You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got a special guest Jack Brouwer on the program. Welcome, Jack.

Thank you very much for having me.

Jack, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about your background and how you came to the environmental movement?

Well, I am a professor here at the University of California, Irvine and the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center. I came to be concerned about the environment as a kid, because I loved camping and hiking and backpacking and these sorts of things. I also grew up on a farm in San Diego, and had concern for agricultural things and a love for the environment.

As a result, I studied energy conservation and energy conversion technologies for my PhD and have been doing energy conversion technologies ever since primarily now focused on electrochemical energy conversion, which is primarily through electrolysis, hydrogen fuel cells and batteries.

That’s, that’s great stuff. So tell us a little bit more about the national fuel cell research that you’re doing and doing down at UCI.

So we have several faculty who have expertise in a broad set of areas, my particular expertise that are associated with the National Fuel Cell Research Center, my particular expertise is in high temperature for solid oxide electrolyzers fuel cells and related technologies. So these are ceramic fuel cells and ceramic electrolyzers.

And we are advancing these because they can achieve very high efficiency for producing hydrogen on the one hand and converting hydrogen back to electricity on the other hand, so that the round trip efficiency of a hydrogen economy can be supported by these types of electrolyzers and fuel cells.

We have expertise in the lower temperature, proton exchange membrane types of fuel cells, especially represented by Professor arenas. And Yuck, we have people who are doing amazing work in brand new electro catalysts that can be used in fuel cells and electrolyzers, like palm and autonomous off and voice demand KOVITCH. So we have other professors that are doing these other things that are also related to electrochemistry hydrogen and enabling this zero emissions future.

So tell us about some of the things that are kind of in the marketplace right now in in cars, such as the the Toyota MRI that I drive, which is a hydrogen fuel cell car versus the types of hydrogen technology that you’re working on.

Well, the type of technology that’s in a Toyota MRI today is a proton exchange membrane fuel cell, it requires pure hydrogen for its operation. And also as a result requires investment in hydrogen infrastructure for fueling it, which was started from scratch here in the early 2010. timeframe. The technology that I work on is not necessarily for automobiles, it is a higher temperature takes a long time to start and to get warm.

But then can operate dynamically on the grid to complement sun and wind power. So think of it this way as a stationary system, that can be operating in electrolysis mode to make hydrogen whenever there’s a lot of sun and wind power available. And that can operate in the other direction from the stored hydrogen to make electricity when there’s no sun or wind power.

And then if you couple it to the natural gas grid as we decarbonize it, then what you can do is you can actually move that hydrogen around in society use it for all kinds of other reasons, including the Toyota MRI, and use it for massive energy storage and use and other end uses.

Now, are you familiar with the work that’s being done in Lancaster by Mayor Rex Paris and you’re shaking your head? Yes, you get tell us what your familiarity is. We had Mayor Rex on the show a little while ago, and he told us a lot about the hydrogen. How he’s linking up this stuff. We’ll learn hydrogen power in Lancaster. So maybe you could guess your perspective there.

So first of all, the mayor of Lancaster was quite visionary to establish his city as one of the first hydrogen cities in the whole United States. And he’s doing so because he realizes, as we have realized, for many years now, that when you if you want to engender a high renewable content in your energy system, both for transportation and for electricity, then what you must do is you must have certain features, features like massive energy storage, because there always are a couple of weeks where you don’t have a lot of sun and wind power.

And that is engendered by the features of hydrogen which separate the power and energy features of the storage system. In other words, you need a fuel cell and electrolyzer for the power amount, but you size the tank for the energy mo Hmm, okay, we can’t do that with batteries.

Batteries have a certain kilowatt and a certain kilowatt hours, certain amount of power, certain amount of energy. If you need more power, buy more batteries. If you need more energy, buy more batteries, and you end up with a pile of batteries, way too much power capability that you don’t need.

But you need that many for the energy. So this is So realizing this kind of a feature, pointed him in the direction of investing in hydrogen. And one of the particular investments is together with Helio Gen, which is a high temperature, solar thermal means of facilitating hydrogen production. Okay, so this is really interesting.

And it’s directly related to my research on high temperature electrolysis, which can take a thermal input and electrical input to make hydrogen at very high efficiencies. So this is one of the things that he’s investing in there, in addition to the solar and the wind, and everything that’s also there.

So how do you see that being able to roll out across the state of California across the United States and ultimately across the world.

So the techno economic analyses that we have done for hydrogen production from sun and wind power, show that today, the capital cost of the electrolyzer and the fuel cell, very significantly contribute to the cost of renewable hydrogen. But that, in the end, when those come down a learning rate curve when they become more commonplace, and when and when the market size of fuel cells and electrolyzers gets to be a reasonable size, then the most important cost is actually the renewable energy itself.

So what do I mean by this? So today, it’s pretty expensive to make renewable hydrogen from solar power, wind power through electrolysis. And it’s partly because of the capital cost of the electrolysis, but also partly because still, solar power and wind power are a little too expensive. But we already know those are coming down and down and down all the time, we need to install more and more of those.

And in California, we’re starting to already curtail some of that, because we make too much at certain times. And we can’t even use it, we have to force people to buy it in Arizona and Nevada at negative prices. Yeah, that’s kind of crazy. It is crazy. That’s crazy. However, eventually, we will have so much of this, that it’s going to make a lot of sense to put it into electrolyzers, it’s going to make a lot of sense to put the cheaper electricity that’s available on the shoulders of this excess into electrolyzers. And then the electrolyzers costs are going to come down.

And as a matter of fact, the US Department of Energy is going to invest so much in the hydrogen economy, they expect the cost per kilogram of hydrogen made in this sort of way to be $1 per kilogram, which is almost an order of magnitude less than what it costs today.

And let me let me make let me make a point about how does that compare with the cost of energy from petroleum or natural gas natural gas if it was $1 per kilogram?

Yes, if it’s $1 per kilogram, then it’s comparable to the cost of natural gas today and much cheaper than the cost of petroleum today. Okay, petroleum distillate fuels that we use in transportation. However, hydrogen is more difficult to move around in society.

So We’re gonna pay more, after we make it, to put it in the pipelines to deliver it to the fueling stations, and then to have the fueling stations dispense it to vehicles. However, our suggested prices at the pump are order of magnitude $3, then $2 for moving it around and paying for all the infrastructure and $1 for making it.

And that $3 per kilogram, it’s roughly half the price per mile as gasoline today, because you know, you can go twice as many miles per energy content. Okay. So I think in the end, this renewable hydrogen is going to be cheaper than petroleum and about the cost of natural gas.

Well, I think that we’ve got to invest in in the hydrogen technology the same as we invested in fossil fuels and oil and the like, we have tons of pipelines, use, you know, use to transport oil and natural gas, we should invest in pipelines for hydrogen in the same way.

So you’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. My guest today is Jack Brouwer. We’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, your host. And I’ve got Jack Brouwer, professor at UCI. And we’re talking about hydrogen and how it can help us get to a green economy.
And before the before the break. Professor, I was talking to you about Lancaster and what they’re doing there to get to a zero emissions economy. And I know you would talk to us about one of the ways they’re doing it with the Helio Gen project. Maybe you could talk to us about some of the other things they’re doing and how we can use those technologies across the state of California and across the country.

Yeah, Lancaster has also invested in I think two other ways of using hydrogen as a means to store renewable energy or to convert a waste stream into this valuable hydrogen that displaces diesel and gasoline in automobiles. So one of the things that they have invested in and are supporting in Lancaster is a power to gas to power system.

And this idea is to take renewable electricity through an electrolyzer and to produce hydrogen when we have plenty of that renewable energy available. And to store that hydrogen. And then to at a later time, put that hydrogen through a fuel cell to make electricity. In this way, hydrogen is acting like an energy storage medium, just like a battery, it has electricity going in, and electricity coming out. But the benefit of storing it as hydrogen is associated with a number of features that hydrogen provides that batteries can’t like the fact that it doesn’t have self discharge.

Any type of battery, which has the chemicals in close contact with the electrodes cannot stop but have a bit of discharge of the chemical energy over time, even without getting net flow from the electrodes. Okay, so you have intimate contacting of the electrodes with the chemicals and as a result over time the batteries die. Okay, okay. What we have with the fuel cell and electrolyzer is, you make the hydrogen in the electrolyzer, but you store it in a tank, the tanks over there. It’s not touching the electrodes.

And so you can for a very long time, store that hydrogen and return it back to electricity. You know this from your own experience with things like batteries in your cell phones, right? So if you have your cell phone, charged, fully charged, and you turn it off, when you turn it back on a week later, it’s only at 90% charge, what happened? Self discharge, how about your car?

You don’t drive it for six months, and it doesn’t start. Why not because there’s anything wrong with the battery. It’s a natural phenomenon of self discharge. So if you need to store energy from the summer and to deliver it in the winter, you can’t do it with batteries. You got to do it something like hydrogen This is what the Power to Gas the power can No.

But it’s a pretty amazing technology in terms of other efficiencies, that hydrogen has visa vie solar. Maybe you could talk about the lithium ion batteries and the cost of kind of creating those to the environment as well. The mining and such. Yes.

First of all, batteries are very important to our zero emission future and lithium ion batteries are really amazing. They are being used in all of our consumer electronics. And they have very high power densities, very high energy densities. And they’re important to our zero emissions, transportation future and even to our electric grid. But we have to realize the limitations that they also have.

Like I said earlier, they’re not good for long duration storage. And we cannot use them for the massive amount of storage we need at the grid scale. Why can we not use them? First, because they can’t, they have self discharge. Second, because you can’t separate the power and energy so that you have to buy too many of them for how much energy you need to store.

But third, the magnitude of energy storage that the grid needs when it has very high renewable content could never be stored in lithium ion batteries. Simply because we don’t have enough lithium and cobalt, the main constituents in lithium ion battery anywhere around the world to make even one battery that can do that.

So how could we do it with the hydrogen to store the energy coming from the solar and wind farms and keep it for evening or when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining? How do we do that?

So the good news is that we make the hydrogen from water. And water is very abundant compared to lithium and cobalt in particular. Okay, and so when we make it from water, we take it through renewable energy going into the electrolyzer plus water going into the electrolyzer and we make renewable hydrogen, that hydrogen can be stored in pipelines, like the pipelines that we use for natural gas today.

And in the underground storage facilities that we use, also for natural gas today. And those facilities are have a massive amount of energy storage capability. And this sort of technology is being proven. In Texas today. We have two massive geological structures, underground geologic structures that are storing safely and with zero leakage, at least according to air wikid. Zero leakage in underground geologic formation.

These happen to be salt caverns, which are a little bit different than what we have in California, but it’s the same sort of thing. Underground geologic formations where we can store hydrogen in massive quantities and for a long period of time.

And we make are they are they doing it in Texas? What’s what’s going on in Texas?

Well, Texas has a very high hydrogen demand because of their refinery complexes. And the geology they have there is for salt caverns. These are caverns that were made from mining of salt. And there are over 3000 of them in Texas. And those have proven capabilities for storing hydrogen. The ones that we have here in California are depleted oil and gas fields.

They are not yet proven to store hydrogen. So we have some research and development to do to enable that here in California. However, they’re building a brand new one in Utah right now. Okay, that is serving la DWP. Okay, so California power is going to come through hydrogen stored in a salt cavern in Utah to La consumers.

That’s pretty fascinating. So how much how many of those would we need to have to kind of meet the storage needs for for California?

Very nice question. Because we are if we are able to convert the depleted oil and gas fields that we currently use to store natural gas today in California, if we’re able to convert those to renewable hydrogen, they would be sufficient.

So we would not have to even build any new storage facilities. Now again, this is if we are able to convert them to renewable hydrogen from the current natural gas storage that they accomplished for us.

What are we what are we doing currently to test those, the storage facilities in California so we can determine whether they are safe and effective.

So there are some small efforts that are underway to test various aspects of storing hydrogen in these facilities. And in Europe, and in other places around the world. They have actually tested with real hydrogen injection into some some similar facilities.

But this is just emerging now as an option for our highly renewable future. But it’s super valuable to the ability to introduce solar and wind power and very high quantities. This this storage in existing underground facilities is super valuable to zero emissions future.

Where where are we at in California in terms of renewables? How much of our electricity are we getting from sun and wind?

Yeah, we’re getting about 35 to 40% of our electricity today from renewables, which is a pretty remarkable number, but it’s the easiest part. Because we’re able to complement that now with a whole bunch of natural gas combustion that goes on and off every day. Okay, it goes on and off every day.

And interestingly, it’s the main electricity that’s powering battery electric vehicles. Natural gas fire is natural gas power is the main electricity going into battery electric vehicles, because most of them are charging at night when the sun’s good Sun’s down. Interestingly, there’s more than 40% renewable content in the fuel that’s going into your MRI. Okay, oh, Mariah is more renewable than a Tesla.

How is that, tell tell us why is that?

Because the most Tesla’s are charging at night using primarily natural gas power because the majority of our renewable energy is coming to us from sun. And that’s only where’s the where’s the Mariah energy coming from probably, ah, the Mariah energy comes from mostly biogas but some renewable electrolysis, as I’ve been describing, so there’s biogas that gets converted into hydrogen that goes to the fueling station that you feel that.

Okay, well, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, and our guest Jack Brouwer, professor at UCI. And we’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, and our guest today, Jack Brouwer, professor at University of California Irvine. Professor, we’re at 35% renewable content and electricity. How do we get to complete zero emissions electricity in California and around the country?

Yes, thank you the we’ve done a remarkable job of adopting sun and wind power in the state of California getting to that 35% number. And all around the world, other jurisdictions have done similar things. So for example, in Germany, they are at even higher renewable content, but it is the first 50% or so of renewable energy. That’s the easiest, because you can complement it with natural gas plants that are cycling up and down.

But if we have to start removing more and more of that natural gas power, which we depend upon every evening, and which we depend upon, especially over particular season, then you start to need a large amount of energy storage, and storage that can store for a long period of time. And this is where hydrogen is preferred over other storage options like battery energy storage. And this again, is because it doesn’t suffer from self discharge.

So hydrogen can be stored in a tank over here, or in an underground facility over here, and for a long time, without losing any of the energy. But it also has separate power and energy scaling again, so that if we can size the electrolyzers and fuel cells for the power, and we size the tank for the energy, and that makes it a lot cheaper for a massive amount of storage.

And so that’s why hydrogen will be adopted for high renewable content. High renewable content is going to require long duration and massive and seasonal energy storage that hydrogen is best at.

So why do we have so much smaller amounts? renewable energy and transportation applications today.

So transportation depends upon a very high energy density carrier that that we move around. So for example, the petroleum distillate fuels can store way more energy on a volumetric and mass basis than batteries, order of magnitude 100 times more energy is available in a gasoline tank than in a battery of the same size. order of magnitude 10 times more energy than hydrogen is available in gasoline. Hmm, it’s a beautiful energy carrier for transportation because of this very high volumetric and gravimetric energy density.

And so it’s difficult to actually make batteries good enough to actually go a reasonable distance. Now we are starting to have those kinds of batteries. It’s also difficult to store hydrogen in that amount of energy density. And so you can see that for transportation applications, which depend upon a high energy density carrier, it’s more difficult to compete with that than it is to have a power plant over here, that doesn’t matter how much it weighs, doesn’t matter how much it how large it is. Okay, so it’s just that the energy density requirements of transportation are so stringent.

And this is especially the case for things like airplanes, and long haul trucks, right, that have to carry a big payload. And so we imagine that those will most likely not be powered by batteries very much, but rather by hydrogen, which has this energy density benefit compared to batteries. So only if you have to go short distance.

And you don’t mind charging for a long period of time, and you’d have to carry a heavy payload, then batteries might be more efficient, but they don’t have those features of fast fueling long range and heavy payload. That’s where hydrogen shines for transportation.

It seems as though hydrogen would certainly be the fuel of the future for trucks in particular and, and planes. Because I don’t think there’s a battery powered plane that’s going to take off anytime soon.

Yeah, lightweight drones and very lightweight aircraft. Maybe batteries are okay. But hydrogen for most everything else.

Where are we at in terms of making that transition to hydrogen trucks and hydrogen planes I saw recently there was a hydrogen helicopter that they’re working on.

Yeah. The Majors, Boeing and Airbus. They’re all investing in hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives as fuels for their future. But we also have a very large number of startup companies that are making hydrogen aircraft today. We also know that the technology itself, which has been advanced very significantly, the fuel cells are much more power dense than they used to be.

And the hydrogen storage facilities, we know how to make many of these because of the large investment, especially of the vehicle OEMs, you know, Toyota and General Motors and Daimler and Honda and Hyundai. They’ve made huge investments, and the technology is really advanced significantly. And so we’re starting to see, you know, actual aircraft being built that are using hydrogen today.

What saw that one of the car companies that pulled out of the hydrogen vehicle making and I can’t recall if it was Hyundai, or Honda, what why do you think they did that?

So, Honda is very active still. And they’re one of the leaders both in passenger vehicles and in heavy duty trucks, like Toyota, they’re investing in both of those. And so we’re seeing both Toyota and Hyundai very active. And so as Daimler and many, many others, General Motors is doing this to now. Honda stopped offering their clarity in the fuel cell model, I believe, primarily because of the infrastructure challenges they are experiencing all around the world.

And we’re experiencing them here, you probably experience him or herself in your own driving of the MRI. The infrastructure is very nascent. It is just beginning to be installed. And it’s not widely available. And then the supply chain for providing the hydrogen is again, just brand new infrastructure.

There was a there was no infrastructure to start with, which is one of the reasons why hydrogen hasn’t had as big of an uptake amongst consumers, as battery electric vehicles have been because everyone can charge their own battery electric vehicle in their garage.

Well, just to say I really haven’t had too much of a problem in getting fuel for the Orion I’ve this is actually the second one I’ve had. So I’ve been driving the one for three and a half years. Yes. And it has not been too challenging to get fuel. And I’ve driven from here to San Francisco before and there’s you can do it.

But I would say that California seems to be certainly far and away the leader in this front and I was wondering what efforts the Biden administration and and Congress is taking to, to roll out hydrogen infrastructure across the country, because it’s certainly an investment I believe, worth making.

And that for probably five to $10 billion, they could probably create a reliable hydrogen network across the country, which is far less than what has been spent on the oil and gas industry to create their infrastructure.

Absolutely. And it’s very interesting that you note, the Biden administration has established within the US Department of Energy, a program of Earth shots, which is major investments, akin to the moon shot of the Kennedy administration. So this is the idea behind the earth shots. And the very first Earth shot that they announced was for hydrogen energy.

They are the first administration first federal administration that has recognized the needed investment in hydrogen to achieve our zero emissions goals and energy and environmental sustainability, the first administration to do that, and they’re going to invest a lot in making sure that hydrogen can contribute to our zero emissions and renewable future.

What are those investments that they propose and making and what investments have they already started making?

So, the very first, the main motto of the hydrogen energy Earth shot is $1 for one kilogram within one decade. So that is primarily focused upon hydrogen production. So the enabling of sun and wind power plus electrolysis, for producing that hydrogen to get it down to $1 is a major focus of their investment.

But another major focus of their investment is regional hubs that will engender the kinds of things that I talked about a connection to the electric grid that supports high renewable content and the electric grid, but then also connecting it to transportation applications and other end uses that will require hydrogen.

So for example, decarbonizing steel is impossible with electricity alone, decarbonizing cement, decarbonize carbonizing, pharmaceutical production and ammonia production, you need hydrogen or something like it to do these kinds of things. And so these difficult to decarbonize applications are another focus of that administration investment.

Well, it’s a it’s fascinating, I read Bill Gates his book, and he talks about those hard to decarbonize areas such as cement making and fertilizer production, and and what we’re going to do, unfortunately, he does not really focus as much attention on use of hydrogen. He does talk about it, but I don’t think he explains it as well as he might.

So why don’t you stay tuned to KABC 790, Unite and Heal America and you’ll learn more from Professor Jack Brouwer about how we can go about decarbonizing our economy through the use of hydrogen and create this earth shot, which will drop the price of hydrogen to $1 per kilogram, which is revolutionary. We’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’m talking to Professor Jack Brouwer of United, I mean University of California Irvine. And we’re just talking about the Earth shot, which President Biden had announced regarding getting the price of $1 getting the hydrogen price to $1 per kilogram. And where are we at in that process? And how are we going to get there?

Well, the investment is needed in the production technology itself, these electrolyzers. And that investment will not only reduce the individual cost of electrolyzers and their components and make them more durable so that they can last longer and things like this. But it will also enable the broader market investment in this technology, meaning just a larger number of orders of these kinds of equipment that both will contribute to have a dramatic cost reduction in the electrolysis technology itself.

But we also must, at the same time continue to invest in wind and solar technologies, and have the cost of the primary energy that goes into these electrolyzers go down. So both are required. Low cost, primary energy that comes either from like a waste stream or bio, or from sun and wind power, that are the primary inputs to the hydrogen conversion technologies, the technologies that make the hydrogen, we also then need to be able to move it around in society.

So we need to invest in the infrastructure, making pipelines or transforming pipelines that currently carry something that is fossil to something that will be zero emissions, like renewable hydrogen. And that kind of investment, I think also will be featured by the Biden administration, and then also those underground storage facilities that I was talking about earlier.

We’re not sure what we have to invest in to make those hydrogen ready. So these kinds of investments are going to be really important to enabling the cost to come down substantially.

Will we be able to use the natural gas pipelines that are currently in place that run both commercial for commercial use, as well as residential use? Most of us have a natural gas pipeline in going into our homes to power, whether it’s our furnaces, or stoves, are they going to be able to be used for hydrogen in the future?

So there’s two aspects of that question. The very first is whether or not they can be used to deliver mixtures of fossil natural gas plus a certain fraction of renewable hydrogen? And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. So for example, we could deliver up to a certain percentage, we don’t know the percentage yet to almost all end uses throughout the whole United States using the exact infrastructure we’re using today, moving renewable hydrogen around in society, so we could start doing that immediately.

But eventually, we need to get rid of all the fossil. And that will require some research and development and some investment in the pipelines themselves, the regulators, the valves, the seals, and things in the infrastructure, and maybe even the meter sets that are at your home might have to have something a little bit different, right? Maybe your stove at home would have to have a slightly smaller hole size, if it’s burning hydrogen, instead of natural gas, these kinds of investments must be made to go to 100% hydrogen.

So I imagine and we’ve done research to show that it’s quite feasible to first introduce up to 20%. And we can do that with existing infrastructure, no invent no other no other investments, and then to piecewise transform parts of it to 100% Hydrogen, after we invest in the research that’s required for that.

And what would be the advantage of going to 20% hydrogen as opposed to 100% natural gas currently?

So that would immediately partially decarbonize all of the applications that used that 20% Hydrogen mixture. So it would displace the combustion of the carbon that’s in the matte natural gas, right, and reduce the fossil fuel consumption.

Okay. So yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, finish your thought.

But even more important than that, is it would be a massive resource for storage, and transport and delivery of renewable sun and wind power. Okay, use the natural gas system to deliver massive amounts of sun and wind power via the gas system, even at 20%. That’s a massive amount of new sun and wind power that goes into the California infrastructure.

Right and that that we’re giving away to Arizona Correct. Currently because we got too much capacity? We can deliver some of that to people’s consumer use their barbecues, their their heaters, their water heaters.

Yeah.

So how can we achieve zero emissions in all sectors of the economy?

So hydrogen has unique features that enable decarbonisation in difficult to decarbonize applications. So for example, some applications need a feedstock, meaning a chemical. They can’t make that chemical without hydrogen. An example of that is ammonia or other fertilizers.

They need hydrogen, which they’re currently getting from fossil resources. And so renewable hydrogen made in the way we’ve just been discussing today is a feedstock for that. There are other chemicals that we use in society that need that hydrogen as a feedstock, or even food items.

Like, could you explain that a little bit further as to what a feedstock is? And why, say solar energy electricity alone couldn’t fill that need?

Yes. We make ammonia and other fertilizers first by getting hydrogen and nitrogen, h2 and into into a chemical process that chemically binds them together. It’s called the haber bosch process. Very famous process, it changed the world. It’s one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

Anyways, what and what you do is you have to chemically relax, react hydrogen with nitrogen to make ammonia and h three. So you need the hydrogen, it’s impossible to make it with electricity. But just that you need energy, no, no, you need the chemicals. The H is you need it.

Okay. Similarly, with are those of us who, you know, haven’t been through college chemistry classes, this is a useful teaching.

Um, okay. So a feedstock means that you need the H, you need the H2, that atom the molecule. But hydrogen also can make higher temperatures, then electricity can make when you burn it, and some industry processes need this really high temperature that hydrogen could produce.

Other things that need a reducing gas, they need something that will make the environment not exposed to oxygen.

So for example, when you’re making computer chips, when you’re making computer chips, if you do that in air, you will ruin the the cellular Harborfront Yeah, you’ll you’ll ruin your, your, your, your chip itself, okay?

Because it will be exposed to air and it will oxidize all the metal components in that computer chip. Same with making glass or making other things and so hydrogen can do that. Okay, what about making steel? What about making cement, hydrogen has an ability to decarbonize these things that you can’t do with electricity.

Finally, I want to mention these difficult transportation applications, ships and planes, and long haul trucks, the low weight of hydrogen can enable these to become completely zero emissions. But batteries always have a shorter duration, a much smaller payload, because they end up being so heavy in these kinds of applications.

So these are the sorts of things you cannot decarbonizing without something that has the features of hydrogen, the lightweight the long duration, high energy density, that reducing gas, the feedstock, so many things that hydrogen can do to make them zero emission.

Now, how what’s your position on the use of nuclear power in our in a zero emissions economy? Are you for it or you think it’s a bad idea?

So in the state of California, we consumers have decided we don’t want nuclear and I think we can we have a chance here because we have a lot of sun and wind power available to us to do it without nuclear, we can do it without nuclear here in California, but other jurisdictions already have invested in nuclear plants that are being safely operated and that have been have a means by which they can handle the waste that I think are acceptable, the risks for that and zero carbon emissions associated with that I think are acceptable.

And in particular, the fusion reactor reactors that people are investing in which have also no waste stream are very interesting, but I don’t know for sure if they’ll succeed. So um, I think that it’s not a bad idea to think about and invest in nuclear as part of our zero emissions future. I don’t like the fission reactors because of the waste. Okay. The Fusion ones, maybe?

Yeah, it’s it’s a tough choice. And even though I’m not wild about the fission reactors, either I think that a good case can be made that in the short term, we kind of have to consider them as part of the mix because given the risk to the planet, taking a deep dive because of global warming, some serious measures are required.

But I appreciate you being on the show, Professor. It’s been a pleasure having you and we look forward to talking with you in the future about how the hydrogen economy is is moving and the amazing steps that has taken over the last decade to to help help us achieve a zero emissions economy and a cleaner future for for our planet.

So thank you and you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is your host, Matt Matern. We look forward to having you back next week to talk with us further.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks, Professor. It’s been a pleasure and educational for sure.

Thank you.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.