 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Tink-Tek, Hawaii. It's Dan Osserman, coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii, which by the way is a rural area. So in case you hear something that sounds like a live rooster crowing in the background on my shows, that is my normally well-mannered co-host, Pew Pew, there he is, Pew Pew the rooster. But when you don't pay attention to him because he's totally domesticated, he's asking for attention and I'm not giving him any attention now because I'm trying to do my show. So you'll have to excuse the crow crowing because when he was little, he just Pew Pewed now he crow crows. So anyway, that's my co-host, Pew Pew the rooster. So as we get into hydrogen news of this month and some of this is really, really current, the first thing I want to start off with is in a couple days, there's going to be a nationally televised special by Toyota and it's going to show up on several different venues, Motor Trend, Discovery Channel and Science Channel. So if I've got it up on the screen there so you can check out the times, they're all Eastern daylight times, so you have to convert to wherever you're at if you can get those cable channels. And it's supposed to be a really great video but and it talks about Toyota's commitment to electric transportation, in particular hydrogen fuel cell transportation, which of course is one of my favorite topics today. The articles I've picked today for the show, some of them are, you know, they're actually really, they're all real, none of them are fake, but I found some of them, for lack of a better word, cute and some of them kind of you have to read between the lines and realize that they're from a time in my past when I was in the military where I studied foreign countries and propaganda and stuff like that, so I'll clue you in on that as we go and so this show will have a little bit of sarcasm, a lot of a lot of facts, a little bit of sarcasm and a little bit of international studies thrown in just for good measure. I'd like to start off though with an article that was actually literally just sent out yesterday and it's from a publication called Renewables Now and it says Denmark based hydrogen company Ever Fuel, AS, on Friday unveiled a plan for rolling out up to 15 fueling stations in southern Norway by the end of 2023. Now, the Norwegian network will ultimately connect hydrogen with the company's hydrogen stations in Sweden and Denmark. And as part of the Ever fuels ambition to create a green hydrogen value chain in Europe by 2030, it's to be developed in partnership with customers in the transport sector, authorities, which has to mean government authorities and the green energy funding program, which oftentimes means either public private partnerships or government funding. Now, I want to point out in this in this first paragraph that they're talking green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is hydrogen made when you take water and split it to hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. That's, there's all different kinds of hydrogen that is gray hydrogen, blue hydrogen, green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is like the ultimate goal. And the problem with attaining that green hydrogen efficiency is basically it usually takes a lot of electricity to make the hydrogen and up electricity is expensive. It makes the hydrogen too expensive to be competitive with other carbon based fuels, but situations with green energy are coming around and technology on converting hydrogen and your converting water into hydrogen is getting more and more efficient. So it's becoming a reality. I'm going to pick up where this press release goes. As ever fuel said, it is mapped out the sites for the Norway station network. It is now will now speed up talks with the customers to optimize locations and cooperation with local authorities. The next step will be to secure sites, file applications and engage with public funding programs. It's a really, it's really exciting to finally launch concrete plans so that the trucking companies, bus operators and taxi owners can negotiate and confirm vehicle orders and ANOVA can see the whole industry off to a strong start with their support. And that's a quote from Helge Scarberg Holland and he's ever fuels business development manager in Norway. And ANOVA is a Norwegian government enterprise that supports clean energy. Ever fuel is due to open two hydrogen stations for private vehicles, one in van and one in the end of April and one in same outside Bergen in July of 2021. These have been delayed because of COVID travel restrictions and slower than expected station approval authorities, which I can relate to the slower than or more slower than expected approval authority. Said the company, it should open a large H2 station for heavy duty trucks and small cars in Alma in Oslo in July of 2022 with smaller cars being serviced served there with hydrogen from the third quarter of 2021 via a mobile refueling unit, which is really smart thinking I'm telling you. That's a good way to go. Ever fuel aims to invest 1.5 billion euros. And the math tells me that's 1.8 million US dollars. That doesn't sound right, but that's how they listed it. Sounds more like 1.8 billion dollars. It is planned to offer green hydrogen fuel for buses, trucks, cars across Europe to achieve Europe's 1 billion euro revenue by 2030. So again, that came out in on March 22nd yesterday by renewables. Now, the rest of these stories come to you via a great newsletter called Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition. So if you're a real hydrogen junkie like me, I like looking at this. It's got a really good international look at fuel cells, but also talks a little bit from time to time about other things like natural gas and other innovative things revolving around hydrogen or impacting the deployment of hydrogen technology. So one of the first stories is comes to us from up north in Canada. And it says Canadian Pacific Railways partners with Ballard for hydrogen, locomotive pilot, and this is from the International Railway Journal. So Canadian Pacific Railways will use fuel cell modules from Ballard Power Systems, a Canadian company for its first hydrogen and fuel cell powered line hall rate locomotive. The class one's hydrogen locomotive program was announced in December and they'll retrofit an existing diesel electric line hall locomotive, meaning one of the regular operational locomotives replacing its diesel prime mover and traction alternator with a hydrogen fuel cell system and battery technology to power this electric traction motor. Now, this is a great story because there are very few trains that actually run on hydrogen, but they're out there. Europe has some. I think Japan has one in the mix and so does China. But this was a really interesting story for me because it's actually a good place to get a teaching point in when it comes to transportation. I always say everything about transportation is all about weight. Well, when it it's also all about efficiency and when you try and look at especially ground transportation or at least internal combustion motors and the things that we use now with trucks and trucks and buses and cars and things, there's actually continuum. And so if I can take this opportunity to do a little bit of a teaching point on why we're going to switch to hydrogen at some point, it starts off with internal combustion engines are about 24 to maybe 28 percent efficient. Most of the energy in that fuel that you burn, the gasoline or diesel you put in the engine gets burned and goes out of your car or your truck has heat, not as torque at the wheels. So when you have an internal combustion engine, it's not really efficient. When you when you go to buy a car, at least the United States, you can see efficiency numbers on the on the price tag of the car. And it'll say something like highway, miles, 24 city, miles, 18. That's your average miles per gallon. And you go, wait a minute, that's a pretty big spread. Six, six miles of spread just in in driving. What's the deal here? Well, if you're driving in rush hour traffic and accelerating, accelerating, you're not getting 24 miles, you're 24 percent efficiency. You're getting like 12 percent efficiency or somewhere like that. Cars with internal combustion engines are designed to operate at 55 miles an hour on the open or 60 on an open highway most of the time. And so if you're operating in the highway most of the time, your efficiency goes way up because that's where the engine is designed with the drivetrain, the transmission, the differential, everything tires, everything to give you your best performance. Anytime you get outside that realm, the more time you spend outside that realm, the less efficient the engine is. So think about this, we're taking really valuable oil. We're turning it into gasoline or diesel, we're putting it in our cars and we're only getting between at the worst end, if we're all in rush hour traffic for hours on end, 12 percent efficiency. And at the very best, if we're always driving on highways or at the top end, we're maybe getting almost 30 percent efficiency. So then comes the concept of hybrid. You go, well, I've heard the term hybrid, not sure exactly what it means. It's kind of a weird thing. Well, a hybrid vehicle still uses a gasoline engine in many cases, but it only uses it to run a generator. And that way you can take that relatively inefficient internal combustion engine and instead of tuning it for a entire drivetrain that does 60 miles an hour at its best performance, you take that engine and you pair it with a generator that matches what you need for the rest of your transportation load, whether it's a truck or a car, and you say, OK, I want that gasoline engine to run a generator at its very best performance. So now when you have a hybrid, it's almost like it doesn't matter whether you're driving in stop and go traffic or on the freeway because electric motor doesn't care. It's it's going to be efficient if you use less less electrons because you're going slow, your battery lasts longer. You need a lot of electrons because you're going up the hill or you're going faster. OK, your battery doesn't last as long. And in a hybrid car, that fuel economy doesn't change based on your inefficiency of your engine. So if you have a car that gets 20 miles per gallon, your hybrid car with the same size and weight and everything is going to get probably closer to 35 miles per gallon. It's going to be substantially better with pretty much the same kind of performance. Then you go to a fuel cell car, which is a hydrogen fuel cell car. Now you take that that gas engine diesel or gas engine out of the generating thing and you put a fuel cell in there. So instead of generating electrons with just a battery or with an electric generator, you have a fuel cell motor generating the energy for the electric motor and batteries in your car. Now you're up to 60 percent efficiency. And if you really want to get efficient, you go to a plug in electric car and you go, OK, now I just got batteries and motor. And every every bit of the battery I can I can get. Almost all of it goes right into the motor. I'm up in the 90 something percent efficiency. So there you have the full full spectrum of why hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles are the future because they're so so much more efficient than anything internal combustion related. Now, why do I promote hydrogen over batteries? Well, because we started off with in transportation, it's all about weight. When you talk about batteries, they weigh so much and they cost so much. And when you put them in vehicles, they are max performed, let's say. They they use a lot of energy. They're cycled up and down a lot. They wear out batteries faster because transportation is very energy intense. And if you don't think so, try pushing your car at 30 miles an hour and see how successful you are pushing your own car at 30 miles an hour. It takes a lot of energy, a lot more than you got in your body. So the idea is if you have a hydrogen fuel cell, you can take solar power, wind power stored in hydrogen and you have really lightweight energy instead of storing it in really heavy batteries. You can have a small battery. It gives you a little boost here and there for acceleration. And you have a fuel cell that can give you a lot of power relatively quickly and it's available at a much, much lighter weight. So even though the fuel cell is not as efficient as a battery in converting electricity to torque at the wheel, it's much lighter. And then the long run, when you put all the variables together in the calculation, you'll find out that hydrogen, cost wise, safety wise, efficiency wise, actually comes out much better. And on top of it, you don't have to wait a long time to charge it. You don't have to wait for batteries to cool down. It's in the long term. It's a really efficient thing for you. And it's really the best choice as we go into the future. Just think about right now, less than one tenth of one percent of the vehicles on the road in the world are electric. And even if it's one, one tenth of one percent, if we multiplied out all the vehicles we have in the road by how many pounds or tons of lithium and cobalt we'd need in there just to do batteries, you'd run out of cobalt and lithium probably before you even got to 10 percent of your cars on the road. You've really, really got to think bigger than isn't this cool. Batteries are going to get cheaper when we start making more of them. Well, the batteries like everything else, the law of supply and demand runs head to head with the economy of scale and manufacturing. And guess what? Guess who always wins that battle? Supply and demand. So don't be taken in by batteries are the only answer for electric cars. They're they're definitely part of the big answer. They're definitely in the mix. They're definitely have a place, but they're not the sole answer for or vehicles and transportation. And when you get to aviation, that's a whole nother story where weight is a big factor. So that's my little segue off of the discussion on on batteries versus fuel cells and gas powered engines. Let me see this next story comes from Newswives. It says nation's first green hydrogen energy station expected in 2022. And this comes out of Ithaca, New York. It says catalyzed by Cornell University Grant and Cornell Sustainability Research over the past decade. Energy Storage Company, a standard hydrogen corporation, SHC, and the National Grid announced plans on March 11 to build the first hydrogen energy station of its kind in the nation. I thought that was pretty bold, being that California has about 50 of them built already. But the SHC energy transfer system will be built in New York's capital region. Completion is expected in 2022, pending regulatory approval. There's those regulators again. The facility will be the first demonstration standard hydrogen. The first demonstration of standard hydrogen's multi-use renewable hydrogen based storage and delivery system. It will be available for fuel cell powered automobiles automobiles with carbon free energy, while also fulfilling other energy needs. And the other energy needs are the things that I talk about all the time. This story is out of South Korea. The South Korea demonstrate hydrogen fuel cells powered industrial equipment. This is out of adju business daily. So South Korea will demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell powered industrial equipment, including forklifts, unmanned loaders and in a reception or excuse me, in a regulation free industrial complex in the southern part of Ulsan, South Korea. The new industrial machines have the potential for increasing work efficiency at logistics warehouses and indoor facilities. Ulsan was selected south of South Korea's testing ground for hydrogen powered mobility services in 2019. And the Port City produces. This was amazing to me, 820,000 tons of hydrogen annually. Now, I have a station in Hawaii that makes 65 kilograms a day and 65 kilograms a day means three tons a month, meaning my station can make 36 tons a year at full production. These guys are producing 820 tons a day in this little testing program. Well, companies and research organizations are operating research centers in the area for fuel cell electric vehicles and other equipment that use fuel cells as the main source of power. Now, South Korea, Japan, Europe, all the nations in Europe, but especially Germany and France, Sweden, those countries. They really get the hydrogen thing. US needs to catch up. New development could significantly reduce fuel cell stack production costs. This is from H2VU, and it's from one of the companies that I've actually talked to quite a bit, in fact, I just talked to him about a week ago. The company's called GenCell. GenCell has unveiled a new development that could significantly reduce the manufacturing cost of fuel cells. Israeli-based company today, and that's the 15th of March, so last week, confirmed the news unveiling a new catalyst, that's the key catalyst, is not based on noble metals and the noble metal they list as palladium, which is used quite a bit in helping to to catalyze the hydrogen and produce power and fuel cells. Anyway, it therefore provides an economical substitute for what was normally a very costly noble metal or rare metal that you have to go and pay a lot of money to get, and it's in high demand. The sharing details of the background GenCell said, the process by which the new catalyst accelerates chemical reactions are that are so necessary to generate clean electricity that the reaction inside the fuel cell is basically identical to the process of using the noble metals. So if that breakthrough is real good and if that replacement catalyst doesn't deteriorate any earlier, then it's probably one of the great breakthroughs in the fuel cell business. And well, again, make hydrogen even cheaper than it already is. This is the one that, this story here, it actually brought back my days in the military, and I'm going to put a lot of commentary in here. It says, see back energy partners with European hydrogen energy giant to promote hydrogen fuel cell development. PR Newswire. OK, PR. Don't know who PR Newswire is. I mean, I've seen other headlines in here and companies and publications, but China, most of us don't actually know the real name of China is the People's Republic of China or PRC. So PR Newswire, I have a funny feeling, is probably a Communist Party China news release. It says Dalian China, March 15, 2021. PR Newswire, Seaback Energy Technology Incorporated, listed on the NASDAQ is CBAT or Seaback Energy or the company, a leading lithium ion battery manufacturer and electric energy solution provider. Today announced that it has signed a memorandum of cooperation with a leading European hydrogen energy group with hundreds of years of operational history, the hydrogen company. OK, let's stop right there. I don't know of any company that's got hundreds of years of operational experience in hydrogen. I don't know of any company in Europe called the hydrogen energy company. It's just they're talking that having some notional discussion with some big company, you don't want to name it so that people don't flock to it and buy their stock or get all scared and quit investing in them. I'm not sure, but I'm telling you, this thing reads like a propaganda article from Pravda or any other thing. And unless you're trained to look for that stuff, I can I can see why people would read this and think really good things. When I read it, I start all my senses go up and say something's really funky here. So anyway, this company and the other trying to get together to promote the development of hydrogen fuel cells as part of the corporations. The cooperation, both parties will be able to capitalize on each other's competitive advantages in technology, innovation and industrial resources, as well as exchange ideas on industrial development. Well, first of all, a what they call it a memorandum of cooperation. I'm familiar with the legal terms of memorandum of agreement and memorandum of understanding. A memorandum of cooperation just sounds like they started talking and none of them are going to commit to anything. They're going to sit there and dance for a while till they figure out who they can trust. And then maybe they'll actually come up with something realistic. So for me, this was a big nothing burger news release. And I just wanted to point it out because it's a shame that these kind of press releases get out in the world and they really don't mean a whole lot. And they're meant to bring in investors, especially when you mentioned the NASDAQ identifier and the technology piece. I mean, somebody's trying to push a company and market stuff. It's probably partnered with or about to partner with a Chinese communist related company. So take it for what it's worth. The next story I thought was was kind of interesting. Let me make sure I got the right one. Oh, yeah, this one this one here. Hydrogen may power the future of commercial trucking. Doesn't say anything about cars or anything, but says trucking. So I went, OK, and that's that's true. It's going to especially be important for trucking. This is out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Picture a couple of semi trucks hauling cargo down a highway. You see any clouds of black smoke in the left left in their wake? Oh, you don't. These trucks are powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The only waste product is water. Hydrogen fuel cell motors are powered by hydrogen to create electricity for cars and trucks. And unlike solely electric vehicles, which can take eight hours to charge a sedan, hydrogen fuel cell motors can be fueled as quick as regular gasoline vehicles and then drive just as long. It's like I just read this and I went, that's that's the kind of article you get from somebody who's never even heard of the technology has done no background research on it and has made the most plain vanilla assumptions they could to describe a really good idea and really good technology. But it was just almost sad to see this press release come out. It's it is the right fuel. But there's there's no there's nothing here tells you why it's just describing. It's it's like painting a picture of trucks going down the highway. No smoke coming out of it. It's like doesn't tell you anything about why it's such good technology. So I just bring that one up just mostly for the entertainment effect. There's a story on Norway building a Gigafactory. This one I seen come out a couple of times. I'm going to wrap it up with this story. This one has actually come out a couple of times. This is just a short blurb from it. It comes from a publication called Dornob, D-O-R-N-O-B. And it says strange new hydrogen goo could cleanly power small vehicles like scooters. Now, I'm not sure because there wasn't a whole lot of detail in any of the articles I read, but I'm assuming it's some kind of metal hydride paste. It says when it comes to clean vehicles, nothing currently beats electric power, which is true, which is said to eclipse fossil fuels over the next couple of decades, which is true. Hydrogen has a lot of potential in this area, but there's one significant obstacle to widespread adoption. And it's the one that I always say it's pressurizing hydrogen to put in tanks that you can actually efficiently use because even the pressurized tanks are heavy. It's hard for especially small vehicles like motor scooters and motorcycles to have a tank that can hold a significant amount of hydrogen just because of size. So the strange new sticky gray paste developed by a German scientist might change all that. Now, other articles I've read on this, it lists the university and the studies and the names of people that actually did the research. And they're legitimate companies and legitimate research facilities and legitimate people. And so this thing actually holds some serious potential for the future. And I think that's going to about wrap up the 30 minutes I have for today. Every once in a while, I like to bring you guys articles, but some of these caught my attention for the right reasons and some for the wrong reasons. But I hope they enlighten you a little bit on where the state of hydrogen is today. Thanks to Michael Markrich and the folks at Renewable Hawaii for involving me in their forum today. I had a great time and I think we addressed some important issues talking about how to take care of the lower and low and middle income folks that are being affected by energy costs during COVID. So until next Tuesday, thanks for watching Think Tech and STEM Energy Man, aloha.