 our future on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Brittany Zimmerman. And I'm Richard Haun, your co-host. And joining us today is our guest, Dr. Michael Ginsberg, who will be helping us do a deep dive into our e-invention. Welcome, Dr. Ginsberg. Thanks, Brittany. Awesome. So our e-letter invention this week, ladies and gentlemen, is electrolyzers. All right, Richard, what do you know about electrolyzers? Electrolyzers, something bubbles up out of the water and something happens. I got to give you more explanation. Awesome. Maybe Michael can help us dive a little bit deeper. At a high level, Michael, give us an introduction to who you are and then maybe transition into what an electrolyzer. So a pleasure to be with you all. At a very high level, Richard had it right. Basically, we're taking water, H2O, and we're splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen using an electrical current. So it's allowing us to harness the hydrogen fuel for a lot of applications. Awesome. And give us some of your background, Michael, where you come from. What is your experience with electrolyzers? Fill in the picture for it. Yeah, absolutely. So I've worked for the last 15 years in renewable energy, primarily working on solar projects, modeling and designing and installing renewables. And for the last seven years, I've worked on a PhD in electrolysis and figuring out how to commercialize electrolyzer systems. And so I've been able to now, in my most recent role, develop green hydrogen projects throughout the United States. That is exciting. Yeah, we're here in Hawaii, I think, you know, and this state in particular has shown a lot of interest in the potential of moving to a hydrogen-based economy. And I know that's something that Richard has been having conversations around and spearheading as well. So I'm really excited to kind of pull the veil out from underneath or around what electrolysis is. So we have these conversations here about hydrogen and how it could help us in the future. But where does it really come from? We hear about different colors and different types. And I'm really interested in kind of having a conversation there, right? Are there better hydrogens than others? And then diving into how those are made. Yeah, absolutely. And we call that the hydrogen color wheel, which is becoming sort of everybody's biggest frustration. So the hydrogen color wheel is all about, you know, getting to zero carbon. And when we say it's green hydrogen, we mean that it's a hydrogen that has no carbon dioxide emissions. And so one other way to look at that is then just looking at the carbon intensity of the produced hydrogen. So most hydrogen today, 95% of it is made from burning natural gas. It's called steam methane reformation. And so obviously that emits a lot of CO2. So there are a lot of other ways of doing it. The primary way that we look at with green hydrogen is electrolysis, because when you split water, there's no carbon emissions. But there are other ways. You could do what's called methane pyrolysis. You end up with a solid carbon. And so there's just a variety of ways. You could also capture the carbon from natural gas burning. And so we call that blue hydrogen. So yeah, we're all moving towards just looking at hydrogen with the lens of what is the emissions profile. And so, you know, those those are the major, the major ways of looking at it. Okay, so green hydrogen isn't the color green. It just means there's no CO2 released in production. Exactly. Awesome. Okay, then how we talked a little bit about electrolysis, right? We're kind of splitting things. Water, right, to make hydrogen. And actually, are there different ways, are there different types of electrolyzers? Yeah, that's a great question. Absolutely. So there are several different types. And so there's several mature types of electrolyzers. And in fact, for some viewers, they probably are familiar with the fact that this electrolyzer technology has been around for a number of years, since really the 1970s. The earliest form was called the alkaline electrolyzer. And it's so called because it was based in an alkaline electrolyte or a liquid that passed the charge. We also have what's called a PEM or a polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzer. And that's a solid membrane that transports the we call the ions across the across the anode and the cathode or the two sides of the electrolyzer. Those are the two most mature types. There's several other types that are also maturing, but they're less developed at this stage. And what are the benefits and drawbacks to either taking the alkaline approach or the PEM approach? Yeah, so the alkaline more mature, better cost profile in terms of the upfront cost. But there is a higher operations and maintenance long term. You need to manage a liquid electrolyte. You need to have a larger footprint to store that medium. One of the biggest benefits of the PEM system, which was the focus of my dissertation research is the ability of a PEM to respond rapidly to changes in the renewable energy supply. So if there's, for instance, solar power that's powering that electrolyzer, the PEM system could rapidly fluctuate based on the amount of power that's coming into it. On the other hand, an alkaline system is a little bit more sluggish. It takes a longer time to respond. And so that's probably one of the biggest differences. The PEM system also is able to what we operate at what we call a higher current density. So when we are able to operate at a high current density, we can generate more hydrogen versus a lower current density, so it can be more compact. We need a lot more cells or active area to generate the hydrogen if we use an alkaline electrolyzer. Awesome. Awesome. So you're saying that you did your dissertation in PEM style technologies. What did you do your dissertation on? Yeah. So I saw I last six or seven years now, I focused on the commercialization of these PEM electrolyzers. And so what I looked at specifically was how do we reduce the cost of making hydrogen by only using these PEM electrolyzers and by varying the rate of hydrogen production? So one question really key to this research was assuming that we could change the amount of hydrogen that's being produced during the day, how does varying the production reduce the cost if we can take advantage of really low cost electricity? Because keep in mind that our major inputs here are water and power. So if we can generate a tremendous amount of hydrogen when the cost of electricity is really low, we expect that we should have a very low cost of hydrogen production. Vice versa, when the cost of electricity is very high, we should ramp it down. And so we're sort of in this Web 1.0 version of electrolyzers where they're just running 24-7. So I tried to look at this more closely to get a newer nuance of view of this. And what I found was that we could actually reduce the cost of making hydrogen by up to 60-80% over just running them constantly. You know, we're sitting out here, Hawaii, we're sitting out here in the middle of the Pacific. And so we need to be able to respond quickly to changing events. So right off the bat, the PIM sounds like it reacts quicker. But do you need to have storage? And how does that play into everything? Yeah, absolutely. If you were talking about the storage of the hydrogen itself, sometimes we do recommend or we do include hydrogen storage. If you need to make sure that you have a constant flow of hydrogen to wherever your application is. So for instance, if you're overproducing or underproducing, then we include what's called buffer storage. So we smooth the flow of the hydrogen to the end user. So yes, absolutely. We also use another form of storage, sometimes battery storage, if we're using a solar or wind farm. What you find is that obviously because the solar and wind isn't always producing energy, your electrolyzer won't always be running. So we often increase what's called our capacity factor by adding some battery storage. We're able to run that electrolyzer more consistently. What I've noticed in Hawaii is that it appears that when we do battery storage, we have about four hours worth of storage batteries. And that seems like a small amount of storage in case something bad happens. How does that sound to you four hours with the storage batteries? Yeah, that's that really four hour discharge or duration of storage is pretty standard in terms of the battery storage that's available today. You have either a two or a four hour battery. So it is a challenge in terms of not only the duration but also the cost. We can discharge the battery at a lower capacity or output over a longer duration of time. So that's also possible. So if we have a large battery, we can discharge it more slowly. But yeah, battery storage is also one of the reasons why the challenges with battery storage are one of the reasons why electrolyzers have a role or hydrogen has a role because it can store energy for longer durations of time versus a battery. Here in Hawaii, we have one of the highest costs of energy in the world. So it's a really interesting place when we're looking and considering hydrogen as a possibility, right? As you were saying, Michael, the two inputs are water and electricity for electrolysis. We do have a lot of access of course to some of the renewable options. We also happen to be sitting here in a place where there's a geothermal plant as well. So you have spoken about some of the pros of utilizing electrolysis with potentially wind and solar applications. Has there been any research done into electrolysis paired with geothermal? Yeah, absolutely there has. And I would say that geothermal could provide a more consistent output of energy as compared to solar and wind. It's a matter of getting access to it and there's a larger capital investment. I'm sure Richard could speak to harness the required amount of geothermal energy that would be needed. But certainly that's something that has been looked into. Yeah, I don't want to go too far off topic, but if you're going to do a battery storage, what is the long-term effect on the climate? Because you have to have rare earth minerals and stuff like that, which we don't have in the supply of that either. Yeah, for sure. So that's a great point. And so not only batteries, but also electrolyzers, some of them, especially the PEM use rare earth metals. So that is an important issue that we need to address. And I would say that there's a lot of work being done today in terms of recycling of those rare earth metals. There's some companies now in, for instance, in the Salton C that are working to recover and recycle and also harvest rare earths. But I would say that if you look at the full lifecycle analysis, we're still seeing a net improvement over, tremendously net improvement over the traditional fossil fuel-based energy if we transition over to battery storage and renewable energy. So I think one of the, not to get into the weeds too much, but one of the major research priorities as we move forward in this is to reduce our reliance on critical rare earth metals like lithium and platinum and iridium. And so I've seen a lot of work and success actually in replacement of those critical metals or platinum group metals with non-PGM alternatives. Wonderful. Okay. So I know that, Michael, you had shared with us beforehand this really cool, like, I don't know if people say GIF or GIF, but it kind of shows how things are moving in an electrolysis unit. Yeah. So I can kind of walk through that and then folks can take a look online at their leisure. So essentially, if you can visualize this, what we're seeing is you have water flowing in. And then you also have electrons or electricity coming in. And so those two meet in at the membrane. And so you have the, you have H2O, right? And then you have oxygen splitting off into the anode. And then you have these hydrogen protons or H2, solve, we call them, solvated protons that are then moving over to the cathode. And so you have that essentially water, electricity, and then the split occurs. And the anode is oxygen, cathode is hydrogen. And never to sell the two meet. That's the idea. You shouldn't have any crossover. That's obviously an issue. But yeah, that's the general principle. It's pretty straightforward and simple. You require a certain minimum amount of voltage or electricity and a certain amount of water to make, you know, a certain amount of hydrogen. And what happens with the oxygen and the back end of the system? Yeah, that's a great question. So oxygen can, you know, is valuable in and of itself. It can be certainly commoditized. And there's a number of companies that certainly would be willing to pay for that oxygen. The stoichiometry, if you look at just how much oxygen on a mass basis is generated is about eight times. And so it's Lamolar mass. So there's a lot of oxygen that's generated, and it can be used. If it's not used, then it's vented. Or I've seen some projects taking that oxygen. And in fact, there's a benefit of injecting, as you know, Brittany, injecting oxygen into waste streams to improve aerobic digestion, which is a form of wastewater treatment. Ooh, exciting. Okay, so if I'm the average person sitting in Hawaii and I hear about these systems, it's like, okay, so water comes into the system, electricity comes into the system, and then I get hydrogen and I get oxygen separated, right? Okay. I think I have a pretty decent understanding as the general person about what oxygen is good for, right? I know that I breathe it and I know that it's good for the environment. What do I utilize the hydrogen for then in my everyday life? Where do I see hydrogen playing a role in my day-to-day in the future if we did move to a hydrogen economy? For sure. And I think that the nearest term application of hydrogen for general folks, everyday folks looking in their communities is most likely going to be in transportation and mobility. So we are starting to see the fuel cell vehicle industry taking off. And so our first, one of my first plans that we're working on is actually for mobility. So essentially it's the gas station for a hydrogen powered vehicle. Primarily, we're seeing them for heavy duty vehicles. And so they have a certain benefit over traditional battery electric vehicles for these heavy duty cars. And so that's probably number one. Number two, you're going to see the primary uses of hydrogen are really out of sight for most people. So it's for industrial processes like steel, cement, and potentially aviation fuel. So these are more industrial processes that people are not really going to see. But we call these hard to reach sectors because they are really out of view of most everyday people. I would be remiss to not mention that ammonia or fertilizer is also requiring hydrogen as a major input. So nitrogen hydrogen with that traditional Haber-Bosch process, you make ammonia. So when we call something green ammonia, we're just replacing the hydrogen with the electrolytic hydrogen. And so we make ammonia that way. So I see that as a big market in the near term as well. You know, lately I've been noticing internal combustion engines running off of hydrogen. What does that look like to you? Yeah. So personally, okay. So personally, I prefer the fuel cell electric vehicle. When you combust hydrogen, you end up with some volatiles or some undesirable byproducts. You could have socks and knocks. But certainly you're not going to end up with CO2 emissions. I think that certainly there's a lot of interest in the internal combustion for hydrogen. But I would say that fuel cell EV, fuel cell electric vehicle, is probably going to be the primary form of transportation with hydrogen in the future. How far off are we? Yeah. So not far. I mean, I've been in this every day, but I would say that the market is there. It's just emerging. I could mention like Nicola, for instance, is now producing a large number of these vehicles. So yeah, I think that we're there. We're at the very beginning. I think maybe within three to five years we're going to see these vehicles hit the mass market and become much more widely available. What do you think Hawaii can be relative to? Because everything is a lot of cost. You got to compare. No matter what you do, it's just like farming. If the farmer makes money, the farmer is going to farm. So when you compare all the different possibilities, my question is what is going to be the effect on the regular folks, the rubber slipper folks? Well, us being here in Hawaii, we've got an advantage because Brittany folks are doing what they're doing, and that's a big deal. And of course, we have geothermal as well. For me, I'm thinking that we have a big advantage over most of the world actually. Is that a fair answer? Yeah, I agree. I think the resources are really well aligned in Hawaii. I think the fact is hydrogen is really another form of energy security. And it's also a commodity that can be exported. And especially if we can take advantage of seawater or treat that, treat the wastewater, seawater streams, there's certainly a lot of potential for Hawaii to produce hydrogen. Now, it's certainly a challenge when you look at the cost of electricity. So what I think is if you're able to take advantage of abundant solar, for instance, and have a truly renewable hydrogen facility, that's probably going to be more preferable to building out a lot of grid infrastructure or electrical infrastructure to supply the energy, because it is very energy consuming. So yeah, Brittany and the team, they certainly have a lot of great innovative ideas for how to lessen the burden on the grid. Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you so much, Michael. I know we're starting to wind down in time here. We only have a few more minutes. So one of the things I know a lot of people are concerned about in the hydrogen space and certainly in the electrolysis space is is this safe? If we were to see electrolyzers in our community, is this something I need to be worried about? Can I go close to it? What are the safety concerns around it? Yeah, for sure. So definitely something that I talk about a lot. I see those concerns. Certainly there's a history here. So the, and I'm not going to say there are none at all, I'm just going to say that we have a long history now of developing codes and standards to protect or mitigate against catastrophes. There are a lot of, if you look at the generation of hydrogen, there are a lot of alarms and sensors that are placed on that equipment. You have a lot of design measures that are put in place, for instance, minimum safety distances between piping and roads or people. And so we've studied or not, we've, you know, certain experts have studied the impact of blasts and how far that can go, both propagation wide and vertical. So I think we know a lot about hydrogen and how it could potentially be flammable and harmful. And so as long as we design, according to those standards, I think that we're going to be okay. Awesome. Thank you, Michael. And one of the things I wanted to mention too is, right, I know in NASA, at least we've had a long history of utilizing hydrogen, right, as a plant and for a few other things. So there is a long industrial history with hydrogen that has been very safe, right, and that's something to point to as well. In terms of also our vehicles, right, in terms of we have gas tanks, right, on our vehicles right now, and we utilize in our industry tanks of oxygen, for example, right. Oxygen is actually is a more dangerous thing to tank than hydrogen, right. And so it's really interesting as we do this because there are aspects in which actually your gasoline vehicle right in your gas tank is more dangerous than hydrogen is. So it really comes down to recognizing that there is danger with just about everything, right, even dropping your glass, right, on the ground and has an inherent danger. So there is something to, you know, needs to be taken into consideration, all of these things. And I think we do it with hydrogen. Yeah, and I would I would just add, you know, our whole gas infrastructure has been designed for methane or natural gas as a molecule. And it's a little unfair to say, okay, can we just transition that over to hydrogen? It's just a different type of type of fuel. So, you know, we're talking about, you know, blending it with an existing pipelines or building out some dedicated hydrogen pipelines. And so I think, I think we just need to consider the nature of the fuel. You know, and I'd like to mention one thing. Hawaii is is fifth in the nation of large metropolis that has lost population. We're number fifth in the nation. So that's that's because of jobs and costs and stuff like that. Do you see that the possibility of making steel, for example, aluminum or exploiting hydrogen and stuff like that as helping with that? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely one of the big benefits of this new green hydrogen economy is we we see there's a lot of jobs that can be created as opposed to, you know, solar or wind farms, which, you know, are are really not requiring as much on, you know, sort of on the ground in, you know, employees. So for instance, you know, for a typical a small scale green hydrogen plant, we could be looking at at least 20 to 50 employees on a 20 for 20 years. Very cool. Well, awesome. I know we've wound down our time here. Any closing questions or remarks, Richard? Oh, well, this sounds really promising and very exciting. Seems like we are at a kind of a special point in human history, you know, to me. But what do I know? I'm just a banana farmer. Oh, you're not pulling that one over on us, Richard. We know better. Awesome. And thank you so much for joining us, Michael. Did you have any last minute comments that you'd like to close down with? Yeah, thank you all. Thank you both for inviting me. And I would just say Hawaii is especially a great place for green hydrogen. It's it's could be a real boon to the to the economy and also position Hawaii as a leader in the the new energy economy. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This is inventing our future on think tech Hawaii. Thank you, Michael for joining us today. And thank you to you, our viewers for watching. If you want to get our email advisories to see a complete listing of our shows, you can sign up for them and think tech Hawaii.com. We will be back in two weeks. So please tune in and we will do a deep dive into our f invention. Until then, I'm Britney Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, think tech Hawaii.com. Mahalo.