0:00
/
0:00
AAH #679 - Can We Convince You Fuel Cells Have a Future?
AAH #679 - Can We Convince You Fuel Cells Have a Future?
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
About this episode
Hydrogen fuel cells are gaining traction as a viable alternative to traditional powertrains, especially in heavy-duty applications. Charlie Freeze from GM discusses the recent advancements in fuel cell technology, including a new production facility in partnership with Honda. The conversation covers the challenges of scaling production, the importance of hydrogen infrastructure, and the unique advantages of fuel cells in commercial vehicles like trucks and forklifts. Insights into cost comparisons with diesel and battery technologies, as well as safety considerations, make this episode a deep dive into the future of hydrogen in the automotive industry.
Topics:
fuel cell technology
hydrogen infrastructure
commercial applications
production scalability
cost comparisons
safety considerations
automotive partnerships
heavy-duty vehicles
renewable hydrogen
TOPIC: Fuel Cells PANEL: Charlie Freese, General Motors; Lindsay Brooke, Freelance; Gary Vasilash, on Automotive; John McElroy, Autoline.tv
Filter:
|
Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Car
Chevrolet Equinox
"...ld easily fit underhood. The reason we had in the equinox then was it took an equinox to house that origina..."
Car
Honda Crv
"... Now Honda's going to do that. Excuse me with the CRV one right, Well, what do you think of that? Of to..."
Select text to request an explanation
I'll do online after hours is brought to you by bridge Stone Tires Solutions for your journey. Ready to do another show? Absolutely, I am too.
It's gonna be a good one. It's gonna be a good one because we're
going to be talking about hydrogen and fuel cells. The future, the future
of tomorrow future is now. Well, let's find out we know it's now.
Well, we've got Charlie Freeze, who runs all fuel cell development at General Motors globally. We've also got Lindsay Brook, our fellow colleague here and
Charlie. Let's get to the bottom of this. I mean, we've all
been writing about fuel cells, we the journalists, you know, for decades now decades, and you know, we know so much about them, and it's always been boy, you know, in another ten years and this is probably the thirtieth of another ten years that it's it just hasn't happened yet.
Are we ever going to see fuel cells in vehicles? Well, it's happening,
John, Actually, yesterday we just pulled the wrappers off of our plant that's over here in Brownstown, it's not too far from here, and that's the joint venture of fifty to fifty with Honda where we're producing fuel cell systems now and those will go into Honda applications, they'll go into different places that we're installing fuel cells, and we've announced a few things in the last six months about different places that we're targeting to put the fuel cells. And one
of the great examples is in autocar applications. So if you're not familiar with
Autocar, they make big Class eight trucks, but these are not just semi trucks, which they do make, but it's also going into applications like cement mixers and dump trucks and refuse haulers and things that can really take advantage of what a hydrogen fuel cell can offer and batteries would be much more challenged to do. So it's happening now. Yeah. So I was actually there yesterday
and I mean they literally have a factory and they literally have people that are there. It's just like any factory you can mentionine. The thing I've started
wondering about, Charlie is is that what are the sort of skills that you needed to bring there to be able to do this technology that we've been waiting.
You know, people have been doing this like making jewelry, right, I mean like one by one, but now you guys are have a production process. Yeah. So it there was a lot that went into bring in
fuel cells to where they could really be production viable. And I don't mean
as a curiosity. I mean everybody knows that it's a really interesting way to
make electricity with two invisible gases, oxygen and hydrogen. Everybody knows that that's
been done in a lab for a long time. But the trick is to
make it something that you can scale for production. And we had to do
a lot of work to develop the new designs as well as the manufacturing processes, borrowing from other industries as well. So we have the things that we
know how to do as an automaker that's made high volume for a long time.
We've had our partner Honda, all the things they've learned. All of
that came in, but we also had to bring in some things that came from other industries. And one great example is the filmmaking business like Kodeac.
And so if you think about how you make film, which is layers that are deposited on top of each other, and in the case of also putting it on big role to roll coders, so's it's like from the paper making business. So we brought those technologies together and that allowed us to go in
and start to build the capability to do very high volume production of the soft goods that go inside the fuel cell stack and do it at high quality.
So even though this thing might be coming off at seven meters of material per minute, we can scan it and find micron level defects and call those out if there's any manufacturing defect and avoid those defects propagating into the actual parts.
All that had to be developed. So those are the types of things that
we brought in. And I think you've been through our lab in Pontiac before.
That lab is basically where we used it as a proving grounds for all the manufacturing techniques. So everything from the roll to roll coders, to the
way that we do the quality detection on the membranes, the way we mix the inks that are printed onto these things, all that we did it in the lab in Pontiac. So right there where the engineers are doing the design
and development, they're developing the processes right there alongside it. And that was
a big enabler to making all this happen. And then the other thing is
automation. So we've gone in. You probably saw the place where all the
stacking of the fuel cell stack is done. So you take these big roll
coats coated material which is the membrane with the electrode on the two sides of it, and then we take that out and we cut it and we shape it to the right size. We put on a gasket layer basically, and
then it moves into this stacker which is all robots swinging around. You can't
even get very close to it because there's fencing to protect you from all the different robots, and all these robots are literally just going in here ten second cycle time, reprocessing these parts into a stack, and it's quite amazing, and it just the engineers that have done all this hard work for all these years have really perfected the elements that go into making this design possible. And
it's also scalable, so we can do something here that we're in the beginning of the industry cycle of this. It's not like we're building millions of them
every year, so we have to allow ourselves the flexibility to scale up as demand develops, still using the same technologies that in themselves are designed to be scalable, and that's part of what we've done, Trilie, in this long I mean, I've been covering this since I think that eighties, and GM has always been in the forefront in terms of IP and just you know, subsystem and component development of the fuel cell. You got to a point where
you had a thing called Project Driveway, which was actually putting fuel cells in I think equinoxes time if I'm correct, on that racked up a lot of miles, a lot of user miles, real people driving these things. And
then it seemed like there was kind of a period where we didn't hear much from General Motors, and we heard things from other automakers and so forth.
And I even covered a fuel cell powered submarine for the German Navy that Ballard was developing. So these things were happening in different places, and you mentioned
all these other industries kind of gaining knowledge from these other industries in terms of manufacturing and so forth. Was there a point that really kicked this off?
Was it the partnership with Honda or it seems like your program has accelerated in the last four or five years faster than it had in the past. Well,
that's a good point, Lindsay. I think if we go back to
Project Driveway, that was a stack, it was actually two stacks. Every
one of those fuel cell systems had two stacks. Trede. I drove that.
I drove an Equinox found all day driving around LA in it. Yeah,
And it was a two hundred twenty cells per stax of four hundred and forty cells inside one of those systems. And they were done on basically a
carbon composite plate and the membranes were in there heavily loaded with platinum. So
we had over eighty grams of platinum in that fuel cell system. Was this
like Gen one? Would you call this Gen one? We call that Gen
zero zero? Yeah, So that was basically proving that the technology had what
it would take in the future once the problems are solved to kind of get you to where it needed to be, but also showing that it could meet the customer expectations. And that's really what Project Driveway did. It showed a
three hundred mile range vehicle that could go out there and refuel quickly in minutes.
It could be in your garage, it could deal with all the safety and make it so it's not a special vehicle that you need. I mean
the very first time vehicles were fueled, they were fueled with people in hazmat suits and grounding cables and all these other things. I mean, we moved
it to a consumer level. Consumer level, it's something that you could just
do. I mean, I had it in my garage. You know,
my kids rode in it, you know. I mean, it was no
big deal, right, it was just standard how you use your every day driver. So that was where we were at that point. We had to
get much lower cost. You know, the platinum levels and that eighty grams
that wasn't commercial. Metals were unrealistic and from the cost exactly. So at
the time, right around where I took over the program, Biral McCormick had done a lot of work along with Larry Burns. They were trying to get
the technologies, you know, understand what the future had to be, what the trajectories were. So we got a team that did what we called the
Automotive Competitive Study. So we looked at this and we said, okay,
kind of asymptotic analysis, where does the technology need to go, what are the enablers to get it? There and we developed from that point forward that
kind of instructed the work to do what we call Gen one. So Gen
one was this very compact system. It looked like a line for gasoline engine
that would easily fit underhood. The reason we had in the equinox then was
it took an equinox to house that original Gen zero, but we actually had Gen one so they would package under a small sedan engine compartment, things like that. So it was early two thousand times, so this was around two
thousand and eight two thousand and nine ish timeframe, and we started to get that kind of a system put together. We cut the platinum level in half.
We made some directional changes in terms of the design, so getting away from those carbon fiber or carbon composite plates where they were very thick, so the repeating distance on the stack was very long, so you get tall stacks.
So if you went to a stamped metallic plate. Borrowing from the automotive
industry experience on things like head gaskets, right, we know how to make a lot of head gaskets and do them economically, So we got to these bipolar plates. They could be stamped and so that took the cost down that
took the packaging down. It made it much more reasonable to move forward,
and we simplified the mechanization of the overall system, the number of sensors, the number of valves, all those things, and borrowed from the parts bins of things that are more automotive in nature and that could That simplified the design.
And then because what you said, we we had millions and millions of miles on that Equinox fleet, we we spent that time with that fleet not just accumulating a lot of miles, but we developed the analytical models that let us model exactly how those vehicles were operating in the field. So when we
went to Gen one, we didn't need another one hundred and something vehicles out there to go and prove out what it would do. We validated the models
in the lab, we could prove how that would operate on the vehicle.
So we kind of went down that road to lab to math, virtual modeling pathway and that was incredibly enabling. So with that we learned even faster.
So to your point, we accelerated the learning periods and we also learned in the laboratory how to accelerate the durability testing I mean, you can imagine just if you're if you're developing these high mileage systems, and if we start talking about replacing diesels, you have to get to very high miles. So you
want to get to a thirty thousand hour system. You're not trying to deal
with something that lasts one or two thousand hours, million million mile durabilities where you have to start heading. And so you have to be able to test
these to prove everything out, and you have to do it with acceleration test.
That's not anything that existed in the testing methodology. So that was a
big leap. That was a big, big leap. Yeah, we had
to do that. And so now we have those accelerations and we can put
those acceleration factors into our testing and all of what we launched yesterday, the Gen two system has been down using those models. We took what we learned
in the Gen one, We took what Honda brought to the team. We
had number one and number two in the patent space when we started our joint collaboration twenty thirteen yep, and then all of that together we started kind of building this out, and in parallel we had to kind of develop some of these applications, because I think the first place that this is going to make the most sense, where it's really economically paying off for the users, is going to be in the largest vehicles first, and truck long haul trucking if you're talking about road applications, big mind haul trucks if you talk about off road. So we're working with Kamatsu and that's the nine thirty E three hundred
and twenty ton dump truck. Looks like a Tonka truck. Right. The
size of this room. Oh, it's it's incredible. You take a ladder
to get up to it, up to the cabs. So it's it's a
two megawatts of power to move this thing. Right, So it's it's a
massive vehicle. It's a big battery. You're gonna put a battery. That's
the problem, right, you see, batteries. Batteries are great. Don't
don't ever think that because I'm a fuel cell person, I'm not a battery person. I think batteries have a role to play. They're very important,
Okay, but I think the fuel cells and the batteries are complements to each other. And if you're trying to solve all the problems with a battery,
You're you're handcuffing yourself because the largest of the vehicles need the end energy storage density that you can get out of hydrogen, and you can't accomplish that with batteries, even the most leading edge batteries. For those very long operating cycles
with very heavy payloads and the need to refeel quickly, you need the hydrogen as the solution. And that's an order of magnitude less costly for putting the
same amount of energy on board the vehicle. And so that that's kind of
where you step into with this, and that's I think where we had to do a lot of development to develop those new applications because those industries weren't even looking at batteries to the level that we were doing in automotive, so we had to bring them along along that pathway. Charlie, I'm wondering. You
know, you had John driving around LA in an equinox, You had customers driving around in equinoxes. So A, what was the sort of feedback you
got not from him, from regular people, and and B you know, you talk about these these commercial applications, yet the base of information, presumably is from regular folks. So how is this reconciled so that project Driveway fleet.
I mean, I love driving those cars. They were very very they
were just they seemed commercial. You had a hard time. You had to
kind of remind yourself that those weren't production vehicles because or anything. Well,
they said they had some it said hydrogen fuel cell on the back. There's
a remarkable thing about them is that they were completely unremarkable. I think that's
the that's the right way to think of it. That is exactly the right
way. My favorite thing about it was was actually the shutdown, you know,
So that was different because we would purge the system of all the water because you didn't know if you were in a in Alaska and it would be freezing and things like that. So we'd blow out all the water and so
you'd shut it down and you walk around to the back and you just hear it make these very characteristic sounds. It is flushing the water out of the
So the water comes from them. We're assuming that everybody knows how Yeah,
So hydrogen is used as the fuel. It's the energy storage, energy carrier
for a fuel cell. So we bring that in that goes into one side
of the fuel cell and then on the other side we take air right out.
We just compress the air and we put that in on the other side.
So what happens is in a fuel cell there's a membrane with an electrode on both sides of it, and the one side where the hydrogen is.
The catalyst breaks the diatomic hydrogen, which is two atoms in the molecule, breaks them apart and separates the proton from the electron. The proton wants to
complete its charge balance and wants to rejoin and it can actually get drawn through this membrane. The electron won't, right, so the electron will make the
trip around to join it on the other side. The what the proton wants
to do is get to the oxygen on the other side, which goes through another catalytic reaction breaks that diatomic molecule part so you've got two oxygens ready to then go and combine with the hydrogen. So you basically get H two O
water and you've completed the electrical circuit because you need those electrons to make that reaction happen. When they come around to the other side, they've done the
work through a motor or whatever else you're trying to power, and your waste product is water. So that's kind of what makes them so magical, right,
is you're just putting two gases in you can't even see them, and you're making electricity, and you're doing it with efficiency in the sixty sixty five percent range, and you're making water as your exhaust product. So when we
have these going into freeze, we flush that all out because water could freeze and you don't want water collecting in different mechanical parts of the system, so you just blow it out the end of the tailpipe. And it was great
because it actually had a unique tailpipe. It was kind of segmented and you'd
watch this the steam coming out the back and made these great sounds, and so I think that was that was really kind of the fun part of it.
There were a lot of customers that when it came time for them to turn these cars back in, I mean, we had to pry the keys out of their hands because they were they were just religious followers of they wanted to buy the next hydrogen fuel cell. And unfortunately, those Equinox vehicles,
as great as they were, you know, they were still expensive and they were designed to be a development fleet. They weren't really designed to be a
production, uh feasible vehicle at that time, and so we had a lot of work to do to bring the costs down. And and now with the
Gen twos, you know, we've gotten down to we're in the range of a quarter of that precious metalone size. How big is this thing? What
have you done with the platinum all that? Yeah, so the platinum is
about a quarter of the level that we were at, and so we think you're talking twenty grams of platinum. It's in that range. Yeah, So
it's it's much less, and we've got the membranes are now made it very high volumes. As we indicated before, these plates because they're thin metal stampings,
we can basically get a very compact stack. So the stack itself is
yea big with the parts around it to go in and basically make it work.
So you've got a big compressor. It looks like a turbo charger actually,
and so it's taking some energy that's out of the waste and it's using that to help compress what's coming in. But it's electrically driven, so we
drive the air through with basically a big compressor and that compresses the air side of the stack. And then we have injectors that are injecting the hydrogen into
the system and those have some proprietary designs that GM has invented, which in the past there were different types of things like recirculation pumps and hydrogen pumps, different things that were used. But what we found was we could actually simplify
the system and use an injector with a venturi that would cause the mixing of the game ases and make everything function that way, and it looks kind of like what you might have with natural gas injection systems, if you want to think about it that way. So that's where we started leaning on the part
spins that we're out there for automotive and put that in. And then there's
coolant. And you can't underestimate the coolant on a on a fuel cell system
because an engine wastes most of its heat through the exhaust. Almost all of
our heat rejection comes through the coolant. We have very little coming out the
exhaust and or higher efficiency coming out in terms of useful work. So what
we have to have is good, good cooling, and because it's coming out so low temperature, it's going to be operating up to maybe ninety five degrees c. Because of that, that means you've got very low grade heat.
So you need a radiator that size to be able to deal with that, and that's part of the development that goes into putting these into the different vehicles.
Heat is generated just from the electrical reaction in the cell, yes, exactly, Yeah, so we keep it cool. It likes to be cool,
it likes to be humid, which it makes its own humidity. But
we actually have something that's a lot like if you remember when we've talked about diesels in the past and EGR exhaust gas recirculation was a big thing, complicated, right, because you have to run the exhaust through to dilute the combustion mixture and bring the emissions down, and then you cool it and do different things. We kind of do something like that on a fuel cell, but
it's the humidifier. So we take some of the water that's coming out and
when you run through this compression system for the air, you get some pretty dry air coming into the stack. So we want to humidify it again,
so we'll use that water coming out the backside of the tailpipe basically before it gets there, and we'll recirculate that back into the system for a humidifier.
So it's kind of like an EGR system on a level of humidity. Is
that a peak? It depends on where you are in the cycle, But
we run very wet in some cases. We're actually to the point we're developing
liquid water in the system. And you had mentioned early problems. I remember
driving in Opals of Fear in Germany back in early maybe early two thousands, and your engineers had said before you were on the program that the cold weather operation challenge was pretty much taken care of at that point. So there's no
worry about if I live in the Midgie Minnesota of buying a fuel cell mot a car, truck. And now that's a good point because what we've done
is we've targeted something that could truly be a replacement for traditional propulsion systems.
And we all know where diesels are used. I mean they're used, they're
used in the North Bank in Alaska, they're doing work everywhere, and so we couldn't have a system that was going to be compromised that way. So
our systems are designed, they work reliably reliably to start down at minus forty they'll work up to positive forty degree C. So we're in a range there,
the automotive thermal range here. That's exactly how we designed the system.
How about cost, I mean, I'm not expecting you to give us strict cost numbers, but where do you stand now versus batteries with the battery electric where do you stand against a diesel engine right now? Do you see a
pathway to get under them? Well, it's still more expensive than a diesel
engine today because we're not in the high volume the diesel engines are in, and it is a scale business and so we have to we have to try to compare on comparable scale if you really want to do a fair comparison on costs. But with the way that the precious metals have been coming down,
with the way that we've been optimizing some of the other things, like getting away from these carbon composite plates and getting to the stamplates, that's lent itself very well to being more economical and getting to where we can challenge diesels in some applications. Now, it's not going to be the right solution from a
cost basis everywhere it's basically a total cost of ownership model that you have to think about, and we pick up advantages in terms of efficiency. You have
to look at what the cost of the hydrogen is that's being used, because sometimes the hydrogen is going to be pretty economical. Sometimes you're leaning on limited
supplies in an area and the hydrogen cost goes up. But the idea that
you move toward an electrified solution where the wheels are turning constantly earning money like a mining truck, that's where you can really start to shine. And so
that's that's how we're focusing on this going forward. I think in time,
the cost of internal combustion engines and meeting the emission standards that are increasingly more challenging. You know, the after treatment systems that are in there. Some
of those after treatment systems and a diesel are using almost as much precious metal as we have in the in the fuel cell stack. Different metals sometimes it
could be palladium more than platinum and things like that, but it's still it's still you know, thousands of dollars that you can put in for after treatment costs, and that's given you some headroom in terms of where you can find the comparable fuel cell system that can compete with it, and so I think going forward, well, you know, we'll be able to compete with those diesels. And there are examples today where the propulsion system of choice from the
lowest cost solution ends up being a fuel cell. And the best thing to
look at is forklifts. They're probably the most forklifts that are out there,
and the or the I'm sorry not forkless fuel cells that are out there in the US right now are hydrogen powered. You know, if you think about
it, in the new high capacity plants where they're running three shifts, they don't have time for battery rooms and battery changes and you know, putting these things on for quick charges in between shift changes. So that's where you can
really get in and change things. And they're already paying for themselves. They're
pulling with the inion batteries out, they're putting hydrogen fuel cells in, and that that's where it's all driven by economics. You know. I think it's
great. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out to the audience that you
started out as a diesel guy, So when you're talking about diesels, this isn't like you know that, you know, like, oh, I'm a fuel cell guy, therefore diesels are you know, not as good. I
mean, so you have deep knowledge of that. I started my whole career
in diesel engines, so it's kind of ironic that today my job is to try to replace the engines that I spent all my time trying to develop, you know, whether it was all the way back to the Detroit diesel days or when I arrived at GM, and it was what a gift to be able to work on the Duramax diesel. I mean, that was taking that
engine through its generations and missionizing it and working with the team that was doing that. I mean, that was that was my dream. I mean,
that was I thought at that point my career had gotten as far as it had to go, because I had got into what I always wanted to do, is work on those those really high volume engines that make a difference.
And uh and then along came the fuel cell. So yeah, it was
it was kind of a it was kind of a little detour, and then it became it became the second half of my career. Basically, Charlie to
John's play about cost looking at some metrics of cost per kilogram of say gashous hydrogen versus a gallon of diesel fuel cost of you know, other aspects of the of the engine and also performance metrics as well, specific output and so forth, you know, versus like the standard inline six comings diesel. It
would be in one of those auto car refuse trucks. Where where does your
system stand right now? Yeah, So hydrogen today is more costly because of
how we're distributing it, how it's being dispensed, things like that. So
one gallon of gasoline or diesel fuels about this, you can think of it just round numbers. It's about the same amount of energy as a kilogram of
hydrogen. So today you're looking at gasoline that's sitting, you know, in
the three dollars a gallon range, depending on what kind of what octane you're buying. Diesels fluctuate fluctuates quite a bit, but you know it comes off
of a different end of the distillation tower. But you know, usually it's
going to be somewhere in that range. Let's just round off. I mean,
the last couple of years we've had above gasoline sometimes dropping below. But
if you just kind of say this three dollars window is about where petroleum prices are. That means that the hydrogen cost needs to get down for parity,
it's got to be within twice that number, because we're about twice as efficient on an overall propulsion basis. And so if I'm sitting at three dollars a
gallon, that means if my hydrogen should be in the six dollars a kilogram rate, and right now, my understanding is it's in the thirteen to fifteen dollars a kilogram. So if you go to California, where it's a very
nascent infrastructure, you know, there aren't a lot of stations. I think
the number right now is about sixty two or sixty five something like that, and they're very low utilization rate. I mean, those stations might feel one
vehicle a week sometimes, right, hard to make a business out of that.
And so you put in a big station fully capable of maybe doing one thousand cars and it's feeling one. Right, So that's that's not a very
practical business model. So that naturally runs up the cost of your dispensed hydrogen.
But that's not the way we should be thinking of the business, right I mean, if you're going to do this, You're going to do it at scale. Partly why we're picking these very large vehicles as one of the
starting points for the business is because they tend to operate and centrally refueled locations.
So if you're at a mine, all the trucks would refuel at the same point. So you can size that infrastructure around what the fleet demands and
keep it fully utilized, and that allows you to bring the cost down.
So price of actually producing the hydrogen is I mean, now you're well below a dollar to make hydrogen. It's a matter of storing it and compressing it
and cooling it and distributing it and all the other things that go along.
That's what runs the cost up, and getting the return on your capital to put the stations in drives it up. So we're trying to focus on these
ways that we don't have to go and bte that one off at the beginning.
We can start to tackle it in pieces, and I actually think it's going to roll out something like the diesel again. So when I started working
on diesels for automotive, nobody thought you're going to have automotive diesels and pickup trucks. I mean, that was that was viewed as why would anybody do
that? And one of the biggest excuses was nobody will want to go to
the truck stops to refuel those pickup trucks. But the propulsion system was so
fantastic that people were willing to make that compromise. They'd go to the truck
stop, they'd fuel up, and that got more vehicles on the road, And as more and more vehicles came to the road, then you could justify pretty much every meyer and you know, I fuel up admirer BP stations quite frequently they're all there with with hydrogen or I mean diesel pumps. They will
be with they will be there with hydrogen pumps. So so that's you know,
that's all there, and I think that's where this is going to start to go in the future. You'll start with these big trucks going up.
They'll be using the centralized refueling and eventually, over time, as more and more vehicles are out there, it can start to distribute into the smaller Jay wait, wait, wait, we're going to take a quick commercial break right now. We're going to give a shout out to our sponsor we'll come back
to it. How do you bridge don't tire stop shorter on what roads?
Is there hydro track technology that you don't have to know how the science works, just where the brain is. What really matters is they're bridged out talking
hydrogen fuel sales with Charlie Freeze from General Motors, and I know the way the conversation's going, we are going to run out of time before we run out of questions real quick. Okay, okay, So scaling up this hydrogen
distribution availability, so you've got users like a mine having their own distribution for the trucks and equipment that's being used there. Last year, I believe it
was, the government established these hydrogen hubs nationwide, kind of regional hubs.
You must be excited about that. In terms of another piece of the puzzle
kind of coming into this. Yeah, I think hydrogen hubs are going to
be an enabler as long as they start up in the places that are close enough to these different big users so they can get the volume, the throughput.
There's a lot of hydrogen in the country right now. It's used to
fluff gasoline in the process of the refineries. It's used in making fertilizers,
it's used in steel production, there's all used hydrogenate, peanut butter, it is. It exists in nature too, by the way, exactly, so
it's there right. What this is going to do is it's going to put
some big volume distribution networks with kind of a hub and spoke. And as
that starts to roll out and you start to build fleets around that, I think that will help things substantially, but it alone probably isn't going to fix the whole challenge. I think what you're going to have to imagine here is
starting to leverage nodes. And let me kind of describe that here. If
you start to think about forklift fleets, which are already using hydrogen, and they're at warehouses and factories, so there's already a refueling sight there. If
you imagine all the other things that could leverage that same investment in hydrogen refueling, and it's going to start with the vehicles that come into and out of the factories and the warehouses and so these are trucks. So that's why we
work with a company like Autocar to develop Class A trucks because they can start to leverage that not only making it more efficient putting the hydrogen there for the forklift fleet, but also for those trucks. The other place the trucks go
is they go to ports, they go to airports, they go to rail yards, and so then you can start to make another node. Right So
at those airports the aircraft which we're working with liber Aerospace right now to put hydrogen fuel cells into commercial aircraft and they would leverage that same investment in the refueling, and the trucks that come into the airports can also refuel there and leverage that same investment. You can also think of it as a rail yard
solution or terminal tractors at a shipping port, and that's another thing that Autocar develops. So I think that smart collaboration between different industries and trying to find
ways to maximize the efficiency of the investments, that's the way this thing can start to roll out. So, Charlie, if we look at the scene
right now, so Toyota is working with Peter Built in terms of putting fuel cells in there. Honda's got its own Class seven. I think, I
don't think it's a Class eight truck. But be bad as it may,
for all practical purposes a long haul Honda is going to be testing a fuel cell in Japan, and then they said they're going to be bringing it here twenty four or twenty five for testing. You guys working with autocar, I
mean, do you see that it's this trucking more than it is a fuel cell Toyota Marai that's going to be making the difference in terms of building this out in a big way. Yeah. Well, I think it's obvious if
you just watch what all the participants in the industry are doing. Everybody's trying
to focus on Class eight trucks as one of the segments because it does make sense, and it's also a place where if you're hauling heavy pay load so liquids steal, I mean, the things these trucks are best at. You
need that energy storage density that comes from hydrogen. If you're hauling half empty
Amazon boxes, it's maybe not a big deal. Maybe you can even deal
with using batteries, and some companies are trying that. They're trying to put
batteries in for local distribution things like that. That might be completely viable.
But potato chips. Potato chips are a great example. But if you want
to haul the heavy stuff, which is really what these trucks are best at, then that's where you're going to bring in the hydrogen. So I think
you're seeing that segment already. I don't want to speak to a specific competitor
or anything like that, but I can tell you from our perspective, starting in those small vehicles doesn't make sense in our portfolio. We have battery technology
that can serve those needs and do it very well. So if you want
to electrify a passenger vehicle, then a small passenger vehicle like your everyday driver, then you have a solution with batteries. Most of the time those vehicles
are stopped either your home or the place of work or some other location for an extended period of time. They're not on the road most of the time,
and so that gives you the time to recharge them, and that's completely viable. What about fuel cell as a range extender. You know, Stalancis
is talking about that for its full size pickups, which I find intriguing.
So a fuel cell as a range extender. You might recall when we introduced
the Vault with a v that was a flexible architecture that had engines, or it had a fuel cell variant, different ways that we can figure that.
So you can do that. But the thing you got to imagine is one
of the challenges is to put the energy on board the vehicle and manage not just the energy you put in when you fuel, but the energy that comes to or leaves the vehicle on an operating cycle. So what I mean by
that is, if I'm putting a big, heavy payload out there on a vehicle, it's got to go up the hill and it's got to come back down the hill. And what I want to do is I want to bring
it down the hill and capture all that energy coming down the other side of the mountain. I don't want to give that up in terms of break heat
because I've already electrified the overall propulsion system. So anything that doesn't capture that
is wasteful. And I've got a very capable propulsion system. And if I
don't size the battery right, I can't actually do that. So the challenge
is going to be how you keep this battery right sized and not have it become so big that it jeopardizes the payload of these payload carrying vehicles. And
so that's all where the battery architecture comes in. So I would say that
different configurations might make sense for different different types of usage cycles. But the
thing you're always going to come back to is how much energy do you need to be able to capture from that breaking That's going to very often size the battery. And once I've sized the battery, then the question is going to
be how much fuel cell and how much hydrogen do I need to do the rest of the cycle get it up the mountain as well? And so sometimes
you might be able to think about that, but we've actually found it the the optimum solution looks a lot like a hybrid, where the engine is pulled out and the fuel cells put in its replacement. So, for example,
in a in a fuel cell powered Class eight road tractor versus a battery electric class eight road tractor, would your storage battery be, say fifty percent the size of a BEV. It's going to depend on the cycle, okay,
And so if you're doing a like a cross country hall right, you're going to probably be going over some mountains, and if you're hauling heavy things, you're going to make a lot of energy recovery. As an opportunity coming down
the mountain side, So those would be very large batteries. The fuel cell
in these trucks is going to be about three hundred kilowatts. And these refue
try the auto car application in well in autocar, but that's a different load cycle. So you know, autocar is an interesting one because these these vocational
vehicles, it's not just moving the load, it's operating all the equipment the truck while the load is either stationary or in movement. So if I'm if
I'm talking about a cement truck, I've got a big drum of cement that is constantly mixing, right, So I'm moving the heavy load, but I'm also mixing the cement and that uses a lot of a lot of power.
If you imagine a garbage truck, right, So a garbage truck has the compactor on there, and that's that's using a lot of exportable power off of the propulsion system to do that compression of the of the refuse in the garbage truck. So you have to be able to think about the overall cycle.
We actually are very excited about what a fuel cell can offer that way, because we can we not only give high range for a vehicle, but we can give extended operation when the vehicle is on a job site trying to do work, even exporting power off the vehicle. And we did that with the
Equinox. You know, we had we had operating job sites where we basically
had a had an exportable power unit on the back and we could power contractor tools and circular saws and things like that. When we when we had the
fleet at it was at one of the military bases in Hawaii and they were doing some testing with that fleet, and we we ran the entire dedication ceremony off of the the Equinox quietly nobody even knew it was running, and it's sitting there running all the lights and the microphones and everything. So your colleagues
at GM Defense really interested in fuel cells. So we are working with our
GM Defense partners. We have a number. If you might recall a few
years ago, the ZH two. So the Colorado ZH two was the very
first vehicle that we did after the Equinox. So we prove that at at
Milford. I think, yeah, yeah, that was now. That vehicle
was a lot of fun to drive because I mean I come from off road motorcycle routes. Right, So my dad had a motorcycle shop and I'd drive
motorcross bikes and that thing. We got that thing airborne sometimes. I mean
it was it was an amazing vehicle that the military. They were rough on
it, you know, and it did all kinds of things. But that
that vehicle had this exportable power, and that was kind of what set the stage for some of the collaboration on the GM defense side. So the military
they're learning kind of what it takes to do some of the things that they want to do, and they're evaluating these different technologies. And what you find
is as you start putting more and more electrification into the field, you can open up all sorts of other benefits. So that Equinox had a very low
thermal signature. It didn't have any any sound to speak of from any distance,
which is very different than a generator. I mean, if you look
at the generators that the just think of your own neighborhood. If you've got
if the power goes out, you can hear your neighbors generator from blocks away.
And if you're trying to be stealthy in a battlefield situation, the last thing you want is to be having a noisy generator to power you're recharging for battery vehicles or whatever you're doing your comm systems and other things. So they
were quite quite interested in the concepts that we could offer by providing exportable power off of a fuel cell system that operates quietly. But it also because of
that low thermal signature, you don't see it on thermal imaging. You don't
see, you don't smell it, you don't see the smoke. They actually
with some of the vehicles that they operate, the way you find them is you look for the smoke. And so we were testing those that ZH two
out in Fort Carson, and they always told this story about how they did a night operation and they basically took the soldiers and they put them out on this one ridge and they told them to set up an encampment. And there's
a there's a hill going up to it. They called it agony. So
this is like every vehicle going up this thing is just roaring along. Right.
So they set up the encampment and the mission was to go in for one team to go in and basically invade the other team. And so they
sat up there and the next morning after this was all over, they said you never came. They said we were there. They showed how close they
got. They left, they came back again, they left, And so
it was all just because the HU was able to go it quietly. It
didn't make a thermal signature. There was no smell from diesel exhaust, there
was no noise. I mean, it was just it was. It was
game changer. And it's also kind of interesting. You can make your water
in theater, right, so the other thing they carry is a lot of water, and that you can make your water in use. All right,
is this potable water or is this water that you're gonna eat? Drink it?
Don't drink it. Yeah, you've got to because it's basically coming out
as deionized water. And so you know, if you drink deionized water,
you could get sick. So you'd have to add some things to bad,
some minerals so that you could actually make it potable water. But that's much
easier than trying to find other water sources than a desert or something like that.
Probably in this long development journey the GM's had, you've brought the supply chain along, which didn't exist in this realm before I'm curious your current technology, what percent rough percent of suppliers are traditional automotive suppliers and what percentage are new new startups or new hydrogen tech segment UH suppliers And what are you looking for I know some of John's audience or supply guys, what are you still
looking for in terms of supplier technology. Yeah, so that's a great question.
Are you thinking on a on a per dollar basis or a part count just a bill of material basis? Okay, So I would say we're probably
leaning about half and half. Wow, there are a lot of materials and
suppliers that we had to go to that just aren't big players in some parts.
I mean, if you think about the things that you're doing on the membrane that material, there's things and so yeah, there's some there's some companies out there that aren't traditional. Now there are others that have started to get
into it and and have have been involved in it in various development ways over the over the years. They might be the companies that are doing after treatment
systems for diesel engines as an example, and so that's that's one. But
there's some companies that have done carbon fiber and automotive, but they haven't really been in propulsion systems and so a lot of what we're doing now is relying on carbon fiber. That's a that's a big one. Tanks, particularly right
tanks is a is a big part of it. But we also there's a
there's a layer that goes into making the membrane electrode assembly that goes into every cell and it's actually uh hydro entangled carbon fiber filaments that change the distribution or the water that goes through the system, right, So we call that the gas diffusion membrane, and it's changing the way the water moves, the way the gases movement, making sure that they're evenly distributed across the cell. So
that's not something that is you know, quite like what you would normally do in an engine development program or something like that. So we had to develop
some of those kinds of suppliers into that space. There's a lot of things
like the valves. You know, these are these are valves that are dealing
with a lot of water and you know that's not necessarily that it's not a it's not like a coolant system which has any freeze in it, and that kind of thing. I mean, these might be dealing with water, like
drain valves that are taking the water that develops in the stack and purging in it at certain cycles and things like that. So those are new suppliers.
They're bespoke for these applications. Some of them are, yeah, and some
of the you know, the way we do the ends of the stack, you know, those kinds of parts are are somewhat unique. And then there's
there's all the safety systems that you put into a system like this. Because
we're dealing with hydrogen, we're dealing with electricity. The vehicles might crash and
so you have to be able to discharge all this energy safely, very quickly.
The parts that go into that, you know, pyro switches and things like that that kind of borrows from airbags, but they've never been used, you know, in these kinds of configurations before. And you know, and
an engine, let's say, so different things that we had to kind of borrow from. So I think going forward, we're always looking for very capable
automotive type suppliers that are willing to take what they know, because what we're finding is there is a lot of overlap. There should be a lot of
overlap with the traditional automotive supply base in there, know how and where we need to go with this. When you talk about a casting, I mean
a casting is a casting, right, and so we have aluminum castings and this that are doing the housing around the stack and so getting aluminum castings or cradles that hold the unit which look like an engine cradle. But sometimes they're
different, you know, it's a little bit different designs than people are used to, and so we've got to do a little bit of development with the supply base. So what you're saying, so if volumes really take off,
some of these little specialist guys will have to be brought into a higher volume realm or some of the large volume suppliers will maybe step into some of those areas. Hey, we asked our viewers to submit questions, and I'd love
to go through We're not going to get through all of them, We've got so many here, but I'd like to go through rapid file rapid fire style here. So we'll need short answers. So Robert Parent from Winnipeg, Manitoba,
wants to know do you think that fuel cells are going to go through the same infrastructure issues that the ev charging part of it has gone through.
Well, any new infrastructure is a challenge, and there will be some fits and starts. I'm sure. The trick it, kind of as we talked
about, is how you get through this transition phase and get the volume up to enough that it can sustain the scale that's needed to bring some of the costs down. But I mean, we've done some analysis work and it takes
basically the same investment to put in a coast to coast hydrogen infrastructure on a cost basis as it does for coast to coast uncharging. So it can it's
doable. Is the hydrogen highway still under construction in California? The Schwarts plan?
Remember I think they've located a lot of their stations up along that highway, but I wouldn't. I don't know that it was actually finished to the
way it was envisioned. Okay, we've got another question from Chris Gibslan from
Australia and another one Christoff eighteen eighty eight, very similar. What about running
fuel cells on alcohols, propane or methane? Is would that be viable?
What are the main issues? Yeah, so there are a lot of different
fuel cell configurations, right, I mean, there's methanol fuel fuel cells, there's different types of fuel cells. For the business that we're in, we
found that the PEM technology that we have and fueling off of the compressed hydrogen seems to be the pathway to get us to the best solution for the customers and the usage cycles that we're trying to trying to solve. Okay, Todd
Crook from Long Beach, California says he drove a Honda Clarity fuel cells three for three years, put sixty thousand miles on it. He would love a
plug in fuel cell. Now Honda's going to do that. Excuse me with
the CRV one right, Well, what do you think of that? Of
to be able to plug in when hydrogen's not available, every fuel cell should have a plug on it too, because why not, right? I Mean,
the electricity coming off the grid is quite inexpensive, and if I ever am in a situation where I am constrained on whether the hydrogen network has been built out, I can still probably do plenty with a plug that plugs into the wall. So it's a great way to augment the vehicle. Most of
the hardware's on vehicle anyway. Stuart Midwinter says, what's the overall efficiency of
a fuel cell ev versus an ice vehicle? So an ice vehicle is going
to sit somewhere in the thirty percent range, right, depending on how much it had to have as emission's curtailment to that. Sometimes a fuel cell will
be up in the sixty five percent range. So the best way to think
about is we're about twice the efficiency. Okay, k Serman I hope I
said that right. He says, who's going to be responsible for all this
hydro and distribution? And he also wants to know what about the hydrogen brittleness
on steel parts? Yeah, so okay, two questions, Yeah yeah,
yeah yeah. So as far as who's responsible, I think this is going
to be There are already companies out there that are taking advantage of a market that is developing for hydrogen supply and distribution. And I mean perfect example is
the forklifts. Right. There are companies that that's their business to get that
hydrogen there. They make money at it, they profitable. So there will
be companies stepping into the space. The trick is coordination, and I think
there's got to be some industry coordination. OEMs need to coordinate, the supply
industry needs to coordinate. All of that's got to happen. And then eventually,
you know, if we can manage this right, we can. We
can be visible enough about how these these different examples of production equipment are coming out in the marketplace and people can plan the infrastructure around it because they all have to kind of match. As far as the embrittlement, that's completely manageable.
I mean, we obviously wouldn't putting fuel cells together that are going through the talked about steel stampings. Yeah right, yeah, so that's that's manageable.
And and you know, I mean even in pipelines, there was a big thing about hydrogen and bridle and pipelines, and they're already blending hydrogen into existing pipelines because they're mixing it with natural gas methane and they're using that as a distribution. And it's happened in Hawaii quite extensively. And you know,
imbrittlement's not a problem that So Data Matters eight says there is all kinds of R and D money pouring into battery electric vehicles, batteries especially can fuel cells keep up in terms of all the R and D. Yeah, well,
I don't think it's a competition that way. I mean, yeah, there's
always there's always a challenge that you have a lot of things to develop, and it can be expensive. But I see these two as complementary. A
fuel cell will make a battery electric version better for these big vehicles, and a better battery will make my fuel cell more efficient as a propulsion system.
Two need to go together. And honestly, we've had a lot of learning
that's come out of some of the things like what we've done on fuel cell development. Well, we started really ramping up batteries in GM. We took
a lot of those fuel cell engineers and put them into the battery space to make sure that learning carried over. So I see them as actually complementary in
the development as well as in the product execution. And Shacas wants to know,
is green hydrogen five to six times more than efficient and electricity? I
must have written this down ron maybe more expensive or yeah, So that's a good question. It's hard to answer quickly. So, I mean, really,
one of the reasons green hydrogen is more expensive is because those green sources that go online are not leveraged to the maximum extent possible, and that's because they're cyclical, right, So wind doesn't blow continuously, the sun doesn't shine twenty four hours a day. So what you end up with is mismatches between
the production of the green energy, the availability of the source, and the use the demand on the grid. And that's very hard to manage on the
grid right now. So what you end up doing is you put in a
wind farm, and when you don't have a use for what's coming off the wind farm, you stall those wind turbines and you've just got a very expensive investment that's doing nothing for you. You're wasting the energy. Hydrogen is the
solution. So hydrogen, I can take that energy off when I don't have
another place to put it. I can store it for long periods of time
if necessary. In the form of hydrogen. It is the buffer for the
green energy grid when that develops. So basically electricity is being generated to use
electricity to do electrolysis breakwater apart, get the hydrogen, put the hydrogen at the tank. And that's exactly why we're working with Nell on developing lower cost,
more efficient electrolyzers using the very technology that we've been developing on the hydrotech fuel cell system. Well, where does that stand right now? Nell's development
of that. Yeah, So NELL and GM are working on a joint development
present and we're taking all that technology that's coming out of those those PEM fuel cells and applying it to their electrilizers so that we can help them get to scale, bring the cost down. They're installing. The equipment will come into
a plant here in Michigan, not too far from actually our lab up in Pontiacs, so that we're able to share the learnings between the two. And
we're quite optimistic about how that's developing and where it'll go. You know,
we had a lot of viewers right in very skeptical about fuel cells in lightning.
There's always a few. But what you're saying, you don't really see
it going into two light vehicles. That's not where you see the sweet spot
for you, not small vehicles. I mean, I think in the in
you know, our leadership in GM have said that we will have in our portfolio fuel cell solution, right and it's but it's not going to start in the small cars. It's going to have to come from the top down and
that's that's really the strategy that we're on. We don't want to put a
technology into a place where it takes away what the customers want from their vehicles.
We need to add more. We always need to be able to find
a way to solve problems and give them more. And that's really the focus
on how we're developing the technology. So what you've said is fuel cells or
forklifts make a lot of sense. Long haul trucking makes a lot of sense.
Generators, I mean generators. Yeah, I'm not home generators. I
would love a fuel cell generator as a backup supply for my house. Yeah,
So for generators, I think you know, some states are actually prohibiting internal combustion engines as a generator solution. Some of the permitting to get those
kinds of installations in it is very lengthy. So I think hydrogen and fuel
cells can be an enabler to unlock some of that and make that happen going forward. But the thing that we're finding very interesting is these mobile generators.
Right, So we've got some hydrotech power units that we put together. It's
basically think of it as a trailer that has two fuel cells on it.
Sometimes one, depending on how we can figure it might carry its onboard hydrogen with it. It'll have one or two chargers on the back. And so
if you're going to go out to the middle of the desert where there is no infrastructure for anything, you can take that out there, park it there.
And if you want to take hummers with evs and run them all day in fleets. Actually, some of some of the vehicle evaluation teams that have
gone out and compared competitors, they've actually borrowed those units from us so that they can keep like an all EV SUV fleet that's out in the middle of nowhere charged and do it quickly. So DC fast charging very fast, and
hydrogen can provide that where you're not going to get there with anything else unless you want to run a diesel generator to try to charge these vehicles. And
you had said something about planes. Planes are an interesting one. That's now
that's a longer time horizon because you don't just do a new airframe and commercial aircraft every year or every four years, like automotives. Seven forty sevens are
still in the air and they were started when I was in high school.
Yeah, so what happens is we have to be in early in it, which is why we're working with Libar Aerospace. And the first best step into
that space is going to be by replacing the turbine that's at the back of the plane. That's the exiliary power unit, and that's there to make electricity
for the aircraft, whether it's sitting at the terminal or whether it's in the air and that's hard to optimize a power generation system. So it works just
as well at altitude as it does at ground level, and it's very noisy.
It emits a lot of odor, it's smoky. Can you see all
the Bagga channelers with noise protection when you get on the jetway right crossing over, that's the thing you hear screaming away at the back of the aircraft.
So they keep the temperature correct and keep the lights going in the aircraft.
And so that's the place we're going to start. We'll go into that application.
The Bears working with us to get the solution using all the hydrotech technology.
And then when you replace that turbine in the back, I can get a more efficient solution. I can use the waste product for water to either
commodify the passenger compartment or maybe flush toilets. A big commercial aircraft has about
two tons of water to flush toilets. That's a lot of mass to take
off with. We can make water in flight, so you can start to
go and change the architecture of the aircraft piece by piece. It's also interesting
because a commercial aircraft is very predictable, right It's not going to stop en route and decide to fuel at some unpredictable place. It's going to stop at
an airport, and so you can put the hydrogen at the airport support not only the vehicle, but the ground support equipment as well, which looks a lot like a forklift by the way, So you can start to optimize that, and you can design it so they take off full and they land as close to empty as they can they can get. That actually works for liquid
hydrogen, which now I can start to put even more density in my energy storage and it's a whole game changer. And we're actually looking at the same
thing with the mining equipment, because they can actually justify putting liquid hydrogen on board those vehicles, so they can extend the operation between refueling at the mind sight when lily, how about train trains could do the same thing. Yeah,
and you might have a tender behind behind the vehicle the first locomotive, and it might just be carrying liquid hydrogen. And again, it's predictable routes.
It's knowing exactly how they're going to run, where they're going to run, where they're going to going to refuse. So we haven't talked a little
locroomotive division. You'd have a captive application for this. Yeah, that was
before my time. So one of the things we haven't talked about, and
I'm sure that people are wondering about, is safety of hydrogen. I mean,
it may be a naive thing to ask about, but I've got to ask it. No, I get that question all the time, and I'll
know my job is done explaining hydrogen when everybody comes to me and tells me, oh, yeah, hydrogen, of course it's safe. And so,
I mean, hydrogen needs to be respected. It's it's it's a fuel,
it's an energy storage mechanism and when you put it, when you deal with energy storage in dense ways, you always have to treat it with safety in mind. And we do that. So the thing I I always like to
refer to as When we were doing the work with the military, that was a big question in their mind was how safe is hydrogen because they're not just trying to go and drive as an everyday driver. There are people that are
shooting projectiles at these things. They've got to be safe under those conditions,
not just an unexpected crash, but literally targeting the vehicle trying to make it fail in a distarted way. RPGs. And so we did the testing with
the army, actually did the testing. We supported them. They targeted the
tanks with RPGs, with different rounds of incendiary rounds, with five, five, six, two, two three, I mean all these different rounds.
You're talking hydrogen tanks, not you know a lot of our army tank Yeah, and so they they found that they were able to penetrate the tank.
You know, that's not surprising. If a rocket propelled grenade has its own
explosives on in the payload, it brings them to punch holes and things.
So they would punch the hole in the tank, it would go through the tank, the tank would explode. I mean, I've got pictures that I
like to show of the tank with the hole and it's a nice little clean hole in, a nice clean hole out. But we didn't explode the tank.
And that's what it's all about, right, making sure that you've managed the energy that's on board, you've done it in a safe way. And
so I think that there's actually a lot of benefits that if we were developing, if cars weren't on the road today and you said, how are you going to power these cars? Hydrogen would be one of the things you'd be
talking about. If you knew how to develop these different propulsion systems at the
time, you'd be saying, Wow, that's a nice safe alternative. Because
if it leaks, it goes up at about forty miles an hour. It
doesn't hang around, it doesn't pool on the ground. You have to have
a combustion source to light it off at about the right strike in metric mixtures, and it's easy to snuff itself out. You know, if I had
a leak on a tank, it ends up being more like a pilot light.
If it's lit off, then something that leads to an explosion because the mixture inside the tank actually couldn't go off. And one of the exams that
we did was we actually took mile our balloons, and we put the perfect stoichiometric mixture inside the balloon with an ignition source in the balloon so you can see through the balloon, you can see in there. You light this thing
off, it goes and it goes out, It puts itself out. The
gas doesn't all go the balloon doesn't pop, and it's because the pressure wave actually moves it to a non stoich emetric mixture at the flame front and you lose the combustion event. Right. So it's actually a pretty I mean,
you have to understand it, you have to manage it with safety in mind, but it's actually something that can be done in a safe way. And
hydrogen atoms love to escape just about everywhere. So is ceiling technology finally nailed
down, Charlie. You know, in the units you're making, but also
you're putting them in somebody else's vehicle. That's going to be really critical here,
right. Yeah, So we do know how to seal hydrogen, and
you know, there is no perfectly sealed device. I mean, everything has
the ability to have leaks, but not in the area where it would cause these combustion events and things that you're describing there. It is kind of kind
of an interesting property of hydrogen though, is that if you're running liquefied which is what some of these applications are doing, that wouldn't actually work in your vehicle or mine, because if we go and park our vehicle at an airport for a week and we go on a trip, we don't want to come back and have vented all that hydrogen that was actually warming up and it was going to gaseous form. So that is one of the reasons we go to
compressed hydrogen because we can manage that, and it's actually high pressure. It's
ten thousand psi seven hundred bar. We run the pressure to that level,
but in that kind of form, in that kind of a situation, we can manage it, and we can do it and contain it and do it safely. Maybe one last question, what about making hydrogen on site? I
asked that because I remember when Larry Burns was running GM and R and D.
You pointed out that every building that you look at, every single one you look at driving up and down the street, has got water running into it. There's water pipes going into every building. And he said, man,
if you could figure out how to make hydrogen with that water, you could make it right on site. Is there anything going on with that?
Yeah, so that is part of now, right, That's part of what we're doing with now. And that's that's a perfect way to think about it,
John, I mean the idea that the building has water, the building has electricity. Those are the two things you need to run an electrilizer and
make hydrogen out the other side. So I think that will as the as
the electrilizer cost and efficiency improves and we get to the point that you can make small or scalable units, you can start to get to where you can make your hydrogen close to the point you want to use it. Could you
do it at home? Well, I have a home charger for your BEV.
Could you have a home electoralizer here where you look at it. I
will never say never, I just not right now, so I think, but in a scalable size to do a small fleet, this can start to make sense. And what I think is so interesting about it is is hard
to move. If I don't have a pipeline, I have to do it
in tanker trucks. And once you get over about two hundred miles to tank
it, then your costs go up and it becomes prohibitive and you want to go to the next closest site. And so if you combine the fact that
taking that distribution cost out of transportation the storage that comes with it, and then the fact that if I leverage this green energy that they don't have a place to put it off the grid, I can start to envision a really interesting model of localized production, like you're saying, using electrolyizers close to where the fleets are refueling. And I think that's going to be something that as
a technology and the infrastructure evolve, will get to that point. I go
ahead, Okay, So in this whole challenge of bringing this to production, what is the greatest area of challenge. It sounds like you've got the vehicle,
the hardware, the control systems pretty much nailed down. We talked about
hydrogen hubs and distribution, and then there's this kind of overall goal of getting to a green hydrogen sourcing is it? What's the biggest overall kind of package
challenge for this? I get one thing, yeah, one thing more than
one yeah. So one, i'd say, is coordinating that whole thing,
right, I mean, because we have we have industries that need to provide the infrastructure. Right, we have we have our business of scaling up and
making cost effective fuel cell systems to power these applications. And then it's going
to be getting all the applications up to the speed that they're ready to shift.
Make the shift. I mean it took a long time before the auto
industry was ready to electrify it, right, I mean electric vehicles have been around for one hundred years or more right, more than one hundred years, So I mean it getting an industry to that point and having the demand for them to make that shift in scale and spend the investment to kind of shift over there already try and true technologies with diesel engines that they're pretty happy with in general, for a lot of things, that takes time. So you've
got to get them to understand the new technology, modify the vehicles, and then as that starts to scale and having all this come together at the same time, then you can make this thing where over all the total cost of ownership improves and you can provide things that the customers couldn't get with other technologies.
I asked about the green hydrogen because a lot of hydrogen naysayers say, well, the gray hydrogen isn't good enough. You know, we have to
get to this full kind of you know, zero emission ideal. I think
it would be foolish for us to ignore the other forms of hydrogen in this nascent period where we're trying to start the thing up. You know, the
gray hydrogens can be cleaner than alternative propulsion, even though they're not you know, perfectly green, and they can be much lower cost, and they're much more readily available. I mean, you can put steam methane reformation out there
fairly effectively in all different types of places. So I think that kind of
an approach using clean natural gas, which you know can't I mean, the natural gas, rather than venting it and burning it off, let's convert it to hydrogen in your house. Yeah, you know, yeah, So it
could make a lot of sense that way. So I think there's there are
there are options there that can develop. I wouldn't I certainly wouldn't wouldn't turn
my nose up on green or gray hydrogen. Right right, right, it's
good, We're good. We're gonna have to wrap it up. This could
go on for a lot longer time. This is really good stuff. Charlie,
thanks so much for coming, Thanks for having a really good things.
I apologize we didn't get to all the viewer questions, but we got in dated with them, so I think we got to a bunch of them.
Anyway, Thanks again. Lind's the great having you here. We'll keep on
doing these And and the aforementioned mister Larry Burns will be here in three weeks I believe. Yeah, he'll be on the show. How them, I
said, Hi, yeah, we'll do that. So thanks everybody for having
to I'll online after hours. Is brought to you by ridge Stone Tires Solutions
for your Journey
Request an explanation for:
2 cars
2 cars featured
Request an Explanation
Heard something you'd like explained? We'll add it to this episode.
Sign in to request explanations for terms you heard.
Want to learn more?
Browse our glossary for plain-English explanations of automotive terms, jargon, and concepts.
Help improve this episode
See something that's not quite right? Our annotations are AI-generated and can sometimes miss the mark. Click the flag icon on any annotation to suggest a correction.
Report incorrect info
Suggest better explanations
Flag missing cars