 Welcome to the energy man Stan Osterman here on Think Tech Hawaii coming to you live and direct from the city and county of Honolulu and the mighty, mighty metropolis of Kailua, Hawaii on the windward side where it's a really, really beautiful spring day today. Hopefully my rooster will be quiet. I haven't heard much of him and hopefully my dogs won't be barking and we will keep them quiet because this is a solo show today. I don't have a guest so I can't mute myself while my guest is talking. So I hope my critters don't act up. Anyway, I want to start off with something I forgot to announce last week. Fortunately, we got a little bit of time, but the Ohio fuel cell consortium that that does coalition that does some great, great work. Ohio for those who don't know for hydrogen is kind of like the epicenter of hydrogen research in in the United States. California is like the hydrogen mecca for vehicles, but Ohio, the university and Dayton and everybody around there, they're all really big into hydrogen research, the university, they're built a hydrogen race car and all kinds of stuff. Anyway, they're they're sponsoring a symposium this fall. And so I wanted everybody to see the dates and stuff and got it down. And if you want to participate, make sure you save the date and kind of go on the web and look up look up the coalition and maybe start getting their their their newsletter so that you can chime in when that symposium kicks off and sign up for it. So anyway, today's show is kind of goes back to some of my training in the Air Force and some of the training that many people got over the last no 20 or 30 years or so. If they were really heavily into efficiency and business planning and running a business and things like that, the whole Covey Seven Habits stuff and total quality management and Six Sigma and, you know, in the Air Force, we call it AFSO 21 Air Force smart operations for the 21st century. And we all had to study all the different techniques for making things efficient and planning better and just doing better organization. So today we're going to, you know, I got this quite frankly, looking at one of my one of my business magazines from from Honolulu and they happen to have it on the front page and it's called a SWAT analysis. It's that's called a SWAT for short, but it's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and the SWAT analysis in business kind of goes hand in hand with your business plan and your balance sheet. As you if you're going to do a business, you kind of want to know where's your money coming from? Where's it going? How much are your expenses? What can you depreciate? You know, all that that stuff to make sure you've got all your finances covered, but the SWAT analysis is more on the practical side. It's like, if you're going to start a business like a bakery or something, you'd want to know if you had any competition, you'd want to know what made your product special. You'd want to know all the things that are more on the, not on the finance business side, but on the, hey, can I really sell this product? Can I really deliver this service? Can I really, you know, make a brand or something that's going to make it and you do a SWAT analysis? So I did one really pretty quickly over the last couple of days, and I'm sure all of you guys can watch today and add a whole bunch more because I'm sure I missed a bunch. I'm sure some of my cohorts out here in the hydrogen wall, they're going to critique me on it. But what I wanted to do was a good SWAT analysis of hydrogen because, you know, those of us who are in the energy world know that hydrogen is really gaining traction big time as one of the key tools in combating climate change and energy efficiency. And it's also a big part of, it's going to be a big part of the grid and a big part of transportation. And it's got a whole bunch of unique aspects to it. So I said, you know, I'm going to do a SWAT analysis of hydrogen. And that's what we're going to do today. So normally the SWAT analysis or the SWAT diagram is just a big plus sign and it's got strengths and weaknesses on the top and opportunities and threats on the bottom. And I'm just going to go in the order that it's listed. So S for strengths and some of the things about a hydrogen that make it really, really, a really good energy partner for green energy is number one is the most common element in the universe. And that's important because, you know, right now, if you think about it, most of the wars that have ever been fought in history have been fought over resources, whether it's trees or land or money or in today's world, a lot of times it's energy. And every country on the planet and every even small communities and small islands in the middle of the ocean, they all have hydrogen because hydrogen is the most common element, not just on earth, but in the entire universe. And it's so versatile and it's so useful. But it's it's such a simple element that it's almost always tied to something else. So one of the things I'll be talking about today is hydrogen green hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from splitting water H2O into hydrogen and oxygen H and O and H2O. And that's called green hydrogen. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But hydrogen is found every place. So can you imagine an energy source that we could use that nobody'd have to go to war over because everybody has it. Even the state of Hawaii has plenty of it. We're surrounded by water and you can make hydrogen from water. So another one of hydrogen strengths is 14 times lighter than air. And that means a lot in a lot of different areas. Being lightweight as a fuel means if you spill it, it doesn't sit on the ground or it doesn't saturate your clothes so you catch on fire if it if it spreads. It goes straight up in the air at 45 miles an hour and it gets out of the way. And when it gets up there, it makes clouds. So you don't have to worry about it from a safety perspective. And it also has advantages being so lightweight that when it comes to transportation, there's an advantage there. It also has a very high energy density. When I say energy density, that means by weight, hydrogen carries more energy in it than just about anything else. I keep a couple of figures in my head. And one of them is if you had to store energy in batteries and you stored them in like lead acid batteries like in your car, those batteries can hold about 54 amp hours for every kilogram of weight. And then you have like alkaline batteries and nickel metal hydrate batteries and they can store like probably somewhere around 80 or so amp hours per kilogram of weight. And then you get your modern lithium ion batteries like to use in the Tesla and stuff. And they can store probably four to six hundred amp hours per kilogram. But when you get to hydrogen, hydrogens can carry twenty six thousand amp hours per kilogram. So when it comes to storing energy, hydrogen is probably the most efficient thing to store energy in. That's why when NASA sends a rocket into space and it's a liquid fueled rocket, it's fueled by liquid hydrogen because it has so much energy in it for the amount of weight that you're putting on that missile or that rocket. So it's very high energy density. It helps facilitate more renewable energy. So one of the problems you have with PV and wind is it doesn't always the sun is not always out. So you can't always get PV power on your house at night when the sun is not out. And when the wind doesn't always blow and sometimes it was really hard and sometimes it was really soft. So intermittent renewables, you have to be able to store the energy. And one of the best ways to store the energy is to make hydrogen. Because when the sun is out there and you're making way more power from your PV than you need, you just take whatever power you're given and make hydrogen with it because the hydrogen electrolyzer can ramp up and ramp down. And it doesn't care how much electricity it's getting from the PV. It'll just make more hydrogen with lots of electricity and less hydrogen with a little less. And then at night you have that hydrogen saved up and you can put it back into your house using a fuel cell. Also, like I mentioned in transportation, and if you heard this show before, you know, I always say transportation is all about weight and it is. I don't care whether you're building a rocket ship, an airplane, a big cruise ship or a car or a truck. When it comes to storing energy to propel your vehicle, the less it weighs, the more efficient your overall system is going to be always. So hydrogen has everybody beat. Hydrogen is also non-toxic and it has non-toxic byproducts. So when you use hydrogen in a fuel cell or if you burn hydrogen in a turbine, there's no NOx, there's no carbon monoxide, there's no carbon dioxide, there's none of those pollutants. So you can use hydrogen, burn it in a like when you're cooking and you don't make any CO2 or carbon monoxide, you don't poison yourself. So that's another strength of hydrogen. It's carbon free. So when we talk about greenhouse gases, hydrogen can be burned just and used for cooking, just like propane or natural gas or whatever. And it doesn't have any carbon in it. And it's non-polluting. If you burn hydrogen or use it in a fuel cell, your only byproducts are electricity, heat, and water, pure water, distilled water, essentially. So you even get that clean water when you when you use hydrogen. If you do want to cook with hydrogen and you can, it's just it's a lot like using any kind of gas to cook with. The hydrogen is very directional. It's more like a torch kind of flame than it is a fireplace kind of flame where you got flickering flames and stuff. It's it's really very directional. And because there's no carbon in the hydrogen, it doesn't really heat sideways. All the heat is right in the horizontal direction of the flame. When that hydrogen is going straight up and burning, it puts all the heat right above where the source of the hydrogen is burning. And so you can put your hand literally within a half inch of the flame on the side and you barely feel any heat. But if you put your hand in that flame or right above it, it's four to five hundred degrees. So it's it's really interesting in terms of efficiency. A lot of the guys who have food trucks can hardly wait to start using hydrogen in their food trucks to cook because it won't heat up their food truck as much. All the heat's going to go up in their hood and out the top of the truck and not so much of it spreads through the truck. Let me see, like I say, we can use it for cooking and heating, heating water, heating your house. And it's a directional flame of little radiant heat. It can be used to make electricity. So if you take water and solar panels to split the high, the water into hydrogen and oxygen, you can you can save that hydrogen later on and turn it back into DC electricity. And if you your solar panels make DC electricity, you can use DC electricity to split the water. And then you have hydrogen that can be mixed with air in a fuel cell and give you back DC electricity and water. And the DC electricity can be turned with inverters into AC power to run all your AC appliances in your house. So it can it can be made from DC electricity and it can turn around and make DC electricity on site. Hydrogen can be extracted from more things than just water. Hydrogen, literally you can steam reform it from methane. You can get hydrogen from a lot of different sources. We like to focus here in Hawaii on green hydrogen, which is hydrogen by splitting water in in two components. And making green hydrogen actually has another attribute that helps what we're trying to do overall, which is go with more renewable energy sources instead of burning fossil fuel. Now what happens on the grid when you have a lot of photovoltaic or a lot of wind, the grid becomes very unstable because as clouds move in front of the sun and the wind stops blowing, it starts blowing, it gets really strong and then drops off. Now your grid is so unstable that the electric company who has to provide a nice steady grid frequencies and power, they can't keep up with all those ups and downs of solar and wind. So what you can do is you can control those ups and downs in your solar and your wind by putting an electrolyzer on your system that makes hydrogen. And like I said, the electrolyzer can follow any load you want. So if there's way too much solar or way too much wind, the electrolyzer can take all the electricity you want to give it. And instead of turning off generators like they do in the grid now or curtailing solar power, you just divert that energy into an electrolyzer and it helps stabilize your grid and it gives you stored energy in the form of hydrogen. So it's really, really a grid. Hydrogen fuel cell, electrolyzers and fuel cells, they don't have very many moving parts. In fact, most of the moving parts in a fuel cell or an electrolyzer are pumps to move liquid around or to use for cooling. Because hydrogen does heat up a little bit, even when you just use an electrolyzer. So it's really, really a great thing to couple with the grid. Hydrogen fuel cell, electrolyzers and fuel cells, they don't have as much heat when you just use an electrolyzer. But it's not as hot as an engine like in a car, but you do have cooling fans and you do have circulating water in a lot of times. And that's actually makes the equipment so much simpler than internal combustion engines or big refineries that they last a long time. In fact, I've been working with hydrogen equipment for probably about 12 years now. All of the equipment we have is basically still the equipment that we started with, because we haven't worn it out yet. It just keeps on going because there's not very many moving parts. The pumps and things may wear out because they have some moving parts in them, but the core pieces, the cells in the electrolyzer and in the fuel cell, they just tend not to wear out. They last for a long, long time. The last thing I have listed under strengths is military applications. Because when we worked at HCAT, we were funded by the Air Force. The military really appreciated things like how quiet the equipment was and how low the heat signature was coming off of the fuel cell equipment. So the reason that's important in the military, of course, is when you're trying to be stealthy, you don't want to have a lot of noise and you also don't want to give off a lot of heat signature. And then, like I mentioned also, because fuel cells don't release any kind of noxious CO or CO2, you could actually use this equipment in an enclosed hanger in a warehouse all night along with all the doors closed. And nobody would be able to use it. And that's what they target with their artillery or their mortars or their rocket attacks. So fuel cell stuff, they just don't give off much of a heat signature. And then, like I mentioned also, all the doors closed and nobody's going to get sick because all you're making is water, water and a little bit of heat with your electricity. So there's a lot of really great attributes to hydrogen and the strength part of my SWAT analysis was actually one of the biggest parts of this analysis. So now we'll go to weaknesses and here, you try and be brutally honest with yourself, I'm such a hydrogen fan. It's hard for me to think of negatives, but there are some weaknesses with hydrogen. Number one of the weaknesses, it's tough to compete in the energy world right now because there is so much infrastructure that centers around internal combustion engines and gasoline and diesel. It is hard for hydrogen to be competitive price-wise and it's hard for hydrogen to be competitive just because there's not much infrastructure built and it's too expensive to compete dollar-for-dollar with gasoline or natural gas. Another weakness is hydrogen fuel cells, even though they're much more efficient, over twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, they're still not as efficient as lithium batteries in terms of energy into energy out, but they are safer and they are less expensive and they tend to last longer. So over a long lifetime, they actually are a better value overall than batteries, but for straight energy into energy out, hydrogen can't beat batteries. Number one, if you're going to be with hydrogen, you've got to scale it big. Like right now we have huge oil fields and huge pipelines and tankers that move fuel and everything. Hydrogen doesn't need all those things. You can just make it anywhere you want, as long as you have electrical source and a water source. But right now there's so much infrastructure out there that to get to that scale, hydrogen infrastructure has to scale huge. One of the biggest weaknesses we have as we try and share the technology with people is the negative connotation of things like the Hindenburg Zeppelin incident way back in, what, 1917 or 1915. It's over 100 years ago, and yet if I say hydrogen, the first two things I hear is either Hindenburg or H-bomb. And the hydrogen we're talking about is hydrogen, but it's not anywhere, it's not nuclear. We're not building nuclear bombs and we're not building nuclear energies here. We're basically just working with hydrogen as a gas. And the Hindenburg, most people don't understand that whole complex incident, but quite frankly, if it wasn't filled with hydrogen, that disaster would have been much worse. But the hydrogen actually kept the people below the Hindenburg cooler because it drew all the heat upward instead of radiating the heat downward. It also was not the cause of the Hindenburg disaster. The cause of the Hindenburg disaster was the coating, the protective coating on the derogable itself. It was meant to protect it from weather and sunlight and things like that. But it was also very, very flammable. In fact, today we would call it thermite, the same stuff we make dynamite from. It's a very unstable paint that caused the fire. And then of course, once you have a fire burning, if you compromise the hydrogen gases inside the Hindenburg, they caught fire too. But it didn't cause the accident. It was just a contributing element in there. But hydrogen, when we train the firefighters, it's much safer than most of the other fuels that we use today. Another weakness on hydrogen is it doesn't measure like liquid fuels. We measure hydrogen in pressure and kilograms. And because it's a compressible gas, depending on temperature and pressure and all kinds of things, the volume changes with all those variables. So it's not like you could pour a gallon of gas or a gallon of anything and just have a gallon. Compressible gases are much more complicated to measure. And that's a challenge for the people after regulated. Under opportunities, there's so many business opportunities that will come with the adoption of hydrogen. I mean, just think of everything in the automotive and energy world. Opportunities are just going to be creating so many jobs and so many different chances for new businesses to come about. Also, when you think about it, we're trying to be sustainable, like especially here in Hawaii, we want more sustainable agriculture and things like that. Well, believe it or not, ammonia is just nitrogen and 70% of the air you breathe is nitrogen and hydrogen. And ammonia is used in fertilizer. So you could be making your own fertilizer with stuff out of the air and hydrogen. Methane is CH4. So methane is much cleaner to burn than gasoline or diesel fuel because it only has one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. But it's still carbon. So a lot of the natural gas companies, Hawaii gases, they're committed to converting to hydrogen as their future fuel. And if you electrolyze saltwater to make hydrogen, you also get chlorine. And then as a regular water, if you electrolyze, you get oxygen. So those are all byproducts that contribute to other industries while you're making it. So they create opportunity. Like I said, you can help manage the grid stability. It supports what we call distributed generation. When you look at a grid, if you live in a good community now, all your utilities are underground. I live in an old community and I have power lines strong all through my community. And it's an eyesore. And it's actually a vulnerability during a storm. When you have a big hurricane or strong winds or something, you have power outages or thunderstorms because of all those lines. Well, you can use that those hydrogen technologies in a small microgrid and do away with a bunch of power line. So there's some other advantages and opportunities if you adopt hydrogen. And hydrogen mixed in a fuel cell gives you a really good with the utility company calls base load power. It's really, really important for electric companies to have that stability and base load power gives them stability. When you use hydrogen and put it back on your grid, you're putting really stable power back into the grid. It supports the sustainability. Like I mentioned in agriculture, making your own ammonia for your fertilizer in transportation, it lightens up all your transportation systems so that they are more efficient. It helps balance the grid, gives the military advantages, and then a lot of the byproducts are used in manufacturing. So another example of kind of a bridge between agriculture and other farming is if you take the oxygen from your electrolyzer and you feed it into an aquaculture system, your fish or whatever you're raising usually can metabolize their food a lot faster and your fish can grow faster. Therefore you can actually make more money with your agriculture products. Another thing is I have their code generation what code generation is, like I said, hydrogen when you're using the fuel cell does make a little bit of heat. So, when you're when you have a heat byproduct, that's wasted energy. So, if you take the heat byproduct of your fuel cell, and you can apply that to air conditioning and things, that's called code generation that's using every bit of the energy out of that system. Natural gas is going to commit to carbon free hydrogen in the future. Pipelines are becoming available because as natural gas tapers off those pipelines are available to move hydrogen so therefore you don't have to drive them around in trucks, you can use a really cheap way of moving it. It helps us address all the climate change challenges. The last block is threats. And the biggest threat that I think to hydrogen as a, as a future problem solver in our energy sector is just misinformation and irrational fears like I say from the Hindenburg H bomb. These things are really, really dragging us down in terms of moving forward in a, in a technology that is really, really going to transform our energy sector. There's also a huge and established carbon based power generation and transportation system that is that is in direct competition, but has all the infrastructure already built and paid for. You have to compete with when you're starting a new technology and you have to build all new infrastructure. It tends to seem really expensive. The other thing it's, and this is a fairly minor one, but I've noticed that people who really love batteries like Elon Musk. Think that batteries are the only solution. And batteries aren't the only solution. They're one of the solutions. There's some great reasons to have just a pure battery plug in vehicle. Right now, if you have a Tesla and you're plugging it into Hawaii's grid, you're probably putting also fuel electricity into your Tesla. So you're really not being clean and green. And the idea is to use renewable energy to charge your electric vehicles. But hydrogen is not competition for plug in electric vehicles. Hydrogen is a compliment. It is an electric vehicle. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are electric just like battery plug ins are instead of having a battery like a lithium battery, they have to charge from the grid fuel cell battery is self charging put hydrogen and air in it, and it runs. So that's a quick SWAT analysis of hydrogen. I'm sure there's a whole lot more we could go into, but I only have a half hour show. I tried to pare it down to the to the high points. But if you look at it overall on the SWAT diagram the SWAT analysis, the advantages clearly outweigh any of the disadvantages. And if, if the larger community could get their head around all the things that hydrogen can contribute through many sectors of our society. I think that Hawaii's economy to be much better off, we could go from being energy import and importers to energy exporters. And that would make a huge difference in any island economy, or any any community that doesn't have natural gas or oil growing in its backyard. So I think it's going to do it for Stan energy man this week, and I appreciate it I should have a guest next week. I'm working on getting some some folks from Europe to talk to us about where Europe's going with hydrogen. And then I'd like to actually get somebody on the can talk about aviation fuels renewable aviation fuels, because I will be a big player here in Hawaii as well. Until next Tuesday. This is Stan energy man signing off.