 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Yuan, our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest and my very good friend Matt Moran, founder of Moran Innovation and a true rocket scientist. Matt worked for 31 years at NASA developing power and propulsion systems, including first-of-fine liquid slush, I didn't know they had slush hydrogen and gaseous hydrogen systems. He recently designed a zero-boil-off system for the world's largest liquid hydrogen tank at the Kennedy Space Center that holds 1.25 million, that's with an M, gallons of liquid hydrogen. We're gonna be talking today about hydrogen, myths and facts moving beyond the hydrogen fairy tales. Matt, welcome to the show. Aloha, thanks for having me back. And let's throw up this work of art that Matt created, especially for this show. He never knew he had it in him, but he's now a buddy artist. This is an awesome little piece of artwork. Matt, I think it goes over all your slides. It's like a compendium of the slides we're gonna be looking at. Do you wanna start off a little bit about myths and fairy tales? So I know you like mind map, Mitch. So this is a little bit of an unstructured mind map, but a brief sketch of each of the topics that I thought we could chat about. And these are all pretty common. I'm calling them myths, but they're misconceptions generally that many folks have about hydrogen in a few cases. Even some authoritative organizations, both domestic and international, that are still have some facts and misconceptions related to liquid hydrogen in particular. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about those with you and your audience today. Yeah, it's amazing. You and I have gone through several of these reports. And don't they get the word? Like, it doesn't do that anymore. I'm not gonna steal your thunder on the show and tell people what it is, but it's unbelievable that they still haven't got it. So let's get on to the first slide. Let's talk about the hydrogen safety because that's always a concern with people. And there's a lot of myths about hydrogen safety. So lead off, Matt. Yes, as you said, Mitch. It's hard to avoid the topic of the dirigible. That's now 75-year-old black and white movie. There's a lot that can be said about that. But the most important thing is it had very highly foundable skin on it. And hydrogen, as you know, in daylight is invisible to conventional cameras in the eye. And it rises at 20 meters per second in ambient air. So within a first second or two of that black and white frame, there was no hydrogen left. It was all gone and high up in the atmosphere. So you're watching the skin of a balloon base that are a dirigible burning for the rest of that film. But people think about that. What a lot of folks don't realize is that there's been large-scale hydrogen systems, particularly liquid hydrogen systems, operating safely over the last 60 years continuously in the space program. And that's ground systems, fueling of vehicles, launch missions, the whole nine yards. So that's a big piece, I think, that needs to get out there in terms of communicating that these systems have been in place for many, many decades. And there's lots of standards and guidelines in the safe usage of them. The second bullet, oh, go ahead, Mitch. Oh, no, you go ahead. I was just gonna say the second bullet there is actually a more recent bit of information. The Army did testing with a armor-piercing ammunition on a composite overwrap pressure vessel, 700 bar pressure, that's about 10,000 PSI in US customary units. And that was a gaseous hydrogen. And all their testing, there was no ignition. When they made the hole into the vessel, the hydrogen escaped without any safety concerns and emptied itself out. So just another example, if you think about the fire triangle, you have to have a fuel ignition source and an oxidizer. And a key part of that or the caveat is they all have to be in the same place at the same time. So that rise rate of hydrogen is a big key to that, even though hydrogen has a fairly wide flammability range, it rises so fast in air that it's gone most of the time when, you know, once the ignition starts. So that bit of testing, I think, is another piece that most people aren't aware of. And again, if you compare that to some of the legacy fuels, the same sort of tests, armor-piercing ammunition, I don't think anybody would want to be very close to that situation. So I wore lithium-ion batteries for that matter. And I drive an electric vehicle. I've been driving one for almost a year and a half now. But if I thought there was any compromise of that battery casing, I'd get away from it very quickly because there's nothing you can do once you've pierced that battery pack and you get a thermal runaway situation. I just, you know, pretty much smoldering masses all you have left after a while. There's really not much you can do to stop it. And you can't put it up. I mean, they put thousands and thousands of gallons on it. It might go out for a little, a few minutes and then it reignite. But I also want to clarify something. When you talk about 20 meters per second, that's actually 66 feet per second. So if you say 1,001 and you release that molecule, it's already a six story, seven stories up. I mean, imagine how fast that is. 1,001 has gone up seven stories. Tremendously rapid. Yeah, it's unbelievable. And that's not under pressure. If you had a tank that's pressurized, it's actually shooting it up like a gun. So it's going probably the speed of sound going up, it's going so fast. That's an excellent point. And that's the way most vent systems are designed, of course, for hydrogen systems is to shoot, you know, point them up upwards. So you're right, it's going to have momentum in addition to that natural buoyancy, which is already very rapid. And even with the case of liquid hydrogen, it vaporizes very quickly and it begins at rapid ascent as well. So you don't have pools of fuel laying around or starting to spread or ignited as you do with legacy fossil fuels. It's even with the liquid hydrogen, it'll stick around for a little while, but within a few seconds, it'll warm up and start to characterize very quickly as well. So a couple other points that my friends stand awesome made, first of all, you know, they coated the Hindenburg with rocket fuel, basically powdered aluminum, which is what they use in solid state rockets. So wow, that was a really good move. Bad idea. Yes, especially with electrostatic problems you have with weather and dirigibles, which they knew fairly well at that time, but you know, there was a lot of, I think bad decisions made in terms of the operation of that particular mission or flight to that dirigible. The other thing Stan reminded me of was, you know, when that hydrogen escaped, it was going up really fast and it brought the heat with it. So instead of the heat going down below amongst the passengers, the heat escaped very quickly above the Hindenburg. And that's why so many people actually got away, got away alive and survived. Yeah, it's pulling a lot of that up. Yeah, the latest thing I tell people to bring it up is if that had been filled with helium or hot air, it doesn't matter what the lifting gas was, you would have seen the same footage. It really had nothing to do with the hydrogen. But again, you know, this is what's stuck in people's heads. So you have to address it, particularly when you're talking with a public, you know, a public group or a group that doesn't have a lot of experience, which is most people with hydrogen systems, so. And that's what we're trying to do on this show, myths and fairy tales. Okay, so let's move on to the next slide. Another beautiful work of art, I must say. Thank you. So this is another bit of a myth, I guess. You'll occasionally or maybe more than occasionally hear comments about liquid hydrogen in particular, being kind of a far off vision or something that will take many years to implement. The fact of the matter is that the liquid hydrogen jet engine was developed in the 1950s and successful dozens of successful flights with the liquid hydrogen fueled aircraft where the jet engine was done in the 1950s. And then in the 1960s, the first launch of a rocket with liquid hydrogen occurred. And every year since then, there's been successful liquid hydrogen launch vehicles, not just in the US, but across the globe. Europe, you know, China, Japan all have liquid hydrogen launch vehicles. So for the last 60 plus years, that was the continuous use I was mentioning, you've got everything from production to storage of liquid hydrogen to long-term storage and transfer into the vehicle and usage. It's all available, the technologies really are well-developed and well-known and the supply chain is there. It's just very concentrated in the space industry currently. And that's changing, of course, very rapidly now as more applications are looking at this. But there's really no true technology gap. There's certainly enhancing technologies that won't prove the economics and the performance. But in terms of actually enabling it, there's no gaps currently in liquid hydrogen to transition into just about any of the areas that are currently being looked at. And of course, and you and I have talked about this, what's really needed right now is the loss of capital investments and that's happening very rapidly and has been happening over the last year or two at a quick pace. But in conjunction with that, and this has been a focus I've been working on and I know you and I have talked about this, there's a real need for workforce training and getting the skill sets required to handle this because it is new to so many industries and so many folks. So I think that's a very important piece of this. And of course, public policy and incentives accelerate this whole transition. And we're also seeing lots of activity again, internationally in that area. Yeah, personally, I see a great future for liquid hydrogen on off-road vehicles. For example, mining truck tractors and agriculture, construction equipment. Really, when you look at the logistics of refilling one of those big huge tractors or trucks with gaseous hydrogen, you'd have to have like two or three tube trailers lined up to be able to refuel one of those big guys. And they haven't got the time to do it. It would take them hours to refuel at the level they want. I mean, imagine trying to transfer 500 kilograms or like 500 gallons or 1,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen equivalent into one of these big mining trucks that takes forever and that's time is money for these guys. They gotta keep that truck going. Absolutely, and I think those kind of use cases, like you said, Mitch, especially infrastructure is probably one of the biggest challenges with hydrogen. So if you have use cases where a vehicle is coming and going back and forth between central locations or distributed locations where it's the same end and beginning point, it starts to pencil out a lot better in terms of the economics because you can set up that infrastructure at those end points, the beginning and starting points or the centralized location. And now the infrastructure problem is more or less solved for that particular use case. So I think you're right. I think those kinds of, those would be the first, I guess, adopters or those kinds of use cases where liquid hydrogen really gives a big performance benefit. Yeah, exactly. So let's move on to another set of myths about hydrogen leaks and materials. This one is interesting because a lot of these, I started to call it zombie myths because they just keep, they never die. It doesn't matter how many times you, you try to cut them off at the head or whatever. But one of them is this idea that hydrogen is a small molecule and it will leak through anything, which is just nonsense. I probably should pick a better, you're worried for it, but that's what it is. There's established design methods and materials. One of the things, again, you and I have talked about and this has been demonstrated in multiple places is these 700 bar compressed hydrogen storage containers have been around for a while, the composite over at pressure vessels and many of them have held pressure without any change in gauge pressure for over 10 years. So obviously the leakage is not a problem for a proper and a properly designed system. And then the materials is another one where people will start to make remarks or statements about there's not any materials that can hold in hydrogen, which again is just silly. 300 series stainless steel and aluminum alloy has been used for decades and decades with the hydrogen systems of all types. Now the main thing you wanna avoid, as you know, is the carbon steels because that's where the embrittlement can become an issue. And if you're at liquid hydrogen temperature, you wanna avoid 400 series stainless because it's a transition, ductile to brittle transition is above the liquid hydrogen temperature. So, but that's the caveat with 400 series stainless is fine with gaseous hydrogen but not liquid. And then Teflon and other steel materials are well known and available for hydrogen. So all of these things have really been solved over a very long period of time, including, you know, there's almost a hydrogen industry around embrittlements sometimes. And, you know, for new materials, it's absolutely necessary to study them and understand them, particularly the thermal plastics and some of the composites. But for standard materials, the embrittlement problem has been known for a long, long time and been characterized, you can go back to reports from the 50s and 60s that are still the basis of the standards and codes when it comes to material selection and hydrogen. So again, it's just an misconception that folks have that haven't really had an experience in this field that, you know, are jumping to conclusions about what you can and can't do with these systems. So let's move on to, let's talk about greenhouse gases. And this is kind of a complicated drawing. So why don't you help us out with this one and talk about greenhouse gases and what's good and what's not. I am by no means an expert in this field either. But I'll tell you what I do know and what I've found. These top four here that I show in text and really the top three are the ones that are getting the most focused. The percentages that actually represent those greenhouse gases, you think of it as a pie chart, those would be the pie chart percentages of each of those greenhouse gases that are currently in the atmosphere. So you have to take a look at that as well as the longevity of these gases in the atmosphere because it varies greatly. You can see from thousands of years in some cases to 10 or 100. And then the final characteristic that's very important to keep in mind is what's the global warming potential and over a hundred years, it's kind of a common legus or length of time that seems to be used to measure that. So carbon dioxide sort of is the normalized value of one there but it's 76% of... I'll just interrupt you. That's what GVWB means in case you don't know. Yes. Global warming potential. Yes, thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. So the carbon dioxide which has been obviously the bulk of the focus because there is so much of it in terms of the pie chart percentage of it that's in our atmosphere in terms of greenhouse gases and it has a very long lifetime in our atmosphere. But methane sort of under the radar for a lot of folks but it's very problematic. And there's a lot of leaks that have been unreported and under reported over the years. And now there's satellite data that's showing just how bad the problem really is and it's international. And one of the issues is it's a much 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide and it's a fairly high percentage and that percentage may actually be low because of this under reporting. Now it doesn't last as long as in the atmosphere only 10 years versus thousands. But again, these are all kind of those trades like you said, it's a complex issue. Nitrous oxide is produced in any combustion process. It's a temperature related disassociation of nitrogen and then, I'm sorry, disassociation of oxygen in the atmosphere and then it reconvines with nitrogen to form NOx, often called if you've heard people talk about NOx. So that's an issue and it can be controlled by controlling various parameters of the combustion process. But if you can avoid combustion altogether, of course, all the better. And fuel cells do that and in a very much higher efficiency than any combustion process. And then the last one actually is a little bit of a success story in terms of showing what the global community is capable of doing when it comes to harmful emissions that are affecting the global environment and fluorinated gases. CFCs years ago were in a lot of refrigeration systems, hairspray, different propellants and cans and so forth. And they were all phased out or mostly phased out and there's been an improvement. Ozone was the main thing people were looking at at the time, the attack of the ozone layer and that has improved and recovered. So it's a little bit of, I think, a hopeful example for us that we can get to come together as a global community, attack its problems. Now, the interesting thing that's caught up- And of course, during, sorry, interrupted. I get to do that. Of course, during COVID, a lot of these things went way down and pretty rapidly, but of course, now we're kind of coming out of it, starting to wrap back up again, but just goes to show when people stay home, work from home and they're not spewing all this stuff out of their car exhausts, things being the actual environment, snapped back pretty quickly and they were surprised at how quickly it did. So- That's very true. There's a lot of interrelated pieces and parts to this moving parts. One of the recent, I'll call it a myth, that's popped up and I just put a bullet in there and made it as plain as I can. Hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas. There's no question about that. There has been a lot of media attention though, and it's been warped beyond the original intent, I think, of the studies and the analysis that's been done, calling it a quote, indirect greenhouse gas. And when you start to dig into what's behind all that, there's a bunch of unproven hypotheses that really probably should be looked at from a scientific research standpoint, but it basically is that if hydrogen gets into the upper atmosphere and doesn't combine somewhere else in the lower atmosphere with water or air and turn into water, I'm sorry, with water or air, it can combine with hydroxides in the upper atmosphere, which are one of the ways that methane is mitigated. So there's this strange kind of house of parts of assumptions and then at the end is, you've got a circular argument that hydrogen could prevent the mitigation of another greenhouse gas that it's gonna replace. So there's been a lot of hyperventilating headlines, from some outlets and social media folks and some vested interests that are being challenged maybe by hydrogen coming on board and transitioning. And it's just too early to say anything about it that has any veracity. So one of the things that's gonna make our new energy economy work, it has to be energy storage. So let's go to the next slide and talk about how hydrogen can help with that and some of the myths involved there. Yeah, so I tried on the left, one of the things that people bring up is, well, it's wasteful to use renewable energy to electrolyze water into hydrogen and then put it back into a fuel cell later because of the round trip efficiencies and the loss there. The problem with that argument is that, intermittent renewables cannot follow electrical demand. It's a fantasy to think otherwise. The sun shines and the wind blows based on the local resources and weather and so forth. And electrical demand is driven of course by what people's usage is. So you have these times of underutilization of your renewables and then overutilization of the renewables and therefore, as you get to a certain point and most studies have said that's around 30% and when your regeneration sources are 30% or more intermittent renewables, you need to have storage in the mix or you're gonna have difficulty controlling the grid, the electrical grid around that. So I just did that little sketch on the left-hand side to show that when you have that overgeneration, so when in the middle of the day, when people are at work, the residential loads aren't as high and you have extra energy, so to speak extra, if you don't store it, it just gets curtailed or in other words, not used, it's wasted or isn't put into use of any kind. So if you use that to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen by the way, which you can use for various things, then store the hydrogen. Then when you have an insufficient amount of renewables, you can of course, as you know, match or run through a fuel cell and you can make up some or all of that shortfall in terms of the demand and generation capacity you have. So that's the essence of it. And again, people get twisted a little bit around the efficiency part of it and that's not really the point. The point is you need energy storage because you can't load follow with intermittent renewables. And I think on that slide, I had a little bit more about some of the other storage, yes, options. Pumped hydro is one of the cheapest and most effective and well-developed high technology level storage approaches. That's where you take water, you pump it up to a higher elevation so you've got potential energy. And then when you need it, you run it back down through a turbine, a water turbine or some other generating type of a paddle system or what have you, and you get that energy back. The problem is, if you don't have the local geography that supports that, you can't use it. So if you're in a flat area or you don't have a land rights that you would need to have quite a bit of storage available for that water, then it's not a much use. Batteries have very high efficiency. We're gonna get a good round trip efficiency. But as you start to scale, the cost gets to be infeasible. There's replacement cost after they reach a certain lifetime. They're expensive to even the initial capex so to put them in a place expensive. And there's other issues that, we've got a lot of things coming online now with batteries and they all have supply chain challenges and all kinds of strategic materials issues and recycling issues that are all being kind of worked out in real time, but it's not the end all solution. The thing about hydrogen is it can be implemented anywhere at any scale. So you do have a lower round trip efficiency of the batteries, but you don't have any recycling concerns, you don't have supply chain issues, you don't have strategic material issues. So, there's always a balance with these options and which solution makes the most sense. But I tried to capture that at least in some of those bullets. You did a good job and I can hardly wait for this next slide. It's your best one. Santa Claus. Yeah, Santa Claus is helping us out here. This kind of gets back to your comment early on, Mitch, there seems to be this missing communication that a lot of even official reports will talk about unavoidable boil off losses. There's no such thing anymore in liquid hydrogen. You can always avoid boil off losses by a variety of methods. And I've kind of done those sub bullets sort of in the order that you tackle them for a typical system design. You first try to do it with passive thermal design, then you can do some liquid mixing depending on your concept of operation. That might get you to the point where you're gonna consume the hydrogen before you would have to vent it. And then there's vapor cooled shield. Jewel Thompson cooling is a thermodynamic technique. And then finally, if you still have heat coming into your system and you have long-term storage, you can go to cryorefrigeration and crowd coolers. And that was the system that you mentioned that I designed for the largest operational liquid hydrogen doer tank at Kennedy Space Center. And that eliminates all the boil off completely. So that's one of the things that seems to still be kind of embedded in a lot of assumptions and analysis. The other one is this idea that you have all these distribution and transportation losses. And the fact is you can do everything with hydrogen in one site, one place. And I think that's what a lot of the systems that certainly a lot of the ones I'm working on now are doing that. You're generating the hydrogen, you're liquefying it and you're using it all in one place. So there is no transportation or distribution. Therefore, there are no losses. And then finally, the importance of life cycle energy and efficiency analysis is very important. Anytime you see you're in one particular isolated figure of merit, I think you're missing the big picture and I'll stop there because I know this is something we could chat about for a long time and I know we're getting close to the end. Well, we got a few more minutes to go, but I wanted to make the point that you made to me that these cryorefrigeration coolers are basically commercial and they're not that expensive in terms of how much they cost. And also they don't use that much energy to run one of these cryo coolers compared to the amount of energy you'd lose if you allowed your hydrogen to boil off and the cost of losing all that hydrogen to the cost of paying a little bit of electricity to keep your liquid hydrogen intact. Yeah, and that was the sort of economic analysis that NASA did at Kennedy Space Center when they asked for us to design that system. It was pennies on the dollars to save the hydrogen that they would have vented otherwise if they didn't have that cryo cooling system in place. So you're absolutely right, Mitch, it's a... And again, you want to take those other steps first. They're the cheaper and easier ones to do and sometimes that's sufficient depending on your use rate and your concept of operations. You may not need to do a cryo refrigeration but you do have that option. So now we have to hurry up getting the... I'm getting the hook here. And we're on our last slide. How about that? Perfect. Look at that. I can cover this quickly. This is a mnemonic I made up to help people remember some of the facts. So we're getting into the facts now. And I call it the 2020 vision for the counter time to hydrogen. So the first 20 is that meters per second rise rate we already talked about. 20 degrees Kelvin is a second 20. That's the temperature of liquid hydrogen. So two facts you remember. Five safety tips with hydrogen, ventilation, leaked ignition sources. And then if you're talking about liquid hydrogen you're working with cryogenics and phase change. Liquid gas typically is one you want to watch for. And then the countdown, the next part of the countdown four is the volume, four times the volume of liquid hydrogen required to have the same energy as legacy fuels but you got to remember efficiency. If your efficiency is better in a fuel cell then you need less of the fuel. However, the same mass of hydrogen has three times energy of legacy fuels. And that's what that scale on the left hand side is trying to show. And then the two one and zero two is the spin states of hydrogen which becomes important if you're working with liquid hydrogen. One proton per atom and two atoms per molecule. So that's why it's called H2 for folks that have always wondered why the two is. And then zero carbon emissions and no smoke, no particulates. It really is a no environmental impact when it comes to use of hydrogen. So last slide tells us how we can get in contact with Matt and he has a really nice website. And I might also add he has a, he does, he has educational program on liquid hydrogen and he also has a blog site on LinkedIn and a ton of information because this is like a dead spot. It was a gap. And now everybody's flooding to that site and coming up with all sorts of new information that's really, really effective and he did a really good job on that. Thank you. Thank you, Mitch. So I can't thank you on there. Yeah, I didn't welcome anybody to take a look at that. I'm getting the hook. So I'm getting close now. So we've been, we gotta leave it there. We've been watching Hawaii the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii and talking with Matt Moran, rocket scientist, managing member of Moran Innovations and a hydrogen expert as well. Today we've been talking story about hydrogen and myths and facts and I'm sure we're all now better informed. Thank you, Matt for getting us right on this. Thanks for having me. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in on that you and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii the state of clean energy. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.