 And welcome to another exciting, exceedingly exciting episode of Stand the Energy Man here coming to you live again from the beautiful, beautiful God's country of Kailua, Hawaii on the windward side of Oahu. And again, I'll let everybody know that just in case you hear roosters or chickens or dogs, sorry, that's as quiet as I can get them and so far they're behaving pretty good. So we should be okay. I'd like to reach back and talk a little bit about some of the stuff we've talked about last couple weeks, including what I'm doing to kind of while away the time here and kind of get used to my self quarantining if you will, minimal travel, minimum contact outside. And I think we have an image of my mask that I've been wearing actually take this out and wear it all the time. It was I bought it at a hardware store. It's actually meant to just kind of help you keep a dust and stuff out. But it does two things for me. I can double it up. So it's actually pretty sheer. So I wouldn't want to cough straight through it. I'm sure some stuff could get through it. But it does help if I try to touch my face, I realize when I have the mask on that I shouldn't be touching my face. So when I put my hand up anywhere near my nose or my eyes or whatever, I automatically hit the mask first. And I realize if I'm going to scratch my eye or scratch my nose or something, that I should be doing it through the mask. So I don't transfer stuff to me. And if I do cough or sneeze, I still cough into my arm or my elbow and don't just count on the mask to keep it from spreading. So good to do whatever you can. And here in Hawaii, you have to go outside with a mask. Lisa wants you to. And so we're doing that. Another thing I was doing was this week, I started working on an electrolyzer. And this is a pretty cool setup that I kind of worked on. I did a preliminary design a couple of years ago, but I wanted to do a new one where I could actually change out the electrodes on them. And for the electrode, I use stainless steel wool, which is generally sold in hardware stores for scrubbing pots and pans. So you can get electrolyzer or electrodes for your little little electrolyzer at the bargain basement price of about probably 25 or 30 cents per electrode. And that with a little copper wire and you're ready to go. So once you get that thing finished up, I'll probably charge it up with some electrolyte and show you folks and explain how it works and show you how easy it is to make hydrogen right in your own house. And and it actually separates hydrogen and oxygen. So the hydrogen that you get is relatively pure and should be pretty safe compared to if you just make hydrogen, what they call hydroxide out of a out of an open container with electrolyte and two electrodes, you actually get a flammable and potentially explosive mixture of hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, which could be pretty exciting if you're not careful with it. So I'll show you that sometime soon. Another thing I'd like to mention is that when I left the employment of the state of Hawaii, I changed my email address and a lot of the folks that I invited to shows, to be on the show, haven't been responding to my emails because my new personal email doesn't say Stan in the in the address line. So I actually went to Gmail and put up a new email address stan.energy.man at gmail.com. And so if you want to get a hold of me, if you want to be a guest on my show, if you have a hydrogen product or an energy product and I can schedule you or if you have a question, feel free to send it to either Think Tech Hawaii or to that email stan.energy.man at gmail.com and I'll be glad to answer it. I just set it up just for the show here so I can keep people connected via that email to the show. So today's show is actually international again. I get a lot of great data from a lot of different locations and the one that I really found most helpful is from the California Fuel Cells Partnership and Keith Malone who I've had on the show several times. But I just got his newsletter about two weeks ago and we were kind of in the throats of the coronavirus and I was traveling from the big island to here so I didn't I didn't want to do the show on those topics then but I'm going to do them today and it's just really little new snippets from around the world and I'm going to start off with one one of the guests that I plan to have on the show here in the not too distant future is a guy named Joe Pratt who used to be a PhD at Sandia National Labs and I worked with him on several hydrogen projects particularly maritime projects and when he was out in Hawaii we work closely together we help give him some hydrogen for one of the products he's working on out of our HCAT station. But he's working on a great project that I'm really looking forward to seeing commissioned and getting on the on the water as it were because he's working maritime hydrogen and he's working with a bunch of really great partners National Labs and public private partnership sort of scenario to build a ferry that will pass shuttle passengers in the San Francisco Bay. The project is called Water Go Round and I did contact him last week and I'll have him on the show in a couple weeks but there was an article talking about how that project is being worked and it's a little bit behind schedule but mostly from permitting and issues like that but they're working on it and they expect to be launching it sometime later this year at the very latest early next year sometime. So we'll talk to you about that when I get ahold of Joe and everything's worked out we probably have a launch time or a christening time for it. Another story comes out of back actually the Pacific region I've told you before that Australia back in 2018 or early 2019 actually started developing a policy a national policy to become a hydrogen economy and what they've done is they've actually started to do massive hydrogen production and they're trying to do green hydrogen production which means making hydrogen using electrolysis and some kind of natural energy source like solar or wind or geothermal or hydroelectric to use the electricity from those generation sources to make clean carbon free hydrogen and then what they do is they either sell that hydrogen as a gas or as ammonia most people don't realize this but ammonia is basically one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms it's an H3 and that's really easy to transport relatively speaking because it's a known commodity that already has safety protocols set up for and everything and has a safety record of being shipped on rail cars and ships and things like that and it gives you a lot of hydrogen in a form that's easy to transport relatively speaking compared to liquid hydrogen which would be have to be carried in very very specially built ships with cryocontainers they call doers and the ammonia can be can be shipped fairly easily well it turns out that Australia once they announced that they were going to be doing this Russia of all places decided they were going to compete with Australia for the Japanese market so it tells you a couple things number one Australia is number one really smart for doing this number two there's a definite market in Japan and it got the attention of number three the Russians who have already been in the natural gas business and I have some more stories later on that talk about the the connection between natural gas and hydrogen and they want to make sure that they're part of the hydrogen game so again as I talked about a couple weeks ago in the national security show now we need to be careful that the United States doesn't get too far behind a lot of the other countries in Europe and particularly China Korea Japan and Russia when it comes to hydrogen because we're losing market share every day that goes by and we really should be focusing on how we can be a market leader in hydrogen for example one of the next stories I have is from Japan it's Mitsubishi heavy industries is going into produce fuel cell trucks for one thing and they're looking at producing a kind of a mid-sized truck and using it in the Japanese market and that ties to some other stories I've got coming up another big story is DHL the big international air freight company is very bullish on hydrogen and published five reasons why they are bullish on hydrogen and they're basically because of the range on the transportation side the safety they point out how much hydrogen has been used in the space industry and space travel and the safety record that it has it's zero carbon and also it's very easy to store so besides the decarbonization and the clean energy stuff the safety aspect and an application for transportation and again as I say in transportation your fuel is weight and weight is everything in transportation so if you can have a lighter fuel and get good energy density out of it your way ahead hydrogen has the best energy density on the planet next Cummins diesel I announced a few weeks ago that Cummins diesel bought out hydrogenics in Canada which is a big fuel cell producer they've also apparently started working with a company called Loop Energy and they are really starting to step out in hydrogen fuel cell transportation and that says a lot when a big diesel company starts looking at hydrogen and says they want to start incorporating it into their their works the Netherlands has really stepped out along with several European countries on hydrogen I think I've told you before that one of the first Kawasaki built liquid hydrogen ships will be delivered to the Netherlands and Kawasaki Heavy Industries is building that ship for the Netherlands they're going to replace their coal power plants with hydrogen fuel cells at the gigawatt scale and they'll be producing electricity on their outer islands and taking down the coal plants that currently produce their electricity and they're using surplus North Sea wind which is apparently pretty prevalent and they're using that to make clean hydrogen and sending it out to their outlying islands also the European Union has stepped up hydrogen adoption and Germany along with Portugal have planned to plans to expand their pipelines and I'm hoping that they're actually start constructing pipelines with reinforced fiber tubing which is going to be much much better for hydrogen transporting than traditional metal pipelines they're number one they can hold higher pressures and number two you don't have the embrittlements issues that you do with some of the steel pipelines or the pipelines that they don't know what the actual components are in the steel in the steel pipes themselves some of them are so old and they can't sort they can't figure where they're a source from so they don't know if they're heavy and iron content or if they're heavy and nickel content they don't know so they should be looking at using the fiber reinforced pipelines for transportation pipelines and not just transportation again North Sea wind is being turned into hydrogen and several countries in several articles that I've gotten have been talking about how the hydrogen is being infused in the natural gas pipelines to boost the energy content of natural gas for their turbines that they use to produce electricity so number one you start off with fairly clean natural gas which is much cleaner to burn than other carbon-based fuels like oil and coal because it's just a cleaner source of energy and then you boost it with hydrogen and you get a much cleaner source than just the natural gas itself then what you can also do is you can strip that hydrogen off because it's lighter than the other gases you can actually separate it out fairly simply and then use that hydrogen for your transportation sector you can pressurize it and start putting it into vehicles so you're starting to step out in this Germany and Portugal are taking the lead on it right now and it's it's pretty exciting news Toyota and a company called Kino are really starting to step up to make what we call class eight trucks which are your big 18-wheelers and your large platform trucks they see a big market for it I'm sure they're looking at Cummins diesel and they're looking at Nicola motors and some of the things that are happening across the world and they realize that some smart people are connecting the dots with hydrogen and long-range heavy haul transportation and realizing that if you're going to clean up heavy transportation it's got to go electric and if it's going to be electric you're not going to be able to use batteries on those big trucks because the batteries will weigh more than the freight that you're you're hauling so basically you'll just be driving around hauling batteries instead of hauling freight so fuel cells are definitely going to be impacting the heavy truck market so I've got a bunch more stories and I'll get to those but to give my voice a break and to give you a insight into what else is going on at think tech we're going to take a 60 second break here and I'll see you in a minute Aloha I'm Kili Akina the host of Hawaii Together on the ThinkTech Hawaii broadcast network. Hawaii Together deals with the problems we face in Paradise and looks for solutions whether it's with the economy the government or society. We're streamed live on ThinkTech bi-weekly at 2 p.m. on Mondays. I want to thank you so much for watching we look forward to seeing you again I'm Kili Akina Aloha. Next story up was a story from Australia Queensland University in Australia is studying hard on ways to increase capacity with clean hydrogen like I say using renewable energy sources to electrolyze hydrogen and that's one of their big university systems and right here in Hawaii I'm actually talking with some other folks to parties in Australia about doing projects here in Hawaii where our universities can collaborate and work on some actual projects together to expand hydrogen transportation so I'm hoping I can release one of those stories to you here in the not too distant future. As many of you have probably heard the summer Olympics this year have been postponed for a year what you may not have heard is that the Japan plan to showcase hydrogen in this year's Olympics and from my perspective postponing it for a year due to the coronavirus is actually going to help to showcase hydrogen even better because in the next year Japan will be able to capitalize off of a lot of really advanced hydrogen work that's been going on recently but would be rushing to make this summer but by next summer they should actually be able to do some really amazing things with hydrogen and I'm looking forward to that. Hot on the heels of Japan China is hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022 and they have already announced that they will be showcasing hydrogen in a lot of the venues around the Olympics including a lot of the transportation. In fact there was another story I'm trying to see yeah China has purchased 2,500 hydrogen fuel cell buses for their bigger cities because they pollute their cities are so polluted with industrial pollution that they're doing everything they can to reduce that pollution and China's stepping out in public transportation big time with hydrogen fuel cell buses. It's amazing to see that a lot of these stories start to connect the dots on renewable energy and clean electricity and hydrogen. It's like you know I guess as a military guy I can tell you that conceptually you can think of how to do something when you're writing up your war plans or something you get a bunch of smart people in the room and they all talk about what if this and what if that you kind of come close but until the reality hits of what it really takes to make all this stuff happen you really don't have a good handle on it and what I'm seeing is from that perspective is that a lot of the countries have said to themselves hey if I'm going to use renewable solar and wind and things like that to replace all of the the sources of fossil fuel and nuclear power that we use right now to make electricity I have to be able to store energy so their immediate thought is we'll do it with batteries except for a couple major problems. Number one the best battery technology we have right now is really expensive and if we went to try and source all the materials to turn the entire world into lithium cobalt technology batteries we would basically be out of materials before we even got started we couldn't even make a dent in transportation let alone the grid with batteries so people are starting to wise up to the fact that hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen energy storage are so much cheaper so much more dependable so much safer than these massive lithium cobalt technologies and it's amazing I just see all over the world people are just coming up with these hey the light bulbs coming on we need to look at hydrogen and that's great because hydrogen dovetails well between the grid and transportation like I've been telling people for years you have to realize that transportation is going to become electric and that means the grid and the roadway are going to start joining in how they work and the hydrogen piece is that connection and if you don't see it now you'll start seeing it in the next few years as hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen vehicles become more ubiquitous and used all around the world right now you see a lot of them in korea you'll see a lot in japan and in california pretty soon you'll start seeing more and more in the northeast in the northeast quarter where those folks are starting to really move out in hydrogen fuel cell you certainly see them here in hawaii because we're stepping out a lot especially on the big island with hydrogen fuel cell transportation and hopefully on the grid as well but it does my heart good one big company an engineering company in the european union called man man all caps they are pushing the european governments to start forming policies that basically encourage the utilities electric utilities to start understanding how to apply hydrogen in their turbines to mix with natural gas and burn in their turbines to make electricity cleaner than with other fossil fuels or just natural gas alone and some of these big companies like Mitsubishi and General Electric they're starting to look at how they can transition these new turbines that use a mixture of hydrogen and natural gas to run completely off hydrogen and if that's the case then you can start transitioning your electric grid to using natural gas and renewables and at some point be able to go from renewables right to pure hydrogen to run your turbines and not have stranded assets like big generators that can't do anything because they can't burn hydrogen these natural gas turbines are being built with the end state being they can burn pure hydrogen as their fuel and that's a game changer for the electric grids a company or an institution called Woods and McKenzie estimates that there will be nine million that's where they am fuel cell electric vehicles in the not too distant future backing up that is that Honda, Hyundai, Toyota already have production vehicles production trucks are coming online class eight trucks are coming online a lot of municipalities particularly in California are using hydrogen fuel cell buses in their system you got to get the clue it's happening folks another great thing for the industry is that the Department of Energy stepped out in what they called scaling hydrogen hydrogen scaling or hydrogen at scale and in other words getting hydrogen to large scale gigawatt level applications and in transportation really pushing the limits and they've put two other national labs specific Northwest National Lab and Sandy National Labs to the test of taking materials like I talked about the fiber reinforced tubing and things like that and really testing all kinds of materials so that they know how hydrogen reacts to rubbers and vinyls and plastics and metals so that better compressors can be made and better electrolyzers can be made and better storage tanks can be made and things like that so the Department of U.S. Department of Energy is actually stepping ahead and really trying to work hard to get hydrogen at scale large much larger scale and they're using their national labs to help do that my last big story is BMW BMW you know i don't know if you're a car enthusiast or not but i've always really admired BMW even though i've owned more mini coopers and i've never owned a BMW i've actually owned five mini coopers believe it or not and they're now made by BMW but i've driven BMWs when i was in the military in europe and i've always been a big BMW fan but they just announced recently that by 2022 they will have a production x5 which is their suv that'll be hydrogen fuel cell powered so for the those of you that are naysayers and think that hydrogen is still just a pipe dream down the road never happened not going to work BMW doesn't think so they're making the x5 in 2022 and uh if you're in california i'm sure you'll be able to get it in california i'm hoping that by 2022 hirene hawaii will have enough hydrogen stations that all of the car manufacturers can deliver cars to their dealerships here that can run on hydrogen i'm just really looking forward to it so let me uh close by saying there's a couple of companies or a couple institutions out there that really uh are worth paying attention to and if you can uh you should try and look them up and do some homework online especially if you're stuck at home and can't get out and you're self-quarantining and you got to have a cool mass like mine to go anywhere and you're you just kind of want to you're or you're old like me like i'm 66 and i'm not supposed to go outside because i'm i'm a high risk category and although i don't have any underlying health conditions other than being old and senile but some of these institutions are really doing great work i'm going to start with the uh california fuel cell partnership over there and and keith malone and his folks who really deliver a great newsletter so if you look up the california fuel cell partnership sign up for the newsletter you'll get the latest and greatest on what's going on in the hydrogen world my next big shout out goes to the hydrogen council i was fortunate um in 2017 to be at their second meeting in new york uh they met there at the same time the un security council was meeting and it was invited to participate in some of their activities and um at that time they had started off with maybe 16 or 17 fairly large companies to promote hydrogen at scale with the department of energy they're up to 81 companies and we're not talking little companies we're talking shell oil total oil air lequid air gas uh you know honda toyota um kawasaki um hunday i mean just big big big companies that are doing great work fuel cell companies um plug power um hydrogenics they're all part of this uh consortium basically what it is and they are doing an outstanding job of accelerating the technology and the awareness of hydrogen in the industries and they're growing leaps and bounds so if you haven't bought hydrogen in stock in some hydrogen company and start looking at it start following them and jump on that so you'll probably make some money um i guess it can't be too specific about getting arrested arrested by the the trade commission but um look at uh some of the companies are in that hydrogen council and uh you'd be surprised also the renewable hydrogen alliance sends out a nice newsletter and keep people up in the form so look up the hydrogen the renewable hydrogen alliance and see if you can grab their newsletter and also there's a zero emissions bus conference scheduled for the 16th to 18th of uh september in denver so you might want to look that one up and if you're not doing anything in september maybe that's something you can jump in on and do so i think it's going to do it for stand the energy man this week and uh i'm going to try and line up a guest for you sooner enough to listen to me drone on too long and uh next week we'll we'll try and get you a great guest so aloha from kailua hawai and be safe wear your mask don't touch your face and wash your hands aloha