 to Stan the energy man here in Think Tech Hawaii, Stan Osserman, I'm into you live and direct from Kailua Hawaii and it's really turning out to be a great start to summer. I actually got some surfing in yesterday. Nice south swell came in and surprised us all. Anyway, this show and just for the record, I don't particularly like to do solo shows. I figured it's probably much more interesting for me to interview some really good people that are doing energy work, clean energy work. But I also have a passion for hydrogen and I feel like there's just not enough information getting out in the normal media and in our newspapers and social media about hydrogen and where it's going. And it really is a game changing technology that's starting to really, really take off around the world. And so I've got a couple of stories today. I'm bringing you hydrogen news from around the world. And the first story I'm actually going to read the whole article to you because I think it's really, really important. It came out yesterday and we're going to we can put the screenshot of it up on the screen so you can you can grab it. But it's by Michael Weyland and it's called by land sea and air. GM or General Motors plans to expand fuel cell business beyond electric vehicle. And the reason I wanted to do this whole article is it really covers a whole bunch of the things that I've been saying, not just for the last year or so, but for the last decade about hydrogen that's finally catching on in the mainstream. It says General Motors plans for hydrogen fuel cells, a long promise technology, are beginning to take shape in the company as it pours 35 billion, that's with a B, billion dollars into electric and autonomous vehicles through 2025. So that's just over the next three and a half, four years. GM began working on the fuel cells more than 50 years with little or no commercial success. They didn't really market anything. But I know this is a fact because GM actually worked with Hcat, my prior employer, back in the 19, excuse me, 2010. And a little bit before that, maybe 2006, 2010 timeframe with fuel cell vehicles being driven by the military here in Hawaii. But GM aims to change that lack of actual exposure in the coming years with its hydro tech fuel cell system, I guess their proprietary name for their special fuel cell system, which could be a dark horse business to grow GM's operations outside of automotive. GM has these tremendous opportunities for fuel cells in the military, commercial vehicles and other forms of transportation, such as rail and maritime. GM is exploring those areas and more as a complementary solution to its emerging battery electric vehicle business known as Altium, U-L-E-I-U-M. I guess that's their other proprietary name for their battery side. And just remember, last week I did a show on the Energy Observer where Toyota had a similarly packaged fuel cell that they put on a floating laboratory that was already put 40,000 kilometers of sea under its hull, testing out the technology. The article goes on to say batteries have a role to fill, but to fully electrify and deal with the breadth of the different applications that we're talking about, you also have to have hydrogen fuel cells that is Charlie Freeze, who leads GM's global fuel cell business. They complement each other extremely well. Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles and equipment operate much like battery electric ones, but are powered by electricity generated from hydrogen and oxygen instead of pure batteries or additional batteries. With water vapor and the only byproduct, they also heat. They're filling up with a nozzle that's almost as quick as traditional gas flow-ups using diesel or gasoline. As a general rule of thumb for you says batteries are best utilized to replace vehicles and equipment that use gasoline. Well, fuel cells are better for longer range, and vehicles that are semi-trucks that use diesel fuel. Every market, this is continuous code, every market is going to be a little different, but what's clear is that the world's moving towards electrification, I would say in transportation especially, he said the fuel cell technology has moved down the cost curve dramatically and continues to do that. GM said last week it plans to launch a third generation hydrotec fuel cells with even greater power density and lower costs by mid-decade. It goes on to say that fuel cell vehicles face the same challenges that battery electric vehicles face when they first came out, including consumer acceptance, fueling infrastructure, or lack thereof, and cost. It's one of the reasons why GM is looking outside of the automotive realm to help drive demand for these technologies. GM announced Thursday a deal with Lever Aerospace to develop hydrogen fuel cell-based power generation for demonstrator systems or aircraft. That announcement came two days after the automaker that it was signing a memorandum of understanding with Webtech Corporation to engineer and supply battery and hydrogen fuel cell systems for freight locomotives. If you go to the website and look at this article, it shows you photos of the vehicles and locomotives as well. Anyway, GM also has agreements or partnerships regarding hydrotec, that's their fuel cell system, with Navistar and embattled EV startup, Nicola Motors. The programs are in addition to several prior ones between GM and the US military, involving hydrogen fuel cells, including a pickup truck and an underwater unmanned vehicles with an AD. We use kind of a land-sea air approach preset. It's energy storage density for longer missions, quick refueling and quiet stealth, low thermal initiatives, but it's images. Those are the things that are very important to, especially to the military, to those applications. And those carry over to some other industries as well. Reset General Motors expects to commercialize the fuel cell for real-world solutions soon, declining to elaborate on those plans. GM has a joint venture with Honda Motor, which offers a production fuel cell vehicle called the Clarity to develop and produce fuel cells and a plant in Michigan. The most near-term product that GM has announced is with the Illinois-based truck manufacturer, Navistar. The companies earlier this year announced the collaboration of a fuel cell-powered semi-truck that JD Hunt Transport is expected to be the first customer to pilot semi-trucks and hydrogen fueling systems by the end of 2022. Think about that. That's just literally months away. They're going to have the pilot system up and running. Remember the article said earlier that Navistar was also partnered with a company called Nicola Motors? Well, Nicola really, really got this whole thing started and GM jumped on it. They had a little bit of a rough going for a little while with Nicola Motors, but the project itself is still online. And that's going to come online shortly. And it basically, what it does is it gives the commercial truckers an alternative to diesel fuel. It's actually in the long run cheaper than a diesel truck. The truck itself is and the fuel are part of a system and the truckers can lease the vehicles and the lease comes with the fuel and it's a firm fixed price, which is great compared to diesel and other gasoline and things like that that fluctuate with world oil prices. And that's coming up a little bit later in this show. The next subtitle is Uncertain Future. Go back to the article. Many believe hydrogen can help decarbonize industries where batteries fall short due to their low energy density and higher weight. But the technology is still expected to take a backseat to battery electric vehicles, which are cheaper and easier for consumers and companies to understand. In other words, it's just a matter of people getting used to the hydrogen technology and then it will probably become much more popular. I've explained on the show before, there's other setbacks for battery electric vehicles and the battery technology, but that really sums it up pretty well. Hydrogen's transportation future looks more uncertain given the tug of war with batteries. BTIG analyst Gregory Lewis said in a recent note to investors, we expect hydrogen to be used in a niche application. I'm going to beg to differ with them, but it is one of the problems with getting hydrogen to move forward because we have people who still tend to focus on batteries and overlook their shortcomings just because people are more comfortable with them. The biggest naced air for hydrogen, of course, is the famous Elon Musk, whose company is Tesla and also SpaceX. So everybody looks at him as a brilliant guy, which he is, but he is made, I think, a very big air in calling fuel cells, fuel cells, and mind bogglingly stupid. I think he's going to be eating those words in about 10 years. It just takes a little while to get there. So to wrap the article up, it says, but there's a growing market for the technologies amid an increase and an increase in legislation globally that's targeting decarbonization. Fortune Business Insights forecast that the global fuel cell market will be $29 billion with a B by 2028. The key, as GM is targeting it, they bring down the cost for commercial customers, many of whom have set routes and site for fueling stations rather than customers alone. Industrial applications like steel, refining, and chemicals where green hydrogen can be produced and consumed on site avoids transportation costs, and they are poised to be heavily heavy adopters of green hydrogen. Lewis said additionally, hydrogen for industrial use is already gaining traction in some nations zero emission policy. Again, the synergies of hydrogen technology reverberate across everything. Like we talk about electrolyzers to make green hydrogen. Well, the interesting thing about that is the byproduct that we throw away is pure medical grade oxygen. And if you're using a fuel cell to make electricity, you're also generating a little bit of heat. That's why I injected that the fuel cell doesn't just make water and electricity. It also makes heat. When you're making heat, you can capture the heat. We call it cogeneration. And you can use that heat to also make electricity or air conditioning or other things. So the article, this article that focuses on GM brings in the entire spectrum of what fuel cells are being targeted for. And when a company like GM talks about spending the amount of money they're talking about in the billions of dollars, after already investing almost 20 years of research and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars in refining these technologies, you've got to understand that this technology is on the cusp of taking off. So the next article I have, and I'm not going to read the whole article, I'm just going to summarize it, but it's called it's too late to avoid a major oil supply crisis. And as I mentioned, when I was talking about in the GM article, the one thing that I have learned from, and I always will keep an eye on the carbon energy market as well, not just the hydrogen focus guy, but that carbon side is so volatile in terms of whether there's available fuels, whether there's a, you know, when we had OPEC basically jerking us around because they control the oil supply that the world needed, we would go through heavy price, you know, ungodly price increases. And then the next week it would plummet and nobody could predict. If you talk to any businessman, they'll tell you that when it comes to raw materials or supplies that they need to produce whatever they're manufacturing, if they can stabilize that, if they can get, you know, a multi-year contract at a fixed price that they can work with, they know they can maximize their profits by having a stable cost of their raw materials. Well, energy is virtually a ubiquitous raw material in manufacturing. It's something that every manufacturer has to have, whether you're into computers or making silicone chips or making bread in a bakery, fuel costs are critical. And if you can stabilize them, you've really, really got your economy under control. So this article, it talks about how with changes that the U.S. has made in its energy policies and with other circumstances, the cost of energy is going to become very unstable and probably go up quite a bit. So the oil, this is a quote from some of the articles that says, share wells have a naturally high decline year to year that can be avoided temporarily by fracking. But make no mistake though, lack of new drilling will start to show a decline in production as early as next year. And as we all know, lack of supply, increase demand, price goes up. Because what's not said in so many articles is, fortune has been spent on by Wall Street banks over the last 15 years looking for the new super oil fields with little results. In other words, they spent a lot of money looking for more oil that we have access to, and they haven't really found them. So you have all the fracking and all of the shale oil and things like that that we're counting on to keep our energy independence going, even before President Biden jumped in and shut down pipelines and things. Even the fracking of things that we're using are of limited value because they're declining. As the shale drilling fleet has been depleted, Gulf Deepwater platforms are also in steep rates of decline. It says, and most of the employees from last year's oil market crash have moved on never to return. So of the U.S. conventional oil wells, we lost 25% due to the marginal production rate that we experienced over the last year due to COVID and manipulation in the markets that drove some of our companies out of business. And when I say that, it's like when you are a company that invested heavily in fracking or shale oil recovery, and all of a sudden the prices of oil drop, now you can't pay back your loans because you borrowed so much money to buy all this equipment. A lot of those companies went bankrupt, their employees are gone, and they've gone on and moved on to new technology. They're not going to stay in the oil business. So as we talk about hydrogen growing in popularity and growing in viability in the energy system and transportation, you have to kind of keep looking at what's going on in the oil side of it. So what I'd like to do now is just go through a bunch of articles that came my way from Keith Malone, my good friend from the California fuel cell partnership, and I'm going to read through just the list of the articles, and then I'm going to pick a few of them and kind of focus on them. The first one is Jaguar and Land Rover are beginning testing of a prototype hydrogen Land Rover vehicle this year. So not only is GM bullish on hydrogen fuel cells, but Honda makes the clarity, Toyota makes the Mirai, Hyundai makes the Nexo, and they also have a SUV model, and Hyundai is in production. These are companies that are in production. You can buy these vehicles from Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai right now, and GM is coming online. You can bet that BMW, Ford, almost all major motor companies that are doing that are starting to really put out electric vehicles, Volvo, etc. You can bet that within a couple years they'll be complimenting their electric vehicle line with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles because as infrastructure gets put together in the U.S. and across Europe, and people can travel comfortably with hydrogen, they're going to go that way because of the range that you can get and the speed of refueling you can get, much more convenient than with electric vehicles. It says Honda fuel cell technology will continue to play a role in their EV strategy. Germany is going to support 500 megawatt of electrolyzers around the world with $1.1 billion in German investment. Opium, which is a car company, unveils its hydrogen-powered sedan prototype and opens the first 1,000 pre-orders. Then another company completes its light-duty hydrogen fueling infrastructure network study for British Columbia that talks about their plan to actually populate British Columbia with network of fueling stations to accommodate fuel cell vehicles. Southern California GAF says H2 Hydrogen House was named a fast company in 2021 for world-changing ideas. I don't think these related to the hydrogen house by Mike Stritsky over New Jersey, but H2 Hydrogen Home by SoCal GAF is supposed to be a pretty remarkable, basically off-the-grid, self-contained, fully sustainable structure. There's a couple articles from Norway. Norway Roadmap for Hydrogen includes Node and Research, British Petroleum and Acre, and a Stratcraft joint forces for offshore wind in the Norwegian North Sea. A lot of that wind is being converted to hydrogen, so it can be shipped as ammonia to outline communities and used in fuel cells to generate electricity in these communities. They can come off of coal-fired power plants. I just read the article on GM to supply electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cell systems for the locomotive. Japan has a big bet on hydrogen, and they said it could revolutionize the energy market, and that's the story from Wall Street Journal. San Francisco Bay Area's AC Transit has ordered an additional 20 fuel cell electric buses from New Flyer. Now AC Transit in San Francisco is one of the larger public transportation systems in the U.S., and they've actually been using fuel cell vehicles for probably, I would say, close to 10 years now. And the feedback, because I've talked to people there and talked to the state agencies that have developed those county agencies, and the feedback from the customers is outstanding. In fact, they've literally reported that some people will wait at a bus stop just for a fuel cell bus rather than driving a diesel bus, because it's so much more comfortable, air conditioning works more effectively, it's so much quieter, and it's nice to move the ride. The last couple of articles from Keith Malone's newsletters, U.S. must take a leading role in hydrogen use for our energy future. That's kind of a broad sweeping statement, but I can tell you that there's a lot of other countries that are much farther ahead in hydrogen infrastructure and deploying hydrogen technology than the U.S., and the U.S. needs to be the leader. The U.S. leads in so many ways, but this is a profound change in the way we use energy on our planet to clean up the environment and treat the planet more respectfully, and if we don't take that lead, somebody else will, and we should be doing it because we have the capacity and we have the resources, and quite frankly, we have the intellectual capital to make it happen. The last article says why green hydrogen is reaching a tipping point, and it goes into a lot of the details that I've kind of covered already in a lot of this, and you see it in the articles that we're talking about is that whether it's aviation or ground transportation, locomotives, tips, boats, hydrogen is such a clean, simple, few moving parts, just, I would call it a, we used to say it's just an exquisite or it's a, it's just a very, very beautiful system, and you get into looking at all the moving parts, all the pieces that go into it. It's clean, it's safe, you don't have to go into mines with child labor in foreign countries who start producing these things. The fuel cells went from being heavy uses of platinum, which is a metal that's hard to get, and we'd get mine in many other countries using labor, but Toyota by itself reduced the amount of platinum used in electrolyzers and fuel cells by 95%. The fuel cells that are in cars today that are like 114 kilowatt fuel cells in the Toyota Mirai use about the same amount of platinum that's in a regular catalytic converter in a regular gasoline car now. It's just amazing. So things are beginning to gel with hydrogen, and it's really starting to kick in around the world. And I'm going to keep everyone small, I'm going to keep bringing you news from around the world, but Germany is supporting that 500 megawatt, that's a lot of electrolyzers around the world. That includes 16 companies joining H2 Global Foundation, and they're expecting to have the first electrolyzers out in 2024, again not very far down the road. Oh, that Hopium, that company Hopium that unveils their hydrogen powered sedan prototype, their website for the article is www.ernewswire.com, and you can look up, or you can just Google Hopium, H-O-P-I-U-F. The Hopium team has already fully committed to carrying out the next steps to get this vehicle online. Oh, the founder of Hopium is Oliver Lombard, who was the youngest winner of the 24-hour of Le Mans race, founded Hopium to manufacture high-end hydrogen-powered vehicles as an achievement, resulting from his experiences acquired on the racetrack. So this Hopium vehicle is probably a pretty high-tech like racing vehicle, you might want to check it out. Now let me see, talked about Southern California gas, that hydrogen house, they claim it's going to be built later this year in the city of Downey, E-O-W-N-E-Y, and they claim it's the first fully integrated demonstration project with solar panels, batteries, electrolyzers that convert solar energy to hydrogen, and a fuel cell supply to supply direct electricity to the home. In addition, the hydrogen will also be blended with natural gas and used in the home's heat pump and H-Back system, water heater, clothes dryer, and gas stove. The home will be functioning, have the function and feel of a typical home today, but will be fueled or energy powered by reliable and clean energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Normally these systems, and we're pretty familiar with them here in Hawaii because of Blue Planet, you'll have solar panels that will charge up batteries, and when they're done charging batteries, if they're still making electricity, they make hydrogen. So every bit of that power from the solar panels is used, not wasted, and it all goes into running your home. Now, when I say you can do that, the amazing part is that a typical house only puts about half of its roof under solar to make enough electricity for that house to run 24 hours or more. Now, if you throw transportation, like say you wanted to run your hydrogen fuel cell car or charge your electric car at home, you would have to almost double the amount of power you need to be generated, maybe even a little bit more. So if you think about it, if you build your houses oriented properly in Northern Hemisphere, oriented with a roof mostly facing south, you should be able to put on your single family roof enough solar panels to make all the electricity your house needs, all the fuel your vehicles need, and still have a supply of hydrogen that's enough to back up things in case you have cloudy days or a storm that takes off some of your solar panels or other natural disasters. And besides that, when you have a bunch of those independent houses that can work like that, there's less pressure on the grid because there's less demand in the whole grid, and those houses can take care of themselves and maybe even take care of their neighbors. I'm going to wrap it up for today. That's really good up-to-date on what's going on around the world, and I'll keep doing it when I see new things come up. But until next Tuesday, I'm Energy Man Simon on the floor.