 Hey, welcome to Stan Energy Man on the 14th of October, 2016. Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, state of Hawaii, D-Bid. And this is going to be kind of a different show. I just came off of two weeks on the road, so I'm a little bit jet lagged. And as you can see, sans gas, I have no gas today. But I'm going to start off a little bit on the philosophical side before we get into the energy side. And it kind of goes in line with this year's political season, which in case you haven't noticed is squirrely to say the least. So let me talk a little bit about one of the things that I've noticed that happens to dovetail into politics, but sure hits me smack between the eyes in terms of energy. And that would be the area of critical analysis. It seems to me that we have either stopped teaching critical analysis or we have stopped thinking critical analysis or we have been actually manipulated into not applying critical analysis and a lot of the things that we do. I noticed this probably 2006 or 2007. I think it was like in a midterm election. And I turned on and was flipping through the channels watching all the pundits talk about the political race at hand. And the first thing out of their mouth was, and this candidate has raised this much money and this candidate has raised this much money and therefore they will win. And I'm going, since when do we just start talking about how much money somebody raised, like is this a popularity contest? And then it hit me. No, it has to do with how much advertising they're doing, how much marketing they're doing. We've been trained over the last 20 to 30 years, maybe a little bit longer, into being consumers. Good, good capitalistic consumers. And as a result, the industry, the advertising industry, and now the political industry has said, you know what, we need to do marketing. And so therefore, the more money a candidate raises, the more money they can spend on commercials and advertising good, bad or otherwise to promote themselves or to tear down somebody else. And it's become marketing. So we rarely actually don't worry that much about the actual qualifications or capabilities of a candidate. We're kind of just worried about how well they're marketed. And we're looking at advertising only. And why is that? We've gotten busy. We've gotten really, really busy. So we take our information and sound bites and we tend to take it at face value and agree with it or reject it in a fairly short amount of time. We're busy trying to make decisions all day long about what to have for dinner, what to wear to work, what kind of car to buy, what this, what that. And I think it's just kind of made us poor at analyzing real facts that pertain to whatever it is we're doing. And in the political sense, maybe that applies this year, where we've got two candidates running for president that, to say the least, are not very popular and probably have some serious character flaws on both sides. But they're there. How did they get there? I think it's because we haven't done any serious, serious analysis, in-depth analysis. So what does that mean for the energy side? And that is one of the most important questions I always get when I start talking hydrogen vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is, why do we want to go with hydrogen powered electric vehicles as some just battery powered electric vehicles? And normally the discussion that comes across right away is how much energy in for how much energy out. Batteries are more efficient than hydrogen, so therefore discussion over batteries win. And I go not so fast. Batteries may be the best energy in and energy out, but where's our critical analysis? What have we really done to decide whether or not batteries are the best choice? I actually had a slide for this part of the discussion, and it didn't translate well in the computers here. I guess I must have saved it the wrong way or something. But basically, it was a slide that had on the horizontal axis, it had power. So it had the power from one watt to gigawatts. And on the vertical axis, it had time from milliseconds to weeks. And the reason this chart was so important was because it actually showed in little ovals the different kind of energy storage and where it fit on the scale of power to time. And what you notice is in the lower, it would be the lower left-hand scale over here on the TV, it would show that if you needed to store energy that was required in a quick time, the best storage medium was a supercapacitor. In other words, it's like a super battery that stores energy, holds on to it, and can release a large amount of it in a really quick millisecond type response. But it didn't last more than a second or two seconds. It was only meant for a really short duration. But it could give you potentially a pretty good boost up into the hundreds of watts to kilowatts size chunks. Above that, you have your traditional batteries, which cover a pretty broad area. They cover out to multi kilowatts, up to megawatts even, and give you hours, minutes to hours on the time scale. Above those batteries, you have flow batteries, which can give you actually out to days of time and fairly high on the power output, maybe even up to the into the megawatt range, several megawatt range. Above that, the batteries just drop off, all of them do, even the flow batteries. And you get into other ovals that talk about things like compressed air storage, where if you have big salt caverns under your city or in your suburbs, you can actually compress air, put it into those salt cavities and have compressed air for energy storage. Or if you have the capacity to pump water up a hill and put it into a reservoir and it comes back down and give you energy as the water comes downhill, the distance above your level that the water is and how much you can get through the pipe determines how much energy you can get back. But those energy storage forms give you high into the multi-megawatt scale and long duration. However much compressed air or how much water you can store up hill can give you long duration of energy after the fact, even at high energy levels. In that same realm are some things like natural gas storage and fuel cells and hydrogen. And that's why when I have the discussion with battery people and they say it's only energy out, they're not really looking at that chart and where you're talking about. It's true that across the board you're going to get the best bang for the buck energy wise in and out with a battery. But if you're looking at storing energy for days, hours, days, weeks or months, batteries are not your choice. Batteries will cost you more. Batteries are not as safe. Batteries have other issues with recycle and end of life disposal, things like that. They're never ever brought into the discussion on energy storage. And that's where I get back to the point of are we really doing critical analysis, especially on the energy side. So I just want to talk a little bit about what I mean by critical analysis. First of all, you have to talk about the cradle to grave costs. You have to talk about the things that are built in that maybe we don't have to pay for, but maybe we're going to another country and buying it cheaper. Like labor, a lot of countries don't have unions. A lot of countries don't mind paying their people 50 cents an hour or 15 cents an hour or just 10 cents an hour. And they don't care. For them, that's a good living. For us, it's projecting poverty in a third world country that we're trying to pull out of the third world. So just because we can buy it cheaper in some other country and cause them to keep their people down in the ghettos, does that make it right? No, maybe we should be looking at what it really cost and what we should really be doing in that country to not pollute their environment, not cause their economic suspension of growing and increasing the quality of life for their own people. Maybe not putting their people at risk when people have to go into mines or have to do something that's inherently dangerous. And we're pushing that off to some other country because, well, they don't care. Their government doesn't regulate that stuff. They apparently don't care about their people. Is there a conscious part of our critical decision-making other than dollars and cents that we need to put into the equation? Maybe we should tolerate paying a little bit more to help that country come up a little bit more. So where you get your resources, where you get your raw materials and your labor plays a lot into your critical analysis. At least it should, if you have a conscious it should. How long does it last? If you have a piece of technology and it works really great for five or six years but then you have to scrap it down to zero and start from scratch, is that as good as a similar product that may maybe cost a little bit more initially or doesn't give you quite the return on the short term investment but at last 20 or 30 or 40 years and it doesn't have an environmental impact in your country or wherever you're getting the materials from, there's that aspect to consider as well. Then there's the question of what about when we dispose of it? I mean just think about what you see on a little battery pack, even just your rechargeable Everettier or Duracell batteries, they say don't throw it in the fire, you know don't throw it in the rubbish, you're supposed to recycle those things so that the hazardous material in batteries can be eliminated before it goes into a landfill and starts polluting your water. So there's another point when people don't dispose of this technology properly and they do throw it in the landfill and it does pollute your water, what's that worth to you? Is that a risk that you want to take as a society that a technology that you're putting into your system that isn't handled according to what the law says that it's going to end up polluting the drinking water of your kids and things like that? This is all part of critical analysis and really taking a good hard look at what you're doing when you decide on a certain technology or a certain type of of any decision, political decision or otherwise, are you really looking deep enough? So let's compare apples to apples as closely as we can and let's look at some of the more important things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna switch now for a few seconds to talk a little bit about lithium batteries. I'm completely aware that lithium is one of the better battery technologies that we've come up with. You don't have a cell phone or a small appliance or battery or a notebook or a tablet that doesn't have a lithium battery in it and that's for good reason. They're very efficient and their their weight is right. The cost is a little bit high but it gives you great great performance. Lithium batteries tend to perform really well until they're dead and then they drop off. Unlike a car battery that just slowly drops off until it's down to where it's not usable. Lithium batteries have a wider range in how far they can drop before they're not usable. They're just really, really great technology. So it's not that I'm whole-hum on lithium batteries. Trust me, they're the best we've got and that's why you see them in all the appliances. But they're not the whole answer. So what I'm gonna do is we're gonna take a quick break here and give our our folks a chance to advertise some of the other shows on Think Tech and when we come back we're going to talk about lithium batteries and I'm just going to go through Wikipedia and talk about some of the great characteristics of lithium that we probably ought to be considering under a full cradle-to-grave analysis. This is John Adenilian from Think Tech of Why Keys to Success. We'd like to thank all of our viewers for tuning in and enjoying the show as we enjoy giving it to you. We are very grateful for all the wonderful feedback we receive from our viewers. My name is Danilia D-A-N-E-L-I-A and I'm the other half of the duo John Newman. We thank you all. Aloha! Aloha, this is Maria Mera and I'm here to invite you to my bilingual show Viva Hawaii and Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 3 p.m. We're here to inform, motivate and entertain you. Join us. Hola, soy Maria Mera y estoy aquí para invitaros a mi show Vilingüe Viva Hawaii and Think Tech Hawaii cada dos lunes a las tres de la tarde. Estamos aquí para informaros, motivaros y entreteneros. Apuntaros. So, so one, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man. I'm getting jumping into my topic already. Welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on Friday. Thanks for sharing your lunch hour with me. The topic today is critical analysis in energy storage and we kind of got to the point we're going to talk a little bit about the most popular battery, especially for your appliances and small appliances and computers and things, the lithium ion battery particularly. Now there's all kind of lithium batteries too by the way. There's not just lithium iron iron or iron rather, there's lithium iron phosphate, there's all kinds of batteries that are coming out nowadays that are really good and that's an even finer distinction. You really need to look at what the battery is going to do and what are some of the characteristics of it. For example my friends in the big island that are using the Sony lithium iron phosphate and I think Panasonic and a couple other companies are using this technology as well. They have a great technology there that doesn't have the thermal issues with running away temperature-wise when they charge and discharge. They are super cool, they don't raise the temperature in your house if you're air conditioning your house, you're not killing it when you're charging your battery by giving off waste heat. You've got cost is a little bit higher but it's actually going to last you longer. The cycles will last you much longer, it has a better recharge regime where it doesn't have that storage memory like the old nickel metal hydride or other batteries that are rechargeable. Sometimes they have a memory if you if you let them discharge only partway and then recharge them sometimes you can actually kill some of the memory in the batteries but lithium overall is a real interesting subject so what we're going to get into is talking about some of the things that I would call cradle-to-grave costs when you do critical analysis and we'll start off by just talking a little bit about lithium. The first thing that it talks about under the definition of lithium and trust me Wikipedia just because I got on the internet doesn't mean it's gospel truth I have perfect skepticism over the internet as well but understanding conditions and this is a scientific fact it's one of the lightest metals out there it actually can float on top of most liquids including water it's one of only a few metals a handful of metals that can float on top of water I'm not talking like a homemade of it I'm talking about a chunk of it solid can sit there and float on water not that you'd want to do that but lithium is highly reactive and highly flammable and for this reason it's typically stored in mineral oil so you've already got some limitations there that start to talk about well there's some special handling with lithium. Lithium never occurs freely in nature and instead appears only in compounds that's an interesting fact that means that you don't just go mine lithium like gold or silver or silver sometimes also pulled out of other materials but you you have to literally not only pull up the raw materials but then refine it to get to the lithium and pull it out and it can be mined in ore it's harder to find in ore but it can also be pulled out of brines and and other muds and compounds or slurries and pulled out of there but it's it adds more steps to the process therefore it's not super cheap just like hydrogen by the way there's a parallel with hydrogen there's tons of hydrogen in the universe in fact hydrogen is the most common element in the universe but we don't just harvest it we actually have to run it through an electrolyzer a steam reformer or something to pull the hydrogen away from other atoms and get pure hydrogen pretty similar to lithium as them as a metal you have to kind of pull it out of other compounds it's present in ocean water you can find lithium in ocean water unfortunately it's in such minute quantities that we you would probably have to drain the ocean and process it to get any substantial amount of lithium out of it so not a good place to get it it's not very common I think one of the things that gets passed everybody in this whole analysis is that lithium is pretty rare on the earth and we'll talk a lot in detail about exactly what that means in terms of of reserves and things but one of the ways that it's described in lithium is less common in the solar system than 25 of the first 32 chemical elements even though the nuclei is very small and very light and weight lithium and its compounds have several industrial applications this is interesting including heat resistant glass ceramics lithium grease which I'm really familiar with lithium grease is some of the best stuff out there flux additives for iron steel and aluminum production lithium batteries and lithium ion batteries and these consume more these uses that I just described consume more than three quarters of all the lithium that is harvested or manufactured or processed worldwide across the globe but think about that Tesla's and other electric cars make up a fraction of 1% of the vehicles on the road worldwide today the clean green technology of a electric car there's such a small amount and yet they take about a ton or a little over a ton in the Tesla's case of lithium iron lithium ion batteries okay we don't have many cars they take a ton of batteries and we're already using up three quarters of the worldwide production just in the group of things that I mentioned that we produce so if we got to 5% electric cars running off lithium batteries we be sucking down way more lithium than we do now in terms of per annual production and we will go through the world supply of finite lithium faster than we can produce it what does that mean in economic terms the price goes up so unlike other things where there's a lot of it like iron ore or something and the more you can produce the cheaper it gets because you get volume you get more volume you can produce more you got economies of scale you can ramp up production get get it done faster better more efficiently by making bigger plants lithium is just the opposite when we start really taxing the natural resources and the natural sources of lithium you can easily get to a point where you can't produce enough lithium to meet demand and therefore price is going to go up there already lithium is already an expensive commodity and it's going to get more and more expensive the more batteries would make this concerns me as a hydrogen guy because hydrogen vehicles also need lithium batteries so we have kind of a dilemma coming here especially if we want to use all lithium batteries I already said it can float on water that was one of the more interesting points here's another really interesting one that you won't see a whole lot of a lot of things on the internet about lithium batteries catching on fire in cars because most of the manufacturers pull that fact and pull the videos as fast as they get out there but lithium will ignite and burn in oxygen when exposed to water or water vapors so if you have a car with a lithium battery and you run over a piece of metal and it tears into the lithium battery you will have a fire guaranteed and if the fire department doesn't realize it's a lithium battery when they show up and start dumping water in the car the fire will burn faster it will actually make the fire worse not better you have to use chemicals on lithium to put the fire out and unless the car is recognizable as a lithium powered car you may not know it try to dump water on it make the fire worse fortunately here in Hawaii the fire departments trained to respond to electric cars because we try and train them so they know how to respond but you don't dump water on a lithium battery fire or it gets worse and the battery itself when it ignites it's pretty dramatic if you want to go online and look at some nail tests as nails are driven through different battery types you got to pay attention to what happens when you drive a nail through a little tiny lithium battery that's maybe three inches long and a half inch in diameter it starts not a fire but damn near an explosion that'll get your attention really quick so safety is a big concern as with alkaline metals lithium fires are difficult to extinguish requiring a dry powder fire extinguisher of the class D type so what are some of the other great things about lithium where does it come from well of the top eight countries in the world that produce lithium in order chili is number one and China is number two number three is Argentina number four is Australia number five is Canada number six is Portugal and number seven is Brazil eight is Zimbabwe I didn't hear the United States in any of those meaning guess what we import lithium from everybody else we don't make a whole lot ourselves are there any reserves in the United States they found some in North Carolina they found some in Nevada and I think some in Wyoming but apparently the reserves in the United States are fairly miniscule and if we included them they'd be maybe one year worth of the total world recurrent requirement for lithium across the whole planet so what does this mean in terms of estimated reserves worldwide it's estimated there are 14 million tons of lithium available for harvesting and we currently use 32,500 tons a year to make all the batteries for cell phones and our cars and everything so that means we have about 431 years of lithium reserves if we harvested everything that we know we have now and that assumes some of these are estimates so it assumes that all of it's there and maybe we'll find a little bit more but if we increased the number of lithium batteries we use in cars appreciably we would easily deplete very easily deplete that 431 years and take it down to maybe 15 or 20 years and after that it's gone and we may have better uses for lithium than running into batteries and you know Tesla's got a great program and I'm not here to slam Tesla that's an awesome car if you've ever been in one driven one or driven next to one it's it's an impressive vehicle and I'm not here to slam their their product because it's really impressive but if you think about what happens to your car after it gets down to about 80% battery capacity the battery is no longer good for your car so you're gonna have to change it out and how much does that cost $8,000 $10,000 so after you own your car for five years and it's a slick car maybe it's worth putting another ten grand into what happens that battery that you pull out well fortunately for us Elon Musk has thought about that and he builds the wall which is he takes the car batteries and sorts through all the individual cells are in the car batteries pulls the best ones out and he puts them into an appliance that now becomes your uninterruptible power supply for your house called the wall and it helps your house keep going great use great way to recycle the batteries but now what happens when it gets down to a threshold in your house you can't use anymore now you have to dispose of it that's that's another big problem disposing so overall the analysis by most folks and this is from the handbook of lithium and natural calcium lithium is a comparatively rare element and although it's found in many rocks and some brines but it's always very low concentrations when you find it there there are a fairly large number of both lithium minerals and brine deposits but only comparatively few of them are actually or potentially commercial of commercial value many are very small and others are low in grade chili has the largest reserves by far of seven point five million tons and as I said before as the demand in lithium increased during the Cold War guess what it's used for nuclear weapons there's your competing with lithium because they use it in nuclear weapons till today even in all the modern nuclear weapons not the old ones like we had during World War II or during the Manhattan Project modern nuclear weapons require lithium so that should tell you something there about the safety piece to after the end of the nuclear arms race the demand for lithium decreased and this and the Department of Defense and Department of Energy sold off a lot of their lithium therefore giving kind of a false market it dropped the price of lithium worldwide and lithium batteries developed and became popular but as I said if we started making more more batteries the price would go up and up and up so with the surge in lithium demand in the 2000s new companies have expanded they've started extracting more but how much can we get and how long will it last there are a couple of analysis done and it says that a 2011 study by Lawrence Berkeley laboratories project that we should be okay we should be okay to have lithium batteries for at least till 20 the 22nd century but some of the other folks different their opinion and I'm one of these folks a 2008 study concluded that realistically achievable lithium carbonate production will be sufficient for only a small fraction of the future electric vehicle electric vehicles in the global market demand from portable electronic sector will absorb much of the planned production increases for the next decade and that mass production of lithium carbonate is not environmentally sound it will cause irreparable ecological ecologic damage to ecosystems and we should protect lithium iron propulsion expect lithium iron propulsion to be a big driver of the cost and create a shortage of lithium in the world so as we look at again cradle to grave critical analysis and we talk about an energy let's put all these other things on the table and not just talk about hey energy in to energy out this is really efficient now is this fair for hydrogen too of course it is I would put hydrogen up against other gases for safety I'd put hydrogen up against other gases for availability for for for ecological balance and everything else you spill hydrogen in the air it turns into clouds it turns in the rain it rains on your earth it's kind of what we need more of so if we can put up I have one slide one last slide we can throw that up before we end it'll be a good way to to end here's my big mantra if all the fossil fuels in the world contain carbon and after you burn them you end up with CO and CO2 what do you get when you burn hydrogen and all you get is pure water so I'll close with that thought today and tell you do critical analysis whether it's in an election whether it's with energy whether it's with hydrogen or lithium batteries or liquid natural gas or diesel fuel or whatever you want but don't sell yourself short do your homework take the time and don't just try and be in a hurry to do analysis and with that I'll close for today hope I haven't driven you too far into depression and we'll see you next week on stamina energy man aloha