short video, but for those of you that aren't familiar with hydrogen, this is a great video to get you oriented on hydrogen. Hydrogen. The simplest element and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe, so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure. And they're limited. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat, and electricity. Easily transported, hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released, and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles, and can last for decades. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean, and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. I really love that video because it just puts it all together in a really understandable format. But there's still some things that the video doesn't explain much about hydrogen that make it really, really a great option for storing energy and helping with our transportation and our grid. One of the things that helps is scalability. Hydrogen is really interesting. It can be scaled down to like cell phone size electric charging and all the way up to megawatt scale grid energy. So it's just a great, great, safe way to store energy, small scale or large scale. On the large scale, it's actually much, much more cost effective now. But the technology is getting so much better at the small scale, I wouldn't be surprised if you'll see cell phones running on hydrogen and not too distant in the future. So what is one of the other advantages? Like I say, nobody owns the hydrogen. So think about the world's wars that we've had in the last 50 years. Almost all of them have been over raw materials, particularly oil or natural gas. Most of our international diplomacy and the issues that we have, trade issues that we have with other countries all center around energy because energy is what's needed for all the post-industrial revolution machinery and equipment and manufacturing that we do. So can you imagine a world where there's no oil to fight over, no natural gas to fight over and all your energy is carbon free? That's another great advantage to hydrogen. A lot of people don't realize how safe hydrogen is and later on I've got a video on this, but it's actually very, very safe. And I've got a couple of videos that I've shown on past shows that talk about it, but it's much safer than most people think. Hydrogen is so buoyant, so light, that it actually goes straight up at 45 miles an hour. By the time it's released from wherever it's being stored in a bottle or a tank or something, it barely has time to mix with any oxygen to get to the point where it's flammable. And pure hydrogen isn't flammable. It won't burn, it doesn't explode. But if you think about things like the Hindenburg where everybody points to and says, oh, the Hindenburg were good, hydrogen's dangerous, it's explosive, well then why aren't pieces of the Hindenburg all over New Jersey and Connecticut and New York and Pennsylvania? The Hindenburg didn't explode, it burned, and most of what was burning was the surface of the Hindenburg itself which had a very flammable surface to it. And the hydrogen actually helped save lives in the Hindenburg, and people don't understand that either. I've got a couple of links in other shows that show that. The hydrogen is scalable, it's ubiquitous, that means everybody's got it, you're not going to have wars over it, and it's very safe. It's also really simple to make, so I have a really, really short video, sorry it's a little out of focus, I'll have to redo it. But this video shows you how simple it is to make hydrogen. Literally, this is a 12-volt motorcycle battery, about two quarts of water, a little bit of salt in the water to make it a good electrolyte, and a couple of electrodes that I was experimenting with made of carbon fiber. For those of you that don't know, carbon fiber will conduct electricity. In fact, it's as good a conductor if not better than copper. And so anyway, this little video shows you how easy it is to make hydrogen. This is all done with the battery was the most expensive piece of this whole thing. The container that I have the water in was a cookie jar from Costco. The wires and the conductors probably total about $1.50 worth of materials. And we're making hydrogen on the desktop. So the video shows two electrodes, one making a lot of little bubbles and the other one making a few big bubbles. And so we'll run the video and I'll explain what those are after the video. You notice the little electrode on the left? It was making tons of bubbles. And that's because there's a lot of surface area on that little carbon fiber electrode that I made. And it's the negative terminal on the battery. And the salt water transmits electricity between the positive and the negative electrodes. And on the positive electrode is the oxygen coming off of that electrode. So all you have to do to make hydrogen from water is make sure that those electrodes are close enough together that the water is conductive enough and that you don't have to put salt in it or anything. You can put sodium hydroxide, you can put salt, you can just have regular water. But the more conductive it is, the more reaction you get from the water. And as the water is used up, you can replace the water and you don't have to put in more salt or more sodium hydroxide because it's not used in the reaction, at least not very much of it. And you can make hydrogen right on your desktop. I've shown people how to make hydrogen with a 9 volt battery and two paperclips and a plastic cup of water in it on their desk. It's that easy. So it's really simple to make. And the equipment that makes hydrogen on a commercial level is very sophisticated but it's also very capable and very safe. So I tell you what, we're coming up on a break time here. Let's take a real quick break. And then when we come back, we'll talk about the safety aspects of hydrogen. Hi guys, I'm your host Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3pm and this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health regarding your health and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So do join me. I look forward to seeing you and Aloha. Aloha. My name is Becky Sampson and I'm the host of It's About Time. On the Think Tech Hawaii, a digital nonprofit organization that's raising public awareness. Join us on Wednesday at 2pm where we talk about real issues. Some of the topics will include entrepreneurship, health, life skills and growing your business. So once again, this is Becky Sampson on It's About Time. On Wednesday at 2pm on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Manager on Think Tech and we're talking about hydrogen and I was just getting ready to talk about some more safety aspects of hydrogen. One of my very favorite demonstrations of hydrogen is conducted by Paul Ponteo from Blue Planet Research over on the Big Island of Hawaii. And I've actually got a couple little video clips of them but this is the first one I shot and I shot it with some folks from my office I used to work at which is Hcat. And it's just a great demonstration that really gives you the full picture on how safe hydrogen really is. So we'll roll this video and let it speak for itself. The spell some of the myths about hydrogen because most people are afraid of hydrogen. Most people think it's the most explosive thing on the planet and that if you have a small leak in a hydrogen system then it's just destined to explode and burn down building it. Well, the reality is is that since it's the lightest element in the universe it's 14 times lighter than air. It goes up at 45 miles an hour when it's let loose. That's 66 feet a second. So think about it going 1,001 and it's six stories away from it. It's gone. And because of that it's very difficult to get a concentration that's flammable at the source of a leak unless you're right at the leak source. And what we do in the classroom is we do it by showing this. So you got a really audible major leak of hydrogen. It's blowing out right now like crazy. And most people would think it's a spark it's going to blow up. Well, it'll blow the flame up if I get close enough to it right now. It won't ignite until I get down closer to where it's concentrated enough. But as it's leaking out it's hitting the ceiling of this building and it's going out then and then. So before I lit it, the hydrogen that had leaked out already left the building. It's gone. It's moving really, really fast. So the other cool thing about hydrogen is that since there's no carbon in it it's just purely hydrogen. And it's a little windy in here. But there's no radiant heat. And because of that you can put your finger about an eighth inch from the flame and there's no heat, it won't burn. But above right here it's 500 degrees plus. It's very hot. And if you come here you can actually put your hands over and you can feel the humidity in the flame. It's making water break out of the oxygen in the air. I'll turn it down a little bit. The other thing is the other big myth or misunderstanding is not a myth is that hydrogen is invisible when it burns. Well it is outside. So if we took this in the sunlight you wouldn't see the flame. But indoors in subdued light it burns orange. And nighttime it burns bright orange. Yeah, I mean I can get really, really close. And this tubing will actually, it's actually colder than room temperature right here. It's hot by the jet but it's pulling the heat out of the air and cooling down. That was my fat right hand sitting in the last part of that video. I can contest to you without a doubt that you can put your fingers within an eighth of an inch of the side of that flame and it doesn't radiate any heat. You put your fingers 10 inches above that flame and they're cooked in about two seconds. That flame is about 500 degrees just above it. So hydrogen safety is actually a lot safer than most people think. Almost all of the fuels that we deal with gasoline, propane, methane, they all are liquids that tend to hover right around the surface and their vapors rise up and that's all flammable. Hydrogen goes so quickly like you saw when Paul first started his hydrogen tank up. It goes so quickly that just two or three feet above it it would blow the flame out of his lighter because it's just zooming right by and there's not enough oxygen mixed in there to burn. It's only down near the very opening where the flame is where it's mixing with oxygen till where it can burn. So it's really, really much safer than most people realize. In the fire departments that we've trained to deal with hydrogen car crashes, by the time they finish the training they're much bigger fans of hydrogen and gasoline or even natural gas vehicles. So another thing that I always get asked is why would we want to use hydrogen when it's not as efficient as batteries? In other words, if you took all that electricity that you had to take to make hydrogen and you made hydrogen, you'd only get back about maybe 50 to 60% of that energy when you turn it back into electricity and the rest of it's gone in heat and why would you want to not use batteries instead of hydrogen? And that's a really good question. You want to have batteries and hydrogen but the question is can we really afford the huge batteries, literally the ton of batteries that goes into a car? And what are some of the other issues with batteries? I like to use the term fully burdened cost. The fully burdened cost of anything is what you've got to consider before you use it. I'll use this as an example. The fully burdened cost of the little fluorescent light bulbs that we got, the CFLs, compact fluorescent light bulbs. Everybody was sold on these little ice cream looking light bulbs that were supposed to last forever and they were really energy efficient and everybody went great and then the government subsidized it and everybody bought all those CFLs. There's millions of them out there. They're full of mercury and people are throwing them in the rubbish and the rubbish is going to the landfill and the landfill is gonna leach all the mercury and the mercury is gonna end up in your water. Why didn't we figure that out before we went with CFLs and fluorescent light bulbs? That all that mercury is gonna end up in the dumpster someplace. I hope people breathing it when those bulbs break in the big dumpster in the commercial side. That's part of the fully burdened cost. What are the costs? What is the cost of the environment when you harvest the raw materials? What is the cost in health when the material is breathed in or the bulbs break or whatever? What's the cost of making a battery in terms of where do you get all the materials from and how do you process it and how much pollution and stuff do you get making batteries? It's just, it's gotta be considered. It's part of the fully burdened cost. Another thing is I say the economy of scale will at some point run into the law of supply and demand. In other words, I keep hearing that lithium batteries are gonna get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper when we start using more and more and more of them because of economy of scale. In other words, as you make bigger batches of them the price goes down. Well, the problem is not only is lithium a fairly rare substance, but the cobalt that they use with lithium to make the current type batteries that we're used to in vehicles is even rarer than lithium. And guess what? It's mined outside the US because our own EPA doesn't want lithium or cobalt mined in the US and the restrictions on mining and they're so strict that we go to other countries to buy that material. So when only a fraction of 1% of the vehicles on the road in the US are battery powered along with all of our hand tools and cell phones and everything, what happens when every car has two tons of batteries or a ton of batteries in it made of lithium and cobalt? We can't afford that much lithium and cobalt from other countries. It becomes an energy national security issue. It's also a large scale cost when you start to look at putting power on the grid. One of the problems we have with absorbing what we call renewable energy like solar power and wind power, it's not constant. When there's clouds that come over your solar panels or wind that doesn't blow or blows too hard, the electric companies have a hard time balancing their grid when they have intermittent renewables. You have to be able to store that energy. And if you wanna store large amounts of energy on in some kind of battery, it just becomes unaffordable. It's totally, totally unaffordable. I have a graph that I wanna show you that we'll put up on the screen. And this shows you where batteries work really well. And like I say, hydrogen doesn't, I'm not saying we shouldn't have batteries, but we should use batteries where they make sense. Batteries are great for applications up to a megawatt or maybe 10 megawatts and up to a few hours. But when you're starting to store energy for days or weeks or you're starting to use energy in the 100 megawatt or 500 megawatt or gigawatt range, you can't use batteries. You'll be out of money. The typical, when you store energy in battery type technology, we use kilowatt hours as the metric to go by. The typical cost of a lithium cobalt technology battery is around $3 to $500 a kilowatt hour to make the battery. Can you imagine if you had to make gigawatt hours worth of batteries at $300 to $500, $8,000 watt hours? Just do the math. Get out your calculator. It's exponential. You cannot afford batteries at that large scale. But hydrogen, once you buy the infrastructure for hydrogen, number one, the hydrogen tanks won't deteriorate, the batteries will. And the hydrogen tanks are made of stuff that's pretty much recyclable. And the storage component, when you talk about kilowatt hours, or yeah, kilowatt hours, hydrogen turns out to be around $30 or $40 a kilowatt hour to make the storage for it once you put it into a megawatt scale or larger system. So the cost at large scale for hydrogen is much cheaper than batteries. The idea is to pair large scale hydrogen with the proper scale batteries in grid applications. Now in transportation, I've talked about the weight of hydrogen before. The next graph shows the transportation impacts. This is the cost of putting buses, like fleet buses, into a system. So if you want a hydrogen fuel cell bus, your first one is gonna cost you a lot of money because you have to build a whole hydrogen station even if it's for one bus. But for every bus you add to that system, the cost of the infrastructure starts dropping off. By the time you get to 100 buses or more, the cost of the 100 buses is really cheap. Now electric buses are kind of deceptive because when you buy a bus and you buy a charger, it's a lot cheaper than your hydrogen bus to start with. But by the time you get to about 70 buses or so, all of a sudden your infrastructure costs start going through the roof because not only do you have to buy the chargers, but you have to upgrade the hydrogen or the electric utility to your facilities, which means new transformers and new substations that the electric company has to put in. And guess who pays for that? You pay for it when you're running your fleet. So that graph shows you just can't count on batteries alone in the transportation sector. Another fact that when it comes to weight, and it showed in the video, when you have heavy weight batteries, you're moving around a lot of weight. And everybody that does anything with transportation, whether you're an airplane, a boat, a small ship, a sailboat or a car or a truck, every ounce of weight that you add to the vehicle costs you in fuel economy. So you don't want heavy batteries to be your primary storage source when you can have the right mix of batteries and real lightweight hydrogen to run your vehicles. So hydrogen can help store energy when paired with batteries and renewables because it's the perfect match. You should have flywheels or batteries or even, oh shoot, the capacitors, ultra-capacitors. You give you the boost that you need, but hydrogen should be your long-term storage. So the logical answer to storing intermittent renewables and that stranded energy from intermittent renewables is hydrogen. So I hope that answers some of the big questions that you folks have had, and I've heard, about hydrogen. And I hope it gives you a good idea of how we could start to think about hydrogen and how we could start to think about hydrogen and how we could start changing our grid and start changing our transportation to be including more hydrogen in the picture, in the mix. And I think that the more you think about it, the more it'll make sense and we should start looking at it for a long-term solution. So I hope I've given you something to think about and until next week, this is Stanley Enryman signing off. Aloha.