 and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. Dan Osserman coming to you live and direct from the, again, super city of Kailua, Hawaii. It's a beautiful day today. In fact, it's kind of one of those, you think it's autumn, but it's still kind of summer. It's a little cool, but it's nice and sunny, surfs nice. Time to come make your reservations to visit Waikiki and come out and spend some money so our economy can pick back up. It's gotten a pounding in the last year and a half. Anyway, today's show is really interesting. We have a return guest who's going to, he's working his way into a regular guest, probably taking Ryan Woobin's place. I used to have Ryan come on once a month as an electric engineer and explain complicated stuff to us, but he's gotten tied up with other things and Dan Gowan has graciously said, yeah, it's okay to lean on him from time to time and he's just such a wealth of knowledge when it comes to overall energy markets and especially hydrogen, which he has some specialty in. So today's show, we're going to start off talking a little bit about what I normally call the bane of hydrogen, which is compression and Dan's going to expand a little bit on that and explain why it's such a challenge, which I think would be great for a lot of people out there that don't understand why it's such a challenge. And then we're going to talk about some bigger issues in the energy world and we'll give you a hint on what's coming up for the rest of the year if you don't keep your finger on the pulse of everything energy. So Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being on again. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Stan. Welcome to be back. Great. So it's all yours now. You can jump into that presentation, which I think will be enlightening for everybody. Sure. If I can get to get you to place slide number one up, please. Right. I'm just starting off with a sort of a demo for the company. I had to make sure I put a web address up there, make my CO happy. So slide number two, please. So what that is, and I'm starting this story in the middle here and I've got a reason for doing this. What what you're looking at is that's an ASME certified pressure vessel. It's certified to 4500 bar. It's a crack unit from an oil refinery. It's made of stainless steel. It has a 316 stainless steel liner. It's a 15,000 liter tank. The reason why I'm putting that on the screen there for everybody to see is remember last time we talked about these megawatt grid scale electrolysisers that produce for one megawatt hour of electricity produced 22 kilograms of hydrogen at 20 bar. That's 13,200 liters. So 13,200 liters will fit inside that 15,000 liter tank. So that gives you an idea of how much gas, whatever compressor you're going to throw at this, that it's going to have to compress. Now, the reason why I'm pointing this out is 22 kilograms of hydrogen. Now a Toyota Mirai car usually holds about 6 kilograms of hydrogen. So that's a little over. That's not quite four cars worth of fuel up, the tank fuel up. But that gives you an idea of how much gas that you're going to have to compress. So when you talk to anybody, keep that in mind because a lot of the compressor technology out there, if you ask them what the displacement is, they'll say it's like four liters or 10 liters or something like that. When I look at Lend or Hoffer or any of those companies that make these compressors that compress hydrogen, they're pretty notorious for being really, really small. And when you see how much volume that compressor has to press down, you quickly realize that you're going to spend a lot of time, a lot of horsepower and a lot of energy trying to compress this gas. Before you move on to the next slide, number three, please. Before you move on to the next slide, I want you to say again, I know you mentioned it, but you said that that vessel that was on that trailer was how many bar? Well, it's an ASME certified pressure vessel is certified for a maximum of 5100 bar. That's like 88,000 PSI. Okay. Yeah. That's what I wanted people to understand. 88,000 PSI. Now, 88,000 PSI, if you think a scuba tank is high pressure, it's 2,500 PSI. That vessel is 88,000 PSI. So that's the volumes that we're talking about and the pressures. Right. The volumes and the pressure. So at a cracker unit, what they use that for is they put heavy crude oil in there. They heat that tank up to several thousand degrees. They pump nitrogen in there. They use heat and pressure to break the long molecules of oil down into smaller molecules. Okay. And once they've done that, then they inject hydrogen into that tank and that reacts with the sulfur, forms hydrogen sulfide. They burn the hydrogen sulfide because that's a poisonous gas into sulfur dioxide, rent through a catalyst, some water, and that sulfuric acid, which happens to be battery acid. The kind for your lead acid battery in your car. That's where one of the byproducts in the oil refinery happens to be battery acid. But that device is in every refinery. Usually, the manufacturer that builds those, they certify those to last for 20 to 30 years. So that's a pretty tough piece of metal. I don't know how many people have told me that Dan, what you're talking about is impossible. Mike, really? Have you talked to the guys at the oil refinery? Don't they call that a catcracker? Catcracker. That's it exactly. Okay. That's exactly what it's called. Yep. Slide number three, please. Okay. So there's a paper that Dr. Justin Johnson and I wrote a couple of years ago called Hydrogen Compressors are not matching up made and head. So if you go out to our website and there's a way to contact us, we can send you a copy of that paper anybody wants to get a hold of. And I don't stand, you've got a copy of it also. But what's on that paper and what that image there is, there's an image of a piston and a reciprocating compressor. So if you look closely there, you can see there's a crankshaft, a piston, an inlet valve, an outlet valve and so forth. So what the story here is, and here's how I'm going to explain what the problem is, and that is you're trying to build a wall of bowling balls to hold back sand. I will say that again. You're trying to build a wall and made out of bowling balls to hold back sand. And what I'm talking about is the bowling balls, those are the iron atoms in the sand. Those are hydrogen molecules. That's how tiny the hydrogen molecule is. In fact, if you look at the space between your piston and your cylinder wall to the hydrogen molecule, that is the Grand Canyon. And it makes matters worse. There's this effect called the Bernoulli effect. And what it is is the compression ring. If you look at that piston, there's a groove around the edge of that piston, right? And that's for a compression ring. And that's supposedly that's a seal the space between the piston and the cylinder wall. But the problem is the hydrogen molecule is so tiny, it'll fit between the compression ring and the cylinder wall. And when you've got that piston moving really quickly, the Bernoulli effect, and I don't stand, you're a pilot, so you know how air and gases move over the wing of an airplane, well, that Bernoulli effect will funnel lots and lots of hydrogen right past your compression ring. Okay, so there's that. And then the other thing, and since you've got that problem with your compression rings, your input valve and your input, your output valve, you'll never be able to grind those surfaces smooth enough to keep those sealed from the hydrogen gas. Okay. The next thing we talk about is the displacement. And I'll give you an example when I talk about displacement. So I've got a Ford Ranger pickup truck and in that truck is an internal combustion engine. I burned gasoline in it, so I wanted that guy because I burned gasoline in my truck. But that engine's a six cylinder engine and the displacement is four liters. Okay, think about that four liters. And so therefore what an internal combustion engine is a former reciprocating compressor. So whatever compressor you're using four liters can you imagine dividing four into 13,200. So that'll give you an idea how many how many cycles that engine would have to go through just to move 13,200 liters of volume. Now, why hydrogen occupies that much space, we're going to talk about some of the issues with hydrogen and the charges and so forth of why it occupies a lot of space. So if I can get you to move to slide number four, please. Okay, this one will probably be on for a little while. So in brittle to destruction. So on that, you've got the top and the bottom. So the top, the top there. Well, first of all, there's a company over in Germany called Hohenberger compressor tech that's a German company. And what you're seeing up there and you see that gentleman standing right next to that is a the head of a giant industrial compressor. That's just the head. I understand that that huge cylinder right there at those per trues and you see those are actually valve covers inside there's a compressor, the displacement is 10 liters and usually these compressors will have six to eight cylinders and that head right there is tied to a common crankshaft and a great big huge motor. Sometimes they use a diesel engine or a jet engine, sometimes even induction motor. Usually if it's induction motor, this is the type of device you'll suck down between six and 10 million watts per hour, just trying to move this huge machine. Now, if you're compressing natural gas or carbon dioxide or anything like that, that's a wonderful machine. It's from the age of steam. It's been around for 100 years. There's a lot of really great companies that that build these things. Okay, it's just that this machine is completely inappropriate for compressing hydrogen. Now, the issues with hydrogen on the left upper left hand corner of the screen there, you can see that that head there has been destroyed. It only takes hydrogen about two years to destroy that compressor head. That's hydrogen abridgment. Now, as to what causes it, it's a combination of that tiny little molecule and the fact that when you compress gases, they get really hot. So, down in the bottom left hand corner there, there's a molecular model of titanium at the molecular level and on the right hand side, that star, David, you see it right there, that is an X-ray diffraction of 316 stainless steel. So, years ago, when I asked to investigate this, what I did was the National Institute of Standards Technology, they have this database. And so, I took this thing, I downloaded it, put it in the Hadoop cluster, I data mined it, and I came back with a list of things that seem to be impervious to hydrogen. Now, at the time I was working at Ilea-Lili and through the grace of Ilea-Lili, Lili has a relationship with Fermi National Labs up in Chicago and they have a synchrotron, it's a big atoms matchup. The only one larger is CERN over in Europe. One of the things that Fermi National Lab does, Lili sends them samples of molecules and Fermi does these X-ray diffractions to take pictures of actual atoms and sends it back to Lili. And then Lili compares it with their molecular models to say, okay, do these molecules actually look like what we think they look like on our computer models? Okay. Well, Lili let me send up to Fermi, basically samples of all these things that are impervious to hydrogen. They let me send up samples of things that I knew wasn't impervious to hydrogen. I send up samples of things that I destroyed with hydrogen and I also send up some samples of some things that I, things that are supposedly impervious to hydrogen and got some pictures of those. So I had four sets that took them about four and a half months, they sent me back the flash drive and I compared all these pictures and I, it became very apparent what's occurred. So if I could get you to show slide number four one more time. Okay. So what's going on, the difference is the difference between the boxes and the triangles. And that is the materials that are impervious to hydrogen, the atoms are actually connected together in triangles. The materials that are not impervious to hydrogen, the atoms are actually hooked together in boxes, boxes or five atoms or six atoms, whatever. What's happens is the hydrogen molecule is so small, it'll jam itself between the molecules and through brownie motion, that means hot, hot gas just driving from pressing it, just the vibrational energy alone breaks atomic, breaks atomic bonds. So hydrogen has the ability to break atomic bonds. Now, nothing else has the ability. Now, you kind of have to ask the question, why, what, why is this happening? And the reason why is because hydrogen sits on a boundary between the atomic world and the quantum world. It sits on a place in the world of quantum mechanics is truly a really strange place. And if you get a bunch of physicists in a room, if you want to get them arguing, start talking about quantum mechanics. Okay, now, as far as the materials that are impervious to hydrogen, I'm going to go ahead and give you the three metallic alloy families, it's a short layer. Okay, and the stainless steel family is 303, 306, 316 stainless steel. 316 stainless steel is the same stainless steel that's used in knives, forks, spoons, utensils, that kind of stuff. Again, that's 303, 306, 316 stainless steel. The next one are your coppers, your copper family, and that is copper, grass, bronze, beryllium copper. Again, that's copper, grass, bronze, beryllium copper. The third one happens to be your aluminum alloys. Now, there's a couple of notes about the aluminum alloys. You have to keep your temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius, because there's chemistry above, above the boiling temperature of water. Now, about the aluminum alloys, there needs to be a lot more work done on this. The reason why is because there are some aluminum alloys that have tensile strength greater than titanium, but I don't have any good test data on them. The reason why I'm interested in those metals is because it really helps me out with my work. The last one, the last two are the different plastic families. The two plastic families are your polycarbonates and your high-density polyethylene plastics. It has to do with just the plain density of those materials and the fact that those plastics are not adulterated with chlorine, sulfur, fluorine, or any other, that those are true hydrocarbon-type materials and how the atoms are actually put together. Now, I shouldn't be any surprised that those materials are on those lists considering if you look at any of the manufacturers that make carbon fiber bottles, either they use aluminum liners or they use stainless steel liners and they always use high-density polyethylene plastic on the inside of the carbon fiber bottle. So it shouldn't be any surprise. So if I can get you to go to slide number five. So I'm going to talk about an interesting subject in physics and it's something that most people don't know. So what I've got sitting there in front of me is a distribution transformer and that's one of those things that you usually see attached to a telephone pole. What I want to talk about actually is those bushings there on the top, those high voltage bushings. So bushing to bushing is about 14,400 volts. From the bushing down to the casing is about 7,200 volts. Now, if you notice those insulators or shapes are like an accordion, okay, that's intentional. What it is is electrons like to travel along the surface of things, between that. So between the air and the actual insulator itself where the electrons actually travel because there's because the molecules don't exactly come up flush against the surface of the insulator. So that's where the electrons like to travel. And so by having that accordion shape, you actually increase the surface area the electrons have to travel to ground out on that casing there. So if I can get you to move down number five. So I've got a group of five things in that picture. Now, you're going to say, okay, why did he put all five of those things in there? Well, all five of those devices are what we call quantum devices. Now, this is all going to lead up into what we're going to talk to how to compress this gas. Okay. Well, the first thing we can talk to the device up in the top left hand corner is a diode. The next one there in the middle is called an MPN transistor or bipolar junction transistor. The device there at the bottom is called Lemosvet, which is metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor versus a proton exchange membrane hydrogen field cell and a proton exchange membrane electrolysis. All those devices have things in common, it has to do with quantum physics. In the case of a diode, when they first discovered semiconductors, you usually start out with germanium and they quickly switched over to silicon. What silicon, silicon is a semiconductor meaning you can conduct or be an insulator and usually they'll add something to it and impurity to it to make it either positively charged or negatively charged. When you sandwich those two pieces together, you get this what's called a boundary effect. In the case of a diode, what it means is electrons can only travel in one direction through that device. In the case of the transistor, they've taken three of these materials sandwiched them together. You have two boundaries and that middle boundary there acts like a gate or a control valve. The device below there is called a field effect transistor and that device uses something called quantum telling and quite literally that's an effect where they can use a charged plate next to a junction and you can actually cause what they call basically an electron jumping from one side of that barrier to the other. In the proton exchange membrane field cell, they describe the membrane as a proton exchange membrane, but the truth is is that boundary actually has more in common with the quantum device and quantum tunnel because when a hydrogen atom flows through it goes through a carbon fiber membrane, the platinum strips the electron off of the hydrogen molecule and you've got a proton and that proton disappears on the side of the membrane and repairs on the other side. That's called quantum tunneling. Now, slide number seven, please. I realized that a lot of the people in the hydrogen universal think this is a little strange, this whole idea of quantum tunneling and quantum mechanics, but that equation you see right there, the Schrodinger equation, that's been argued about since Albert Einstein's time and Albert Einstein passed in 1955 and the Schrodinger equation still rules supreme and as a testament to the effects of quantum tunneling, if the effect did not exist, your cell phones would not work and these laptops would not work either, so without that effect. So obviously it does work and obviously hydrogen field cells do work. The last page ought to be slide number eight and that's the record that I said in my lab, June 10th of 2021, that's 57,579 psi from Pressing Hydrogen. I blew out a coupling and I'm in need of a master machinist and I got through my presentation stand. The bane of hydrogen as far as moving forward in our future is compression. And I think what you just explained, what certainly cleared up a lot of things in my mind, not that I understand all the physics details, but certainly I understand why it's a challenge and I've always known about embrittlement and I've always known that it was not only pressure related but temperature related, but what you went through makes it a lot clearer. I also understand the boundary thing from aviation because one of the things that's fairly new in the aviation wing technology is called boundary layer separation, where they actually inject bypass air from the engine through tiny, tiny holes on the wing to separate the surface of the wing from the air passing by it and it actually reduces resistance, therefore less drag, therefore more efficient wing. So the concept you're talking about, even though I can't put them all together because I'm not a physicist, they start to make sense to me and I'm encouraged that at some point in the not too distant future I'll be able to really get a good grasp on all this. Well, I also know that people are going to play these videos multiple times, they're going to unwrap a lot of the things that I've said too. So the next time we get together I'll show you how to build a check valve that's molecularly tied at the quantum level and it is a quantum device and I'll also show you how to use the quantum physics to compress the gas and not only that, but the device that you'll end up using, well basically I'm going to use that great big tank to compress the gas and I'll use the hydrogen itself to compress itself. Right now that sounds fantastic, but when I sit there and talk about quantum tunneling, understand 75 years ago Albert Einstein thought this was focused, focused too, but look at all the computers and semiconductors that are built upon that concept of quantum tunneling and the quantum world is truly, truly bizarre and hydrogen definitely violates a lot of physics. I guess we could say it violates the laws of physics, but more accurately what it probably is we just don't understand the universe well enough. So that's good. I don't feel quite as ignorant as I thought I was because it's still a mysterious world in a lot of ways including with physics. I tell people a lot of Einstein's work is still called theory and that's for a reason. There's people that have string theory of quantum physics and all other kinds of ways that are different from the way Einstein viewed it. It just so happens that a lot of his stuff lines up with what we can experience and see so we tend to put a lot of of trust in it, but it doesn't mean we completely understand it. I've had the honor of my life to actually help prove some of his theories when I worked on GPS because the GPS satellites that have started GPS satellites have a seasoning block in them and I was able to be able to prove that the GPS satellites at time truly does run faster in the GPS satellites than it does down here on Earth and that the gravity actually warps time and space and we're able to prove it. So I was actually honored that when I was developing GPS we helped prove some of the theories that Albert Einstein put out. I appreciate you sharing that insight with us and you know we have a few more minutes left and you and I talk a lot online and chatting and stuff on the text messaging. Let's talk a little bit about kind of the perfect storm we have coming up in the energy world if you can if you can do that in like five minutes or less. Well I'll try and I think a lot of people have been talking about there's a it's not quite the energy world but it's a it has to do with something called Evergrande. It's a property developer there in China and one of the things that's been going on in China for a very long time and Stan and I you and I have been throwing about videos and stuff about some of the really bad property development that's been going on in China for quite a while but they have a 30 year speculative bubble and it's pretty bad. I mean it's not just the ghost cities there actually videos out there of 30 and 40 story buildings collapsing and killing people that's how bad these things are. Well this Evergrande company is basically declared bankruptcy the 24th of September and they have 30 days net due to make good on their debts and they can. Now Wall Street wants them bailed out the Xi Jinping is not going to for a lot of different reasons. Part of it has to do with politics. The last three years he's clamped down on corruption and China has been turning into kind of a hermit state basically. Look on like North Korea unfortunately that's what's been going on and as part of that stamping down and corruption he's definitely been stamping down on some of the bad property development there. The other side of it is he simply doesn't have the cash reserves to do it. With what's been going on with COVID so forth there's an entered crisis going on in China because of some conflicts they have with the Australians right the Australians eject the price of coal 300% they can't buy iron ore. Some of the coal mines in China they've had some pretty severe storms and it rained out their coal mines so they're having blackouts rolling blackouts going on in China right now. The Chinese haven't been able to fire up the the factories and of course we've got all the problems with importing goods here in the states and so forth so they don't have cash flow burn coming in and the COVID situation is pretty much deleted of cash now of dollars mainly. Now the reason why it's important dollars is China imports more than 60% of their food and they definitely are a large importer of crude oil and a lot of their other energy supplies. So Xi Jinping's a situation where if he bails out immigrant and you know we're talking about 300 billion dollars right that's going to have for his ability to buy food and fuel for his people. So the Wall Street is one of the bail out but the truth he can't politically you know he might end up being on the casually list if he did. Now as far as the Wall Street is concerned while they're so concerned about it in the street and amongst the financial community and especially amongst some of the big hedge funds they describe it as a dumpster fire and basically with the ideas they've taken all these bonds thrown in big dumpstries sat on fire and you got a rolling fire right and come the 23rd which is Saturday they're going to roll that into a building full of dumpsters full of that's been stoked up with gasoline and if you want to know what that proverbial or that that's symbolic building in it's called HSBC the big bank in Hong Kong and whenever that fire starts burning that's about that'll roll through the world's derivative markets and that's about 300 trillion dollars. You know this this is really really a scary time and I think the only reason it's not scary to most people is they they don't have a economic background. My unfortunate self had to go through a master's program and I through a university that all my electives were economics and I hate economics but I was forced to go through the classes and now I'm scared to death every time I open up a you know Wall Street Journal or I listen to what's going on with Evergrande but you know we've already hit our time limit and you know I'm gonna have to have you back again fortunately because I think I think we need to make this a regular thing you're very enlightening. I think you're right I think we're going to make it you know just sort of when I talk about 300 trillion dollars the United States we only have 20 our GDP is 20 trillion a year guys yeah so nobody can bail this out is what I'm trying to tell you. I truly wish it were a different story. Too big to bail not like the real estate bubble we had a couple years ago. Yeah not knowing that but the CCP can't because of political politics inside of China they can't bail it out yeah you know. Well thanks so much again for being on the show I really appreciate it and I'm gonna probably have you back in like two weeks just so we can do a Monday morning quarterback of what's going on around the world economically and talk a little bit more about hydrogen so thanks again and I appreciate it and we'll have to have you back. Well I appreciate your time Stan. All right hello to everyone and thanks for watching Stan Energyman I hope you'll really get something from this segment because I certainly did and I appreciate Dan coming on and sharing with us. So until next Tuesday Stan Energyman signing off.