 Here on ThinkTek Hawaii, Dan Osterman for another, I usually say exceedingly exciting. This one probably not exciting, more on the profound side than the exciting side. I'm going to kind of pick up where we left off last week and talk about Hydrogen 101, except I'm going to start there, but by the end of the show today, I want to talk about Hydrogen today and give you actual proof that Hydrogen is no longer a dream, it's a reality, and it's going to become part of your life just so you might as well get ready for it, or if you're into investing, probably a good time to start thinking about stocks you want to invest in to deal with Hydrogen. To start off with I'd like to show a video that I didn't get to show last week on the show. I wanted to, because last week was about Hydrogen 101, and a little bit of basic training on Hydrogen, and it's a video I've shown a couple times on the show, and I really think it's important because it lays, especially for transportation, it lays some of the fundamental facts of Hydrogen that we'll be talking about today. So let's go ahead and roll the video. Hydrogen, the simplest element, and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% 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 that's a really good review of Hydrogen in general. What I wanted to really talk about today is a summary of all of the things that make Hydrogen so really applicable. And I want to really focus on these as basically the facts and fundamentals that make Hydrogen or storing energy a superior product for the future. Now, what I've found over the last few years is that sometimes I feel like I'm screaming into a hurricane. I'm talking to politicians. I'm talking to business people. I'm talking to all kind of folks about the benefits of Hydrogen and they just kind of shake their hand and go, yeah, yeah, okay. But they can never get past that and they go back to what they're comfortable with. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what makes something a fad versus what makes it a real solid trend going forward. And how I know for a fact that Hydrogen is really starting to move into the reality where it used to be always kind of the hypothetical. Yeah, it seems a good idea. Yeah, it has some cool stuff, but it's just never going to make it. And I know it's making it now. I see it happening. I see it because I look for it. If you're not looking for the signs, you're probably never ever going to pick up on them. And just like other things where people go, gee, I wish I had thought of that first or gee, I wish I had bought stock in that company a long time ago. I'd be a millionaire by now. I'm telling you right now is the time to really start looking at Hydrogen for the signs that'll say it's here, it's going to make a difference, and it's here for good. So first of all, let's talk about some of the characteristics of Hydrogen that I've been pushing for a long time that are the solid truths, the things that don't change, the things that no matter what, these are always going to be there and give Hydrogen advantage. The first thing to recognize is, and I start off in hydrogen transportation, the first thing to recognize is that transportation, if we're going to go fossil free in the next 15, 20 years, you're going to have to go electric. I mean, makes sense, right? We're all looking at electric cars and hybrids and things like that. Well, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is an electric vehicle. So what you have to understand is that when you start moving towards electric transportation, whether it's a hydrogen fuel cell car or truck, or whether it's a battery plug-in vehicle, it's electric, and you got to charge it from somewhere. And that somewhere is the grid. And the grid is going to need to literally double in size to keep up with all the transportation requirements that we have. So let me just point out that when we start talking about ground transportation, cars, trucks, buses, trains, it's all going to be electric. And it's all going to run off either the grid directly or batteries or hydrogen, one of the three. And right now, I think we need to be looking at all three. But eventually, I can tell you hydrogen is going to win. And here's why. When it comes to transportation, it's all about weight. Everything is about weight, whether you're designing a car, a truck, or the space shuttle, or an airplane. When you have to deal with weight in airplanes, you end up dealing with drag, and you end up having to deal with all kinds of issues with carrying that weight around, costume or fuel. So number one, you've got a weight thing that hydrogen can't be beat. Hydrogen is 14 times lighter than air. So you can pack an awful lot of energy into a small space and a light compartment, if you're using hydrogen, hydrogen is most energy energy dense element that you can imagine. It's, it's like the video showed all the batteries for one tank of hydrogen. That's literally true. The other thing that's been interesting in the transportation sector is that a lot of people that are supporting electric vehicles, they look at hydrogen as competition for batteries. And so they actually start fighting the laws and the and things that are meant to help hydrogen, because they see it as competition. Most of what I've seen in the in the world is that if you're a hydrogen person, you actually like batteries there, you need them when you have a hydrogen system. But battery people hate hydrogen, they see it as competition. So there's always attention. And nowhere does that tension show up more than with Elon Musk, and his fuel cell test his cars versus fuel cells. The second area I want to talk about, oh, and also the cost of infrastructure and transportation, there's people don't think about this, but you think about the infrastructure for charging batteries. And everybody goes well, yeah, battery charging system costs X amount of dollars. Remember what I said at the beginning, when you start to go electric, it all runs off the grid. Right now, almost all of it. So if you're going to charge your Tesla, and the Tesla's being charged off a grid that runs on coal or oil, you're not really being clean. But also, your grid is going to have to double in size to start charging all these vehicles. What happens when the grid doubles in size? It's not just the charging station that you got to pay for. It's the substation. It's the transformers. It's the power line upgrades. It's all that infrastructure that also has to be paid for by somebody. And the somebody is the rate payer for the utility, or the person who owns the building that's got to be upgraded for the power. The second thing, because this leads right into it, is the grid. If we're all going gung-ho for clean energy, hydroelectric is very clean energy, and we have that, but we don't have enough of it. Nuclear is very clean energy, but most people don't have a tolerance for nuclear based on the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and things like that. Nobody really wants to have nuclear now. Japan is basically getting rid of all their nuclear. But it's clean power. But once we're getting comfortable with it, and the ones that are getting really cheap and really ubiquitous are wind and solar, they're just great. But the one thing about electric energy that you have to understand is, you either have to, when you generate it, you have to either use it, or you store it. Because you can't just take, you know, sunshine, when the sun's shining, you have to take that energy while you have it. And if you can't use it all, you need to be storing it. So how do you store it? Well, there's, you can do pump hydro, pump water uphill, and then run it through turbines downhill. We talked about this stuff last week, so I'm not going to go over it again. But there's a lot of ways to store energy, flywheels, hydrogen, pump hydro, could stored air under pressure, all kinds of ways to do it. But you have to store it. And just think we're doubling the size of the grid or more just to accommodate transportation. And we're going to be getting all of our energy, or a lot of our energy from intermittent renewables like solar and wind. And you're going to have to store all that energy that right now we store in oil or gasoline, or coal or something else to keep it on the side until we need it. What happens if you don't have oil or coal or natural gas to store that energy? You're going to store it all in the battery? And you start looking at the cost of batteries as you scale up, you get to about 100 megawatts, and batteries do not pencil out. They're too expensive. They're totally being used inefficiently. And you have to replace the batteries when they start to wear out. And the batteries have hazmat issues, the batteries have material issues when you build them, that the materials come from foreign countries, and we don't have a lot of control over things like that. The batteries also have normal batteries. The technology we use now mostly is lithium cobalt technology. The cobalt, number one, there's only about 20 years of it left in the earth at the present rate for using it. And again, we're going to be all transportation and all. It's not going to last. So what happens when you run out of materials for your batteries, all of a sudden they're not getting cheaper, they're getting more expensive. They're getting mined by kids that are working in mines for 50 cents a day and things like that. You just can't do it. So when it comes to transportation and grid, they're interconnected. And the way to connect them the best is hydrogen, because that hydrogen can be used to store energy, to put back in stationary fuel cells, where you need power instead of running power lines, to charge cars and things like that. And it can be made in the same location off of, what it will take off of houses and those kinds of things. So transportation and the grid are going to be tied in the future. And the best storage medium for a number of reasons is going to end up being hydrogen. I end up talking to a lot of folks about the military, because we did all of our research work for the Air Force. And one of the contractors that we had, when I first met him and talked to him and he told me, you know, some of the great things about hydrogen from his perspective, I said, well, what does it mean to the military? He goes, it's clean and green. And I go, the military drops bombs on people and blows things up. They don't care about clean and green. They go in to make a mess. They'll do clean and green because the federal government tells them they have to spend money on that. But they really don't care. It does nothing for them in the field. What does hydrogen do for the military? Even the military didn't know that. And the things they thought they knew, they really didn't know well. So I had to explain it to them. Number one, the military needs stuff that's silent. Hydrogen fuel cells and that technology is nearly silent. Not like an internal combustion engine that's got mufflers and making all kinds of noise. I could tell you stories about sneaking up on buildings. So fuel cell vehicles versus trucks that are run off internal combustion engines. There's no comparison. Number two, fuel cells put off very little heat. They do put off heat, but not much and it's easy to conceal. When the enemy is looking for you at night, they look for hot spots. They take a thermal imager and they're looking for you with a heat source. Fuel cell vehicles don't make much heat, whether it's in a stationary site or whether it's in vehicles in a convoy. Hydrogen fuel cells don't put off any carbon monoxide or any noxious gases. So you can run 24 hours a day in a hangar and you don't hurt anybody at all. They can breathe it. It's just making water and heat. So it's not making any carbon monoxide or anything. You've also got the point that if you were going to have all of your support equipment running off of batteries in a combat cycle like we do in the military, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for week after week after week, you have to have three batteries for every piece of equipment. One that's running the equipment, one that's being charged, and one that's being cooled down after charging so it can be put back in the equipment. So you have to ship three times as much equipment in the form of batteries to run your equipment and that all translates into logistics costs and costs in an aircraft fuel and weight to ship all those things overseas. The next thing is safety. And if I say the word hydrogen to most people, the first thing they come back is Hindenburg or, and I apologize for the rooster, you just woke up. Hindenburg or hydrogen bomb. In reality, the space program has been using hydrogen not only for rocket fuel to get air rockets into space, but in making oxygen aboard spacecraft just like we do on submarine using an electrolyser that takes water and turns it into oxygen and hydrogen. We've been doing that for years, like half a century. And we've been shipping liquid hydrogen from where it's made in Canada to keep Canaveral on tanker cars. And have you ever heard a big story about a major hydrogen spill or hydrogen accident in the last 50 years? Quite frankly, I look for hydrogen accident news and it's hard to find. You can do searches and everything. You just can't find it. So I wanted to say one more thing. Safety is, is just, I could do a whole show about safety, but this is another one of the uses for hydrogen. This is actually a hydrogen cooker and that that silver puck in the middle of the thing with a nice flame coming out is an experimental burner that was built by Paul Pontio at Blue Planet Research and it does two things. It shows you, number one, how great a flame you can get for cooking out of hydrogen. But also, if you look up on Wikipedia, it'll tell you that hydrogen flames are invisible. Well, they're not invisible. They're invisible in daylight. But if you're indoors or if it's nighttime, guess what? It looks just like this. We're going to take a quick break now and when we come back, we're going to talk some more about some of the advantages that let me know or let us know that hydrogen is here for the long term. So this week, I got two emails. One from J. Fido, who's there to think tech, with a comment on one of my earlier shows. In fact, the show is over a year old that somebody sent in and he was bad mouthing hydrogen and said Elon Musk is a genius. Therefore, battery plug-in cars are the way to go and Elon Musk sends rockets into space and has underground tubes for transportation and all kind of cool stuff. So he doesn't like hydrogen, so therefore it must be stupid. And I didn't even answer the email. I mean, usually if somebody sends in a question or something, I'll answer it. So if you're watching whoever you are again, I don't remember your name and I already deleted the email. Elon Musk is a brilliant man. He designed a beautiful car. He built an incredibly efficient factory with great workers. But I've got a couple things to tell you about Elon Musk. Number one, even the most brilliant people on the planet in history have screwed up and have made mistakes. Some of them have made huge mistakes. If you've ever seen a person burning to death in a Tesla, it's because it hasn't been taken off the internet fast enough. But if you watch, you'll see them. In fact, one of the most recent ones, a guy was driving his Tesla. He went off the road and hit a tree and the impact made him unconscious. And the car, the batteries in the car caught on fire and a bunch of bystanders ran up to the car to get the guy out because his car was on fire and the Tesla lithium fire is so hot, it burns so fast and cannot be put out with water. He wanted to get the guy out of the car, except that the doors wouldn't open because the doors were locked and the only way he can lock him is to do it from the guy who runs the car who's unconscious in the car on fire. So the bystanders got to watch a guy get burned to death and to get pre-mated in his own vehicle. Now battery plug-in cars are great, but everything has its limitations. And I'm not saying that there would never be a hydrogen fire in a hydrogen car, but he is not perfect. He does amazing work. He does great things, but just because he's pooping hydrogen doesn't make him the rocket scientist that he has proven himself to be, which is he does amazing stuff, but he can be wrong. It happens that he's wrong. Hydrogen is going to outlast battery, outperform battery, until a newer, maybe digital, maybe some kind of cosmic thing we haven't even thought of yet comes along. And most battery people that I work with say that's at least 15 years away and hasn't even been proven yet. So we can't just keep looking at people like Elon Musk and saying, oh, he's so smart. He knows everything. We're just going to go with him. That's the mentality of the society we live in now, where we're looking for the quick solution, quick answer, and we go to the smarter person we can figure out, call a scientific, make a decision, and go. That's not doing your homework, and that's not doing it right. So I got a second email from a good friend of mine that you have on ThinkTech that does say to clean energy, and he sent me this thing called an article that was really an infomercial by some guy pushing stock, that he was a stock wizard. The first couple seconds on the infomercial I went, you know, this guy's talking about hydrogen, but he didn't even call it hydrogen. He called it blue gas, and there's no reason for that. When you don't want to have that, remember I said that when I say hydrogen people say Hindenburg or they say Hbomb. Well, if you say I've got a new name for hydrogen and you just start selling this new product, this guy called it blue gas. He calls hydrogen blue gas. Okay, you suddenly don't have the negative perception of hydrogen. So he's talking for 20 minutes about blue gas, and I'm going, he's talking about hydrogen. Every example he gives, they go, that's hydrogen. Even the pictures he's showing, the car is a hydrogen fuel cell car. The pump at the station he's fueling his car. It's a hydrogen fuel cell pump. It's a J2601 standard pump. Sure enough, after he gets finished selling his website or his blog or whatever, he says it's hydrogen, and he's talking about hydrogen. He's talking about how great it is. Well, let me tell you something. The time of hydrogen has come. In 2017, in January of 2017, it was a turning point in hydrogen. That's when a group got together. They decided to call themselves a hydrogen council, and they brought together the biggest companies that deal with energy and hydrogen. And they started talking together about how they could go to scale with hydrogen. 2017, so almost four years later, you're beginning to see it really take off. And I've been streaming at legislatures and congressional staff and mayors and governors for 10 years about how hydrogen is so great. We could have put in a hydrogen station in Honolulu for between three and five million dollars, which is not chicken feet, but I couldn't get them to do anything. I got a legislature to float a bond for $1.25 million, and then my department head wouldn't let me put out an RFP for the bond because he couldn't back it up if it defaulted. So I get nowhere with politicians. But at the same time, the city of Honolulu had a three billion, that's with a B, not an M, three billion dollar rail project that is currently grown to a 10 billion dollar rail project that during this COVID virus has bankrupted because we no longer have the tax revenues coming in to pay our bills has literally bankrupted this county and the state in short order. We're in the hole already for revenues, but don't worry, that bill is now up to 13 billion dollars for a stupid rail project instead of putting in hydrogen station. Now for a bunch of politicians who are screaming about global climate change and the existential threat to climate change and they're spending 10, 13 billion dollars on a rail project when five, six, eight, 10 years ago even farther back they could have started putting in the infrastructure for hydrogen and changed our whole economy to a energy self-sufficient economy. Don't talk to me about climate change. I mean that's as simple and critical as you can get. But the industry wasn't talking about climate change. They were solving climate. The industry has turned the corner. The industry has said we don't need subsidies, we don't need big companies to back us up, we need to make economic sense and we need to take off and do stuff. So I want to put up a chart. And this chart is kind of important. It's actually a stock chart. It's a one-year chart that shows from November of 2019 to November of 2020 the growth of a company. I won't tell you what company it is but that's one I really like. I've had the CEO on my show several times. But the thing to look at at this chart it doesn't matter what the company is. The thing to look at at this chart is how it's grown. On the left-hand vertical scale is dollars, zero at the bottom and I think it's 40 dollars at the top maybe 30 dollars at the top. If you look at any hydrogen company that's established you'll see it looks almost the same as this where for the last three to five years it's been flat like on the left side of that chart for the whole time. And you look at starting the middle of this year it just starts moving up and up and up and up. So on that chart if you bought that stock back in December you would have paid 350 a share, three dollars a share of that stock. On the right side that's like 27 dollars a share on the right-hand side. The stock went from three dollars a share to 27 dollars a share in six months. That's happening in almost every established hydrogen company that I know of and I could pull up five more charts that look just like this. The exception would be and it's the one that the guy commented on is Nikola Motors which by the way Nikola is run by another very sharp man like Elon Musk. He doesn't do rockets he just does big trucks and unfortunately when he was trying to market his equipment he did a little bit of buffoonery in a video and got caught and so there's a big scandal and his stock went from 20 dollars a share to almost 100 dollars a share then back down to 20 dollars a share and as of today it's back up over 30 dollars a share it's recovering. But the interesting thing about that company is even before he did the shenanigans with the video Toyota had actually run the same test and showed that that truck could outbeat a diesel truck in real time with no shenanigans. So all he was trying to do was reproduce a test done by Toyota with his own equipment and it wasn't really ready for market yet. But the real story is that that company has the backing of General Motors has the backing of a whole bunch of large large industrial investors and folks that make the equipment and that company is going to take off. The company is Nicola Motor just keep watching it. It has kind of a bumpy graph not like the one I showed but it's definitely moving the same direction all up. So don't let me be telling you I told you so a year from now or two years from now or 10 years from now. If you're serious about clean energy if you're serious about clean transportation if you're serious about clean grid start looking at hydrogen and start looking at the companies that do hydrogen and start watching their stock prices go up. And if you want to invest I'm not an inside trader I'm just telling you. So let me tell you I told you so until next Tuesday stand the energy man hitting you off. Great Thanksgiving. Hello.