 Hey welcome to my lunch hour stand, Energyman here for another great show where we get to talk about my favorite subject which is hydrogen. So nice background today. We'll be talking more about that when we get into our guest. I would like to start off talking about some equipment I got briefed on this week called Simple Fuel and it's a hydrogen station and Missouri can bring up the pictures. It's a hydrogen station basically that makes hydrogen and dispenses it. So you can see it's really kind of an elegant looking thing. It's it's actually from France and they're an international company that just one of the gentlemen I believe he was from Newvera helped start Newvera is now helping this company called McPhee with this portable hydrogen station which is really slick looking. Anyway it's not only a dispenser it's actually a standalone hydrogen station so you connect water up to it and an electrical probably a 240 volt connection and it can make this particular model can make 10 kilograms a day of hydrogen and store it and dispense it. I think it stores it at probably 5,000 psi and if you have a 10,000 psi vehicle I think it runs a compressor so it's not a quick fill like some of the regular hydrogen dispensers at a station. It's actually going to take probably 10 or 15 minutes to fill a vehicle if it's going to go up to 10,000 psi but it is a standalone station. They're looking at for something like this around 170 to $200,000 so it's not a homeowner's model but it is something that could get a small community that's just starting off in hydrogen vehicles get them going into hydrogen and if we can throw up the second shot it shows how you can incorporate it into a gas station because most people don't realize this but you can actually put hydrogen dispensers right into regular petroleum refueling stations and this one is designed to fit right there on the island between the other dispensers the other gasoline and diesel dispensers and again this thing makes the hydrogen right on site and dispenses it right there just excuse me just drive up put your credit card in and you're off and running so that's just a little update on what's out there and I'm going to try and get the folks from McVita to come on the show maybe I can Skype them in on one of my shows but today we have Mr. Claude Colbertson from the American Hydrogen Association in Phoenix, Arizona one of my favorite places to go visit when I'm on the mainland and he's here to just kind of update us on what's going on with American Hydrogen Association and we'll talk a little bit about Roy McAllister and the work he's doing out there and the things that that the American Hydrogen Association does to kind of promote hydrogen not just in Phoenix and around the Arizona area but worldwide so Claude thanks for being on the show with me today I appreciate it great to be here well I guess you get over here once a year whether you like it or not because your wife's from here right right you get to come visit Hawaii but what got you into hydrogen and working with Roy McAllister over there in Arizona well years ago I was talking to a young man who was in solar and he was in charge of the Arizona solar association library and we were talking and I said what what I really want to do is I would like to build a hydrogen powered car and he says oh well you need to talk to Roy McAllister and I said oh who's that and so he gave me the information and the next day I called up Roy and I told him that I was interested in hydrogen and then I had a little welding shop and he said oh come on over and visit it so I went over and I've been a member of the American Hydrogen Association ever since and and did you build your car no I'm still working on it I'm still working I have a little car it's a old Carmen Gia and I bought it with this with the idea of converting it to run on hydrogen and I've had it a lot of years and it's still running on gasoline but we're getting closer okay and we haven't given up and persistence I guess is one of the secrets so what's your what's your design gonna be like on that on the car is it like are you gonna just have the fuel cell charging the battery and have the battery run the car no no how are you gonna do it no what we're one of our focuses and my main focus is running is making a fuel a liquid fuel that can be stored at room temperature that's basically a net hydrogen fuel made from hydrogen and CO2 and and nitrogen and called metrol and so so an internal combustion yes and modified to run on this metrol fuel yes and if I understand right because I have been talking to Roy the metrol is a liquid fuel that you can actually sequester the carbon as and the hydrogen goes right into the internal combustion engine well that's that's kind of how it works okay but you can give me the details right that and and I'm a mechanic I'm not a chemist and Roy he gives me the jobs to do and you know sketches or sometimes drawings and what do you want built and and and you fabricated I try to manufacture what it is he needs for doing the experiments but basically the fuel be stored in a regular gas tank and then pump through a reactor that's heated by waste heat from the engine and converts the liquid fuel to a gaseous fuel that is a combination of hydrogen and and CO mostly and then when it burns all the carbon that is burned is just what you put into the fuel I mean so you're not creating you're making it from carbon oxide and nitrogen out of the air right so your carbon neutral right and and of course we have to have hydrogen to create the fuel initially you know to put with the with the CO2 and the and the nitrogen and and so however you can get the hydrogen whether it's electrolysis or you know steam methane right okay and and that's one of our main goals is to take a lot or to be able to take methane from sewage and garbage and whatever and take the carbon out of it and utilize the carbon as a resource and then have that get the hydrogen basically for free and combine that with the other gas so so that's you would sequester the carbon making the liquid fuel you'd take the methane and get the carbon out of it and make the liquid fuel with nitrogen carbon oxide and the hydrogen you've gotten from the methane yeah okay yeah so you got a liquid fuel you can store it in a liquid tank right in your car just and it would probably be about same energy density roughly as liquid fuel so yeah same roughly the same mileage and I'm I'm I'm making decent assumptions right okay pretty close so and and the fact that we take that liquid fuel and we add a lot of heat energy to it from the engine boosts the energy density and makes it more okay more efficient so so a lot of internal combustion engines that they try and put hydrogen in they can't cram enough hydrogen in there to really make it work so you're saying as it comes out of the liquid state through this heat exchanger basically it's hot enough that it's also still under pressure and you're pushing it into the cylinder under pressure well yeah it'll be it won't necessarily won't it will be cooled somewhat but then it will be under considerable pressure and injected directly into the cylinder okay with the engine not throttled and the injection and the ignition after top dead center so it makes it really efficient okay you don't lose that it's been quite a bit of time talking to Roy about this very witness Roy McAllister we're talking about by the way is a PhD he's a chemical engineer holds at least a half a million patents and I don't know how many he holds but it's a lot and and so he's he's worked with American Hydrogen actually he's the founder of the American Hydrogen Association and he's working on this metrol concept because the theory being that we have so many internal combustion engine cars on the road that by the time we get fuel cell cars to replace the internal combustion engines it's going to be years and years and decades and decades before we make any real headway but with all the internal combustion engine cars on the road if he can do a modification and convert the vehicles to run off this metrol you can start cleaning up the greenhouse gases much earlier because the conversion is relatively simple like Claude says you basically can keep the liquid fuel tank in fact according to Roy you can actually run off both fuels you just have to have a computer changing the timing back to your old timing for the old fuel and the lake you said top dead center for the new fuel and then you need to modify how it's injected into the engine so in a diesel engine you'd actually change the glow plug out for an injector igniter and then in internal in the gasoline engine you would take the spark plug out and change it with an injector igniter so what happens is if you have fuel injection on your regular car and you're running with gasoline and you convert it and you're going to run off gasoline you'd use the same fuel injector and the igniter to ignite the gasoline but if you want to switch to this metrol fuel it would be a switch in the cockpit in the compartment and you'd switch to the metrol and then it would be injecting the hydrogen through the same spark plug igniter that's in this in the cylinder exactly and then there's also the part of right now what Claude was talking about an unthrottle carburetor when you when you have a gas engine you basically control the amount of oxygen that goes in whether you accelerate or decelerate your pumping fuel in there but you're also controlling the oxygen in this one you can try you try and get as much oxygen in the cylinder as you can it's on it's unthrottle and you control the acceleration by how much hydrogen you push in right and so it's it's a little different concept and you also are injecting the hydrogen at top dead center not below right so you're not compressing a gas air mix you're compressing an air mix and then hydrogen goes in at the last second right before you ignite and it gives you that oomph that you need that other internal combustion engines don't give you right how's that that's great topics yeah so that's what the guys at the American Hydrogen Association do for fun and hopefully their fun will turn into something great for the environment and and all of us that are that are you know thinking about getting into hydrogen on our vehicles so what are some of the other things that the hydrogen association does that to try and make people aware of of what what hydrogen well we're interested we're in and all forms of sustainable energy and energy conservation and clean water and clean air and actually you know helping one of the projects that we're involved in and I'm not so much involved in it but is this micro dwell project and where figure out how to make dwellings for people give give get people off the streets and into dwellings where they can be safe and comfortable and do it with the so sustaining energy right and and using you know forms of solar for for energy and for energy storage by using electrolyzers and so on to generate your own hydrogen and so it's a it's a project that we are working on with other organizations that that's their primary focus is is helping people with their habitat and so and we've got it's it's kind of neat we have some members that are architects and and builders and so on and they all get together and they get their ideas out there and one of these days we're going to be able to put together a little community of people that you know a place for people what one of the main focuses is people that are the kids that are are aging out of foster care and don't have any place to go and and they don't have any any backup any family to turn to anybody to help out no support system and yeah well why they they really suffer we have a homeless issue here oh yeah I need to take care of as I'm sure you've noticed driving around with your wife but that may be a great solution yeah so when we come back from a break we'll we'll talk a little bit about what that looks like you know what it looks like for this mini dwelling and we'll be back in a minute aloha my name is Carl Campania and I am the host of think tech Hawaii's movers shakers and reformers the politics in Hawaii series join us each week as we have guest after guest talking about the policy and the politics of our state of our islands and of what really matters to each of us so please join us each week and engage in that conversation mahala hello and aloha my name is raya salter and I am your host for power of Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and renewable energy future I'm so excited to be here with you to talk about some of the most important energy issues of our day and most importantly who can we bring together energy engineers artists musicians accountants advocates young people who can we bring together to talk about how we can make this path together by walking and reach a hundred percent renewable energy please join me Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for power up Hawaii hey welcome back to my lunch hour stand energy man here with Claude Colbertson from American Hydrogen Association and they do their work out of Phoenix Arizona actually around Mesa Arizona which is I guess the was at the east side of Phoenix yeah yeah Phoenix is so big you can't just drive through it in a couple minutes it takes like an hour to get through the middle of Phoenix so so you've been working with a lot of folks including Arizona State University and who what's the school there that the Julie Ann Wrigley School of Sustainability okay and they they helped work on this project where he built a trailer and well no that that was another small organization called it's a program that is started I guess they're in Phoenix called micro dwell and all people build different their different ideas of what a micro dwell should look like and and generally they're like 600 square feet or smaller less and they're paid their dwellings that you could build you know out in the forest or something you know where you want to be energy independent and you just want to go out there and well those dwellings are getting real popular not just for to resolve homeless or or you know those kind of situations but it the new generation of young folks that are starting families and stuff there they're not ready to have kids right away and they realize they're gonna change jobs every few years so they decide they're gonna buy one of these little micro homes or tiny homes that's only a couple hundred square feet on wheels and then they move to where the first job is and they do their job there for five years and they know they're gonna travel several hundred miles to another city and go to their next job and instead of buying a house they invest in this tiny home and it gives them the ability to a keep control of their credit they're not in a big mortgage right off the bat and be have a nice little house that's all their own that they can make the way they want and then they just rent some property on somebody's farm to a little garden outside or something and and it's all sustainable it's all you can put some solar panels up and a generator if you need it and some batteries and you know maybe a UPS or some kind of power control system right so that's basically what you you guys started many years ago but it's now just catching on so you're ahead of your time but let's take a little tour right behind you in the background there and then Zuri can consider this is let me see what is as part of the electrical panel and looks like the incoming hydrogen from outside there's a storage tank outside there so you look in the bottom you see a water separator and and as the thing comes to the left you see a stainless steel tube that drops down and goes across so there's actually a water heater that runs off hydrogen and right and then a fuel cell system that that provides electricity for the house and also runs your stove your electric stove and or any of the other utilities that require electricity in the house so as you back up there's a hydrogen tank under the sink there looks like and and this little house it's pretty bare bones it's just this this is actually a photo of the inside of the dwelling just to give an example of of how the system works and it lets the wiring and everything show so that people can see how simple the setup is to actually have your own solar panel on the roof and lighting and appliances hooked up in your house and you can actually can actually you could live in there so what are what are some of the things you talk about when you show this to folks on the inside well the there's the the tankless water heater which is an outside isn't hanging on the outside or no it's right there on the wall okay is that right above the sink yeah okay and and and it runs off hydrogen yeah okay and the ideally the the solar panels out there would would power the electrolyzer which would generate the hydrogen in actuality where we're not able to do that because we don't have a way to pressurize okay the hydrogen but the solar panels run the LED lighting and they run the there's a little cooktop in there too if I'm not mistaken yeah but that's also hydrogen and hydrogen gas or yeah okay so you can yeah a lot of people don't realize you can actually cook with hydrogen too as a gas so it can be just like your propane or natural gas and then you can also make electricity from the hydrogen running it through a fuel cell right so you can do both right we have and we've had in the past some chefs that were very interested in using hydrogen and this one chef put on our this really nice dinner at at the mansion club and but what they love about the hydrogen is it adds no flavors to the food to the food it has no you know isn't any odors right when hydrogen burns it's actually 6000 degrees steam and it's but it's so clean I mean that's all it is it's just hot water very directional to it just heats up right it's really easy to control yes yes there's a very little radiant heat it's it's all convection and conduction and so we have to real pale blue flame if there's a lot of smog in the air or you know other contaminants then you get some color in your flame but for the most parties it's a very pale blue flame okay and very clean let's look at the outside of the trailer too this is this actually a little trailer that they that they haul around with them so you see on the roof they have some solar on the side they have some solar and they can actually tow it around and then take it the little stairs fold up flip up there and what literally on the other side of the I took the picture of the inside just on the opposite wall of the the solar panels there so the background that you're seeing today is just on the other side of that solar panel and like Claude says the only thing missing is electrolyzer and and those things are actually pretty small too you could you could put one outside in a fairly small area to make your your hydrogen I will tell you though that you probably need a little bit more PV to make a to make enough hydrogen on a daily basis than what this little model gives you but it proves the concept that you can make hydrogen from sunlight and from water and then run a little house off of it so that's what that's what they do and that's a good example of how to initiate people because most of the time until people see it they don't really understand it right and this is a really great example of how to to get it out in public and let students talk about what they know about hydrogen and demonstrate what you can do right and you know that the technology is there it just needs to be improved and tweaked and and you get people interested in it and you get the you know particularly young people interested in improved ways to build electrolyzers and build all the ways that you can utilize photovoltaic and use heat from solar and and what we need to do is is promote all these different avenues of sustainability particularly in using solar and and see which ones come to the top which ones are successful great one of the things that helped me understand a lot was DVD that I got from Roy McAllister and we can throw that one up on the screen Zuri called chemistry and manufacture of hydrogen and it's an adaptation from a text but it's basically Roy McAllister talking about some of the technologies and how to actually safely manufacture hydrogen different ways and the history of it because people tend to think of hydrogen as high-tech new technology but in reality it's from back in the 1800s and even the fuel cell which is a new piece was early 1900s at the latest I mean it was it goes back into the 18 long time yeah so the technology is high-tech but it's not necessarily new tech and so that that's a great a great intro it's really easy to understand mr. McAllister is a very soft-spoken very articulate gentleman and it's great to listen to him explain the chemistry and the science behind all this technology and it's really easy to get to in fact there's a there's a great place to order it from www knowledge publications calm it's a you can you can order this DVD and several other good publications from that website to help you understand how to how to work with hydrogen so another great thing with that the hydrogen association does they put on a newsletter from time to time right and there are some great quotes I gotta put my glasses on this one I just got literally just got the mail today but there's two quotes that I think are great one for the political season the opposite of progress is Congress and that's a Mark Twain quote so whether if you just like good quotes this hydrogen association is that is great the other one is if I had if I'd asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses and that was Henry Ford so you know they're they look at the very practical application of hydrogen and and how people are kind of adverse to accepting new technology or you know you ask them what they want they want more of what they already have they don't want to look at what's new but some of the other great articles in this this thing is they talk about the mission of the association a field trip they took to one of the ethanol plants they list some of the hydrogen events coming up give you some more publications that they reviewed that they like they talk about high-pressure tubing and fitting for hydrogen which is primarily swedgelock which is the commercial name for the fittings that are used in most of our art plumbing and some of the technologies that they're compatible with swedgelock but they have to use and you have to learn to use safely when you're dealing with high-pressure hydrogen and then of course if you want to become a member of the American Hydrogen Association you can contact them I think Zuri can you throw up that there you go the HDB clean air org and become a member of the American Hydrogen Association and help them spread the word and also get a hold of some of the great materials that they have to learn from so what are what some wisdom words of wisdom you can let us part with a lot from from the hydrogen work that you've been doing when we're gonna see that Carmen Gia rolling I man I want to I want to have that on the road and take it around you know bring it to Hawaii whatever and and you know every year I think well this is the year it's gonna happen I'm gonna have it on the road but we're working out all the little bugs and getting there but the main thing is you know we got to quit putting carbon in the atmosphere I agree we've got to make good use of the carbon and we got to generate hydrogen by whatever means you know there's lots of different ways to do it and but but if we can make renewable fuels from our sewage and garbage we got you know we those are resources that will that we generally don't consider resources we call them problems but but there's a lot of energy there if we just make use of it okay