 Welcome to Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii and Stan Osterman from Tiger Shark LLC. Yeah, I got a new company, Tiger Shark LLC. So I haven't got a website yet, but we're working. I'm not also planning to take a whole lot of money, so it may take a while. Anyways, we get started on today's show. What I'd like to do first of all is talk about some interesting things that have happened over the last couple of weeks that I think would be of interest to folks that, especially folks that track hydrogen. The first is that if you remember back to around 2008 hydrogen was actually a really big deal in California. Governor Schwarzenegger was doing the hydrogen highway and the Bush administration was pushing hydrogen as an alternative fuel and things were going great guns and all of a sudden at the at the Obama administration change, they put a PhD named Dr. Chiu in charge of the Department of Energy. And for whatever reason, he decided that hydrogen wasn't ready for prime time and he pretty much he funded the hydrogen programs that were going on in the Department of Energy. And it put the skids to a lot of states moving into hydrogen. Well, California kept it going in spite of the lack of federal funding. The state government put in a bunch of funding and of course right now California has about six or seven thousand hydrogen fuel cell cars on the road. And it's still pushing forward to make new stations, but it's all basically being subsidized by the state. Well, believe it or not, the federal government is kind of leaning back into hydrogen a little bit with the Trump administration, even though everybody thinks he's not very environmentally savvy and he keeps talking coal and stuff. But he's actually putting money where it belongs and they're starting to look at more hydrogen and things are happening. In fact, Dr. Chiu came back and said, gee, now that you can get curtailed power for two to four cents a kilowatt hour, maybe hydrogen makes sense. So all the people who slammed the brakes on in 2008 are starting to accelerate out now and really start thinking about hydrogen. Especially the people who were studying it heavily and actually were really sold on it back in 2008. They've just, they never stopped and now they're accelerating out. So to that point, there's a company in Germany, I just found out from a friend Keith Malone in California, from the California fuel cell partnership, that there's a company in Germany that's building a steel plant that will run on wind turbines that make hydrogen to power the steel plant, including firing their furnaces. Because they're finding that hydrogen is the cleanest gas they can get to fire these furnaces and they can do it economically with renewable wind power and hydrogen. And it's amazing. It's happening all over the world. There's a lot going on in Asia, there's a lot going on in Europe, especially Germany, where hydrogen is taking center stage and the price of hydrogen is dropping as they find that the more renewables you put online, the more curtailed power you have because of the need for a lot of renewable energy that's intermittent and all of a sudden there's cheap power available to make hydrogen, store the energy in hydrogen, bring it back later at night when the sun's not shining and use it in stationary fuel cells. A lot's been going on and if you haven't kept your finger on the pulse of hydrogen, it's time to start looking at it, especially you engineers. I have this discussion time after time that most of our engineers are wedded to batteries and they're wedded to diesel generators. Diesel generators are just going to be way too expensive with the gear for generators that you have to use to be clean. They're not going to get any more efficient. In fact, cleaning them up is all aftermarket stuff and it takes away from the power that you're putting in, you're getting out of the generator. So engineers wake up, start smelling the hydrogen roses and start thinking hydrogen and fuel cells for your work. Today's guest is Chris McQuinney, not a stranger to stand the energy man. He's on often and I asked him to come back on because he's working on a project we'll talk about in the second half of the show, but in the first part of the show he was at a conference with myself, Paul Pontiou and a bunch of other smart folks that were talking ocean thermal and renewable energy in Kona as part of the Okinawa, Hawaii Clean Energy Symposium. Chris, welcome to the show. I'm glad you could be on and why don't you tell the audience just a little, a quick synopsis if they haven't seen you before about what you do and and your company. Thanks Dan for having me, yes. My name is Chris McQuinney, I'm in Dayton, Ohio. I'm CEO of a company called Millennium Marine Energy and we build hydrogen fueling infrastructure and deploy it across the country and we have 16 models that are have what's called a certificate of attestation from CSA group, meaning that they meet all the codes and standards necessary in order to put those products out and do it safely and within the codes and standards and we've been in business for about since 2003. I actually started it at our garage at my house and then 2013 we bought a 40,000 square foot building and we've been working out of there ever since and so we have quite a few projects going on and one of them is the Transcontinental Hydrogen Highway. Right, we're at that symposium last week. Is there anything that stood out in your mind that you think is in the category of game changer that came up during that conference? Well, I think it was interesting to hear people talking about how they really needed to store large-scale energy and that you know it's not just batteries and it's not just hydrogen, it really has to be both working together in order to accomplish that and the batteries give you a quick on and off and the ability to follow loads and ramp up and down and then the hydrogen gives you the long-term storage that you need and so it was good to hear people talking about those kind of things and I think that was really probably the biggest thing. Yeah, I agree and you know Paul made the comment to your point that if you start looking at lithium cobalt technology which is basically your tesla wall and that kind of battery, the cost is around 600 dollars per kilowatt hour of storage but when you look at hydrogen scaling the large scale it's closer to 100 dollars or less per kilowatt hour so six times cheaper than batteries and as you mentioned the right thing to do is to put the right mix in. In fact, I would even add flywheels or ultra capacitors to the equation for batteries and say you could probably use ultra capacitors and or flywheels to do that quick if there's a big inrush power requirement to take up that load instantly within milliseconds and get the power up and then let your other generation catch up including fuel cells and and I think that's the way to do it and you know your company I put out there on the introduction to the show that your company has a little different philosophy on how to attack the infrastructure issue with hydrogen generation and of course you need a lot of the hydrogen made in california for the vehicles is steam reform methane and and if you did that from renewable biogas or something like that that's that's probably a good way to negate the methane greenhouse gas but to really make a clean hydrogen it's electrolysis and that's where our equipment comes in but your philosophy is to start small and grow it as the market grows and the other companies and most of the big electrolyzer companies they want to go in big and make these big hydrogen stations that cost millions of dollars and the market's not there yet and then that's a challenge for investors that's a challenge for permitting so explain to everyone how important your technology is number one to scale and number two the fact that it's an appliance not a it's not like you have to build a facility for it it's on a pallet you just drop it in place soak up water and electricity and you're often running kind of like a refrigerator more than a big big building yeah right well it's uh first it's really important to um to to make anything spread across the nation or across the world uh you have to have your finances in order and um if you don't have a product that doesn't always need to have some type of government subsidy to make it fly um you know it's difficult to continue to grow um you know a business that way and depend on the government so we we we think that when you take a product like a hydrogen generator and you combine it with the the five things that you need in infrastructure development are hydrogen production hydrogen purification hydrogen um uh compression storing the hydrogen and dispensing it and we package all that together in one product and by doing it on a smaller scale you can better match the demand for the hydrogen um with the supply and and instead of the way things are going in california often they have um they have to put out a big station because that's the way the government rules work as far as who gets the the grants and um so they have to put out a large station to qualify for that and then you've just put out a new station and there may not be enough cars around to to to consume all the hydrogen that they can dispense so then they can't sell enough hydrogen to make money so if you can match the supply and the demand more closely you can sell all the hydrogen you can make and then with the right um cost for energy input for kilowatt hour electricity you can actually make a financial case that you can put out infrastructure that will make it profitable and so then people want to buy stations because they can make money selling hydrogen and then with the right cost per kilowatt hour you can actually get the hydrogen in certain states like california and hawaii and in certain countries like europe where the price of the hydrogen is actually less than the um cost of gasoline so now instead of just saying hey it's green and it's sustainable and it's renewable and you know selling to that market you can sell to be able to affect somebody economically um by saving money on fuel costs and and then ultimately those two things have to be done within where they can make money and now you can grow an organization organically rather than having to always raise capital or borrow money or get grants and those kind of things so that's the primary reason to start small and grow it big and and then we've taken the extra step to we're the first company in the world to have the csa groups attestation where we have a certificate that you know says that we meet all the codes and standards and that we can fill the car safely um and in doing that process we got it classified as an appliance and because um just in the united states alone on the mainland there's like 3,800 counties and could you imagine what it would be like to go to every authority with jurisdiction and try to explain to them how hydrogen works you know this kind of helps skip over that process when they see you hand them a certificate that says this has already been checked by an internationally recognized third party testing laboratory and uh it's qualified as an appliance so it can just be dropped off and plugged in and used um so um that will I think help in um uh the deployment of hydrogen fueling infrastructure in this manner so then and after that you start small we already we have four products that are already certified that one's bigger than the next and bigger to the next and bigger the next so you can actually move these things around very easily because they're an appliance um and you can take the one that got you started and found a hot location and move it to find another hot location while you put in a bigger system in its place so all together collectively that's our philosophy we've went out and done this this is not something we're talking about doing we're done with it you can look at our website at mreh2.com and see see all the different products that we've got done yeah and and I'd like to let the audience know that um that uh I when I worked at HK we were one of your first customers I think we have serial number two of your of your was a 200 um series electrolyzers and stations and you know we're going to take a quick break here but when we come back I want to talk a little bit about price because I know our station when we when we got it was just over a hundred thousand dollars it was around a hundred twenty thousand dollars for the basic station and I ordered extra storage so that we'd have a little more flexibility on the storage so let's uh we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back after the break and we'll we'll talk about how affordable this is compared to the station the other stations that are out there now. Hi I'm Rusty Komori host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii my show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence leadership and finding greatness I interview guests who are successful in business sports and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha I'm Dave Stevens host of the Cyber Underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on thinktech Hawaii dot 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 keeping you safe. Aloha. Hey welcome back to stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii Stan Osserman and Chris McWinnie talking about Chris's millennium reign um electrolyzer systems that uh not only make hydrogen cleanly by taking power electric power and water and splitting the water they also scrub the hydrogen and make sure it's all the oxygen and any moisture is separated out of it compresses the hydrogen which is five nine's pure by the time it gets to the storage stores the hydrogen and then use a standard dispensing equipment that'll that'll fit any um any uh Toyota or Honda or Hyundai hydrogen vehicle that are currently in production and you can dispense right into the vehicle from this station so uh Chris you know we talked about how important it is to uh to have the hydrogen scalable so to meet the market but the price on yours is also a big deal and if we can use that curtailed power from renewable energy where it's being made out in the community um we have a real a real chance to make a huge difference because if we can get that electricity here in Hawaii down under 10 cents a kilowatt hour we're starting to be competitive with gasoline and certainly if we can get it down in the four or five cents a kilowatt hour like uh you count on the mainland in many places you're actually beating the current price of gasoline so you know let's talk a little bit about that and maybe what your plan is for the continental us yeah so um the price of the product uh we range we have a model 100 a model 200 and a model 300 and then we have what we call a mega four ta 70 and the prices range from between um 120 thousand dollars up to uh 500 thousand dollars depending on the amount of volume that they produce so the lowest one does four kilograms a day and has eight kilograms of storage and the biggest one has 60 kilograms of storage and produces 64 kilograms a day and um uh so uh we've got quite a range there and and because of the the the the capital cost being reduced that greatly affects the um the the cost to the hydrogen at the nozzle that then can be marked up for profit and sold onto the customer at a discount to what they're buying gasoline so um those those are some big uh competitive advantages that we have when it comes to how this all lays out is making it cost effective so and some of the models that you showed us last week you showed paul and i um even at the small scale in there's actually a return on investment around the two percent range not really big and you're selling hydrogen probably a little bit more than gasoline price but that again that's that's when you have a really small demand signal for the hydrogen but as you get up a little higher to maybe four or five cars a day you know we move up to your second or third tier of uh generation now you're you're getting into four percent nine percent return on investment and you're selling your hydrogen cheaper than is in california and you're still making you know good good profit so it's it's your model me looks like it makes a whole huge amount of sense because as soon as you can get you know a reasonable number of customers you're already in a at a place where you're competitive with the current prices of uh of gasoline and you know right now with fracking and uh you know to get most of our domestic oil um those wells don't produce as long as our traditional wells and i think people are just going to start noticing the price of oil creeping up slowly um as we basically lose our supply and what we don't want to do is cut our supply down to where oil is really expensive domestically and then become dependent on foreign oil again and we're back in the same energy security debacle that we've been in for years where we're fighting wars and we're doing all kind of stuff to keep our oil supply going right right so one of the things that dawned on me there when you were talking is is that um one of the reasons that we're able to do what we do and others are not is because we're taking also a different approach in strategy as far as delivering the gas to the vehicle um the stations in around the world that are being deployed right now are all at 10 000 psi and they want to fill the cars in five minutes and in order to do that you have to pre-chill the hydrogen uh down to minus 20 minus 30 or minus 40 Celsius and that takes a lot of extra energy it makes the cost of hydrogen more because the equipment costs more and um it's three times more to put a 10 000 psi station together than it is a 5000 psi station because all the parts for compression and the fittings and the tubing and the tanks storage tanks all those components are not widely available at 10 000 psi so you pay a premium for them and so we we our approach is at 5000 psi so your car is only going to get a half a fill and you're going to go half as far you're going to have to fill up twice as much um but we think the consumer will do that because some is better than none and the way they're currently doing it it will not self propagate it we want to be able to grow organically um uh and and have the growth occur naturally because the demand is there and and it's affordable um if the government decides they're funded out of money um the current the current uh way that is being done is not going to last so um so there is a sacrifice for doing it our way and it's important that people understand that and we think it's worth it i wouldn't call it a sacrifice so much as you know i think as a habit um i can tell you for certain that as a national guardsman uh i never let my tank go below a half on my truck or my car um because here in hawaii we could have an earthquake on the big island that could cause a tsunami that would impact our island and we'd have 20 minutes to react to it you don't have time to go fill up uh you know 800 000 cars at gas stations in 20 minutes because after that you you'll have a shortage of electricity and gasoline on the island so i always keep my tank half full uh or more and you know that's that's where i fill up but you know you you you could do the same thing here and say look i'm gonna i'm gonna fill up and always have a have a half a tank in there and and stop more often you know i i live on the windward side of the island and it takes me i never buy gas in my neighborhood the closest gas station that i get gas from is uh the Costco here in Honolulu but i do it because it saves me money and it's 30 miles away for 15 miles away from my house so 30 miles round trip and um it's not a problem when i'm in town i fill up the day i filled up with some hydro or some gasoline and uh i could do the same thing with hydrogen and you know and you get 150 mile range on an island here in Hawaii that's that's plenty of range and it's equal to even the smaller uh battery plug-in vehicles that they're uh you know accused of having range anxiety it's it's more than they they get no batteries and um uh with the exception of the tesla um you're you're you're you're getting an eight minute fill and you're going 150 to 170 miles so um it's still much better than any of that i just wanted to be clear that there is a reason that we're that much cheaper um and and people have to buy into that argument but i think they are you mentioned the transcontinental hydrogen highway um we're going to be deploying 27 stations from los angeles california to new york city and um we're going to be the first company um uh that we know of that will be able to claim that they have crossed a continent and allowed you to drive on from one ocean to another ocean and i think that's going to be a really important feature or you know accomplishment to wake up the world to see that it doesn't have to cost as much as what it's being you know touted and so in preparation for that we have just completed the very first um triangular highway we call it the ohio hydrogen triangle um from columbus ohio to date in ohio and down to portsmouth ohio one leg is 122 miles another one's 90 miles and another one is 75 miles and we have stations in all three locations and we have five vehicles that we're able to drive in between them and so i've been driving a hydrogen car now for about uh about three or four weeks and um it's pretty cool to be able to see that you know this thing that we're going to do across the country is working here locally in the state of ohio and and and it really is giving me a lot of confidence that we're on the right track so we're going to take advantage of this uh of this small group together and really collect a lot of data and and really understand um what's the best way to fill the cars do we need to spend just a little bit of extra money and put a cascade system in them it only gives you about a 10 more but you know 10 of 150 you know the 15 miles so that might be important to somebody and so you know those kind of questions we're going to be able to answer and we're really excited about how do you do that yeah and and just so everybody knows too you you are you do have the technology built already to go to the full fill um when you get to like the megawatt scale electrolyzers and you know and at that point though you'll be able to um to do the 10 000 psi pressure and be able to afford the stations because you're already at that market where you have the customers to support that biggest station and make it cost effective so that's important important for everybody to understand it is we're not saying we don't want to do 10 000 we're just saying there's a right time and right place for it in a way we look at it is you get enough customers coming in and all sudden you change your station to do 10 000 you're selling twice as much gas to the same people so that's a totally different value proposition because you already know the market exists and you know there's so you automatically know what your numbers are going to be it's not a question of if but it's a question of when so when do you actually deploy the 10 000 puzzle and we already have that built so we'll see what happens when you get a financial advisor and a financial planner that starts doing innovative innovative hydrogen infrastructure it starts to make business sense well chris i want to thank you for being on the show today believe it or not we blasted through 30 minutes and want to thank you for bringing us up to speed on on your vision and i think it's a valid thing and i hope that you can get your your business plan out there for other investors to look at so they can understand how much sense it makes because we've we've shown it to other people and they shake their head up and down and go hey this makes a lot of sense so thanks for being with us and i'll have you back on in a few months and get caught up a little bit more on how millennium reigns doing yeah as you know we're looking for investors right now to help support this and so uh i appreciate you saying something about that all right okay well until next tuesday stand there there's your man signing off aloha