 Hey Aloha and welcome to Stan the Energy Man, Stan Osterman here from Tiger Shark Energy Consulting H2, it's my little LLC, so send me donations I haven't made any money yet. Anyway I was getting ready for today's show and I was inspired by a lot of folks who actually one of my hydrogen safety shows has almost 50,000 hits on it so I thought I'd kind of review some of the stuff because a lot has changed a lot is up to date so I was looking through some of my videos and I actually found one that was done before I even started working for the state which was 2013 and it was when the video was done back in probably 2006-ish 2005-2006, Governor Lingels in the video, Senator Akakas in the video, the active-duty wing commander JJ Torres is in the video and it's all about the hydrogen vehicles who are making it hickam and what really caught my attention was how much they were talking about carbon, CO2, greenhouse gases, climate change. This is 15 years ago. You know how far we moved the needle on almost any of the energy stuff that we talked about 15 years ago? Almost not at all. So other than our new energy goal of being off of fossil fuels for the grid by 2045 it's it's scary to look back 15 years and think how much or how little we've actually done. But anyway I want to talk a little bit more about hydrogen today because for me hydrogen is the answer and I'm not sure people really understand why so here's a few things about hydrogen that I think you kind of like to know. Most folks understand that hydrogen is the very first element on the periodic chart but it's also the most common element in the universe not just this planet but the entire universe. But here's the catch as an atomic particle it's attracted to almost everything so you can't fly hydrogen all by itself like you can other elements like iron or oxygen or gold. But you will find that hydrogen is common in things that need energy. Did you ever wonder why water is so important to life? Think about it water is the most essential element on earth. When you ask scientists about the potential for life on other planets the first thing they do is look for water and wouldn't you know it? Water is only made up of two different atoms hydrogen and oxygen. So not only is hydrogen in water but it makes up two thirds of the atomic composition of water and wouldn't it be amazing if it turned out that water could be just as useful as gasoline in moving your car or truck or even a big train or an airplane? Well amazingly enough it's entirely possible and surprisingly the technology is not brand new it's over a century old and it's also interesting that two-thirds of the atoms that make up water are often accused of being dangerously flammable. Isn't that weird water flammable? In fact for over a century people associated hydrogen with one of the first disasters ever captured on film or broadcast live over a radio. The disaster was the Hindenburg and many people blame hydrogen for the disaster but it's just doesn't it's not true. But in reality hydrogen is very safe. In fact professionals the firefighters we've trained and many others would argue that hydrogen is even safer than gasoline or jet fuel. But at the same time it's also the favorite choice of many engineers when it comes to putting a rocket into space. Liquid hydrogen is one of the key components of rocket fuel. It would also come as some surprise to many that oxygen that friendly element that we so we so require with every breath is one of the most dangerous gases when in its pure state. So I think it's time that we did demystify hydrogen and we study the history books to learn all we learn about all we know already know about this marvelous element and then look around us and see all of the amazing things that have been developed around hydrogen technology particularly in the last 20 years. Let's start by asking the question we already have oil and gas and coal and and we know how to use them well so why should we change? Not only do we have plenty of those things but they're also inexpensive. While many people today are obviously concerned with greenhouse gases and climate change and burning these these transportation fuels and power and using it for power in our homes and our industries with electricity made from carbon-based fuels like oil and coal just don't seem to make sense from an environmental perspective. Even natural gas which is much better for the environment when it's burned other than rather than coal or oil is still carbon-based and releases greenhouse gases. So let's start there. Many power companies still burn fossil fuels to make electricity and unfortunately not many states have the rivers and topography to have big hydroelectric dams and even relatively clean nuclear power comes with a lot of baggage particularly what do you do with the spent fuel which can cause serious environmental and health concerns for many many centuries. Obviously we should be able to do better in generating power particularly with all of the solar and wind that's available to convert to power but the grid and heavy industry only account for about half of the greenhouse gases and particulate matter that come from burning fossil fuels. Transportation is the other culprit so wouldn't it be nice if there was a common solution to clean up our grid our industry and even our transportation sector? I'd like to propose that hydrogen is the alternative for the grid is an alternative for the grid and for the transportation sector they're kind of symbiotic. So for starters let's talk about transportation and its automobile origins. When we stopped using animals to pull us around in carts or on their backs and the automobile came about most of the best automobile designs used electricity and motors for their drive trains. Many people are actually astonished that the very first Porsche made in Germany was an electric vehicle. So why is it that we don't all drive electric vehicles today if electric drive is so much better? We're all driving gasoline and diesel vehicles why? An answer is simple it's all about energy storage. Back when cars were first being developed battery technology was in its infancy and the batteries at the time were heavy and could not store a lot of energy but the emerging internal combustion engine industry used fuel that could give a new automobile the range that everyone desired and as they say the rest is history. So interestingly enough in spite of the incredible progress we've made with battery technology batteries are still limited and vehicles by the way require a lot of energy just for example my house would require as much energy as to drive my car 30 miles in one day so that that's about the energy equivalents. So not only that but in spite of all our marvelous batteries on the market today they're all handicapped by weight and cost so wouldn't it be interesting if there was an electric vehicle that had a self-charging battery? A battery that you didn't have to stop and plug into an outlet for several hours or batteries that weighed thousands of pounds and you are moving around those things with you at that cost of moving that heavy weight. Aviators realize that when it comes to transportation it's all about weight so whether it's cars or buses or trucks or airplanes the more weight you carry the more energy you spend carrying your fuel. So let's get back to hydrogen. Hydrogen can be made or you might even say refined because it's just attached to everything else from many common elements including methane, natural gas, oil and yes even water and the cleanest hydrogen comes from water. For many years the problem with making hydrogen from water was that it required a large amount of electricity so it did make a lot of sense to make hydrogen when gasoline and diesel were a fraction of the cost but an interesting thing is happening around the world we've discovered inexpensive ways to harness solar energy and wind energy on our grids and turn it into electricity and that's a really good piece of news for customers of electricity but it's really bad news for the electric utility because wind and solar power are not consistent like turbines and hydroelectric dams. The sun doesn't shine all day long and the clouds come on go and the wind changes direction constantly so the utilities have a hard time balancing their electric grid when the power is coming from all these little intermittent renewable sources whether they're big fields or just your rooftop and the energy is constantly fluctuating while the demand for power on the customer side is also constantly fluctuating. The power from the generators and hydroelectric dams is called firm power and the power from solar arrays and wind is called intermittent power so how do you take all of that intermittent power that we plan to produce and turn it into firm power for the grid and the answer surprisingly is also the answer to making clean and expensive hydrogen it's it's turning it into hydrogen with an electrolyzer because you see the electrolyzer that makes hydrogen and oxygen from water can handle the fluctuations in the power easier than the grid so all of that intermittent power that the utility would normally have to throw away the official term is called grittailing by the way can now be used to make something good for transportation but wait there's more that hydrogen can be stored at a scale huge scale for a long period of time and it doesn't deteriorate like in batteries and then it can be used to put electricity back on the grid and that large-scale hydrogen storage is far cheaper than battery storage so that's why i'm i think hydrogen is such an elegant solution for many of today's problems environmental problems especially so let's talk about hydrogen a little bit and demystify this wonderful element so as we said before hydrogen is the most common element in the universe we just have to extract it from other molecules and one of those molecules being water which happens to fill our oceans by the way and there's big oceans and they really are the really neat thing about hydrogen coming from water is that hydrogen when you use it in the in the equipment to make electricity you get back some of the water in fact you get back quite a bit of the water and while you're making hydrogen you're also making pure oxygen which can be used in hospitals welding and many other industrial applications so there's plenty around plenty of hydrogen it's non-toxic and when you use it it turns it back into clouds how how good cannot be no particulates and no pollution no carbon dioxide no greenhouse gases so here's some interesting facts about hydrogen it's 14 times lighter than air it goes up at 45 miles an hour which is about 60 feet per second and that's why 150 years ago they used it in balloons to lift payloads high above the earth for transportation and for the military but hydrogen is powerful as well as i said earlier one of the main reason or main components of rocket fuel is hydrogen and even it even powers the stars in our galaxy when it comes to weight you cannot store more energy by weight than in hydrogen for example a typical 12 volt lead acid battery can can store about 50 amp hours per kilogram of weight the typical nickel cadmium battery can store about 165 amp hours per kilogram of weight the most typical lithium ion technologies today can store about 500 amp hours per kilogram which is huge that's like 10 times more than the lead battery but would you like to take a guess at how many amp hours you can get out of a kilogram of hydrogen not 55 not 500 answers a mind-blowing hydrogen will give you 26 thousand amp hours per kilogram so the transportation world hydrogen should be king because remember i said earlier that weight and transportation is everything it costs you money to move a lot of weight so you shouldn't be moving heavy fuel if you can use a lighter fuel that's why the engineers use hydrogen for rocket fuel you can't get more energy by weight than with hydrogen and when you mix hydrogen with oxygen you get a great combustion the big bonus is your exhaust is only heat and water vapor but when people read about hydrogen there's a lot of disturbing questions that come up one question is but hydrogen's explosive and the flame is invisible so you can walk right into it and and be burned to death and not even know it was there so when i get those kind of questions or comments i know i'm engaged with someone who just doesn't know a whole lot about hydrogen from a practical standpoint yes hydrogen will burn but only when it's mixed with oxygen or air which is air is actually only about 20 percent oxygen mostly nitrogen but the reality is that it's very hard to get hydrogen and oxygen to mix to a flammable or explosive ratio unless you can find it and give it time to blend to homogenize the hydrogen that we produce for vehicles is pure hydrogen and it's not flammable at all when it's stored in a tank and the tanks themselves are strong and have safety valves in their design and in fact the army is starting to look at hydrogen for some of their transportation in combat because it's much quieter doesn't emit any smoke has a lower heat signature which is important for imaging and an internal combustion vehicle can even compare on the heat side and they're concerned about hydrogen volatility of course so they went to the range and they set up some fully pressurized hydrogen tanks with high power and shot them with high power rifles the basic bullet just ricocheted off and ricocheted off the tanks because they were so tough the armor piercing bullets went right through the tanks and made a clean hole in and a clean hole out and the gas escaped through both holes but there was no fire then they shot at the armor piercing then they shot armor piercing high explosive rounds thinking that that would make the tanks blow up but what happened is a bullet went made a clean entry like on the first second one and a clean exit but then the hydrogen it was escaping was mixed enough with oxygen once it got outside to catch on fire so a blow torch like flame came out of the tanks and after 10 minutes the hydrogen burned off and the tank was still sitting there pretty much intact with two holes in it and no explosion obviously that wasn't good enough for the army so they also attacked the hydrogen tank with a rocket propelled grenade and some plastic explosives needless to say they did some serious damage to the tank but it was hard to tell whether it was hydrogen damage or whether there's explosive damage from the explosives so the army concluded that hydrogen was pretty darn safe what i'd like to do now is actually show you a quick video and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about hydrogen to wrap up the show city fire department and go to different fire stations all around the islands here to the fire houses and teach the guys preparing them for fuel cell eds the facts about hydrogen and dispelling all the myths and misinformation right so there's basically first of all hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe everybody knows that it's one of the periodic people it's the lightest and smallest as well it's 14 times lighter than there twice as light as helium so it goes up at 45 miles per hour that's 66 feet of seven so if you went 1001 it's six stories away in a second wow it's hauling ass it's hard to keep it around so the buoyancy is one thing that makes it safer than any other flammable gas because hydrocarbon gases are heavier than that so they stick around so in a classroom usually with an eight foot acoustical ceiling i go you got a leak of hydrogen make sure everybody can hear it in the back conventional wisdom the river spark is what it's doing well you can see a little bit of distortion maybe right there where it was actually converting it to water vapor but it's moving so fast by the time it's an inch from the hole it's hit air molecules and scattered to it's not even combustible mixture anymore the ratio is not there anymore that's already left to build before i even started talking about it hit the ceiling and went up events at the top it'll go through the drywall this stuff is really hard to contain right so that makes it safer than any other flammable gas the second thing is that you're gonna have to come in close to this because since there's no carbon in this fuel it's pure hydrogen there's almost no radiant energy and put my finger no touch on top it's over five to a thousand degrees on the side but down here don't touch it you touched it okay i warned you because i'm a carbon based life form it likes to like to jump right out and get you yeah okay so put it in perspective this walk burner way over 200 dollars abuse we never repainted it we never touched it okay and it's because the lack of radiant heat the heat goes straight up unless you put something in it's way like a finger and none of this is heating up or the paint would have been oxidized you know after 10 hours of use so that is the second thing that if you have a leak and it ignites it doesn't heat up everything around you you've ever seen the video of a gas car and a fuel cell car on fire the difference is so dramatic in 30 seconds everyone in that car is burned they're gone the gas only ruptured the tank the gulfs the entire car the fuel and fire the hydrogen is shooting a torch out the back so you got a six foot torch and even the gasket yeah the rubber on the windshield isn't there's no radiant there was a there was a tanker tube trailer in california that was moving hydrogen and it was a covered one like the one you saw down at nelha today with mitch's thing and it had a small leak in one of the second row of tanks and apparently a spark ignited it blew the top of the tanker off and just the the sheet metal and started a fire so of course they evacuated a half a mile around this thing they called in two fire trucks to put water on it and put the fire out and it was a non-event after the non-event the truck still drove out of the 25 cylinders 19 of them were still usable and the only ones that weren't were above the fire where it was in the flame and that it damaged the tanks there was a tree right on the sidewalk within five feet of the thing didn't even scorch a leaf and underneath the tanker there was no damage to the pavement now if you've ever seen a vehicle fire on a highway it damages like concrete so badly you you can't use a bridge anymore if a big truck or something catches on fire huge differences this is my theory but i'll stick to it so as you saw here the lack of radiotherapy the dirigible was painted with an aluminized waterproofing compound that's what they painted the fabric with to make it waterproof today we call that compound thermite okay the thermite lights it burns incredibly hot and it can't be extinguished it's impossible it has to be consumed so lightning struck the the bladder caught the thermite on fire the skin started burning lots of radiant heat from that an enormous amount it ruptured the hydrogen bags inside and a huge hydrogen fireball in the suit that fireball is what saved the people from being baked to death it pulled all of the heat including the frame and the skin and the hydrogen heat up and away from the people given the time that they're on the thermite scale that is the most plausible explanation for what happened i would never have known it if it wouldn't have been from my experience with hydrogen and testing it when i started 2012 with this the first time i lived this stove i had it on a stick anyway that's it so i started learning more and more and more and more and more and you see how visible this flame is yeah it's a beautiful flame that's totalist non toxic blah blah blah need a signature oh thanks for so this was made with sunlight and water okay well it's it's burning some dust in the air but it's mostly just hydrogen with the oxygen in the air making water vapor right and if you put your hand up and you can feel the moisture in the flame it's kind of a damp heat so it's really nice if you barbecue it doesn't dry your food out right but it's all going to vaporize you have a puddle of water underneath uh no because it's making this vapor it's just going off it's just been making clouds from it but the fact that you know i i've done i don't know how many people have come through here by now but i had a group of food truck guys come through one time they went nuts because they cook themselves inside the van when they're cooking it's so hot they went crazy would you fill our bottles if we buy i mean the heat goes where you want it to Paul Pontio from Blue Planet Research on the big island does that uh that he does a tour inside of his lab there and he gives that tour a couple times a month so maybe three or four times a month and that's one of the demonstrations i think impresses people the most but as i hope he answers some of the questions and you know one thing i mentioned before we went to the video was some of the questions i always get and one of them is isn't the flame invisible and paul talked a little bit about that but it turns out the flame is hard to see in daylight but it's quite visible at night and as you can tell in the video even indoors it's kind of bluish and occasionally as impurities go through from the air it'll it'll give off a little bit of orange color but the notion of walking into a hydrogen flame innocently is not realistic one of the things i did is as an example is i would i would vent some hydrogen on my gas station to show what a pressurized tank releasing hydrogen sounds like it's actually deafening the gas escaping out of a small hole and burning uh is without a sound is like impossible it's going to have a sound so you can hear that like it's a torch sound like a blue torch and it'd be very hard to walk into a hydrogen flame unnoticed in fact even the heat waves of the flame outside you can you can see them on the sidewalk so that's that's some of the questions i get from hydrogen so i've got a really good video that i just showed you from paul that he loves showing that um that hydrogen walk and i think he said it in there that the the walk burner um has very little wear and tear on it it's actually in pretty good shape because hydrogen doesn't have any carbon in it it doesn't radiate any heat out the side so it's it's really really clean so thanks to paul for letting us see that so the last thing i got to say is um about hydrogen is that most folks really just don't appreciate hydrogen for all that can do but it's valuable on the grid because it can help stabilize the grid but the only way that'll help stabilize the grid is when we have a lot of intermittent renewal on board and we need to have a load during the daytime when there's too much solar and wind power to be used so instead of having to shut down generators you would just keep on using the electricity and make hydrogen and just keep storing the hydrogen that hydrogen could be used for transportation or to put back in a stationary fuel cell and give you grid power back has to be converted converted from ac or dc to ac power for the grid but you can use it for both so there's a neat relationship there if we could really get our heads around it that if you are using curtailed power to make hydrogen it could help you with your long-term storage on the grid and it could help with your electric transportation because all a fuel cell does in a car is it turns hydrogen into electricity heat and water and there you go you've got the perfect system if you make it from sunlight or wind it's clean from beginning to end with no carbon in it when it gets used in a fuel cell it puts off heat electricity and water and all those are good things that's what i think we ought to be doing and so i hope that this is a refresher for those of you that know a little bit of a hydrogen or if you don't know it's a it'll get you thinking about what we really should be doing and how hydrogen can be a great solution in our world today as we try and use more intermittent renewables and try and clean up our environment so that'll do it for today for stand the energy man and i thank you for joining me here at think tech and we'll see you next week same time tuesday three p.m hawaii time and on think on youtube think tech on youtube so i'll see you next week