 We want here it is Wednesday afternoon already. Where did the week go? But we're over the hump on Wednesday. Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm Mitch Ewan, your host. This program is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum who has been in existence for 17 years and we help support implementing smart energy policy in Hawaii. Our funding also comes from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute of which I'm a part of as my day job. So we thank our host and our sponsors for making this possible. So I'm very pleased to introduce you to Matt Moran who comes to us all the way through this magical interface from Ohio. I almost said Oahu but kind of similar. Matt is the CEO of a company called Moran Innovations and the title of our show today is Hydrogen Endgame, the infinity fuel for a sustainable future. And like me Matt is a hydrogen nut and we want to talk to him all about hydrogen and his ideas on where hydrogen is placed in our energy system. So Matt welcome and aloha. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah so the first thing I like to do is just to introduce you to the audience and have you do the speaking rather than me. Just give a thumbnail sketch of your background and your interest in hydrogen. Sure. So I've worked in power propulsion since 1982. Most of that work has been at NASA and for the Department of Defense and most of those systems have been hydrogen based. So a lot of background in hydrogen particularly liquid hydrogen as well as other fuels and oxidizers. Okay so tell us a little bit more about Moran Innovations. I mean you recently recently two years ago left NASA retired and this is your second career. So tell us what is Moran Innovations and what do you do? What are your products and or services? Sure. So as you mentioned I retired from NASA in early 2016. I started Moran Innovation by leveraging my background in hydrogen and looking at some of the global needs and important global challenges that we had and looked at hydrogen systems for energy, for food, for water and built a business model around that and I know we're going to talk about that in a little bit. So that's where the Genesis of Moran Innovation came from and a little over three years doing it. Okay so just give us a quick thumbnail about liquid hydrogen and why we should be looking at it. I mean we'll get into some more details as we go through your slide deck but just a top level 60,000 foot view of liquid hydrogen. Sure. So liquid hydrogen is actually pretty commonly used at NASA for rockets and other systems. That's what most of my background has been in. The benefit for using liquid hydrogen is that it has more than double the density of a high pressure hydrogen gas storage with the state of the art high pressure systems and composite over overwrap pressure vessels. So you can get a lot more hydrogen in the half the volume basically as you can with state of the art compressed systems. The drawback is that hydrogen in its liquid form near ambient pressure has to be stored at minus 420 degrees Fahrenheit. So you've got to understand the engineering challenges associated with that and design the systems properly to handle that old temperature to minimize the amount of heat transfer that comes in from the environment and then provide the refrigeration required to keep it at that temperature. So those are the main challenges but they've all been done in the space and defense industries so it's really a matter of applying them now to energy industry to see what benefits can come from it. So people in our audience may be wondering well why are we talking about liquid hydrogen? I mean that's kind of space stuff and we're not doing any space rockets right now out of Hawaii. So let me just give a little bit of context from my point of view. I mean I'm the hydrogen systems program manager at H&EI. One of the first projects I had when I joined H&EI was to look at the capacity, the potential capacity for hydrogen production in Hawaii and one of the things that seemed obvious was that Oahu will have a very difficult time of becoming self-sufficient energy. We just don't have the land mass. We have a huge population compared to the other islands whereas for example the big island is big. It's really big. It's got a lot of renewable energy including a geothermal which is one of my favorites and so the whole idea is how can we deliver or capture energy on one of our neighbor islands and then deliver it to Oahu and certainly one of the alternatives or candidates is liquid hydrogen because just as you said it's a very great, a very good energy carrier. In fact that's what hydrogen is. I mean we shouldn't view it as anything other than an energy storage medium and then being able to liquefy it on the big island from whatever source whether it's wind turbines or geothermal plants or PV plants and then liquefy it and put it on a barge or other things and deliver it from the big island over here to Oahu makes a lot of sense and I think it's not going to happen soon or tomorrow but I think it's an option we need to be looking at here in Hawaii so that we can optimize all our indigenous resources. So as we go through the slide deck I hope to you know we can identify what some of the issues are what the challenges are what really some of the solutions are that you've already developed that in my knowing you for the last month looks like you know we have some good potential solutions up there that are potentially economic and technically feasible so yeah so without more ado and I'll stop talking because we want to hear more about this from Matt and me I just wanted to set the scene is let's let's go to your slide deck and and look at I just want to say that the you know what we're talking about here is hydrogen is the end game the infinity fuel for a sustainable future so Matt just tell us about this slide and all the various applications that we can look forward to with hydrogen. Sure so if you start at the top and by the way all these touch on systems that I worked on in my background but aircraft for example Matt has just announced that they're going to be doing some research and development for cryogenic hydrogen on a hybrid electric aircraft so that's reaching back actually for some legacy systems. Hydrogen was on a fueled aircraft back in the late 50s for testing and as was one of the explained tests as well with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen both. So let me just interrupt the I'll interrupt you as we go along okay so don't be offended. Okay. So here on Hawaii we've already looked at an inner island aircraft I believe it's one of the one of the startup companies here is an electric airplane because you know we're not flying across to the mainland here it's just inner island so they're already looking at electric aircraft and so you know batteries are heavy whereas hydrogen is light so you'd probably want to like transition that to a hydrogen fueled aircraft and while you're at it why not use liquid hydrogen so you get more mass for you know the volume so anyway that's right carry on next next point. So you have to get through that slide backup I'll just point out two other ones the next system over comes when counterclockwise a lot of lunar systems I've been involved with in terms of development of landers and and eventually basis that would be based on the moon or potentially mars in the future all of those require hydrogen for propulsion and also for microgrid kinds of operations on those surfaces space station and space shuttle going over to the corner and down to the left space station had fuel cells on board I'm sorry the space cell had fuel cells on board and also use the hydrogen as the propulsion system for the main engines the big orange tank that most people are familiar with was mostly full of liquid hydrogen and I put systems on both the space shuttle and the space station over the years sensor systems and experiments if you go down to the bottom left the grid the energy grid I started my career at a power plant that was a coal fired power plant as a matter of fact so I'm going full circle in a sense only this time with a carbonless fuel and then I did some work for the Navy and the Navy has looked at hydrogen for a number of applications as you know Mitch we sound like we've worked on these a decade apart or so underwater unmanned vehicles that are hydrogen and not liquid hydrogen I'm sorry fuel cell and liquid hydrogen fuel that set up batteries hydrogen cars of course they're on the road already that's the next slide over and I think they're beginning to get some traction now you know when you look at the subsystems involved in battery vehicles a lot of the subsystems are the same they're electric motors so it's electric system you're really just changing out the power plant from a battery to a fuel cell and I like to make the point a plug that we now have hydrogen vehicles here in Hawaii and you can rent one or lease one from surfco from our Toyota dealership the Marai and they have them there and they have a hydrogen station and actually they throw in the fuel for the first three years it's a heck of a deal so yeah so new citizens out there you know the general public should certainly go down to Toyota dealership in Mapuna Puna and check that out so that's that's my plug I think those are the key things on that slide systems engineering I think maybe was the last piece and that's that's a big big part of how we approach the problem right in our company and that's where most of my background is in this is the purchasing things from the systems perspective and then finding the best solution for the overall system performance right and that's important when you're trying to develop the economic and the and the you know the the financial models to show that hey this is affordable or it's it's close to being affordable as we go forward and and you have you have to model these systems to you know get the most optimize all the systems to get the most cost effective solution so that's that's a good thing to do and we'll get a little bit more of that I call it your son of Homer system so it's pretty pretty interesting so let's have the next slide please just just as a quick bit of context if you look at the energy consumption globally it's rising to the left of the dotted line on both the charts on the left is history and on the right is the projections everything's growing but you can see the fossil fuels are still in the top what one two three categories and they're going to remain there although renewables are coming on strong they still represent a minority of the production of energy globally if you go down to the bottom left you can see that the the areas that are actually going to have the biggest growth or are the are the areas that are economically growing fast Asia mostly and to a lesser extent the Middle East and and parts of Africa so we have to look at this and from the global context getting back to that systems approach to things because you know energy demand is growing and right now we're we're doing a lot of fossil fuel burning which of course is adding to the greenhouse gas issue as well as the other ecosystems out here right okay next slide please so this is a very complicated slide that is always always confused me but Matt knows what this what the story is behind this slide he's going to tell us so over to you Matt yeah so if you if you drill down to the U.S. and just look at the U.S. I won't go through all the details of this slide it's a fascinating slide it's put out the annual lead by Lawrence Littlemore National Lab which is one of the Department of Energy Laboratories in the U.S. on the left hand side is all the energy sources that are used in the U.S. and then the magnitude of those lines going across is the quantity of that energy source that is used in various applications so you've got electric generation at the top and then residential commercial industrial transportation in the pink boxes to the right but what's interesting to point out is again if you look now at the U.S. over eight percent of the energy sources are fossil fuels electric I'm sorry hydroelectric wind solar and geothermal make up a little over six percent which is a vast improvement over over the years but still a small minority of the power sources that we have domestically and then the other takeaway I think from this chart just from a big picture view is that we waste more than two-thirds of the energy that we create because of inefficiency so any improvement in efficiency of our systems for energy use is it's like adding potential power generation capacity virtually because you're you're improving the efficiency of the system so it's both ends of the equation you know more renewable resources so we can decarbonize and then also better efficiency so we're we're using our energy more wisely so what what form does the rejected energy take I mean I think it's heat correct yes that's correct almost all efficiency comes out it's waste heat so we're dumping that heat somewhere usually into the environment yeah so in Hawaii we have a lot of oil powered generation electrical generation here so you put it in this big boiler and like 75 percent or so of that energy content of that fuel goes straight out the chimney I mean you can try to recover a little bit through you know various processes for heat recovery but it's a significant loss of energy and you look at the fact that we're paying for that energy that's being just thrown out into the atmosphere we're not getting any value out of it so that's a waste so absolutely correct yeah and as you know fuel cells have a much higher efficiency than just about all you know heat driven type of power cycle so that's another advantage you're going to a hydrogen-based system because you can bribe your generation and your fuel cells with higher efficiencies okay well we're coming up to our first break now Matt so just hang in there for a minute while we give a few plugs to other organizations and we'll be right back thank you great Aloha I'm Stan Osterman a host here on Think Tech Hawaii a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii we provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness here on the island we are a Hawaiian non-profit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going we'd be grateful if you go to thinktechawaii.com and make a donation to support us now mahalo hello my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of security matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios I'll bring you guests I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe your co-workers safe your family safe to keep our community safe we want to teach you about those things in our industry that you know may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because security matters Aloha okay here we are in Hawaii the state of clean energy we're back from our break and we're live with Matt Moran all the way from Ohio through the magic of our modern-day technology so Matt we're going to have a look at so the rest of your slides we'll zoom through those because we've already burned through you know half of our show it goes by fast I told you the next slide please Robert there you go this is just a quick slide showing you know the effects of all that fossil fuel burning one of the effects this is just scratching the surface I mentioned to the viewers who are interested that the lower right hand corner is the source of that it's put out annually by our federal government and it has the brightest minds in scientists in the US government looking at this every year and updating it and it talks about rising sea levels more violent storms droughts worse droughts in some areas heavier water and flooding and others and all these effects that are coming from our increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and on the left hand side just around the middle you'll see those little black dots that's Hawaii and of course we're already feeling the effects of sea level rise and these storms our beaches are eroding and we just we can't wait around we've got to get off the dime and we've got to do something about it and frankly hydrogen is one of those solutions because it is a clean energy source and it is much more efficient than the fossil fuel system so next slide please so tell us about your approach Matt yeah so our approach you know with that context what we dug our heels in about three a little over three and a half years ago that's to get a look for a solution for this was a hydrogen based system and it's an architecture which implies that you can change various parts of this to optimize the system and tailor it to whatever you want to use it for so you've got inputs on the far left energy sources preferably renewable which doesn't have carbon a water source you can also use biomass anything that has hydrogen locked in it again there's processes out there to read get that hydrogen released and then it can be produced in the middle there and stored various methods of storing we talked a little bit about liquid hydrogen it can also be stored as compressed gas or or is absorbed into various metal hydrides is another method of storing hydrogen depends on the application what's the best approach and then you use that the time shifting is what's important here when you store that hydrogen uh then you have it available when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing to uh to drive into a fuel cell for power generation if that's your interest i just i just want to make the point we should we shouldn't look at hydrogen as this you know gas or this liquid we should we need to look at it as through a different set of eyeballs is like it is energy that we're storing so we see hydrogen storage it's really energy stored and that's really really important so when our wind turbines are turning and generating electricity in the middle of the night but nobody can use it what do we do just do we just throw it away or do we want to save that energy and one of the greatest ways of saving that energy is uh is using hydrogen because it's got such a high energy capacity so that's the plug i want to make on on that part of your slide and then why don't you carry on after i interrupt you that's a very good point it's you're right it's an energy storage method so going back to that slide then if you take a look there's also a beneficial byproduct to come out of it depending on how you produce that hydrogen oxygen other things you can also burn hydrogen it's been demonstrated just about every kind of internal combustion engine as well as there's turbines out there now that are running on hydrogen so if you want to have a turbine for either a jet engine let's say or for electricity generation that's also possibility one of the unique characteristics with hydrogen is you get potable water to say is a primary byproduct so that can be used depending on what the application is as well for drinking water agriculture irrigation for example and then you've got heat recovery we were talking about those inefficiencies waste heat well if you recover that heat it's a longer wasted if you use it for let's say a combined heat power application or if you use it to drive a refrigeration cycle or some other heat driven cycle you can begin to improve that overall system efficiency which is another one of the key challenges with hydrogen system that's bringing up that system efficiency to to make it more competitive with battery energy storage right so one of my friends is an astronaut he did uh i think he did uh seven space missions i think he's tied for the most the number of shuttle missions and he was telling me he says they generated so much water on their uh on their missions from their fuel cells that they didn't know what to do with it i mean they i mean they couldn't dump it obviously and they they slowly but surely fill up all their available space with bags of water it was amazing so it generates a lot of water so to your point absolutely pure water as well so it can also be recycled through an electrolyzer and you know if you had a closed loop system you could actually regenerate your your hydrogen and there's lots of systems out there that are doing that now so let's jump to the next slide please yeah so i won't get into the details here but what we did was we developed a software program that basically uh codifies that the architecture so that a user can pick what pieces they want to have in the input the storage the generation and the outputs of the system and once those are chosen and you can see some of the choices up there on the screen you've got a tailored customized system for that particular application in the last dialog box at the lower right is so if you want to create a system model and the uh the software then creates a system model which is on the next slide of whatever parameters you chose in that architecture so essentially you can look at and this is a good way to look at it so you can look at this to size the various components in your system like you know if i have this much wind or i have this much solar you know how much hydrogen can i produce or how much can i store you know what size of fuel cell do i need and the bottom line is you know what's what's my output here so why don't you walk or walk us through this slide yes that's that's exactly right mention um yeah so the left hand side shows you the system model and it shows all the energy and fluid flows so as you mentioned it allows you to start to size the system to design it to optimize it and to simulate it so you can basically do all of those up front things virtually before you start to cut hardware and and put the system together and you've got a good sense of how the system's going to operate and how to optimize it for your application so on the far right side is it's kind of the dashboard piece of this system model you can change the the loads that you want to simulate where the power is coming from how much and then it's got a few graphic snapshots of you know your distribution of power sources in your loads and how much you're storing in terms of excess energy that you can use to create hydrogen and store this energy and then what's your waste feed and fluid flows are so you've got everything kind of there on one screen that to take a look at and you can walk through hours in a day or or days in a year or whatever combination you wish and start to really optimize the system for for the for whatever your application is right so it's a really really effective and useful tool for system design so let's uh oh sorry go ahead no that's right I was just going to say where we're we're beginning to apply it in some of the first case studies and now with some of the pilot demonstrations that we're beginning to get some traction on so I notice you put up the energy target markets if you look at those there's some very large markets that are we believe are prime for hydrogen introduction some of them most of them actually already have some hydrogen systems in place but there's a lot of room for both growth and improvement in the performance of the system so grid and stationary storage as you mentioned being able to store some of that renewable energy when it's produced and use it when that when it's needed when the renewable energy isn't high enough the grid to meet the demand you also have micro grid and off the grid situation again states like Hawaii and island nations this starts to become very interesting because you can start to consider you know isolated systems in a sense energy systems that are self-sustaining and secure and have a high resiliency and then the final one is transportation which actually see quite a bit of hydrogen uh introduction already as you mentioned you've got parts already on the road there in Hawaii that are driving with fuel cells in high so and soon these are right right opportunities and soon buses I have my uh three hydrogen buses we're like almost there it's so close I can taste it I want to ride yeah me too so next slide please so now you can brag a little bit about your background here Matt I thought I'd show this because it gives a sense of what's possible in terms of scale with these systems this is the liquid hydrogen tank uh do order that was used to for all the shuttle launches so what's a doer what's a doer so so a doer is a double-walled tank that has insulation between the two walls and it's also back ejected so it's a vacuum inside it's like a giant thermo I was just gonna I was just gonna interrupt you and say yeah like a big thermos bottle yeah exactly sorry but with additional insulation to improve its performance so I was part of the design team Kennedy Space Center wanted to build a one of these that was 50 percent larger for the new rockets that are coming online the space launch system so I was on the design team and my responsibility was to design the system that would keep this giant ball essentially a 10 stories high through the right temperature refrigerated and prevent any losses from boil off and also reliquify vapor that was coming in hydrogen vapor from various processes so we did that it was completed at the end of 2017 and it's in the process of being trusted right now so a very large deal 1.25 million gallons of liquid act so could you design one for us for the big island and so we can collect all that hydrogen then we can offload it here to a lot of love to awesome we'll bring you out so we have we can kill those parts so so and we can chill our beard down with it minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit so last slide we just talked about the vision let's talk about the vision yeah I thought this was a good slide to put at the end so this was the vision that we put together three a little over three years ago for the company and and all of this is attainable with hydrogen and we're beginning to put projects in place demonstrations in place to do justice it's to provide secure reliable energy generate water for drinking and agriculture recycle a lot of our our bio waste and biomass materials and do it all in an environmentally sustainable way and in fact you admit you brought this up when you deal with agriculture you actually have a carbon net I'm sorry carbon net negative system because you're pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and you're producing no carbon emissions at all so and we can do this anywhere on the globe 24 hours a day seven days a week right an energy food and water with a hydrogen system so that's that's our vision and that's what we aim to prove excellent well Matt believe it or not we're at the end of the show so thank you so much for participating in this and sharing your insight and I'd like to have you back and we'll bring you back you know every now and then to update everybody on the latest with Moran innovations and what you're doing is good good stuff so thank you so much and thank you so thank you everybody that wraps up our show and we'll see you again next Wednesday at Hawaii the state of clean energy