#LTCtalks 2022 Dialogue 4: Hydrogen and Clean Air Technologies: Preparing for the Future

#LTCtalks 2022 Dialogue 4: Hydrogen and Clean Air Technologies: Preparing for the Future

Show Video

Good morning. I know we're a little bit over time, but I was getting things set up here, so it's great to see you all. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Kimberly Collins. I'm the director of the Leonard Transportation Center, and we're very happy to have you all here today. I know we have a number of people who are still joining us, but I think we'll get started. So today we're going to have a great discussion about hydrogen and the emergence of hydrogen as another sort of tool within our toolbox of finding a cleaner better transportation system for our future. I'd like to before we go through any of what our day will look like, invite the new Dean of the Jack Brown College of Business and Public Administration, Dr. Tomas Gomez- Arias to say a few words.

Thank you, Kimberly, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all in on behalf of the organization. We were talking about that a minute earlier, whether it was five, six, seven, seven years as you were mentioning hydrogen and cleaner technologies preparing for the future. And I'm really looking forward to hearing this fantastic news, and learning more about how hydrogen can be part of the solution for cleaner air cleaner tomorrow a healthier community. I want to say a few names. I want to appreciate the work of people behind the screens who have worked on these, in addition to Professor Kimberly Collins from from the center, like Greg and Kerry, from HNTB, Doran, Jay Barnes and Josh Landies from Foothill transit, Ellen Rogers from Omni Trans, and Richmond Melan from San Bernardino Valley College, who were part of the planning committee for this event. I also want to thank

our sponsors and the organizations that support the center and these areas and make it possible. San Bernardino International airport among our platinum sponsors. Mike Bor was there. Thank you. HNTB Corporation Greg Hulsizer Vice President. We're also a vice President there at the Ontario International airport. Thank you all for your platinum sponsorship.

Our gold sponsors are Woodruff Spradlin & Smart, SCAG, and our silver sponsors are Advanced Civilian Technologies, exp, Foothill Transit, GLA, Surveying Lane construction, Omni Trans, and PPM Group. Thank you all for making this happen. I'm looking forward to hearing the conversation today. It's important; It's relevant; and it's part of building the future we want for our community on our planet. And with that, Kimberly I passed the button back to you. Thank you so much, Dean, for joining us today,

and a really warm welcome. Now I'd like to invite a really great partner within this dialogue series for the past five years, and with that all that list of those who have been our sponsors. We are thinking about year six coming up. So if your organization's interested in sponsorship, or even if you have any ideas on topics you'd like to hear to bring forward, please let us know, because we're in that planning phase right now. Greg can tell you as his welcome of one of the founders of this series. Greg Hulsizer from HNTB Please.

Thank you. Kimberly. This is exciting. I understand we have more than one hundred people that signed up for today, which is, I think our largest ever, and the reach that this program now has and has had, and the depth of the discussion, and the quality of the content. It just amazes me every time as we look forward to next year. I'm super excited because you

think how many more topics can we cover. We've recently gone over the list of topics and it's been quite broad and far-reaching, but I know there's going to be some new areas that we can discuss. So as Kimberly said, if you have topics you think it would be great for us to cover, please let us know. So just on behalf of five thousand of my colleagues

at HNTB across the country, I want to welcome you all today. We're excited to have you participate with us. Last week we got an opportunity here from our Caltrans director. I know the California State Transportation agency talked about their priorities for the State. They talked about

safety, they talked about equity, they talked about sustainability, and they talked about the economy. This clearly fits right in the middle of sustainability. So I'm really excited about today's today's topic, and I want to thank Rafi and Estephanie too. They help so much in between meetings, and then just do a lot of the leg work to make this happen. So thank you. So thank you so very much, and I thought that that would just leave us with a hydrogen joke, which I didn't know they had. But I came across one, and that is, that

if H2o is water and H22 is hydrogen peroxide, what is H. Two hundred and four drinks, of course. So anyone with that bad joke. I'll turn it back over to Kimberly. Thank you, Greg. Thank you very much for that. That was a wonderful way to start off. So today we're going to have four great speakers, so it's a really full panel. We wanted to provide different perspectives from each of the sectors that we have. So we're going to start off, and we'll send out. It's in your mailing that we sent as well on the invitation

to join the meeting. But we'll start with a poll in just a moment, and then we'll begin with Tim Sasseen, who is the director and market development of public Affairs for North America. I don't know why Your company is not there, Tim, but it's Ballard Fuel cells, and then we'll have Al Burgende. He's the director of clean air, hydrogen and business lead for Linde, and then we'll have Matt Gregory, who's going to with the clean energy technologies out for Southern California gas And then we'll we'll finish up with a a practical sort of, you know, applied conversation with Roland Cordero, who's the director of maintenance and vehicle technology at OmniTrans. So we're starting with sort of this large

view, and then moving our way down, and we'll have poll questions in between each of these, so that we can again, bring in your voices to this. We're hoping that this is really a conversation. It's a dialogue, as we call it. So we want folks to be able to discuss these important issues that we're confronting around our transportation system in the Inland Empire and nationally and what it means for us. So with that we'll start with our first poll. I think, if it's ready. Okay, you're going to have all of the poll questions here

instead of the first one. But we'll just answer the first one. The first one is: How knowledgeable are you on hydrogen's capacity, and how it works? So very knowledgeable, in the middle, unknowledgeable, or very unknowledgeable. We'll just take a minute here to look at this all right. So we have about twenty three percent, in the middle about fifty five percent, knowledgeable

nine percent, and very knowledgeable at nine percent as well. So I'll hold on one second. I'll share the results with you. And so we see that there is, you know. Again, I think I'm in the middle as well. I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really be able to answer questions that need to be answered. So with that I am going to invite up our first speaker, Tim Sasseen, from Ballard. Tim.

Excellent. Okay, Thank you. I'll get under way. My name is Tim Sasseen. I'm the Director of Market Development and Public Relations for Ballard Power Systems for North America and I'm going to give you an overview of hydrogen and fuel cells and what we're doing in the market today with all the activity with hydrogen one. This particular transportation is a little bit stationary. I got a lot of slides. I'm going to go fast. So we see something interesting, we save it with Q and A. I'm more than happy to dig deeper into any of this. So my apologies

for going a little bit too fast. But there's a lot in this space to get a good feeling for it. Ballard itself has been around for over four decades. We've got about one thousand one hundred employees, a whole bunch of patents, and we're publicly traded. We've got a lot of buses. Buses are very much in our DNA, also trucks, more and more trained ships and stationary power. I'll talk about that, but spice it up to say we've got the hundreds

of megawatts approaching a gigawatt of fuel cell products delivered, and lots of lots of field experience. So we've been deploying products on the road for over twenty five years, particularly in California, but all over the nation, and it's growing rapidly the fundamentals of a fuel cell. This is what it looks like. I apologize for those of you who may already be familiar. But basically what we're doing in a fuel cell is instead of burning hydrogen. We're reacting it at a low temperature, same end effect, but without

the externalities. So this top picture shows on the left side. A part of this sandwich, one of the bipolar plates. There's another plate on the right side. On the left side you see the hydrogen coming in through flow channels in that plate. You'll come up against the membrane. The proton will migrate its weight across the membrane, and the electron will go through your electrical circuit, and they meet up on the other side with oxygen from the air, create water, and the whole process creates heat as well. We call that a unit cell. So you're creating heat and electricity from reacting hydrogen with oxygen and getting

water as a by-product. There's what it looks like incarnated at Ballard. We use carbon plates. Some people use metal plates, but they will look about the same. A plate on each side, and a membrane in the middle of that membrane has the magic bits like the platinum panelists, gas, diffusion, layers, seals, things like that. That cell will make about a fold, and we'll stack those up. You get the voltage. We want much the same way you would do with battery cells. You add a battery cell voltage you want, and then you

parallel those things to get the power you want. In the case of fuel cells, we parallel up fuel cell stacks. We put them into a module. This is our seamless module shown here, and in that module we'll be care and feeding of that stack like the compressor, to blow in and give it to by that air, and recirculate the hydrogen. Then monitoring and cooling as well. That is a box we make, and that's a box that goes into your vehicle in the Engine bay in the place where an engine would have gone. This is how it looks on a European bus.

They have a little bit different layout, but what's nice is you can see the parts. You see the storage tanks up on top. These look like natural gas storage tanks. That's the same on the North American buses. The high voltage batteries as well. We hybridize with batteries for the sake of collecting breaking energy. Ah, but the battery packs are much

smaller, something like fifty to one hundred kilowatt hours of air conditioning, of course, electrified on top. And this you can see the fuel cell module in Europe. We have a smaller fuel cell module, seventy kilowatts. You can see that here we'll be going with one hundred kilowatts in the US. Right now in the eighty-five kilowatt modules on the road. But this is

basically the layout fuel cell module batteries, fuel, storage and power electronics to marry it all together. This is an electric bus, but you take out most of the batteries and you put in a fuel cell and fuel store. We've got over one thousand three hundred buses on the road, now powered by Ballard and lots and lots of miles and kilometers. Behind these

buses, which demonstrated over thirty thousand hours of fuel, cell stack life and not just ours. Some of the older buses that ac transit has been running have gotten over thirty thousand hours as well. It really shows that the technology is capable of lifetimes that are enjoyed by a present question engines. This is how we're deploying across the US. This is expanding

now with the latest Federal load. Note France. Of course we've got a whole bunch of deployments in California. We've got a couple of deployments starting up in Nevada, also Champagne, Havana in Illinois, and a couple of other modo winners there. Michigan expanding in Kent, Ohio, expanding It's late common in South Carolina about the star kits. We're going for a win in New York Lots of interest in Florida and Texas, and also in Washington and Oregon. This is not a Red State Blue State thing. This is really decarbonization electrification across the

US. For whatever means it's most appropriate for that region, and that's one of the magic qualities of hydrogen. These are the numbers broken down. We'll be approaching one hundred buses. I think we have one hundred buses on the road now in North America with a whole bunch on the way, well over sixty. Thank you to Roland for pushing those numbers as well. And in Europe we're exceeding this. We're probably over two hundred now. I think we're

just at two hundred big orders, such as Birmingham, with one hundred buses, cologne for over one hundred buses, and then Asia. Lots of activity over there as well. Costs have come down a lot. Even looking back to two thousand and nineteen, we were within eleven percent of the nearest comparable battery bust from pro terra. And if you looked at a twelve year

warranty price, we were within two percent looking way back to two thousand and ten, and coming down, we've cut from over two million dollars to approaching one million dollars plus, like, I said, really close to those battery prices. Then all technologies need to come down and will come down in price. But we've been very aggressive and very successful in our cost out, and we're anticipating seventy percent cost out of the fuel cell feels so moduled by the end of this decade. And we've got a lot of good reasons to believe in that. In fact, a lot of people are looking at total cost of ownership, becoming superior for fuel, sell electric vehicles over Diesel, even by before the end of the decade, I'm looking at studies from Mckinsey and and Deloitte and others, and mostly this is through the the chiefness of the powertrain. The powertrain itself doesn't have that many components. Once it's in mass production, it should be quite cheap and anticipate reduced fuel costs. We'll talk about that as well. Service costs come way down as well. And there's

some great reports to look at there. We're really showing comparable service costs to the presidential gas buses, and that's with limited deployment and limited technicians out there. So we expect a lot of advancement there as well as we train more and more people to know efficient Ac. Transit. This is from their second study, check out their third study, also very interesting. They have five buses of five different technologies that

they're paracing. They're what they're taking data on. They're looking at costs per mile of the fuel cell buses. Now, these are five new pliers. They have very comparable operating costs, in fact, in some ways superior to what they're seeing with Diesel and Diesel hybrid and close to what battery is seeing, as well with the advantage of very rapid fuel times, and they're expanding their fueling facilities there and seeing these fills in under ten minutes well under ten minutes, which is a huge operational advantage, and we see, as fleet size goes up for battery, electric buses. You go more and more into your grid, into your public utilities. Infrastructure and costco to transformers. The feeder upgrades even substation upgrades as you get over one hundred buses in the depot on the fuel cell side. You actually have a decreasing marginal cost as you add buses on. The components are

quite oversized for small fleets, but as you get larger and larger fleets you can add in buses for smaller and smaller costs. So, as you have very large agencies, you'll see this curve really coming to fruition. We've had this notionally for a while, but for a feasibility study in recent installations. It really bears looking at infrastructure costs as a major

reason to look at hydrogen fuel cells. This is what a liquid fueling station looks like. This is in Orange County. They have about, I want to say, four thousand five hundred kilograms of liquid hydrogen here, and these are vaporizers in the back. This facility all contained within the ball or Gc. It is capable of fueling fifty buses. They have ten buses on there right now, dispensers delightfully uninteresting. They look just like a fueling

dispenser, and, in fact, you can put them right in line with the fueling that you do for Diesel or for other buses. That's Orange County. Set up regarding safety. There's lots to talk about for safety with hydrogen. We can go on and on. Most people know that it's a flammable gas, but a lot of people don't think about the fact that we deal with Bible materials every day. In fact, one of them that we deal with almost every single day is gasoline. Gasoline is nasty stuff. And when You compare hydrogen to gasoline, you

see some real advantages not only as hydrogen is nontoxic, but it also is very buoyant, very diffuse. When it gets out it can be continued, and how it's released, as shown in this study done by Ford, comparing two cars that are intentionally given a fuel leak and admission source. The gasoline you see pooling on the floor, creating vapors engulfing the vehicle in flames, whereas the hydrogen can be contained to a single release point and safely evacuated, comparing it to gasoline and diesel it There's so many personal safety advantages, particularly regarding toxicity and ingestion. Next time you go to fuel your car. Notice how much gasoline you're smelling. If you drive a truck or a Diesel, you'll really be familiar with that. All these different criteria pollutants that come out that we're very familiar with are that you have to be your monetary and a squint, and you need to treat it like a flammable gas, the same as you would with compressed natural gas and converting facilities. You do essentially the same thing. You make sure you have gas, detection, sensors, ventilation

in the roof, and also explosion-proof electrical fixtures above the roof line. One other thing that is worth mentioning is that with hydrogen and fuel cells, you separate out your energy storage into very strong tanks that are literally bullets, and they're isolated from where energy is flowing, where power is created, and that if you're going to have a problem. It's going to be where the power conversion happens with batteries, and we use batteries on our bus, too. You pack both of those energy storage and energy conversion into one spot. And that's

what battery manufacturers struggle with As they densify this technology, it's a challenge. And so it's. So I get muted : hopefully. I've been talking for the last fifteen minutes. Anyways, it's one advantage that you'll see with hydrogen and fuel cells. Is that separation of energy from power conversion in winter? It's true that we are around fifty to sixty percent efficient, but that is also a key that is used to keep the passenger part. Not only do we have extra energy on board, but also we have that key that's used for divine heat, power for folder fleets. We haven't seen that so much in California, but certainly

in Michigan and Ohio and Europe as well. We're beyond buses. We're in trucks and trains and rail trucks. We've got a whole bunch of our delivery trucks. We've done two years for Long Beach with Class eight. We've got giant mining from now being deployed in South Africa,

lots of interest and mining industry. We've got a couple of yard trucks, these yard dogs out of the port of la at trade pack and for Ups trek coming to a sega soon. Some very big classes, eight trucks up in Alberta, lots of activity and trucks we're doing as I said, yard trucks class six trucks with hexagon purists as well as class eight as well, huge amounts of activity and trucks. Again, the same story. We're seeing the technology have the capability of beating not only battery but also Diesel technology in the very near future trains. We have a train operating in China. We've got some getting on the rails

in Europe and Uk: We've got a project with Cp. Rails. Got a lot of attention up in Canada. We have switching locomotives that we're working on in California with Sierra Railway. There are people working on a very interesting commuter train in San Bernardino. I'm: sure we'll hear about that today. That's very exciting. Stop which providing training for that lots of interest in trains, lots of questions around fuel which is common to marine. You have a lot of fuel to hold on board. People are looking at liquid or ammonia, or methanol. Watch that

sector lots of activity there. We're involved in about a half a dozen projects in Europe, and a large tugboat design Study here in California, and we're looking at cold ironing. So some applications of stationary power, such as providing stationary power for ships at dock, is one of the areas that are already economically viable. I got a cool video here, but i'm taking up too much time. So I'm just gonna keep forwarding stationary power. This is looking at comparison fuel cell power versus battery power for a data center for either two or three days. No, two or four days, and as you double the amount of time you need for fuel cells, you add an in the tank, whereas with batteries you add a lot of real estate. We're bringing

out our cost out from advanced manufacturing. A lot of what batteries have already done with continuous manufacturing. This is going to expand our production capability and drop our costs massively. When we talk about the fuel itself you'll hear more about this later, and you can choose between gas and liquid. One thing you should bear in mind that critics of hydrogen say is that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas and possible sources. That's true, but most of it is not used for transportation. Only a very small amount is used for transportation.

More than that is made by zero emission hydrogen. Most of it's used for refining. So this actually is an opportunity which, hopefully we'll get hydrogen hub activities in. Bear in mind with electricity. It's the same case, Not all. Electricity is totally green. It depends on your source, and, however, what gets to you is the same for grid or hydrogen. It matters where that carbon started with. Once it gets to your vehicle, your zero emissions. There

are schemes for using that refine hydrogen to instead use zero emission hydrogen, which then can be repurposed for trucks that helps that economic transition in too many slides for too short a time, but also bear in mind that recycling lifetime conditions are how much embedded energy is in this technology, right at Ballard and in the fuel cell industry. We cover that platform. We get more than ninety Five percent of platinum recovered, and when we look at a comparison of embedded energy. Compare two different buses. For example,

we find that the fuel cell loss for embedded energy in those power, storage and generation devices is about something like a third of what you would see from doing big cost out. This is our latest generation of fuel cell modules, and we also are working on low-cost midlife replacement. You find real advantages there, and hydrogen hubs bringing low-cost hydrogen to you. The doe wants to see a dollar per kilogram production cost sale costs will

be a little bit better higher than that by the end of the decade. And we're waiting for that Federal rent to come out with hydrogen hops over nine and a half billion dollars that the Fed is investing and looking to get two dollars per kilogram, hydrogen by two thousand and twenty six. That's the big picture, and thank you for your attention. Thank you, Tim. That was quite the presentation. Lots of information. I don't know if there's

any just sort of questions right now, or we can leave it to the end for our discussion. If anyone has. Okay, if not, I will move on to our next poll question, which you. You kind of ruined it for us because it's already there. Let's see. Hold on a second to see if I can find it,my help. We're having technical difficulties today. Something in the air. Well, I'm not going to do our next full question, but we need to work through that. But really it was just asking if it's safe or not, and you've already answered that for us it's as safe as any other fuel that's really out there. You have to treat it but with caution, as

you have to do with any energy source. Really, And we need to think, you know, proactively and really intricately. How do we bring hydrogen into our communities and make sure that the infrastructure and the network is built out so that it can really be deployed? I think that's our ultimate goal. So in one thing I think you said or another, one by another expert I was speaking to is really thinking about the importance of these larger projects, these public infrastructure projects, and what that means for the individual consumer down the line, as it becomes more integrated into our communities. All right, thank you. And with that I will invite up our next speaker. Thank you again. Al. Burgunder, who's the director of clean hydrogen business lead at Linde. I'll thank you for joining us if you'd

like to share your screen. You are welcome to do so. Okay. So let's just get started here. So Al Burgender, director of clean hydrogen with Linde. Linde is a global industrial gas company. We've been supplying hydrogen for well over

seventy, five, eighty years globally around the world. We have. As you can see. Here we have a whole bunch of customers across the board. We are probably in terms of corporate organization. We're probably the largest globally, but in terms of hydrogen we are supplying hydrogen that we have been supplying oxygen for the last eighty years, and doing it to do it to support manufacturing. As Tim had noted, refining operations take out sulfur from fuels and things of that nature. So we've been. We've been serving the world with hydrogen. For a long time. Over the last ten years we've been focused on serving hydrogen for transportation.

Starting out with passenger vehicles moving on to buses, and now we're heavily engaged with oems or truck manufacturers in terms of preparing for their rollout again. Our role is primarily in terms of supplying molecules. Tim did a great job in terms of talking about the technology in the vehicles themselves. Our view is, we want to. We want to supply the molecules, and we want to supply the technology to make sure the molecules can be fueled as far as creating the molecules. And there are multiple processes out there we can. We can take methane or natural gas, and we can reform that into hydrogen. And so that is, that's one method. Obviously we have to deal with the CO2 that comes off that process, and that's

an effort. That is well underway. We have captured technology for that, and we're working with people that are heavily engaged in current sequestration. So using steam methane reformers or autothermal reformers to reform methane or natural gas is one way. Electrolysis production is another way where you're using electricity and separating or reforming water into hydrogen and oxygen, and both products are useful in their own right. So obviously the hydrogen is going to be directed for mobility, or for the other applications that tint and highlight in terms of stationary power, or in terms of manufacturing activities. One of the key

factors is, it's important to be able to condition your hydrogen, and we do that in a number of different ways, and one of the most prominent ways is with hydrogen. We actually take a hydrogen molecule and we cool it down to a very low temperature about twenty degrees South Kelvin, and we liquefy that product so that we can transport it. Now, the benefit of that is that we can transport a higher supply of hydrogen molecules typically about ten times versus conventional gas hydrogen trailers, and we can use it very efficiently at fueling locations, especially for mobility. We have a very large presence in North America regarding hydrogen. The yellow diamonds that you see on the map. Here are hydrogen liquefaction plants. As you can see, The closest one in the inland valley is in Ontario, California. We produce over thirty tons, and we're just

. We also produce in La for Texas, Alabama, up in the Chicago area, and Niagara Falls. Alabama has been the primary source to supply hydrogen as a rocket fuel for Nasa and the Air Force. We also have a pipeline distribution of hydrogen, and in many cases we are actually supplying hydrogen from a plant. That's right on a customer site. We call it an onsite production supply. So we have a map across the country. And as I said, the inland valley we have. We've been

in Ontario since one thousand nine hundred and sixty, two making liquid hydrogen and producing hydrogen at that site. And we continue to do that today, and we're expanding that globally. Linde is supporting the conversion of vehicles, mobility markets to hydrogen. We are working around the world. In China, Germany and Korea Malaysia. We have facilities. We have technology, and we're supplying molecules to a variety of different fueling stations in California and also in the Birmingham Uk So we're heavily involved in this space on a global basis. Tim had touched on the hydrogen hubs. This is an infrastructure funding program for the Department of Energy. It was put into law last year, and everybody is working to

develop hydrogen hubs across the country. This is a wonderful opportunity to develop a supply solution that will serve a variety of different users. I talk to people about the fact that a hydrogen hub is similar to a shopping mall. You have a couple of big players that you'll be supplying. But then you're going to have a whole bunch of other smaller shops, smaller organizations, transit agencies, and automobile suppliers and trucking companies, and so forth, that you'll be supplying with this. So this is a process that's underway. Proposals are probably going to go into the doe, beginning in the third or fourth quarter, probably the fourth quarter this year, and funding will probably start next year. Thank

you. And so that's what's underway. The other thing I want to highlight here, and everybody has heard probably a good deal about that, and that is that President Biden has recently President Biden has recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, and that is going to be another funding source that helps reduce the cost of hydrogen and infrastructure that's being deployed across the United States. So the combination of the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, which is commonly referred to as a production tax credit, are two ways that are really going to help, you know. Meet the goals that the doe has set out in terms of the two dollars per kilogram that Tim had presented earlier. Linde has been involved in this space for quite a long time in this slide. Here you can see our value

chain. We're heavily involved in production, and we're using a variety of different sources to produce hydro molecules. We distribute the product in a variety of ways, whether it's liquid hydrogen, compressed gas, hydrogen, or pipelines. We once it's at the Use point,

and Tim had presented a liquid hydrogen tank and one of the slides he did. We have pumping technology to get those molecules out to the preferred pressure that the vehicle manufacturer wants to have on, whether it's three hundred and fifty bar or seven hundred. And so we have that technology to do that. And we are, you know, responding to the demands from a

variety of different markets, and we're in the transit agency mode. We're on the rail. We have the first commuter rail operating on hydrogen. In Northern Germany we're heavily involved in the oems, as far as trucking is concerned, also getting involved in marine activities and rail, so all those markets are opening up in terms of the use of hydrogen. I think Kimberly, that's the last side. Yeah, I'm not sure. That's where we stand in terms of Linde and the supply of hydrogen to mobility. Thank you for your time, that's

great. Thank you so much. Again. Lots of great information there about hydrogen, and we're going to have time for the question just really quick, before we jump into our next speaker. Unless there are any just kind of, you know, burning questions that anybody would like to ask at this time. If not Raffi, Would you launch our next whole question? Thank you

very much. So this one. How many colors of hydrogen are there? One, it seems, is to get us more engaged, and Matt, I think we'll gain his expertise from his very impressive resume with us. I'm glad to see that many are taking the easy way out, and saying many that would be me as well, and we do have a crest request in the chat. If the presenters could send or provide a link to their presentations to the LTC. We will send them out to everyone who has requested that it's possible. All right. With that we'll end the pool,share

our results. So as we see fifty-seven percent said, many, three percent said three. And then we had thirteen percent on one and seven percent on two. So,Matt, I hope you're going to be able to help us further understand these next pieces of information around the hydrogen world. So great. Thanks, Kimberly, Good morning, everyone. My name is Macro Gregori. I'm a technology Development Manager with the SoCalGas

Research Development and Demonstration team or RD&D. I'm very excited to be here, and I will start things up coming off of that poll. Maybe this is a controversial stance to take, but I do not support Believe in the hydrogen rainbow, I think it's confusing.

I think it covers up a lot of the details that go into hydrogen. It creates biases, and there are too many colors. There are just too many colors There's so many ways to make hydrogen that every day I feel like there's a new one. There's sharp truce, and then there's eggplant, and mom it's. It's just too confusing. So I support the California air resources,

board, and their use of carbon intensity. When I think about it, we try to think about what's good hydrogen and what's bad hydrogen, so there will be plenty of opportunity, I think, at the end of the session for you to fight me on that, and I look forward to it. So first I want to share a little bit of information about socal gas. It may be surprising to some folks that I'm here for the natural gas utility. What do we have to do with hydrogen? So just

give you a little bit of background. SoCal Gas has been around for over one hundred years, and is North America's largest gas distribution utility. We served twenty two million customers over twenty, four thousand square miles in Southern California. Our mission is to build the cleanest, safest, and most innovative energy company in America, and we've committed to achieving net zero, greenhouse gases emissions in our operations and delivery of energy by two thousand and forty five. That's our aspiration of two thousand and forty five commitments. And we think to achieve this goal, we can do so by supporting the development of clean fuels like hydrogen. You may have heard about our Angelus link. We recently proposed to

develop what would be the nation's largest green hydrogen energy infrastructure system to deliver clean, reliable energy to the L. A. Region the Angeles link could support the integration of more renewable electricity sources like solar and wind, and would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, generation, industrial processes, heavy-duty trucking and other hard to electrified sectors. So How would it work? We start off with one hundred percent renewable electricity, that is, either on the grid, newly built, or currently being curtailed to provide power to the intellectualizer, Then we would use that electrolyzer to make green hydrogen. We've talked a little bit about fuel cells, but an electrolyzer is like a reverse fuel cell. So you put electricity in, and you get hydrogen and oxygen out. We could then deliver that hydrogen by a pipeline from areas outside of L A. Into the la basin and deliberate to the industries and customers that needed remote. And we can use hydrogen

to decarbonize hard to electrify sectors, such as electricity, generation, heavy duty, transport, and industrial processes. We think that Angela Sink has the potential to displace three million gallons of diesel fuel per day in La, and that would reduce about twenty five thousand tons of knocks per year. This is a big project, and it's still in the early stages of the development, but it's just one of the ways that socal gas is working to achieve net zero, greenhouse gas emissions by two thousand and forty. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about my program, research, development and demonstration of our RD&D. So Calgas has been working, so I guess RD&D has been working on an array of technologies that could enable larger game-changing projects like Angela. The RD&D program funds researchers to develop

new technologies that we think will benefit our customers and all Californians through energy savings, reduce environmental impacts and improve safety and energy and reliability. Our program is divided into five research programs that span the entire energy delivery value stream. So, starting off on the supply side, we have a low carbon resource which is focused on decarbonizing the gas supply. Looking at projects around producing hydrogen. As I mentioned all those different pathways for producing hydrogen, we're looking at many of them, including electrolysis, steam methane reforming with carbon capture, distributed steam methane reforming, and some more advanced technologies like methane pyrolysis which i'm really excited about the gas operations program supports the innovation and pipeline, transportation and storage operations. We recently held a webinar talking about a lot

of the work in the gas operations program to enable the pipeline to accept blends of hydrogen in the downstream of the gas system. We have my team, which is called customer solutions. We oversee technologies on clean power, generation, customer, and use applications, and of course, clean transportation in twenty twenty one. Our D. And we spent eighteen million

dollars on research to advance new technologies to help California meet its ambitious environmental goals. We achieved an average leverage ratio of five point, two X, meaning on average, for every dollar that we provided to a research project. The project received five dollars and twenty cents in funding agencies, utilities, or funding programs. And then this is the

amazing R. D. And D. Team staff with experts in science, engineering, industrial process, technology and environmental policy. These are just a few of the universities, public agencies, research, consortia and national labs that our D and D has worked with in the past. We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with new research partners, especially those from diverse academic populations at universities and college colleges that serve first generation students, students from environmental and social justice communities. So that was the primer on the RD&D program and socal gas. Our interest in hydrogen. And so we'll talk a little bit specifically about the Queen Transportation RD&D. This program focuses

on minimizing the environmental impacts related to the transportation sector, particularly through the integration of hydrogen and renewable natural gas in two thousand and twenty one. The clean transportation program supported twenty nine research projects with technical guidance and about two point eight million dollars in funding. We're just going to go through a couple of the highlight projects that there are twenty nine, the active projects in clean transportation. I only have time to cover a handful of them, but there are so many more, and i'll point you to our website in our annual report, so you can see all of the amazing projects we have going on within ourg and me the first one I want to talk about is a little less sexy than some of the other ones, and some of the other projects we've talked about already this morning. This is a project with UC. Riverside, c. Sir, which is their engineering program, and will evaluate the impact of hydrogen blends in natural gas on the performance and durability of the Cummins, L. Nine and eight Point nine liter near zero

natural gas engine. Come and set a limit for hydrogen content up about zero point zero, three percent by volume. And this is a long standing limit that was likely based on the typical natural gas composition, meaning. Typically, you would find natural gas in a

delivery system with less than zero point zero three percent hydrogen. Since the lemon is part of the common specification, using natural gas is higher. Hydrogen content would void the warranty of the engine. So this proposed work will provide data that could justify

the initiation of extensive validation work to increase the hydrogen limit in the Commons fuel standard. Now, why is it important that we have lots? And lots of these come in as ultra-low Knox engines deployed in fleets, including L. A. Metros fleet but at so-called gas. We're exploring how we can blend hydrogen into our pipeline into our delivery product, and one of the key factors limiting the amount of hydrogen we can put into the pipeline is the impact on Cng tensions. And so what we want to study here is the impact on the engine.

Make sure that putting running more hydrogen through the engine doesn't damage the spark plugs, or the seals, or any of the other engine components. And then we also want to look at emissions, because that's very important in the la basin and in the air quality management district. We want to make sure that adding hydrogen doesn't impact the ultra-low nox performance of these engines, and by the way Socal gas, our D. And D. Supported Cummins Westport, and the development of these ultra-lenox cng engines.

So the next project we'll talk about Tim mentioned this earlier. This is a hydrogen fuel cell yard truck at the port of Los Angeles. The California Air Resources Board awarded Gti and a number of technology partners to develop and demonstrate two fuel cell electric yard trucks at the port of Los Angeles,at a facility operated by Tray Pac for twelve months. The yard trucks are the single largest source of emissions in all classifications of cargo handling equipment. The project is intended to demonstrate to port terminal operators that fuel-style-powered zero emission yard trucks is a safe, reliable, and operationally preferable solution to beat the port's Clean air action plan so the trucks are supported by H. Techs, hydrogen and fueling system, which provides fuel in a similar manner. As Diesel is currently provided. So two of the hydrogen fuel cell trucks you can see in the

photo that's over here are currently operating at the facility you can see there's a fueling station here, and one of the port operators refueling the truck. The truck would showcase at the twenty twenty one act expo in Long Beach and received over five million dollars from the Air Resources board to help develop this technology, and I will say the preliminary results suggest that this first generation of truck is extremely overbuilt. And so we're looking forward to the second Gen. Which will be much cheaper because it needs less fuel cell, less battery capacity. It's just over engineered at this point. So that's one of the major cost savings that you'll see when you talk about learning curve effects, or how we get the cost of these vehicles down is, as we learn more about the vehicles, we can design them more efficiently. We recently announced that we're working with Ford Motor Company on a demonstration project to reduce commercial fleet emissions by developing an F550 super duty, hydrogen fuel cell electric truck. This collaboration is part of the Us.

Department of energy. Supertruck Iii program, which aims to reduce emissions in medium and heavy duty trucks. This is part of our another step towards our aspire two thousand and forty-five sustainability goals, which set the standard of replacing fifty percent of our over the road fleet with clean fuel vehicles by two thousand and twenty, five,and then operate a one hundred percent zero emission fleet by two thousand and thirty five. So in this project Ford will provide so-called gas with an five hundred and fifty super duty truck fitted. I think it's going to be a crane truck, so it's fitted with all the equipment that

our standard workers would use within the fleet within their day to day operation. But it'll be operating on hydrogen fuel cell electric technology with so-called gas. It was chosen to evaluate the prototype under root because of the rigorous demands of utility work, and because of our climate and our geographical location. So this truck will actually be out in the field. It'll be on and off road out there, helping to make repairs and install new equipment. We'll also, and so likely install a temporary hydrogen fueling station at our

Baker's field facility, and we're looking to deploy this truck in two thousand and twenty five. This last project, just to give you a sense of the sort of the breadth of the clean transportation program looking at the potential for hydrogen ecosystems at airports. So this study provided a high-level assessment with the components required to convert Ontario International Airport into a hydrogen ecosystem to support a zero mission regional and short-range aviation and transportation project, analyze the total energy, demand and fuel consumption to support zero emissions, aviation and transportation. We look to address opportunities and challenges

for the deployment of electric and hydrogen, aircraft and vehicles and identified associated infrastructure needs to support the growth of zero emission transportation. This is a really exciting project because of this, the technical Advisory Committee was.It was just an amazing set of experts from the Department of Energy, the Faa Air Resources for California Energy Commission. We had airports, industry like Airbus, Toyota, Zero, Avia, and then other ah startups and industry leaders and public agencies. There's a lot of really detailed information about energy usage around airports. But I just wanted to share one of the key

takeaways from the study. Preliminary results suggested that converting just three types of ground service equipment. These are the vehicles that run around on the tarmac servicing the aircraft are just converting three types of ground service equipment to zero emissions would reduce C. O. Two emissions by fifty, two percent, and knocks emissions by eighty, nine from an R. D. And D. Perspective. This is a really valuable context, because it gives us a direction on which pieces of equipment we should work on and focus on decarbonizing right away. So we look forward to working with other technology developers to help confer aircraft, tugs, bag tugs, and cargo tractors into fuel soil, electric.And, like I said, there are many many more program projects within our program.

So if you'd like to learn more about the Rd program, please visit our Web page where we'll find our annual report. It's available in English and Spanish. You can find out about upcoming webinars. You can see our webinar recordings. You can learn about some of our project spotlights which provide a deeper dive into our most exciting research projects, and our D and D in the news to learn about. See all of our press releases. Also Don't hesitate to reach out to me or my team. My email at Rdd. Info at Socalgas Com. If you have questions, or if you'd like to sign up for our Quarterly Newsletter,and with that I will say, Thank you for the time, and I look forward to the discussion.

All right. Thank you so much, Matt. That was really great,so much great information today, trying to capture it all and put it into something concise for us. With that I'd like to. We'll just move into our next poll as we're running right on time, maybe a little bit behind. But we're all No, we're actually really good. So Why, don't we do our next poll, and then we'll have our next speaker, I think. Would you please? All right? Hydrogen fuel sole buses have a better mileage range, then Diesel hybrid engines, fully electric engines, gasoline engines, compressed natural gas. Hopefully, this question isn't as tricky as our last

one. We are throwing out to the experts something that's going to make us look like we don't know about hydrogen. And I actually have a technical question. But maybe I'll ask it later, and about what happens with hydrogen as it heats up with the movement of the vehicles and such. Now that's cooled down. So I don't know if that's or if I know that some individuals put hydrogen into their tires to make the cars use less gas, and I don't know about that as well. Okay, we'll close this up in just a moment. So most have all of the above and some with fully electric engines, and our next speaker from foothill transit. I think we'll be able to share with us their conversion over to hydrogen, and some of the reasons for doing that, all right. So uh, with that I'd like to invite Roland. But you

know, from foothill transit to speak on their current project, and moving from or moving over to hydrogen. The hydrogen fleet. Roland. Please. Everybody? See it? Okay. Good. Hi! Good morning. My name is Roland Cordero. I'm the director of maintenance and vehicle technology at Foothill Transit. And this morning I'll just share

our journey to zero emissions. At Foothill Transit we're located thirty five miles east of Los Angeles, in the San Gabriel Valley area. We serve twelve point six million riders per year, with a mix of local and express routes. Currently we have a fleet of Usb. Three hundred and sixty, two, and we're down the three hundred and fifty, nine buses, with almost ten percent of better electric buses We retired early, three of our pro terra battery electric buses. Early this year our zero emissions program began in two thousand and ten, with

three short-range en route charge pro tera thirty five foot buses. We added more buses in two thousand and fourteen sixteen seventeen and eighteen, and our latest addition were two double-deck battery, electric buses manufactured by Alexander Dennis in California the California Air Resources Board issued a very innovative, clean transit regulation in October two thousand and nineteen, requiring transit agencies to transition to one hundred percent. Your emission by two thousand and forty. The transition starts in two thousand and twenty, three, which is next year twenty, five percent of bus purchases should be zero emissions, and that goes up to fifty percent by two thousand and twenty, six and one hundred by two thousand and twenty nine. Since our first order of paternal buses have only a range of thirty-five miles it was necessary to install en route charges at the Pomona Transit Center, which is located at the middle of the route line to ninety, one line, two hundred and ninety, one a sixteen point one miles long, round trip,and the line was fully electrified in two thousand and fourteen, with the addition of twelve thirty five foot short-range, fast-charge battery. Electric buses, made by pro-tera in two thousand and seventeen We received

our first feet of Porter extended range buses we supposedly had a nominal range of two hundred and fifty, one miles on a single charge. Our actual findings operating the buses in actual service shows only an average of about one hundred and fifty miles and fifty, nine miles. In order to operate these buses on line two hundred and eighty, which we had planned to electrify. We needed a way to extend their range. What we came up with was to install

a range extender. We built two overhead charges at the Azusa intermodal Transit Center,located at the beginning of blind two hundred and eighty line, two hundred and eighty is a twenty, two mile round trip, utilizing fourteen extended range buses. We had a dwell time to enable the buses to trickle charge, providing the additional battery energy to meet the line's longer bus box. There you go in two thousand and eighteen. We completed our first Indieco charging station at our Arcadia Bus yard. This project was in partnership with Southern California, Edison and Hertera Pono Transit was one of four transit agencies selected by Southern California, and they sent for their transport charge ready pilot program. It is undesigned and built and permitted the infrastructure connection from the transformer to the Bus yard, while for terror and install the charges and overhead structure, it's part of the transport charge ready program medicine gay, for they'll transit a fifty percent rebate on the chargers, totaling an amount of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars operating matter. Electric buses for the last eleven twelve years show that by the electric buses

at the per bell proverbial range, anxiety to do its limited range charging buses, takes hours to charge in depot, and dispatchers must be fully aware of what buses are fully charged and ready for deployment en route. Charging infrastructure costs are expensive, and they can cost up to about seven hundred thousand dollars per unit. Maintaining bioelectric buses is also inexpensive. All they are under warranty period, however, maintenance cost can be very costly when technology related parts fail past. The warranty period, such

as invert, is at around twelve thousand dollars a piece in two thousand and eighteen. We hired Burns and Mcdonald to prepare a study for our plan to transition to one hundred percent better electric buses by two thousand and thirty. The report was issued in two thousand and nineteen, and indicated that it will cost a total transit of about one hundred and twenty million dollars to transition to one hundred percent of that electric fleet. The battery

electric buses are a one point, five to one replacement and require us to increase our fleet size to operate our current service. The consultants provided us with the recommendation for the operations and for a financial perspective. They recommended that we only charge the buses during off-peak electricity usage which would lower our overall cost. However, that's not possible since buses have to be repaired, and charging the buses would only allow us to. I mean electrifying. Our flea would only allow us to electrify sixty percent of our bus routes over the time it took to do the study. We began to get results from other

transit agencies or partners who were using fuel cell technology, and we requested Bernie Macdonald to compare fuel cell technology with battery electric fleets. Why, fuel cell range of up to three hundred and fifty miles around a single fill-up for a fuel cell bus. They operate like their C. And G. Or Diesel buses, without the fear of buses running on charcoal en route. Ah! The cost of an approval and a structure for over one hundred buses cost about six point six million dollars, and scaling the fleet size will only require minimum cost by adding another pathogen tank. The fueling process takes about ten minutes

to fill each bus versus hours to charge an electric bus. California offers several incentive programs to assist in lowering The operating and capital costs of both bad electric buses and hydrogen buses. Low-carbon fuel standards of cfs allows agencies to earn credits from operating their emissions speed. Other programs include the H. Five hybrid and zero emissions, Truck and bus voucher incentive project. There's also a vw mitigation which offers up to about four hundred thousand dollars for fuel. In order for us to move forward with our hydrogen fuel cell program. We had several procurements that were required. We had to issue the following

procurements to move forward: We purchased our fuel cell buses through the California State Zero Emissions vehicle program. We issued payment for the design, build, and installation of fuel cell peeling stations in order for us to move forward with maintaining a repairing of fuel cell buses in our maintenance building. They're required to install pathogen detection systems. And that way the ventilation. We also enter into a contact for the operations and maintenance of fuel, cell station upon, and provision of liquid hydrogen. We received our first hydrogen bus last month, additional buses will be delivered, Beginning next September. We have an order of thirty, three buses with a new flyer, which is the largest order of hydrogen fuel cell buses in North America,and completion of our fielding station. It's currently

under construction and is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Program timeline shown here in November had some supply chain issues, especially with the tank delivery. Now it's been extended to December of this year. That concludes my presentation, and I'd be happy to ask you any questions you may have. Thank you so much, Roland. That was a great transition over to really think about different technologies out there, and the decision points that are being made in moving forward on these key issues around new and cleaner fuels. It's one of the questions you know I put out there

in each of our dialogues, is really thinking about the role of government within this process, and what needs to be done to really help. Some local agencies figure out the best way to move forward with these. But these difficult decisions, and thinking about what is the right choice in these large investments. So thank you for that. With that we have time now for discussion and questions.Of course I always have many questions, but I will open

it up first to each of you for any questions to any of our speakers, any questions to start us off. Well, I'm going to ask each of our speakers on this first one so and this might be. I do

2022-10-25 17:38

Show Video

Other news