 Welcome to Stand The Energy Man here on the second week of February already 2020 just zipping by. Before we get started I'd like to thank Major General Barris Lum for having me up to the PCOM today for a lunch and for to love Williamson to help for helping set it up and for Walt Cunyakua to join us and add color commentary and intelligence to the discussion. It was good seeing everybody again and I want to thank you. So as we get started on the show here today I don't have a guest but I do get a lot of great emails during the week and I got a particularly good one this this past week and I wanted to basically share the meat of it with you. So if you've been interested in hydrogen energy for very long you probably have heard the saying hydrogen is the fuel of the future and it always will be. It's a clever little saw often used by the oil and gas folks but for Stand The Energy Man the humor has been drained from that little phrase and the tide is turning towards hydrogen as a dominant source of stored energy. The way I see it good old H2 will be converted into heat and electricity and do the work of our society's industrial machine for the indefinite future. Over the past several years new associations have stood up around the world to bring to light advantages of hydrogen and as a solution to many of our planets environmental and energy challenges. Those of us that understand hydrogen and all of its aspects understand that eventually the world will recognize the advantages of hydrogen over most of our fundamental energy storage commodities such as coal oil and natural gas. It will just take time but the good news for us hydrogen junkies is that it looks like the hydrogen time is starting today. It appears to finally dawned on many of the captains of industry that find hydrogen in their value chain it's time to organize plan cooperate to overcome the traditional energy giants of industry. Several organizations including the fuel cell and hydrogen energy association the California fuel cell partnership and most recently the hydrogen council have organized and synergized with the support of the US Department of Energy to bring hydrogen technology to large scale in the United States right now. Recently a group of 19 US and international companies came together to draft a plan to grow hydrogen technology and hydrogen industries in the United States specifically but also worldwide generally. Today I'd like to share with you a summary of their plan and logic behind their effort. The author's authorized reproduction and release of the content of this plan provided the source is acknowledged and that source is the fuel cell and hydrogen energy association so I'd like to share with you some of what they outlined in this US plan particularly if they don't mind me adding some reinforcing comments along the way a little bit of color commentary. Executive summary basically states that 50 years ago the United States put the first man on the moon the Apollo 11 mission relied heavily on hydrogen powered fuel cell systems which supplied electricity and water for the mission and a liquid hydrogen as the fuel to propel the rocket motors. Since then America has remained a leader in the fuel cell and hydrogen technology commercializing a wide range of technologies that produce deliver store and utilize hydrogen across all applications and sectors. Today the hydrogen industry as well as the US are the crossroads for the country's energy future where it will be determined how we move forward. Energy systems across the US is evolving or evolving from power generation to transportation technologies are gaining the market share companies are grappling with decarbonization preservation of natural resources and aging infrastructure as well as energy storage and evolving regulatory landscapes along with new customer demands that seem to pop up every week. The resiliency reliability and security of our energy system are growing concerns hydrogen is key to overcoming these challenges and hydrogen as an as an energy carrier that cuts across sectors and has multiple benefits it can be used to store energy over long periods of time and transport energy over a long large geographies. Fuel cell electric vehicles whether they're heavy-duty light-duty material handling vehicles produce no tailpipe emissions and the hydrogen they use as fuel can be can be produced with near zero carbon emissions even on a life cycle basis. A vibrant hydrogen industry would maintain US energy leadership and security create jobs and significantly reduce carbon emissions and support economic growth for our nation. The time to boost support of hydrogen is now. Decisions and investments made now will have long-term impact more over many energy infrastructure decisions take a long time to implement. Other countries are laying plans for hydrogen economies including Australia by the way and the US will need to move quickly if it intends to continue to lead in this growing industry. US Department of Energy is funding for hydrogen and fuel cells and has ranged approximately 100 to 280 million dollars a year over the past decade with approximately 150 million nine dollars a year since 19 or 2017. Other countries are also investing heavily in hydrogen for example Japan's Ministry of Economy and Trade and Industry has announced hydrogen funding of approximately five hundred and sixty billion dollars for 2019 and the only thing a lot of that's going into the Olympics. China has announced hydrogen transportation industry investments of more than 17 billion through 2023 and in Europe Germany's investment includes a 110 million dollars annually to fund research laboratories to test new hydrogen technologies and for industrial scale applications. The investment is needed to lay the groundwork for hydrogen solutions capitals required to build foundational hydrogen infrastructure and companies need the right incentives to invest in low-carbon hydrogen solutions. Regulatory barriers and appropriate codes and standards need to be addressed to enable large-scale commercialization and a robust reliable supply chain. Funding is required for more research development demonstration and deployment of hydrogen technologies to improve competitiveness and performance. Directing capital to hydrogen is key to enabling growth in the US. Now the report gets into a lot of details but I kind of wanted to get to the summary of what they're talking about. They start off with a vision and their vision is basically hydrogen is critical for a low-carbon energy mix. It can be used broadly across several industries including transportation fuel, steel manufacturing, ammonia and fertilizer production, methanol refining, aviation fuel refining, residential and commercial heating and cooking and the grid power system itself. Some estimates indicate that hydrogen can help meet over 14% of the US's final energy demand by 2050, the equivalent of over 2,468 terawatts of grid energy delivered in the form of AC power. 8.4 billion MMBTUs of natural gas. Ask your gas guy what an MMBTU is but it's a bunch of gas and that can be for homes and businesses every year. Rather than being competitive with traditional fuels like coal and oil and gas, the hydrogen industry will reinforce US energy leadership. The US is now the world's largest producer of natural gas and oil. As countries around the world will look to hydrogen to reproduce to reduce carbon emissions, the US has an opportunity to reinforce and grow this industry and its energy leadership position and create jobs in this field. The US competitive domestic supply of hydrogen will enable exports of fuel to other markets outside our country that do not have such competitive supplies of their own. This growing industry creates jobs for US citizens and revenues for US businesses. The businesses operating in the hydrogen value chain will also grow by exporting technology to regions looking to develop their hydrogen infrastructure. By 2030, the hydrogen economy in the US could generate an estimated $140 billion per year in revenue and support 700,000 total jobs across the hydrogen value chain. By 2050, the hydrogen industry in the US could be generating $750 billion a year in revenue and accumulative number of 3.4 million jobs. By utilizing domestic energy resources like solar and wind and increasing energy resiliency, hydrogen will help to preserve our national security. Those of us who have lived through gasoline rationing and those of us with a military background can really appreciate the value of having domestically sourced energy rather than depending on other nations to sell us the energy in the form of oil or natural gas or even coal. Hydrogen production could use abundant renewable sources and even natural gas for several decades to come if we incorporate carbon capture in that process and even enable nuclear power in that industry to produce clean hydrogen over the next few decades and remain in operation. Long-term energy storage with hydrogen will maximize renewable energy production and use further enhancing total domestic energy production and use. It would allow abundant domestic natural gas to continue to provide affordable energy to meet demand in its transition. Hydrogen is an especially valuable solution for energy needs in areas such as long-distance road transport and in high-grade heat. Besides low carbon emissions, hydrogen used as a vehicle fuel completely eliminates tailpipe particulates including nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides along with CO and CO2, improving regional air quality while reducing greenhouse gases. Hydrogen enables better integration of clean solar and wind energy and in particular on our current electrical grid system. Grids incorporating electrolyzers that produce hydrogen can also provide a significant source of flexibility for intermittent renewables, providing long-duration storage solutions that are completely or that are complementary to more expensive short-duration battery solutions. In addition, they can provide additional load to help stabilize the power grid when solar and wind are producing too much electricity and we need a load to absorb that. Or for low carbon power sources like nuclear power which produce surplus energy. This aspect of hydrogen in the grid utility system as an energy storage component cannot be overemphasized from an economic and environmental perspective and I want to stay here too that a lot of people don't realize that when you get more than about 18% intermittent renewables solar and wind on a grid it completely destabilizes the grid for the utility because they can't handle the changes of like when the wind speed drops off or increases or the solar drops off or comes back on too quickly they have a hard time stabilizing their grid. So when you have those intermittent renewables which everybody's going to start pushing over the next 20 to 30 years you need to have something that can absorb that energy quickly and batteries aren't the solution but hydrogen is. The report also cites a practical roadmap that takes us from where hydrogen is today a well understood safe and versatile clean energy carrier to the ubiquitous energy source storage medium and multiple applications that will power us by the year 2050. The report envisions current transportation fuel applications to be primarily focused on material handling equipment and limited light duty vehicles. In power generation and on the grid the plan sees increasing intermittent renewable energy adoption driving electrolyzers as the key tool in aiding in grid balance and stabilization and it sees fuel potential in residential and commercial buildings particularly in the form of heat and cooking or for clothes drying. We're going to take a quick break here and talk about some of the other shows on Think Tech Hawaii and I'll be back with you in about 60 seconds. My name is Mitch Ewan I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I'm the host of Hawaii the State of Clean Energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen most of my heart electric buses and electric vehicles so please dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii the state of clean energy. Aloha. So coming back to this plan it's really a pretty extensive plan and we kind of started going into the what's going to happen year to year but if you want to look at the plan itself either the executive summary version or the whole plan it's we're going to put the the website up there it's a ushydrogen.org something like that anyway we'll throw it up on the screen for you and you can go check it out yourself it has a lot more information I'm just kind of summarizing here but I can tell you that it's a really well done plan that use the expertise of the national laboratories industry partners and folks who have worked in the hydrogen industry for years and hydrogen done hydrogen research for years. So there's starting off in this section describing how things are now but in the years 2023 to 2025 they see hydrogen technologies being adopted in greater numbers of light duty passenger vehicles light and commercial vehicles and buses as well as medium and heavy duty trucks and even light rail transportation. On the grid they see hydrogen contributing to the redesign of the grid to more distributed power generation while at the same time they see engineering analysis and pilot testing for new and innovative hydrogen products and byproducts like using pure oxygen from those electrolyzers and creating a that oxygen industry or impacting the oxygen industry for welding and medical use. And they perceive the need for increased study of hydrogen as a feedstock in larger-scale industrial applications and long-distance transportation. By the years 2026 to 2030 which really aren't that far in the future they see light duty fuel cell vehicles becoming commonplace along with light commercial vehicles and buses. They even see heavy trucks as sprinting ahead of diesel long-haul trucks by providing the best return on investment for those drivers in the long-haul trucking industry. They see light rail and possibly heavy locomotive rail becoming commonplace by 2030 and also by 2030 they see a blending of more hydrogen into natural gas pipelines and the green hydrogen moving its way into the heating and cooking gas industry. They see pilot testing of new hydrogen-based technologies and an industry that as hydrogen becomes better understood is used as a feedstock for larger industries like steel production. By the year 2030 and beyond they see low carbon aviation fuels based on hydrogen becoming a reality which is a big step because transportation including aviation fuel accounts for an awful lot of our carbon footprint. They see hydrogen energy storage as part of a centralized and distributed resilient and redundant grid system working in conjunction with hydrogen energy storage to assimilate as much intermittent renewable energy as possible in our energy grid systems. They envision hydrogen as an industrial feedstock becoming critical in many of our industries steel refining manufacturing agricultural production and in the transportation sectors even providing low carbon fuels for ocean going vessels and shipping. By the year 2050 the plan sees hydrogen as a predominant transportation fuel at all levels of light duty passenger vehicles and in particularly medium and heavy duty trucks and rail the material handling equipment aviation and large ships. They see hydrogen as a feedstock becoming critical in many other industries and on the grid. They see hydrogen as facilitating the maximum amount of solar and wind energy power production by allowing long-term storage of energy in a gaseous or liquid hydrogen form. Some of the plan's projections on infrastructure include the following. They say that current demand for hydrogen in the U.S. is 11 million metric tons but by 2030 they anticipate the requirement to be 17 million metric tons. They state that currently there are 7600 fuel cell electric vehicles on the road in the U.S. and by 2030 they estimate that there will be 5,300,000 of these vehicles on our streets and highways. That's a huge jump. They report that current fuel cell forklifts and other material handling devices that work on hydrogen fuel cells account for 25,000 units but that will grow to 300,000 units by 2030. They cite 63 hydrogen filling stations in operation most of them in California but today the projection is going to be 5600 by the end of by the year 2030 and that'll be nationwide. You'll see them not just in California and on the east coast but across the country. They say current investment in hydrogen is right now less than a billion dollars a year but it will soon grow to eight billion dollars by 2030 and for those who fear changes particularly in the area of jobs the plan projects half a million new jobs in the hydrogen industry by 2030 which should accommodate reductions in other traditional fuel industries and into the new hydrogen economy. I like the plan that the U.S hydrogen association came up with. It's comprehensive, it's logical, it's realistic and it was created with the government and industry working together to bring together the policy, the funding and the corporate realities of the task at hand. Yes folks it's time to move some of your 401k money into some hydrogen stocks and just remember you heard it here first on Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. So that's a summary of the report that came out, the plan and it really is very comprehensive and it's a great plan. It's a great place to start and I think that when people really start to absorb what it's telling us they're going to see that hydrogen is the reality. I talk to people around the world that have been associated with hydrogen for many many years and they all say the same thing it's going to start happening this year. So I'm aside from insider trading restrictions that I probably have I can't tell you which companies but I certainly would look at hydrogen fuel cell material handling and vehicles and probably trucks heavy-duty trucks as some of the early adopters of the hydrogen technology followed by grids and other transportation like aviation. I would look into some of those stocks and maybe think about putting a little bit of your money in there for your future retirement. So just to close today what I like to do is show a short video. I've seen it before if you watch Stand Energy Man much but it talks a little bit about hydrogen and how we could possibly incorporate some of these things in the plan and help you understand how they would fit a little bit clearer. 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 so one of the things that i pride myself on is being one of the most pessimistic non-believers of anything that anybody tells me right up front and you've got to really prove it to me to make sure that it gets through my my scrubbing process and i tell you i've been working with hydrogen now for over a decade and i'm i'm definitely sold and convinced that every time we come up with a challenge hydrogen meets it every time we come up with a shortfall in some storage technology for energy or you know or an industrial hydrogen answers it and i'm just convinced it's the way to go and so are a lot of other people and i would watch that hydrogen council and i would watch some of these other institutions like the folks that put this plan together and i'd keep checking on them because things are happening big time like i've had andy marsh head of plug power who does a lot of that material handling uh he has 20 over 20 000 units in the field right now and he also does stations to fill those things that produce hydrogen and he started turning a profit maybe two years ago three years ago he's been in business 15 20 years and he just started turning a profit now he i think his his growth is going to be explosive so just keep watching these uh these programs there it's coming and do me a favor go to your local car dealer and ask him when they're going to start bringing in fuel cell vehicles because one thing i've learned from doing a lot of different things with industry is if the demand's not there people aren't at least asking for it they'll never make it and you'd be surprised how often industry will respond to a couple customers coming in saying how come we don't have this yet and it spurs them forward people don't think your voice matters it really does and i i've actually made recommendations to big companies and in a couple years those those things came out in their cars so you never know it might be you that makes that push that'll do it for this week stand the energy man stan oserman here signing off and we'll see you next week aloha