 It's Wednesday. And you know what that day is today? It's Hawaii, the state of clean energy day. And this is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and funded by the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, which is my alma mater. So we're going to be doing a third in a series of hydrogen, the decarbonizer, with my good friend Toby Kincaid fighting fires in Portland, Oregon, or at least fighting the smoke. He's going to tell us a little bit about that. And he's got another one of a series of his slides. Toby is an inventor and an author, very good author, I might say. And he can catch his work on Amazon. If you Google Toby Kincaid, you'll see a bunch of his books on there. I bought them all and they're really good. They're really worth reading. So welcome, Toby. Nice to have you again for part three of hydrogen, the decarbonizer. So let's let it roll. Hi. Well, Loha, Commander, thank you. Very good to be with you. This is kind of a sad day in Oregon, I must confess. In the last few weeks since we've spoken, we've had a million acres incinerated. It's been an extraordinary disaster. We've lost almost a dozen people, a dozen are still missing, toddlers, grandmothers, heartbreaking. But a million acres, that's 1500 square miles in a matter of weeks. And we lost all of the critters, the chipmunks and squirrels and rabbits and beavers and elk and deer and bear have been massacred. And so I appreciate so much your subject today, the decarbonizer, and why it is so important that we get a handle on this climate disruption. It's life or death. Right. So let's have the first slide up and we'll talk about why hydrogen is the decarbonizer. So go ahead, Toby. Absolutely. Well, I love the slide you put together because it really shows the simplicity of it. I mean in this slide, what we're seeing is you take water, you add energy to it in an electrolyzer, you make oxygen and hydrogen, you can let the oxygen go, take the hydrogen, it goes through a desiccant, so it's dried and then filtered, and then we'd pump that into tanks. And then it just sits there until you need it. Now in the case of showing that car, in this case, the fuel cell is in the car. And so when you fill the hydrogen fuel cell car with hydrogen, you have an electric vehicle that has the 400 plus mile range and fills up in five minutes. But what's really important about this slide is do you see any carbon? Do you see any fracking or wells or super tankers and all of that infrastructure? Not one bit. It's just unnecessary. And so what we'll go through in this show is kind of revisit the history of this. But these are forms and ideas and how we generate energy that go back over 100 years, 300 years to the first industrial revolution. But this idea of holes in the ground surrounded by men with guns was really popularized by, as we talked about John D. Rockefeller in that incredible pivot when he went from 30 years of the oil industry making kerosene for lighting fuel, and then suddenly the electricity dawned in 1892 with the real Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse and they lit up the Chicago's World Fair and the whole world was changed overnight. You flip a switch, the light goes on. Well, Rockefeller, of course, was they were devastated by this because who's going to buy kerosene if you can flip a switch. So he made this pivot and decided, hey, instead of the gasoline that we throw away, let's change our refining. Let's make gasoline the main player and let's sell it to the military. Let's sell it to the government because now we have a monopoly on this market that is 100 times or a thousand times larger than the lighting industry. So Rockefeller has set us on this course and we are now reaping the unfortunate benefits of this very limited idea. And what's great about that slide is here you have the ability for Hawaii who is really on the leading edge. You're on the bleeding edge of this revolution, but you are demonstrating and I've said this is what we must do. And here in your work behind you and in your picture, we see this marvelous facility. It's almost entirely solid state. There's really almost no moving parts. You have a solar array making electricity. You're taking that electricity directly from photons, by the way. So you didn't need to make biomass and bury it and pyrolyze it for millions of years. No, you're direct photons into electrons. Take those electrons, add it to water through an electrolyzer and you make clean fuel. And not any fuel, you make the most potent fuel that we know of in science. It's the safest fuel because it's lighter than air. If you have a breach, it just goes straight up. You're not going to hurt anybody. You have something made from water that is available to all people everywhere in the world. My goodness, this is getting pretty good. And then on the top, when you use the hydrogen, you only get hydrogen oxide as a waste product that has a chemical formula of H2O. That's not bad as a waste product. So, you know, there is joy in your heart. Enjoy in our hearts because we see a real solution. And I can't walk outside because the smoke is so bad. You know, for an Oregonian, that is cutting our heart out because we pride ourselves on our air. We have all of these forests, pine trees, and furs, and this vast forest under the Mount Hood range. And now those are being absolutely destroyed because of this former paradigm that we've been living under for centuries, that people want to sell you a fuel and that fuel is toxic. Well, now we need to think in a new way. And that drawing you have, this picture is beautiful because it says it all. You've shown everything you need. The electrolyzer, the fuel cell, the water, the solar, that's it. That's all you need. And I'm very proud to know you and I'm proud of your work because this is what the world needs. We need real solutions and you've got one. Well, that's why we like to characterize as the magic part of it. Like, instead of just talking engineering, there's a certain magic involved with that. And when I go and give presentations to school kids, the kids get it right away. Like, wow, this is a wow moment, a W-O-W moment, which is the moment I had 30 years ago when I saw my first fuel cell at Ballard Power Systems way back in the day. I had this fuel cell sitting on a workbench and they flipped the switch and they had 10 aircraft landing lights up on the ceiling. And all of a sudden, I went, bazoom. I was totally illuminated, almost fried. And it was like truly a wow moment. And I said, from that day on, I said, that's the future. And it is the future, except it's now. It's no longer, you know, way out in the future of 30 years. It's arrived. And now we just need a whole bunch of Rockefellers, people with the means to get it done. We need champions. And we have champions in the legislature. We have people that do invest in it as well. The Hawaii legislature, like 10 years ago, was very proactive. Speaker Say put together the hydrogen fund, which was $10 million, equivalent to $330 million. If it was on a per capita basis, if you compared it to the population of California. And he said right in it, like we're going to do it on the big island first and prove how it works before we will get all the kinks out of it. And then we'll spread it around to the other islands, the neighbor islands. And that strategy that he started is valid today. And that's what we're doing. We're about ready to launch our buses here on the big island. We'll learn all about them. That way people won't have to take a risk, a failure. Nobody wants to fail, but it'll be like a kind of a low cost test, overall low cost test, which the hydrogen fund invested a lot of money in this project, which is exactly what it was meant to do. So we'll find all the wrinkles and prove to the people that have to supply a service. You know, they're not experimenting. They have a service to provide that the bus doesn't show up. You know, people don't get to work. So this thing has to work. And we have to prove that it works so that they can provide the, you know, the transportation that people need to get to their work without having to drive their own car, pollute the atmosphere. But the cost of driving their own car is enormous for some people in some certain economic levels. So the bus is absolutely essential to them. And it's the perfect, the perfect experiment or project to be doing because we're using taxpayers money. So every taxpayer gets a chance to sit in a bus and see that magic of, you know, the decarbonizer. So. Bravo. Exactly. And that's exerting. And that is the magic. The magic is that it's real. That's the ultimate magic is that it's not a pipe dream. This is real. And even more, you're making the fuel yourself and you're making it from sunlight. You're bathed in this rich energy resource and you're just using it to take water, convert it to fuel. And when you use the fuel, you get the water back. Marvelous. This is the direction of the world that we must embrace. And I thank you on behalf of everyone for the effort that you've gone through in these years to make this demonstrable and say, look, here it is. And we're not waving our arms anymore. This is the gear. And if you have the right gear, you have freedom. Non-talks. I'd like to make a comment, you know, just a shout out that there's a lot of people that have invested in this and they've been very patient. It's been patient capital and they've allowed me to take what it takes to get it done safely and so that we don't have any problems with it. When we roll it out, much wood is going to work. I'm very confident it's going to work because we're going through the process. Absolutely. Everything. Bravo. I mean, this is really, this is like a Caesar crossing the Rubicon when he brought his armies into Rome. And once, you know, we get that crossing the Rubicon kind of moment, but he's quoted as saying, when he crossed that river, the dye is now cast. Right. So you have cast the dye. You said, look, here it is. This is the form. And it is so important. The entire West Coast is burning up right now. And this is because of climate disruption. You know, in the old days, we called it the greenhouse effect and global warming. That language was a little imprecise because it's really kind of a sawtooth pattern. And so detractors would look at that little momentary cooling. Oh, no, no, it's cooling. See, so it's just a myth. No, no, no, look at all the data, not a few years. So it's this trend that we have to recognize as the truth. And it's, as you said, it's now. We don't have any more time. Well, a lot of, I think a lot of people think, well, what can I do about it? That's just a little wine drinking me. I mean, it's such a huge problem. We got China with all their coal plants just spewing out all this stuff. I mean, you know, is what we're doing just to drop in the Pacific Ocean, like who cares? But essentially what one thing that we've seen here is when the environment is not being stressed, you know what, it snaps back. So we've seen that during this COVID, the last six or seven months, a lot of our tourist attractions are now recovering from the overturism we had. And so we have like pristine bays that are coming back to life. We have coral growing. We have fish coming in where people haven't seen the fish before. So I think it's a message of hope. And especially the younger generation out there, this is not mission impossible. We have the solution. And it's in hydrogen to overcome this climate change. Absolutely. We just have to get after it. You know, people say, oh, it's too expensive. Well, how expensive is it to burn down, what do you say, a million acres? A 1500 square miles. Thousands of homes and businesses. What did that cost? What are the health impacts of all the smoke that millions of people in the West Coast are breathing? And I mean, it's terrible. It's not like a little smoky. I mean, you can't breathe. Your eyes are burning, your throat contract, your body just rejects it. He says, no, this isn't right. So the stakes of what you're talking, I'm so happy that you mentioned the young people. This is their future. A future of fossil fuels is no future. We see them ask anyone in Oregon or in the Washington or California at this moment. They tell you, Houston, we have a problem. And so it is the young people. They've got to vote. They've got to support this. What they can do is be involved, be part of the communication. And I think it's really worth their time. It's their future, after all. And we're working for that. But they're going to have to take it on, too, and demand clean air, clean water, clean biology, clean soils. And we can do that with what you're doing in Hawaii. Well, you know, I've heard it referred to as this is spaceship Earth that we're on. And for that younger generation who may be watching this, this is a wonderful thing to devote your life to get after it, just like you and I have done for the latter parts of our careers. And it's very fulfilling. And it's worthwhile. So that you can say, you know, when you get older, I actually got something done that was worthwhile to the world, not just making money, but I made the world, I left the world a better place when I came in. So you got to step up the plate and you got to get it done. And that's why it's the magic of hygiene. There's hope. You can we can make it happen. We just have to stop throwing up all these false arguments of why we can't do it. I get so many people talking to me about energy efficiency and isn't hydrogen inefficient. Well, you know, I look at the cost of the hydrogen that as you pump it out and start using PV and wind and even geothermal to make your hydrogen, we can beat gasoline and diesel on a price basis. And we're doing good. And all we're doing is making water again. So what's the value added on that? So with these stupid arguments that people make, it's ridiculous and very frustrating to hear that. But we're just have to overcome it, you know, with the magic of the buses and people go, wow, this is really nice. It doesn't make any noise. No fumes. I got air conditioning. When the bus stops at the hotel, it doesn't have to worry about anti idling. I mean, the electric air conditioning system can still work without giving off any emissions. And it's the ideal solution. So people out there, you got to get after it and stop with the fake excuses. Absolutely. Anyway, let's get a hook. No, no, no. No, it's true. My pad itself. It's you've got some great sorry. I mean, I'm going to talk over you've got some great slides now that help to embellish this concept. But go ahead and finish your thought. Well, I don't know. I just want to underscore what you said, because it's that important. This is if we could leave this earth having changed the world from a fossil fuel commodity based toxic fuel paradigm into a clean fuel based on water of which the earth is mostly covered, of which a human body is mostly made. It's coming home again. And so and the reason why it's so important now, let's jump in the slides. This first one we showed last week, but it's the super volcano of our modern civilization. Now, the geologists tell us that there are about 1500 active volcanoes on the earth right now. About of those 50 are interruption. So I went and looked up, what is the pollution produced by these volcanoes? And the best number I could get was between three and 400 million tons. I thought, well, that's quite a bit. Well, how do humans compare? So you go to Wikipedia, you can look up what is the total carbon emissions. I think they have a number from 2017. There's a variety of sources. The number there is 37 billion tons per year. Wow. So we are a super volcano. That's 100 times what the earth is putting out in its natural cycle. 100 times. So if anyone says, well, us mere humans, what can we do to affect the environment? Are you kidding me? We've been, you know, acid rain was a phrase coined in England in 1804. So in the last of this later part of the 1700s, there was 12,000 coal steam engines in the city of Limits of London, let alone all of the houses and mansions burning coal to, you know, a lump of coal to eat your governor, you know, they burned a lot of coal. And all of that emissions went up, drifted over the farms nearby and precipitated out as acid rain. There's carbon dioxide, NOx, which is nitrogen oxide compounds, sulfur dioxide compounds called SOX, particulates, all of these things. What comes out of a super volcano is exactly what comes out of a steam engine burning coal. It's the same kind of stuff and it's devastating. So we're now three centuries into this chemical abuse. And I say that because it has been toxic. And in fact, well, let's go into the next slide and we'll just continue. Why wait for that to flip up? I lived in England for three years and the nickname for London is still smoke. They used to call it smoke because it had so much pollution. Well, that's our nickname now because it's saturated the whole world. Now here on this side, you know, what are the problems like we've been talking about? We're putting millions of tons of carbon dioxide, thousands of tons of NOx and SOx, particulates, mercury, and this acid rain. Whenever you have carbon dioxide in an encounter's water, a portion will form a weak carbonic acid. So because we're putting millions of tons per day of this stuff in the atmosphere, it's the equivalent of walking around the oceans and running around and dumping acid in them. How long can we do that? Well, we're past the tipping point. That's why I think in my calculations, we only have about 10 years to finish the job. Otherwise, the inertia of these toxins may be insurmountable. So we're seeing species loss. We're seeing our environment actually degraded. And if you ask a biologist to study an organism and what they do every day, the biologist would say, well, actually, I have to spend half the time describing the environment it's in. Because actually, we know now that an organism-environment is how we can describe an organism. So we are intimately involved with our environment. Our modern sense is, oh, that's an externality. That's outside of it. No, it is what you are. You are what it is. So the environment is critical here. And so let's jump the next slide. And I can see, now here I tried to kind of show, when you look at the earth from space, it's a big globe. But where we live in the hydrosphere, the oceans and the atmosphere, is such a thin little film. It's a bio-bubble. And we're not even living in the bubble. We're living in the film of the bubble. So on earth, most life, 99% of life is within a mile up and a mile down of sea level. So that's a very thin layer. If you took a basketball and painted some vegetable oil on it in a thin film, that's about the right dimension. And we're going to put 37 billion tons of garbage into that in one year, let alone 300 years. The chemists call this saturation, super saturation. When you take a complex organism and life cycle system and environment and you put in select chemicals in an overwhelming amount, I mean the poor earth, you know, the earth breathes every day. Oxygen comes out during photosynthesis and carbon dioxide goes into the oceans. Every day this is happening. Millions of tons of gases are exchanging. But the oceans have been filled up. They can't take any more acid and now we're actually measuring animals who can't form shells. We are playing with danger here, folks. This is for anyone to come and try and sell you more gasoline or diesel, you just have to shake your head. The reality is we're either going to save this world or we're going to trash it. It's being trashed now. If we want this world, we better pay particular attention. And let's go to the next slide. And the biggest issue is, okay, this one, this is kind of a funny slide. This is a little busy, but let me throw it at you. On the left, we have the drilling, the fracking, the pipelines, the railroads, the fuel depots, the super tankers, all of this gear. And for what? To sell you something. They're going to sell you a fuel. And so when we move across the chart, you take this fuel and what do you do? You burn it in a heat engine. And that means you've got air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, endocrine disruptors, mercury, you have all of this garbage. And then here's the thing that really gets me is at the end of the day, three quarters of that energy you work so hard to put in your tank goes right out the tailpipe. Now, how can that make any intelligent sense? It's a beyond belief. So when we look now, and that's not the 19th century, we've kind of come from that actually earlier, but we'll call it 150 years from the oil age, it's very easy to see. But in the lower right part, we look at the 21st century. And it's like you described in your chart, well, you need about five things. You need a solar panel, maybe a little teeny lithium ion battery to make transitions work. You need an electrolyzer and you need a fuel cell and some storage. That's it. Now, you compare that with all of the stuff going on. It really is it really is baffling. And it's interesting about the economics here. And let's look at Oahu. You have about a million people. And if you add up everyone's electric bill and transportation fuels and heating fuels and so forth, that comes to about $5 billion every 12 months. So 5,000 million is being vacuumed out of your pockets on Oahu every 12 months. And what's interesting about the hardware that we'll get to here and in the systems you're developing is instead of going to the Hawaiian people and saying, hey, buy another thing, there's an alternative here. And the alternative is capitalism. One of the most effective mechanisms in capitalism is an equipment lease finance package. And so instead of buying the hardware that you need, if you were to lease the equipment, then an underwriter would come and pay for it. So it's just like when you when you buy a car, when you go to a dealership and buy a car, you don't walk in with a suitcase full of money. No, you pay $2.99 a month. And an underwriter would say, okay, I'm looking at your credit score, you're good for the 300 bucks a month, all by the car for you. But I'm going to hold the title. So something goes wrong with you. I get my money back. And then at the end of the lease, if everything's good, the underwriter will say, well, I don't need the car anymore, I already made my money. But if you want to pay a residual, I'll give you the title to the car. Some people want to do that. Other people say, no, I'll just take another lease, because I get the full tax right off anyway. And I want the new equipment. And they choose to do that. And the underwriter says, that's fine, because I'll just sell the car to a rental company or something else. And they make a nice little bit on the back end. So that is the way I think we can move forward. Because look at the, I feel so much empathy for the citizens of Oahu. Because you're paying what, a federal income tax, a state income tax, a property tax, you guys pay a sales tax, then you pay a barrel and excise, how many taxes do you guys pay? How can we burden the citizens of Oahu to buy another thing? And forgive me for saying this. It's rude as an outsider to kind of talk about something I'm not directly involved in. But on Oahu, you have, to my research, a $4 billion unfunded sewer upgrade that you need. You have about a $9 billion pension unfunded liability to county and city workers for their pension. Then you have about a $14 billion unpaid medical bill for those pensioners. And then now recently you have a $10 billion light rail project. How much burden can we put on the shoulders of everyone on Oahu? So I'm very excited about the equipment leasing, because here's how it looks. By my calculation, and I don't have the slides, maybe another show where I can show you how this math will work, but I can show that you pay $5 billion now every year. And what happens next year? Pay me again. Year after that, pay me again. $5 billion, $5 billion, $5 billion. Wow. So this is very expensive. If you were to equipment lease everything you need to transition to a solar hydrogen infrastructure, the equipment lease would cost about $4 billion a year. Now, look what you get. That means you have $1,000 million every 12 months that stays in the pockets of the average citizen on Oahu. That's pretty good. And the underwriter comes up with this money. We make the payments. All you have to do is use the system. Just buy the energy you're buying now, but from this other system, and it'll be $1,000 million less per year. And then here's the good news. After the term of the lease, about five years, guess what? The equipment is already paid down. Now, only thing left is maybe some maintenance. So instead of the $4 billion, now you can go down to $1 billion. So you can make it an economic incentive and profitable to go clean hydrogen. It's that path of profitability, which I think is really the prize here. And the great news about equipment lease financing is there's lots of capital in the world. There's huge tranches of capital. They love equipment lease financing because they own the title to the hardware. It's self-collateralizing. Don't worry about the underwriter. They're okay. They make a 10% rate of return each year on the money that they... Yeah, where can you get 10% these days? The bank will give you about half a quarter of a percent for your money that you're parking it. So if you're a saver, you're never going to be able to live off interest of your savings, because there's not enough... You're not getting anything for what they're doing is keeping it in a bank account. Right, what money market account? I want to comment on what you said. So Riley Sato on the big island, he's with the R&D department in the county of Hawaii. So he spearheaded this transportation services contracting concept. Did it all in one year, got it passed so that it's just like you say, it's an equipment leasing kind of an arrangement. So he can go to a private equity company and they will buy my 65 buses, all the support infrastructure, fueling the whole nine yards, workforce development, maintenance facilities, whatever it takes to operate the bus. They retain the ownership just like you said. I think they're in a 10-year lease and what they want is like you said, a 10-year recurring revenue stream with a guaranteed return on their investment. And like you said, there's all sorts of people out there, pension funds who would love to get a 10% or whatever it is. I don't know what their return on investment was, but like you said, a recurring revenue stream that more than they can get by just parking their money in a bank. And because they're working with the government, it's pretty secure. So this is the way we're going to populate, I mean this concept anyways, how we're going to populate the big island with a whole brand new fleet of zero emission buses and maybe some battery electric buses for certain things. But obviously I'm the hydrogen guy, so I want him to be hydrogen. It was brilliant what he did. And the first contractor has already been chosen and using that program, they bought 10, just as a test, they bought 10 electric battery electric vehicles with all the charging infrastructure and everything like that. So it was a great program and I think I'm going to end here because we're almost out of time. But the good news is we have lots of more to talk about. So we're going to have you back maybe in another three or four weeks and we can continue this discussion, but I'll let you say the final word and then we'll sign off. Well, time goes so fast in this subject, but the subject is so important. What we're talking about is the survival of our civilization. No less than that, we're dealing with a pandemic that's viral. Now we're dealing with a chemical problem and that is having kind of a mechanical influence with the climate disruption. So this is a matter of life and death and what's important is the realization and the truth that if you have sunlight and water, you can be as industrial as you want and not hurt anybody, not hurt our future generations, not hurt our biosphere. And that is the most important thing we can do right now. So with that we'll sign off. The takeaway from this is hydrogen, the great decarbonizer, and the hope for our future. Thank you so much, Toby, and we'll be talking to you in another few weeks. Aloha. Thank you. Aloha.