 at least to the folks who don't know Mitch. I wanted to introduce Mitch. Mitch is a hydrogen expert. He is the program manager for HNEI's program or hydrogen program. He is the one who created the hydrogen fuel station at Marine Corps Base Hawaii as well as creating a hydrogen station on the big island and really got passed through legislature to be putting hydrogen buses on to the big island. So with that, Mitch. Okay, well thanks a lot Russ. So it's a pleasure to be able to give a hydrogen presentation to potential hydrogen enthusiasts. So I call it the magic of hydrogen because I believe that hydrogen is a magic element and basically it's a planet saver and I've thought that for the last 35 years and I still think that's correct and the rest of the world is catching up to that. So that's my top of the line. I'm going to tell you why it's magic later in the presentation. A little, a little advertisement for HNEI. I'm not going to go through all this stuff but there's our website and I invite you to go to our website. We have lots of information there about all the various renewable energies, systems integration, energy efficiency and we also do policy and resilience but you probably aren't that interested in that but certainly the various renewable energy technologies. You want to say real quick to the AE chapter that top picture on the right that's a wave energy converter. The next big meeting we're going to have really is a tour of the 500 kilowatt ocean engineering wave energy converter that's sitting in Honolulu Harbor. Pat Cross from HNEI is going to be there to meet with us and teach us about this thing. It's right behind where Gordon Beersch used to be at the Yaloha Tower and it's really big. It's like 400 tons so you know it's a huge critter. So anyway I'm going to start off with a few comments. First of all if you're in the hydrogen space and even if you're not now you're going to see that the world is chasing affordable green alternatives to fossil fuels and that's why they're so interested in hydrogen. Hydrogen, the simplest element and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75 percent of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source and we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure and they're limited. Hydrogen on the other hand is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources including water itself using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source the only byproducts are water, heat and electricity. Easily transported hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel hydrogen itself is very light. In fact hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries and it isn't just for transportation hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades. Hydrogen powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast easy refueling and hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven safe clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere including our clean energy future. So why hydrogen? So first of all we all know about climate change. I'm not going to bang on about that. We all want to get off fossil fuels over time and a lot of the major global corporations and many world powers countries are now choosing hydrogen, green hydrogen as where they want to go. Japan, Germany, at least nine other countries are already heavily invested in hydrogen power. It's like at the billions and multi-billion dollars level like Germany's got a plan for 17 billion euros and this will be the greatest disruption since the industrial revolution because it's going to totally transform the energy system while healing the biosphere. So it's a clean safer fuel and it's the first step to a clean planet and it's the only clean fuel alternative that is now cheap, safe and it's available now. But we're going to try all the other ones first to make sure that they don't work before we eventually go to hydrogen. That's just the way we do it here. So why should you care? Those of you are in business. These are not my numbers. This came out of some various reports from qualified consulting companies. They estimate it's going to be a 10 to 11 trillion dollar market by 2050. So this is the newest industry. It's a game changer and you should all be interested in this as energy engineers because it's right in your wheelhouse. So let's talk about hydrogen. What is it? So first of all, it's an element. You can look it up in the periodic table and I'm going to get this right. It's number one and that's a joke between me and Russ. It must be produced. It can be produced. It has to be produced. It doesn't happen naturally. So it's always combined with something else. So either water, biomass or fossil fuels like natural gases, you know, CH4. It's one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. So it can be produced from water by electrolysis. That's what I have at the Marine Corps base is an electrolyzer. One of its wonderful attributes is 14 times lighter than air. So it naturally goes up and it goes up at 66 feet per second. So I say 1,001 has already gone up the height of a six-story building. I'm looking at its energy content. In the hydrogen space, we look at the mass of the hydrogen. So a kilogram of hydrogen is roughly equivalent to either a gallon of diesel or a gallon of gasoline, you know, within 10%. So the other attribute is potential is for large-scale bulk energy storage. So instead of having tons and tons of batteries, you can store a heck of a lot more energy for the same weight or the same mass as hydrogen, like 250 times more. That's why they use it in the space shuttle. You know, rockets are not fueled by batteries. There's a reason for that. So here's the magic part. You know, when you use it, you start with water. You break it into hydrogen and oxygen. You store it, like storing sunlight, as you see on this little slide. And then when you're ready to use it, you run it through a fuel cell. And when you do that, you make water. So it's the perfect cycle. You're going from water to hydrogen and then back to water again. So it's like a renewable hydrogen cycle. That's the magic of it. So what elements or what substances have hydrogen just about everything? If you look at the renewable sources, the best one we have in Hawaii is geothermal. See this picture here on the left, after left. I took that at the volcano national park many years ago. But you got wind, solar, biomass, hydro. And then on the fossil fuel side, any of the fossil fuels have a high component of hydrogen. But they also are connected to carbon. So what you have to do is you have to break the molecular bond between the hydrogen and the carbon to free up the hydrogen or the oxygen bond. So you have to apply energy to do that. It just doesn't occur naturally. So you have to use somewhat, I call process energy. So it's less for fossil fuels, it's more for water. And generally for fossil fuels, you need to use heat and for water, you use electricity. So just getting on with it. Now we are evolving from what one would call lab scale hydrogen to industrial scale. And I want to point out the picture on the right. That is an industrial size electrolyzer. You can see that the diameter is man-eye and they're very long. Each one of those stacks is a two megawatt stack. And a megawatt will produce about 500 kilograms of hydrogen a day. That's like half a ton. So but it requires a lot, you know, a lot of electrical energy. And the environmental impact depends on the primary energy source. So if I'm using electricity off the grid, and if the grid is being powered by coal or some other fossil fuel, then it's not green hydrogen. It's one of the multicolored hydrogen. In order to be totally green, you have to use electricity that comes from a non-fossil fuel source. Wind, solar, geothermal or hydro. So this is the other part of the magic. It's the opposite of the electrolyzer. This combines the hydrogen, oxygen back into electricity and water. It's called a fuel cell. It looks just like a loaf of bread. Each cell is 1.23 volts. And to get the voltage you want, you just pile a bunch of cells together. And then the area of the cell determines the power it produces. And then you hold it all together with just nuts and bolts, big long bolts, and with you clamp it down and squeeze it together. Pretty simple. And that's what it looks like in real life. That's a 5.5 kilowatt fuel cell stack. So you can see the size of it compared to, you know, a cup of coffee. Give you an idea of the scale. So I want to spend, I have a fair number of slides about safety because that seems to be everybody's concern is the safety of hydrogen. So this is my favorite slide of all times. Whenever I take this to show it to anybody, people automatically get the message. So on the left is a hydrogen car. And on the right is a gasoline car. And they start them off at the same time. And you can see within three seconds, there's a big plume from the hydrogen car goes straight up. And it doesn't emit any heat. It doesn't radiate any heat on the flame front. But you can see what's happening in three seconds to the gasoline car. And in one minute, you can see that the hydrogen car is starting to dissipate already. And then, you know, the gasoline car is just getting going. After a minute and a half, the car, the hydrogen car flame is almost out. And there you go for the gasoline car. And incidentally, when they did this test, the hydrogen flame didn't even singe the paint in the car. So that gives you an idea of what it is. So this is a, we did first responder training on the Big Island several years ago. And you see the firefighter has got his hand, bare hand, four inches away from the flame front. And you can't see the flame in normally in daylight. You can see there are the ripples from the flame. And I've highlighted it with this oval. But you can put your hand that close to hydrogen. So it just doesn't radiate heat because there's no carbon in it to capture that heat. Okay, so a little bit about hydrogen transport trailers. I have three of these on the Big Island, and they carry about 100 kilograms each at 450 bar. And what we're demonstrating is what, you know, central production and distributed dispensing. These trailers are pretty expensive. That's about a $300,000 trailer, and it only carries 100 kilograms. The tanks have to be hydrostatically tested every five years. And on Hawaii, there's nobody in Hawaii that can hydrotest these cylinders, because they're too big for any of the local facilities. I mean, they can do scuba tanks and all that kind of stuff, but these, so these are way too big and too heavy. And so you have to disassemble the trailer and ship it to the main, and ship the tanks to the mainland, or ship the whole trailer there. And that costs a lot of money, and it's time consuming. So your trailer is out of commission. So this is one of the, you know, pain points, I would say. So I wanted to show you what it looks like under the skin, because I'm talking about safety here. So, so you can see that there's a steel cage, it's high tensile steel, you know, first of all, it was designed using finite element analysis. All the wells were x-rayed, it's just like building a submarine hull, and the US DOT actually goes on site and inspects them. And so, as you can see, it's got rear protection from some car coming in and smashing in the rear, and it's got a bit of front protection in case it gets pushed into the towing vehicle. I might also comment about the tanks, they're also tested when they build a lot, what they call a lot of tanks. They test one of the tanks out of that lot to destruction, and it has to fail in a certain way. It has to rupture along the length of the tank rather than at the ends, because if it ruptures at the ends, the thing becomes a torpedo or a missile. And once again, those tests are observed physically by the US Department of Transportation. I might also say that it's the US Department of Transportation that licenses these for on the roads in Hawaii. So the state has no control over this. It's all managed by the by the feds. Okay, so here's a fire. This is a hydrogen tube trailer, and you can see the flame at the front. That's the tractor, the diesel tractor that's on fire. The tanks, all the relief valves open as they were designed to. The hydrogen was vented safely to the atmosphere. There was no flame, no explosion. And the hydrogen goes up at 45 miles an hour. We talked about that. So our trailers are designed with the same safety systems. So that gives you some confidence in the safety factors. So I want to talk about program safety. So first of all, we use power tech. They're a subsidiary of BC Hydro. And they're a third independent third party test laboratory. They test transformers, elect all electrical devices, natural gas tanks. And they're because they're a subsidiary of BC Hydro, which is a crown corporation, they're going to be here tomorrow. In other words, they're not going to go bankrupt. They're not going to go out of business. And so they'll always be there. Whereas, you know, in a new industry, there can be a lot of fly by night outfits. And it's not their fault, but they might just run out of money. And then they're not there. So their warranties aren't worth squat. So we talked about the designs. Rigorous HAZOP analysis was done on all this stuff. In my case, because it was being built by power tech, who's a third party, you know, inspection and certification lab themselves, and they hired an independent third party, I also hired my own. Because I didn't want the conflict, there to be a conflict of interest between them hiring an inspector. And so I brought in my own independent third party to certify the certifiers. And of course, you know, people operate the stuff have to be, you know, trained and maintain and have to maintain it. And safety training for all personnel, including the delivery drivers and bus operators. I take the refresher course every year from the Department of Energy, just to keep myself up to speed. And I always learn something new. And sometimes they change it as well. So safety is a big deal. So now I want to get, now that we all feel safe, I want to get on to Hawaii. So why hydrogen in Hawaii? Well, first of all, this is the solution to displacing our imported fossil fuels for transportation. You know, so it's energy security for Hawaii. You know, we can be manufactured in Hawaii using any of our many natural energy resources. The best is geothermal. It retains money in Hawaii, which is good for the economy and jobs. So there's an economic multiplier involved with it as well. So it's worth billions. That's going to be of dollars. So electric vehicles have already arrived. You can buy any one of these kinds of vehicles. So it's not a matter of finding, of having to develop a new vehicle. The OEMs have got that nailed. So we don't have to worry about finding vehicles. So what do we have to make? What do we have to do to make it happen? It's infrastructure, stupid. It's infrastructure. The OEMs, you know, they'll support putting in infrastructure, but that's not their main job. So that's the, that's the challenge is putting in the, where am I going to fuel my car? So you can go down to a surf comb and you can rent and you can lease a Marai hydrogen car. They have a hydrogen station, but that's it. That's the only one on the on the walkway. So my program is we were trying to de-risk hydrogen or the state of Hawaii. And we're looking at public transportation. And the reason for that is, first of all, I get my money, my money is public dollars. And so I don't want people to think that we're building these stations for rich guys with their toys. You know, we want the general public to get the benefit of their investment in this system. So we want to get public support and if the public supports it, then automatically we'll get political support. So obviously the objective is to provide cost competitive hydrogen. And, you know, you'll hear the detractors saying, well, hydrogen is so expensive. Yeah, it is right now. But if I had two or three cents a kilowatt hour electricity, I could beat out any of the fossil fuels, no problem. So, you know, if you look at what resources we have, like wind, solar, and best is geothermal, we can get down to those levels. If I'm buying it off the grid, like I am now, I'm not going to be competitive. So and we want to evolve to utility scale hydrogen production, not just little stuff. I want to have big electrolyzers like you saw in the previous one of the previous slides. And we want to leverage the industrial benefits that comes from having a hydrogen infrastructure like make jobs. So one of the things I'm doing is looking at bus assembly facilities. Instead of us exporting our money to buy a bus, we can import kits and we can assemble the bus here in Hawaii. And we say we keep 75% of that money stays in the local economy. So those are the things I'm doing on the big island. And the legislature set up this program and said go to big island first, get it installed, and then transfer the lessons learned to all the neighbor islands. And so that's what we're doing. So, you know, this is all new. So, you know, we've got to, you know, educate people, get them comfortable with the safety side, know how to how everything works. We have to train our workforce, a big program for workforce development. Because it's new, people are going to be, you know, suspicious about it. So that's what part of what my program is all about. And that's why they're going to like, they're going to love the buses, because it's quiet. There's no diesel fumes. They don't have to turn the bus off when they stop. So the air conditioning can stay on is all electric drive. And it keeps the bus comfortable. So that's how we're going to win over the general public. And we're going to, you know, they're actually going to experience it. So here's our concept. It's kind of we call it central production and distributed dispensing. So it's just like a refinery. In this case, my refinery is at Nelha. As you can see on the left here, that's our hydrogen station where we actually produce the hydrogen and we actually have a dispenser to dispense it. But I'm going to be using my tube trailers to transfer the some hydrogen over to Hilo to fuel buses over there. This is kind of the layout of the station at Nelha. You know, once again, the dispenser 40 foot shipping container houses a compressor, the electrolyzer and electrical room are three trailers. And then all the ancillary equipment, we, you know, all these chillers, they use up a lot of electricity. So that's like your balance of plant load. And that, you know, we need to make them more efficient. This is what the dispenser looks like in real life. That's the one at Nelha just looks like your standard dispenser at any gas station you go to. And it works the same way too, basically. It's got a hose. The difference is you clamp the hose on, you get a gas tight seal. And then the computer takes over everything is done automatically. So we take the person out of the loop. Here's our first bus, 29 passengers, a beautiful bus brand new where we've converted that over to hydrogen. It's being in its final stages of commissioning here in Kenia Village. And we should be able to get it over there by the end of September. Fingers crossed. It takes a while to commission these things. It's the first of class. So we're taking our time and making sure it works. Failure is not an option. So we're not trying to rush this. The worst thing that could happen is the bus breaks down once it gets over to the big island and then everybody's going to hate us. So we don't want to do that. Here's two additional buses. These are originally meant for Volcano National Park. They, because of the big eruption two years ago or three years ago now that that went south. And so the park service donated those to the big island buses were retrofitting those and putting in bigger fuel cells with those as well. And we're going to paint them so they look good. There's a picture of one of my hydrogen transport trailers. Like I said, we have three of those. This is a really great feature. So what I had with the 29 passenger bus is we put in a power export unit. And so I can get 30 hours of 10 kilowatt, 110, 220 volt AC power. And then so your buses then become emergency, mobile emergency backups for civil defense. But I can refuel this bus in less than 30 minutes. And so it's a great resource and resilience. So those of you who are looking at resilience in your in your businesses, think about this like even if it's a big truck, it doesn't have to be a bus, but a fuel cell powered vehicle can provide this kind of backup power for communications, hospitals, you know, medical refrigeration for drug stores, etc, etc. I want to give you an idea of the scale. Like I said, this is not a lab experiment. So here we are at Nelha, the start of the project, putting in the infrastructure. Remember, it's infrastructure. Everything was undergrounded. All the hydrogen pipes go underground. All the electrical is underground. And it's a really big job. And the biggest job was making sure we got everything connected upright. Because once you put it in the ground, and you've put a big layer of concrete over it, last thing you want to do is have to go back in and jackhammer it up. There's a little bit of a picture show now that this shows the conduit. The biggest thing was trying to string the hydrogen piping through all these turns. We were really worried about but as it worked out, it went through really slick. There was no problem. We used a great big crane to haul it through. Worked great. So I'm showing you this because it shows you the rebar. And one of the features of this slab is it's is grounding. That's that's one of the big safety issues or safety features is to make sure everything's grounded so that static electricity can't build up. And so this will give you an idea. And this is the completed station looking at it from the entrance. As you can see, all, you know, beautiful slab. Nan construction did it. They did an awesome job. There's an aerial view. Oh gosh, it looks just like the drawing. And those red and white bumpers, they're there for protection in case somebody tries to smash a car in through the station. So, you know, it's part of our hazard analysis, the what ifs. You know, what if some nutcase wants to attack us. So that was in there for, you know, for that kind of stuff. So there's a closer view of the front entrance to it. And another view of it completed. So I want to talk about this. This is really important. This is a made in Hawaii solution. So this is how we can pay for it. Like, okay, so I talked about, you know, doing things at scale, you know, very large. I mean, traditionally the way certainly on the big island, they bought buses as if they had, you know, a little bit of budget one year, they buy one or two buses and then like two or three years of laps, you know, times are tough and they buy no buses. And so that's why out of a fleet of 65 buses, you know, they only have like 12 that are operational. And the average age is 16 years old, and they're supposed to be, you know, written off after 12 years. So what this is is a private public, a public-private partnership, where a big money source comes in. And what they want is they want to get a guaranteed return on their investment over a long term. So a recurring revenue contract backed up by a government saying, we guarantee that we're going to pay for this. So what gives the county the courage to sign off on that is because they raise the GT by half a percent to match the GT on Oahu. And that is earmarked for public transportation. So they collect 25 to $30 million a year depending on how the economy is going. So it's not a lease. It's strictly on miles traveled. So, you know, the private company has a vested interest in those buses of working. And for that reason, they also pay for all the infrastructure, you know, the O&M, they pay for the hydrogen, they pay for making the hydrogen. And this is really great. The contract's already been awarded to sustainability partners. And the first, they've used this already for, you recall the Teslas that the state bought. Everybody was, oh, you bought Teslas for government employees. Well, it's because sustainability partners figured out that that was the best deal. And so they can go and buy whatever they want. This is not, they don't have to go through the state procurement that's already been taken care of. So this is all the brain trial, the Riley Sado out of the Big Island R&D department. And he did the sample RFP and he did the sample contracts. He ran that through all the various county governments, got their sign off, finally got the attorney general to sign off on the contract. So this is in play. And this is how we can make this big leap. So instead of buying one or two buses, they're going to come out with an art, with a program in the next few months for up to 20 or 30 buses for the Big Island, plus cars for the county, car fleet, plus trucks, the whole nine yards. So, you know, it's going to be a $30, $40 million contract potentially for the first go round. So this is like a huge deal. And that's it. Aloha. This is Russ Kohler, president of the Association of Energy Engineers, Hawaii chapter. I hope you enjoyed and found value in the AEE Hawaii education presentation. Please feel free to pass it on to your network. I invite those of you who are not members to join the Association of Energy Engineers to keep up to date about what is happening in the energy space. Please contact me if you have any questions and we welcome any suggestions you might have for future presentations. And please visit our website at aeehawaii.org. Aloha.