 It's another Wednesday afternoon at four o'clock and you know what that means, Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan, and I'm really pleased to have a good friend of mine, Toby Kincaid, all the way by Magic from Portland, Oregon. Hi, Toby. Aloha, Commander. It's an honor to be with you. Thank you. So, yeah, I like the Commander part, I haven't been called out for a while. You learned it. Oh, yeah, I did. So, today's show, we're going to talk about hydrogen, my favorite topic, and I characterize it as the de-carbonizer, kind of like the terminator, the terminate carbon. So, Toby has put together a really nice presentation and we'll talk about it, so Toby, I'll let you kick off, and Toby's been on the show several times, and every time he's on it, he puts a lot of care and effort into what he's going to talk about, and he's really good at it. I might also say he's an author, so if you Google him or go to Amazon, some of his books, I think are great, and it teaches you a lot, so this man is a thinker, so he's going to share some of his thoughts on how we're going to de-carbonize the Hawaii energy system. So, Toby, over to you. So how are we going to de-carbonize the Hawaii energy system? Ah, now that is the question. That is the big question. It's the question that we face as a civilization, because what we're facing now, and we've seen this with this pandemic, is our big problem is toxicity. Toxicity, virally or chemically, toxicity is what's going to knock us over, and so the question of whether we go to hydrogen or not is the most fundamental question, and in fact let's pull up the first slide and we'll just go right into it. You can see here's just a cover sheet, but you see in the picture the idea is to take renewable energy, which is intermittent, and what we really need to do is make a battery out of it, so we're going to use water to do that. So you add energy to water through an electrolyzer, you get the gases, hydrogen and oxygen, you let the oxygen go, just let it vent, that's fine, store the hydrogen, you dry it, put it in a tank, and then whenever you need energy, you bring that hydrogen and oxygen back together again through a fuel cell, you get most of the energy out and most of the water back, and the key to that is there's no mention of carbon. Carbon is absolutely unnecessary, as we'll find out. So let's jump into the next slide. It's a great decarbonizer then. It is the ultimate decarbonizer, it doesn't use it at all. So let's go to slide number two. In this slide, what we're going to do, let's look at the big picture. What's the big picture? Well, I call them the three big E's. You have the economy, energy and the environment, and all of these things for us to really succeed as a civilization, they have to be compatible, but at the moment they're not compatible. If we need energy and we're burning fossil fuels, we're compromising our environment. We're also putting our economy in trouble because of volatility, you can't plan, you don't know what the cost of energy is. There's the liability of polluting the world in local environments. That can be a large liability for business. So at the moment, we're kind of in a disaster. So if we look now, let's just ask the question, let's take a look at history and see if history can teach us something. On the vertical axis, I have the specific energy density of fuels, and then on the horizontal graph, we're going to look at different fuels. So at the lower left, you see coal. Fuel has the most carbon, the least hydrogen, and it has the lowest energy density of all the fossil fuels, about 30 megajoules per kilogram. Now when we move over to oil, we have less carbon, more hydrogen, and what happens? The energy density goes up. The less carbon you have, the more energy you have. So in oil, now we're about 40, 44 megajoules per kilogram. Well, then we keep going up the chain. We go to natural gas, which has the least carbon and the most hydrogen. And you see we get about 55 megajoules per kilogram. Well, now let's look at hydrogen and here's your decarbonizer. There's no carbon at all, and we have the highest energy density. So the point of that is at 140 megajoules. So it's three times more energetic than gasoline per weight. That is potent. That is the kind of fuel that we need. So if we look at history, you can see that little 18 I put over the coal and 19th over the oil and 20th over the natural gas. Those are the centuries we're talking about. So way back in the 18th century, we went to coal and that was a huge increase over animal and human muscle and burning wood, which is around 12 to 16 megajoules per kilogram. So what we see in history is that every century we are moving up and choosing a fuel that has much more energy density than the one before. So when we look at the centuries involved, if you consider, what would you rather have, a smartphone or a little telegraph? The telegraph is from 1850. Well, that's about what our oil is coming. Well, 1859 is when we had the first well drilled. But you can see in the latter half of the 19th century, we have been dealing with, in the case of communications technology, something very old with the telegraph. And yet here in the modern age, we would choose a smartphone. But yet we're still using energy that was designed centuries ago. So I think we need to catch up. That's a great analogy, Toby. So thanks for doing that. Makes it so simple to understand how we are evolving. And it makes you wonder, well, why are we waiting so long to use hydrogen? It's the obvious answer, the great decarbonizer. Yes. We're going to get T-shirts made up with hydrogen, the decarbonizer. I love it. Well, let's go to the next slide and we'll just keep going because that's the question. So really, I put it as a question. How would you prefer your hydrogen? Do you want it stuck to a carbon or do you want it stuck to an oxygen? Because if you choose door number one, which is what we've been doing for 300 years, we have all of this toxicity. This is the problem. When you burn carbon, you can't burn it completely. So you get all of these horrible chemical animals, volatile organic compounds, partially consumed hydrocarbons, NOx, SOx, mercury poisoning particulates. You get all of these problems. And it's a big problem. The point of your show is this is the problem. And the question for humanity, for our industrial society, is you need to pick which door you're going to go with. Are you going to go with hydrogen stuck to carbon or hydrogen stuck to oxygen, which is water? And it's kind of amazing. It's for 150 years, everyone is trying to sell you carbon, but the energy isn't in the carbon. That's kind of the funny thing. So it's not a scam because a barrel of oil has 26,000 man-hours of energy. There's a lot of energy in a barrel of oil. But it's not in the carbon. It's to the hydrogen stuck to the carbon. So we have a whole world in the business of moving carbon around the planet. We scrape it, we drill it, we frack it, we pipe it, we railroad it, we depot it. All of these, this infrastructure. And why so someone could sell you carbon? Which has nothing to do with the energy. So here's a paradigm shift. This is the industrial revolution of the 21st century. When we come clean and say, look, what we did 300 years ago is what they did 300 years ago. But in the 21st century, we cannot think or go forward burning carbon fuels because carbon has nothing to do with it. It's the hydrogen. So if we transition away from a carbon economy and go to a clean hydrogen economy, which is the future of Hawaii, in my opinion, that you make your own fuel, that it's the safest fuel, hydrogen is unique. It's different than any other fuel. It's lighter than air. And that's a huge safety feature. If you have any breach, the hydrogen goes straight up. And I mean fast, 45 miles an hour straight up like a pencil. It doesn't even spread out. It just goes straight up. So it has no opportunity to harm you. It shouldn't you ever have a breach? If you had a propane tank or a gasoline tank, we all know what happens when you have a breach. The vapors are heavier than air, so they don't dissipate. They just mix with the oxygen in the air and you get one spark and you've got an explosion. Hydrogen can't do that. The physics doesn't work that way. So it's really wonderful. I'm going to try and put together some videos of all the great testing that has been done on these composite tanks. They shoot them. They drop them. They crush them. And they can't get them to explode because it can't burn them in a bonfire. I've seen them left in the desert for months and then dropped off of cranes. We've been building composite tanks since World War II. We know how to do that. And it's very safe. It's much safer than a tin can full of gasoline under your car. That's nuts. I want to focus on that part is like it's literally a tin can, little thin sheet metal between you and this gasoline explosion waiting to happen. And it does. Many people are injured. Many people are killed. Fossil fuels has a risk. And so when we talk about the future, we shouldn't talk in terms and we shouldn't think in terms of an alternative energy, but as if you want to do something, but you can't, you have to pick an alternative. No, no, no, no. Hydrogen is a superior energy. It's better on every count by every metric. Is it potent? Yes. Is it the most potent? Yes. Is it safe? Is it lighter than air? And we know how to deal with it. Very little. Look, we've had an industrial hydrogen industry for over a century. The Norwegians have been making industrial hydrogen since the 20s and they know how to deal with it. But they have a long history of it and the amount of injuries and death don't compare at all to fossil fuels, which is truly dangerous. And again, the most important thing is it has to be available for everyone here in the COVID messages. We're in this together and we have to find a solution that everyone can do. If we could all do the same thing and it was the right thing, we could transition this world in my view in 10 years and through a series of lease equipment, lease packages, which we'll get to in the finance and the economics. But this is where we have to go in the future. We can't go back to the 18th century. We can't go back to the 19th century. And we certainly can't go back to the 20th century. We live in the 21st century where modern humans, we need a lot of energy. In fact, it's a staggering amount of energy. So as a friend of mine, a professor up in the University of Toronto told me, energy itself is not a bad thing. I mean, energy is what makes the wheels go round and our whole economy is on energy. The issue is what, like you said, what form of energy are you going to use? Like if we just cancel energy, we shut down everything, like kind of like a COVID thing where we're shutting down our economy. But if you just kind of sit, I read a book, you only sit on a park bench and you look at everything you can see and then think about the energy component that was required to do that. If you're sitting, if you're seeing buildings, well, they're made out of concrete. Well, it took a heck of a lot of energy to make that concrete and at that time fossil fuel energy. You can make concrete using hydrogen energy to make it for your car, steel, even the bench you're sitting on, use a certain amount of energy to make it. So we're not going to give up the energy. It's like you said, we're going to take the better form of energy and the best form of energy is hydrogen. And we're, and here in Hawaii, we got, we got a pool of hydrogen that's 2,500 miles between us and then, and then the mainland, that's all hydrogen oxide, you know. Exactly. And it's, it's even, you know, the earth, as you point out, is covered with water. We're mostly made of water. How astounding, talk about not seeing the forest for the trees, that it's in water that you have a perfect feedstock. You add clean energy, make hydrogen fuel, stores beautifully, safely, store for decades, centuries perhaps. That's all statement. It's a nerd. Nothing's going to happen. And then when you want to use it, you get most of the energy back and most of the water. So it's a water cycle. It's the only cycle that is compatible with biology. It doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter where you live. You can be on this little island, like up in the northern Scotland, and if you have wind and sun, you don't get a lot of sun there, but you get lots of wind. You can make hydrogen and you can fuel, you keep your house warm and cook your food, you can drive to the store on something that you make yourself. So you're not being held up to ransom by some country or entity that controls the supply. Everybody has access to it. It's kind of like, what do they call it? Everybody is equal. It's the true decarbonizer, or the decarbonizer, as I'm calling it. Yes. And that's the big point. You've got it. Do we want humanity to advance and play soccer games and chess matches instead of shooting each other for resources? We don't have to compete for resources. This is the great liberation. Now if you listen to the fossil fuel industry, they'll say, well, of course, you're going to have to buy from us, otherwise you're going to live in a cave. Well, I am so tired of hearing that. No, we're not going back to a cave. We're going to go forward. We're going to have more energy, and it takes a lot of energy to run this world. I think in North America, every man, woman, and child needs, it consumes about 250 kilowatt hours per day. Now when you add up how many hundreds of millions of people we're talking about, that's a huge amount of energy. And in fact, even in Hawaii, when you declare we're going to be clean energy by 2045, now that's 25 years from now, and I don't think you have that long. But nevertheless, you are talking about climbing Mount Everest. We're not talking about a little energy. It's huge. And therefore, well, let's go to the next slide and we can talk about it. I'd like to make a point though. Yeah, please, please, please. I don't view the fossil industry as the bad guys. I mean, they're caring for it with the way it was, and we have to evolve. But most of the large fossil fuel companies now are actively shifting over to add a hydrogen component in their recap, repositioning themselves as energy companies rather than an oil company. Absolutely. They're getting the message. And these are the guys that know how to make stuff in bulk. And so they're not our enemy. They're our friends. They're our neighbors. We work with them. I have meetings with them downtown at the Energy Policy Forum, by the way, one of the hosts of the show. And they're good guys and they're trying to do the right thing. And they are shifting over to the hydrogen side of the house. And basically, they say, look, if there's a demand for hydrogen, we'll make it. And so if there's a demand for green hydrogen, renewable hydrogen, they're going to make it. And they know how to produce it. They know how to distribute it. They know how to dispense it. So we need to leverage it. Now, the guys that don't get the message are going to go broke. But these are all smart people. So I just wanted to make that point that this is not anti-fossil fuel. This is actually pro-hydrogen and clean fuel. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I sometimes seem a little embittered. It's just that we want to move this industry that has a lot of expertise. In fact, most of the hydrogen made now is from the fossil fuel industry from methane. That's what we want to evolve them away from carbon and into water-based fuels. And I think, ultimately, you're right, the smart ones, and they know their market, they're going to try and hold on to what they're doing probably as long as they can. But they're positioning themselves to move very quickly. An example to your point is Cummins, which is a big international diesel engine manufacturer, among other things, they just bought Hydrogenics. And Hydrogenics bought the electrolyzer corporation from, remember the stewards from Canada many, many years ago. So Hydrogenics bought that. They adopted the electrolyzer technology. They've added fuel cells. Now Cummins has come in and acquired them. And I think that goes to your point that the people who are in the fossil fuel industry are beginning and earnestly in putting their money behind it, realizing that the winds have changed, that we're not, I don't want to villainize anyone. As you point out, they brought us to where we are. But we have to transition away from the carbon base into the water-based fuels. Which, of course, you're a tremendous advocate for, that's your work. You've demonstrated on the big island how you take clean energy, make clean energy from solar, for example, making clean energy from water with hydrogen, and then putting it into a public bus. Wonderful. See, that's brilliant because you are pointing out and demonstrating that you can make your own energy. You don't need any foreign country. You don't even need any foreign companies. What you need is the technology that you are developing and demonstrating. So I think you're at the tip of the spear. They call it the cutting edge, but you're at the bleeding edge. That's the very, very tip. And you have to take all the knocks and all the hits, but you're still standing and you're still speaking the truth. And that is the power of what work you do. Mitch, I met you almost 30 years ago in Washington, DC, and you were putting high-powered fuel cell stacks into race cars. I thought, whoa, that's a good guy. Not like this guy. So this has been a long, hard evolution. But we have seen so much in that 30 years. We talked about fuel cell buses back then, but nobody had any. But now you have a dozen companies selling fuel cell buses. The Europeans, especially in the Scandinavian countries, they're blowing everyone out of the water. Because they say with Japan, they don't have a lot of oil. They have to think differently. Here in the United States, we have everything. In Oregon, we have 100,000 square miles. We have dams, pipelines. We have access to anything we want. But Hawaii is special because you're in the middle of the ocean and you don't have those options. So finally, at last, the best option is the option you're pursuing, which is energy, independence, clean energy, and economically, no fuel cost. That's a big question. I just want to get a little plug-in for the whole legislature. Many years ago, they actually had the vision. It's in statute that Hawaii will evolve to a hydrogen economy. And they actually put their money where their mouth is. They established the hydrogen fund and put in $10 million. Well, on a per capita basis, that's as if California put in $330 million. So it was a big investment for a population of $1.5 million to put in $10 million with the money. And I've got to say that I can see that station behind over my left shoulder, right shoulder, that shoulder. That wouldn't have been there if the state of Hawaii had not invested that money in the hydrogen fund. Because a significant portion of the funding that went into build that station came out of the state. And the US Department of Energy are going to make sure I get a plug-in there. But certainly, the vision of Speaker Sey at the time, he's the one that was the leader in that and got that all going and started up. So they have the vision and it's taken us a long time to execute it. Too long, in my opinion. But nevertheless, there's not giving any excuses. But things take time. So anyway, let's get a carry on with some more of your slides. We have about nine minutes left to go. Time always goes so fast. No, it's so much fun. OK, well, this chart goes to what you're talking about, is why we want to decarbonize. Why is that important? And why is it so critical? Well, so I developed this silver bullet. We talked about it in other shows a little bit. But the algorithm is very useful. And you could use it for almost anything. And how it works is you list everything in the middle that you want. We want no soil pollution, air pollution, water pollution. We don't want biological pollution. We don't want the nox socks, particulates, mercury. Any one of these things can knock you down, but 17? This is a lot of trouble, a lot of problem here. So in trying to figure out what is the answer, all we have to do is just list everything we want and hold our standard. On the left, let's take every possible solution and throw it at this filter. And can anything get through? That's the big question. And you can look at nuclear energy. It's expensive. It's still a steam engine, so it's not very efficient. And you need a lot of water resources, because it's a steam engine, doesn't get through. Because down in our list, we have it has to be non-toxic, scalable. It has to come up to industrial loads. Because that's what we're talking about. And it's a very popular thing. Oh, we'll just use lithium ion batteries to solve all our problems. The Tesla crowd is really pushing that. But look, those are sports cars. If you want to do dump trucks and buses and things like that, charging with. And I'm involved with installing electric vehicle charging stations. Good stuff. But it's not a complete answer. The complete answer, which scales other than 1% or 2%, that goes all the way up to industrial loads, utility loads, turns out to be the only thing that got through that list. And that's renewable hydrogen. That's using your solar and wind. And then the key component is storing that energy. And in fact, I would even say, as an experiment, if we invited Isaac Newton into our world, and imagine we did that and we show him around. And then we sit him down and we ask him, hey, what do you think? What would he say? I think he'd say this. I think he'd be, well, your technology is extraordinary. However, you do lack one essential element. You have no standardized industrial battery. And he'd be right. We don't have a battery. We have some lithium ion batteries, which will do little teeny loads here around, but we don't have a battery that's gonna take all the solar you can make on the island of Oahu and make hydrogen with all the overage, all the overproduction. You make that hydrogen. You can store that hydrogen for a rainy day. You can use it when you have peak. You have all of the options. And that's what's so beautiful about your work. You're pointing out that this is not an idea. This is a technology. It's vetted. It's been done. All we have to do is pull the pieces together and be clear about applying it as often as we can. So I think that's what's so, I'm glad you mentioned that you had actually mandated hydrogen because no one else in the United States has done that. No, they're in Oregon. Yeah, no, I'm in Oregon. We're very green, but we don't have a hydrogen program. Now that is hard for me. So that's why I came to Hawaii these years is because I could meet you. I could see what you and the general awesome are doing and really Hawaii should really be congratulated. You created the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, HCAT, of which General Osterman was the director for just retired. But when that was first formed, they recognized way back then, I think it was 15 or 20 years ago. I don't remember the starting date, but they said right there, they were talking about hydrogen. We need a clean energy infrastructure because in Hawaii, you're bathed in solar energy. You're bathed in all these resources. And it's worth a lot. I did a calculation. How much is sunlight worth in Hawaii? Well, at 35 cents a kilowatt hour per square mile per year, it came out to $140 million per year. And if I went to Iowa and went to a farmer and said, look, I think I can take $150 million of gold off your land every year. He'd look at me, no, there's only sorghum there. I don't think you're gonna be able to do that. I would say to him, not all gold is buried. Some of it falls on our head. And in fact, if you, in Oahu, on Oahu, you have lots of parking lots. There's, I mean, more than anyone else, you just have parking lots. But if you add them all up, that's where you wanna put the solar. Over the parking lots to make shade, it's already, it's all ready to bring my equipment in. I can drop it in. I don't have to take any new land. You have lots of commercial rooftops. So my calculation is you need about four or five square miles of solar to power Oahu. Now, at first glance, that might seem like, well, that's a lot. Well, there's 600 square miles there. And we've already paved over more than that amount. So you can do it. The numbers are there. You have the resources. And with the leadership that you provide and Stan Osterman and what he is doing and just constantly keeping it alive and keeping it in our year, you have those things in Hawaii because of your work. And people like Paul Pontio as Blue Planet. Absolutely. Wow, I mean, fabulous facility and Hank Rogers invested in that. And that's a real showcase. I mean, that's the model and Paul does fantastic work up there. It's amazing. Anybody who goes there like comes away with a big wow factor. Man, this is so cool. And it is. It is so cool. And because what you're telling the world is, look, you don't have to die. You don't have to destroy or degrade the environment to have all the energy you want. In the 21st century, we're talking about human dignity, human freedom and human industrialization which does not hurt. It fact helps. You know, when you have potable water coming out the back of your vehicle. That's not bad. Right. Anyway, we're got about two minutes left, Toby. So let's run through the rest of your slides. Great. What do we have next? Okay, so here's an example of what you're doing and here are the components. You have, you build out your clean energy. You run it through a machine called an electrolyzer where you add water and suddenly you have hydrogen fuel. You have rocket fuel and safely. And then you have your public transportation system that you can plug into the buses. And I want to talk about, well, we don't have much time, but if you go with an all battery electric bus, Tesla is trying to do a semi, for example. Well, that means it requires a megawatt charger for one vehicle. So if you were going to charge 10,000 vehicles, for example, a drop in the bucket, that would be 10 gigawatts you'd need. That's not going to happen on a lot of energy. Yeah, that's 10 times your grid. That's not going to happen. But hydrogen can happen because it's not in real time. You can use the off grid, the off peak time to take and bubble hydrogen for, you know, 15, 16 hours. And then on the peak time, use that hydrogen to relieve the stress on your load. So what you have is an ideal solution. It's a real solution and it supports the economy. And I may say the dignity of people everywhere. Bravo. Right, right. So next slide. Let's see what we have. Okay, this is interesting. This is the last coal power plant in Hawaii. And it's on your southwestern tip in Oahu. It's the last one. You've been able to get rid of everything else. Now, if I were the king or emperor of Hawaii, I would say the first thing we're going to do is take the single most, the greatest single point of pollution, the source of pollution in Hawaii is that plant. It produces about 1.6 million tons of pollution per year. If we convert that to renewable hydrogen, where you're using solar and wind making hydrogen in Hawaii, whether you do it on the big island or on Oahu, we can convert that plant into clean hydrogen. And it would be, usually people wait for the last, that's not the low hanging fruit. But if you were to go at that, the scale of it would allow all the equipment involved to be very competitive. So that's what I would encourage our next project is let's convert that coal power plant. There you go. So next slide. So one thing we could do is, if you brought the hydrogen from another place, you could actually have a buoy off shore and then have some storage tanks underwater. And because it's hydrogen, there's no problem. If you had a breach, again, it's not chemically active. It's not going to cause pollution. It'll escape and you can't get it back. But you're not going to. You're not going to put oil on your beaches. Yeah, it's not going to, it's clean. So you could make that, I know you've mentioned making hydrogen at the big island and shipping it over to Oahu. That can be done very safely. Again, hydrogen is so much safer than any kind of fossil fuel equivalent. So I know we're running out of time, but I want to think. Last slide, last slide. Oh, okay, great, one more. All right, so here is a little sketch in the upper right I put the state of Oregon because I'd like to supply you. Yeah, sure, go. And at the port of Portland, we can put big electrolyzers because we have all the surplus renewable energy that we have to curtail and turn off. I said, no, I'll take all of it. We'll make hydrogen fillet in a ship, put it in a proper ship, take it down to a Oahu offshore and they can offload it to the buoy. And now you're clean. So you have lots of options. The future of the world is in your hands because someone has to demonstrate the truth and that is happening in Hawaii. And I say thank you. Well, I thank you, Toby. And I'd like to point out that that is Toby's artwork. In his books, you'll see that he does these little drawings that are fantastic and really good. So look up Toby Kincaid on Amazon. He's got about four or five books. Yeah, I think so. He's biome, I buy them and I always learned lots, not just something I earn a lot from them. So anyway, I'd like to thank Toby very much for appearing on the show and how we can, the decarbonizer works, the decarbonizer. Love it. That's it for today folks. Aloha and we'll talk to you next Wednesday at Hawaii, the state of clean energy.