 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to Stand the Energy Man. You may notice I've kind of got a custom shirt on today just to match the topic. I'm going to be talking a little bit about aviation fuel and giving some people some things to think about on how to really start saving aviation fuel when pretty much everything else has been tried. So don't forget tomorrow is a primary election day here in Hawaii. So get out there and vote. Make sure that you make your vote count. Don't try and vote for two parties, they won't let you do that. So when you get on that ballot just pick a party and start voting. And do your patriotic duty because we really need it, especially nowadays in our society we need to start paying attention and exercising our right to vote. So anyway today shows a little bit about a topic that's been near and dear to my heart for a lot of years, spending so much time flying in the military. You kind of get an appreciation for what that means in terms of dollars, taxpayer dollars and cents when you're out there burning thousands of gallons of fuel for every flight that you fly. So over the past several decades the military and commercial aviation have thought ways to reduce fuel consumption by improving just about every aspect of aircraft design and operational technique. From engine design to streamlining aerodynamics and using exotic construction materials to changing international rules for climb profiles, in route descent procedures and more. In short, they've tried about every way the industry could conceive to improve aviation fuel efficiency. With current aircraft designs and with high bypass van engines, engineering limits on fuels and aerodynamic materials have reached the practical limit for the current engines and the current fuel systems. So to push efficiency further and to even make future design and propulsion systems more effective, the removal of weight from the design without compromising safety and strength is also being pushed to its limits. But there's one thing that the industry facing this challenge doesn't control and that is what is shipped or what the weight of the passengers and cargo is that they move on their airplanes. But that weight can account for quite a bit even of over half the gross weight of the aircraft. But the Department of Defense does control the specifications for most of what it transports. Even armor can be made lighter. So why are we not looking at what we carry as part of the solution, as part of that solution aspect in the efficiency equation, particularly when the next generation of airlifter propulsion system or fuel is decades away? Where do we turn next to reduce aviation fuel costs until we have that next propulsion or fuel breakthrough? We at HCAT propose that answer, that the answer to this challenge is to convince the Air Force and other service components, and included, that we need to make losing weight in everything that they ship a priority. Now the Army and the Marine Corps already are working hard to lighten the load that their infantry members have to carry, because they see the penalty for slowing them down as they're trying to maneuver. But there's no weight loss penalty for the Navy or the Air Force in most cases because they've just used legacy equipment. But there should be. That concept needs to be expanded to vehicles and support equipment and possibly even the fuels that they use to make sure that it's lighter and if you can make the assets you ship more capable and do things like a Swiss Army knife concept where one piece of equipment is lighter because it does multiple jobs with one chassis and one power train system but has multi-functions, the weight goes down, the cubes go down, you can ship more. Aviation is the fastest way we currently have for moving things, but just like every other system, there are trade-offs. In the case of long-range strategic airlift, you can move an incredible amount of cargo anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, but the cost is highly effective, of this highly effective capability is expressed in gallons per mile, not miles per gallon. In other words, fuel efficiency is the price you pay for moving a lot a long distance at 500 miles an hour. The bottom line for the Air Force is that aviation fuel makes up a huge percentage of their Air Force budget. The current aircraft engineering modifications that reduce those fuel costs by even fractions of a percent result in many millions of dollars of fuel savings for the Air Force. Likewise, even a small bump in the price of oil can be devastating to the Air Force's budget, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and really no predictability for their budget. How do they forecast for spikes in fuel? So what if you could reduce the aviation fuel consumption by 1%, 2%, maybe even 5% or 10% by reducing the weight of the cargo, what you carry? While lacking any technical order tables from the actual C-17 or C-5, I don't have access to those anymore. I pulled some numbers off the internet, so they may not be the same as what you'd find in the real, what we call dash 1, for an airplane. But the simple physics would follow the same, the same things that I calculated would follow the same rules. So for example, the max un-refueled, meaning un-air-to-air refueled range of a C-17, if it's fully loaded and totally maxed out with fuel and cargo, is about 2,000 miles, give or take. But the maximum fuel being reduced to 90,000 pounds, or 65% of its load, can actually fly 3,700 miles. So if you look at taking 35% of the weight off the airplane, you get 1,700 miles more distance than you would if you were maxed out on the airplane. So another way to put it is, if you looked at the standard day and a flight level of 2,500 same-air-speed rate, you could get, you'd have a fuel flow of about 2,600 pounds per hour, which is how you measure fuel flow on airplanes. And if you could get down, you could get it under 2,000 pounds per hour by dropping your fuel weight by 25%. That's huge. So in the future, much of what drives our ground support equipment, which is what we're talking about here in what we're transporting, is going to be moving to electric power. And that change is being driven because electric power is more efficient overall. So this applies to army tactical and non-tactical vehicles, with marine vehicles, aerospace ground support equipment, which we call age in the Air Force, and much more. So to understand the implications of its transition, it's important to understand the technologies involved in switching to electric drives. And what are the options we'll be looking at? The move to electric drive trains will either be battery, maybe hybrid, or maybe even hydrogen. So electric vehicles, because they have different kind of fuels, are driven by different kind of weighted fuels as well. So being driven by energy efficiency, lower heat signatures, which is another characteristic of electric transportation or electric vehicles, quieter operations and offering actually multiple sources of fuels, because batteries aren't the only source. You can actually use liquid fuels to run generators to generate electricity for drive trains. You can actually have multiple different fuel sources when you switch to the electric transaxle or electric drive train. So when you just go to electric vehicles that are what we call hybrid, you save about 40% of the fuel, because that hybrid equipment only runs when it needs to run, and it uses a generator that comes on and runs at its most efficient level. When it comes to electric vehicles, most people naturally see batteries as the way to go to store energy. However, it's somewhat short-sighted. And I'll display the limits of understanding your storage a little bit later. But hybrid vehicles use traditional internal combustion engines to generate the electricity. So you can use gas, diesel or alcohol in a hybrid engine, but that hybrid runs a generator instead of driving your wheels or driving your equipment and doing your power. So it creates electricity, which has a more efficient use of the power that it has, when you design the generator, the gas power generator, based on its most efficient operating range. So you match your generator to your engine to make sure that it runs only at its most efficient level or it turns off, because all it's doing is producing electricity and either charging batteries or giving you extra power for your equipment. So they burn much less gas or diesel or even alcohol while they're spinning to generate a charge for those batteries or provide extra power. So another electric option is a self-charging battery, known commonly as a fuel cell. And that's where I want to kind of focus some of our time on today. As you know, hydrogen fuel cells are my favorite subjects, so we're going to put these in here. But the most common fuel cells used commercially in mobile equipment is a hydrogen fuel cell. And simply put, it's a battery that takes oxygen from ambient air and pure hydrogen puts them together to make heat, water and electricity. It's that simple. It's just a chemical reaction. So when you have batteries, you have dry cells, you have wet cells like your lead acid battery in your car, and you also have to consider a fuel cell, a hydrogen fuel cell, another type of battery. So how this comes together to reduce aviation fuels in the Air Force is that the three different electric drivetrains that we're going to be moving to for the most of our equipment have different energy storage forms. In other words, the hybrid will still use a regular fuel to store some of its energy. The batteries will store energy directly in the batteries and then put it directly into a motor. And then the hydrogen is stored in a gas, a very lightweight gas, and then put into the fuel cell to make electricity. With no extra generator, your fuel cell is actually your generator, and then it gives you your electricity for your electric drivetrain. So a discussion about the comparative aspects of all these things is going to be coming up a little bit later, and we'll compare between battery, fossil fuels, and hydrogen energy storage. But suffice it to say that hydrogen is, by far, the most energy dense of these storage methods. So if you're looking to reduce the weight, particularly the weight, and that's what we're talking about on airplanes, is to reduce the weight of the equipment itself and to reduce the weight of the fuel being shipped to support this equipment. So electric assets using hydrogen use the lightest weight fuel, and the drivetrains are also the lightest, and can be reduced in weight. So therefore, I think that hydrogen provides the most significant aviation fuel savings potential of all these electric drivetrains. To give you a more practical example, we do a lot of vehicle work at HKAT, Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and one of the common vehicles that we've worked on is a Class 6 25 passenger bus. Now the typical Class 6 25 passenger bus can go about 130 miles, and it can be run on a regular diesel engine, or it can be run on a hybrid technology engine, or it can be run on batteries. And to give you an idea of how these things compare, your hybrid system, excuse me, costs you about 10 pounds per kilowatt hour. Your battery system, which doesn't need any kind of generator or anything, it's just you're storing all the energy and goes right back into electricity, is about 50 pounds per kilowatt hour. And the hydrogen fuel cell storage system and generation is about 7 pounds per kilowatt hour. So what this means in practical terms is if you have about 100 kilowatt hours of storage on one of these standard vehicles, these standard 25 passenger buses, the hybrid system weighs the system itself. The drivetrain energy storage fuel tank weighs about 1,000 pounds. Your batteries to go the same 130 mile distance would weigh 5,000 pounds. And the hydrogen system would weigh 700 pounds. So to give you an idea when I start talking about how much you can reduce weight on a typical piece of equipment, that gives you a rough idea for a bus size piece of equipment, how much weight difference there is between a hybrid drivetrain, battery drivetrain, and a hydrogen fuel cell drivetrain. Now, the reason hybrid is actually even in this mix is important. It's a little important to understand too that the way that the military works is they don't want to have a whole lot of different fuel systems in their logistics train. They only want to deal with aviation fuel, diesel fuel, and gasoline. That's it. So when you switch to a hybrid technology, you actually have all those fuels already in your system. And so if you have those fuels available at your base, you can put a hybrid drivetrain into this electric drive bus or piece of age equipment or tactical ground vehicle and be efficient. Or you can put batteries in there. If you happen to have a lot of batteries and you're not shipping them all over the world and you don't care about the weight, but you have a lot of batteries, you can use batteries. But you can also plug and play a hydrogen fuel cell in there and ship less weight because you're not shipping batteries. And you lighten up the weight of the equipment altogether. So that's where that example comes in. So I'm going to take a break here and we'll take a quick bit to look at some of the other shows here on Think Tech Hawaii. And we'll get back and talk about why this all comes together in airplanes. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. My name is Stephanie Mock. And I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 p.m. And we hope we'll see you next time. So when it gets right down to talking about saving aviation fuel and airplanes, it's going to be a long time before we have new engines or new fuels. And we've already pretty much done everything we can with existing airframes to make them more efficient. So we're talking about the importance of reducing the load, particularly the weight on what you're shipping and how the military, the DOD, controls what they ship because they design and have specifications for everything they ship. So if all the components, especially the Navy and the Air Force, looked at some of the things they shipped to support their operations and could make them lighter the way the army and the Marines already do just to, say, wear and tear on their soldiers, it could make a big difference in aviation fuel as well. So I did a little comparison. Now, this isn't super scientific. It's a little bit more touchy-feely than probably most universities would go with. But what I did was I took some of the general attributes to all these energy storage systems I just talked about and I put them down in a way of comparing the different systems, the hybrid system, the battery system and the hydrogen system. So I'd like to say that comparing them, if you wanted to really do a good analysis, most people start off with energy in and energy out and they start there because, by far, you just can't beat a battery for the amount of energy that you get out of it compared to the amount of energy you put in. Batteries are tough to beat. They are 90% efficient or better. And even hydrogen, on its best day, is probably 60% efficient, followed by diesel-gen hybrids, which is 40% to 45% efficient. But we've got to kind of stop there and we've got to think about, is that the only thing that you've got to worry about or consider when you're designing a piece of equipment is the efficiency of energy in to energy out? And the answer is no. You don't stop there because there's a lot of other things. The military doesn't just operate in Honolulu or in Hawaii. It operates in the frozen tundra of Alaska and South America and the jungles. It operates in deserts where temperatures are 140, 150 degrees Fahrenheit. So temperature is one thing, especially cold temperature. All of these technologies put off heat. Even batteries have a heat cycle to them. And so, on the high end, they all have cooling built into them. Even lithium-ion batteries have a cooling system, believe it or not. But cold temperatures are another story. So let's take things like, besides energy and energy out, let's take cold temperatures. If you have a diesel gas hybrid, they're impacted by extremely cold temperatures, just like any other engine. But if you preheat them, allow a little bit of energy to be used to keep their block heaters in and keep the battery a little bit warm, you can start that engine up with a fairly small battery and then it'll heat up pretty quickly and run on its own. Hydrogen is next because, believe it or not, even though hydrogen makes water, as soon as you put hydrogen and air into a fuel cell, it starts heating itself up and generating electricity, even at fairly low temperatures. The Toyota Mirai is tested to operate down at minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. It can operate in pretty cold temperatures. And if a little bit of insulation, once it heats up, it's going to be operating pretty much on the same par with a hybrid system. But virtually all batteries require heating to get their full performance. And preheating requires a lot of energy to keep the system going, even if you have insulation. You've got to keep the batteries all warm enough to get the life out of them. So when it comes to temperature, it's pretty easy to see that batteries aren't necessarily the best case. Another thing is lifecycle cost. This is a little bit tougher to calculate. There's a lot of variables in here. But things like the cost of mining the raw materials, where they come from, how far you have to ship them to get them to manufacturing plants, what the manufacturing costs are in making the system. How long does it run? In other words, once you build it and put it into service, are there a lot of moving parts to change? Do you have normal recycling of parts you have to change out at certain time intervals? Or, and at the end of life, disposing of the residual components? Are they hazardous? Can you just throw them in a landfill? Or can you recycle all the components and turn them back into new equipment? So when you take all these factors into consideration of life cycle, hydrogen and hybrid and batteries would most commonly be ranked as hydrogen as having the least life cycle cost. The hybrid equipment would have the second and batteries would be the highest. And the reason is batteries have, especially the current lithium iron technologies, have a very high component of hazmat at end state. They're also very high component of hazmat for manufacturing and mining. And they have limited life cycle. And when you scale them up, they start to cost more and more to build and to put into play. So hydrogen components are a little expensive right now, but they have a really long service life, sometimes over 20 years. They don't have hardly any moving parts, except some of that cooling I talked about, like all the other systems have. And almost everything's reusable at the end of life. The hybrid is cheaper in the sense that it is pretty easy to manufacture, but it has a lot more operating costs. The O&M costs are there because the system over has a shorter life. You have to keep changing oil. If you're using diesel fuel, you have to keep reconditioning the fuel. You have to change filters. You have to change lubricants. It's a little bit more intensive on the O&M side. So when you get right down to it, again, if you tried to rank these, the batteries would be pretty tough with all the hazmat involved and the short life cycle on them. The hybrid system would be next and then the hydrogen would be probably the best alternative for all of these, the most environmentally friendly. So the next part that I'll talk specifically from an analysis is the actual O&M cost. I mentioned a little bit on life cycle cost, but hydrogen, to expound a little bit more, hydrogen needs very little scheduled maintenance. A lot of the cell companies that have remote cell towers use hydrogen fuel cells and systems with solar arrays out in the middle of nowhere because they require very little attention. And the batteries in the hybrids just don't make up the efficiencies that you can get with hydrogen. Real long lifetime, very little maintenance. So O&M overall cost is really minimal with hydrogen. Another aspect, and this is the important one when it comes to what we're talking about here with aviation fuel. All three systems use many of the same components, motors, inverters, wires, et cetera. So the difference comes down to how do you store the energy? Which puts hydrogen first, hybrid technology second, batteries third. And that's because batteries are just stinking heavy. They're really, really heavy. Like an example I use with the vehicle, the 5,000 pounds it takes to put a drivetrain in a bus is offset by a 700 pound system using hydrogen and a 1,000 pound system using a hybrid system. So it's easily four times to five times heavier than the other two systems. And that's a big, big factor when it comes to saving aviation fuel. Now safety is probably the most misunderstood category in terms of hydrogen. Most people, they automatically list hydrogen as least safe due to explosive gases and the stigma of the Hindenberg and H-bombs. But most people would be really surprised to learn that hydrogen systems that are used to make oxygen, believe it or not, on Navy submarines have been in service for decades. And NASA uses those same systems in spacecraft because the systems are light and they want everything to be lightweight going into orbit and they also have to be very, very safe. So when it comes down to all the aspects of storing energy with weight being one of the most important ones, safety is also a really important one for the Air Force on airplanes. And when it comes right down to it, hydrogen gas is not flammable, let alone explosive unless it's mixed with oxygen. It doesn't take much oxygen to mix with hydrogen to make it really explosive but we don't store hydrogen with oxygen. We keep them separate. So besides the safety aspect, we have a couple more aspects. We've got fuel availability. So why would you buy a technology or invest in a technology that's just like gasoline where you have to go to another country to get that resource? Most of the batteries that we have in service, the lithium and cobalt and things are mined in other countries, most of them controlled by China. So for energy security, you know, that's not even a good place to start. Fuel availability is important to the military. So why would you go and pick up components for making these vehicles that you have to get from other countries? Where hydrogen, all those components are available. In the US, we can make the components and even the hydrogen gas has no boundaries. There's not a single country on the planet that can't make hydrogen or where they're at with the resources they have. Charge time's another one. Batteries require hours of charge time, hybrids and hydrogen vehicles don't. Hazmat, we talked about scale. When we try to scale energy systems up, batteries become very inefficient when you get to large scale. So if you're gonna run a forward operating base and you're planning on batteries for energy storage, other than the weight of shipping those batteries over there, they are just too expensive when you get them, they don't scale up well at all. Last but not least, there's carbon emissions. Of all these systems, hydrogen is basically, and batteries are the only two without any carbon emissions at all. And that assumes that when you make the electricity, you're using fossil free sources like wind or solar. So if you sat down and did the analysis there and gave points one, two, and three, with three being the most efficient, one being less efficient, here's the outcome. Batteries are 15.5 on the scale. Hydrogen is 29.5 and hybrid technology is 21 on the scale. So if you take the most efficient, most hazmat free technology for the future, what weighs the less, what makes the most sense for the military to use in its future, ground vehicles and support equipment, it has to do with weight. And when you put in all those other factors, the safety and everything else, hydrogen still comes out on top. So I'd like to say we really need to look at hydrogen as a potential fuel and mechanisms for all of our future vehicles. And what we should be doing to save aviation fuel is to reduce the weight on our airplanes with the cargo that we send and the cargo that the DOD sends on their airplanes they have great control over. So make sure that those components that you put into future flight line equipment, future vehicles, future tactical vehicles, use hydrogen fuel cells for their energy source. And oh, by the way, if you do, you can make hydrogen from any water source, solar and wind power, and you don't even have to ship the fuel once you've got the components downrange. You just use solar, wind and water to make your hydrogen fuel. And there you go, it's the best way to go. So that'll do it for Stan Energyman this week. Kind of a long, laborious topic. Thanks for listening to me for 30 minutes. But I really am convinced that the Air Force and the DOD can save a lot of aviation fuel and even Navy oil for their vessels if they went to lighter equipment that they shipped. And they made that more of a part of the analysis of what they're building. So until next week, thanks for being with Stan Energyman and we'll see you next week here on Think Tech Hawaii. Thanks to Cindy and to Robert here in the studio for making all the magic, especially Cindy for scrolling through the teleprompter so diligently. She really did a great job. Aloha and we'll see you next Friday.