This is actually a really exciting time
in the history of hydrogen and fuel cell
technologies, which are actually not
as well known as some of the other
technologies like solar and wind and
batteries. And in fact when I moved to
DOE almost roughly 13 years ago, I moved
from industry and I told people I'm
moving from industry to government and
some people thought I was moving to NIH.
And I've always very perplexed and I was
wondering why are they thinking I'm moving to
NIH and then I realized they thought
fuel cells were the same as stem cells.
And so thanks for this opportunity to
spread the word and educate people, thank
you all for your interest.
So going back to the beginning of the
fuel cell program at DOE, it started in the
1970s during the first oil embargo when
a group of scientists on industry
government, DOE managers got
together at Los Alamos and looked at
know how can we get off foreign oil? And
that was the beginning. Scientists
developed and optimized what's known as
the fuel cell electrodes, the heart of
the fuel cell system. You can see the
cars here, very early version. A lot of
people don't know that GM, General Motors
relocated part of their staff to
Los Alamos to work on hydrogen and fuel
cell technology. And 40 years later we
have commercial fuel-cell cars in the
market. So how many of you have seen the
fuel cell cars?
Okay great and so great great progress.
And thank you all there many people
worldwide who've made this happen.
So the bottom line is we have power,
performance and completely
pollution-free. So these cars can refuel
in minutes. We have more than 300 mile
driving range. The latest model that just
came out has 366 miles on just one fill.
More, one of the models has 66 mile per
gallon equivalent fuel economy and very
high power. They're all electric
drive, no conventional transmission, pistons,
gears and so forth. So straight from a
standing start you get very high torque,
very high acceleration, and all
completely pollution-free. So no criteria
pollutants, no CO2, only water vapor. In
fact this bottle is exhaust from the
from the car.
And in my previous job, one
of my previous jobs in fact working in
industry where we use fuel cells for
space applications. The astronauts
actually can drink the water coming out
of the fuel cell, so completely clean
technology. And we actually have a couple
of the world's first commercial cars
here now in the DOE building, or in the
garage. And we have, so this is the first
time we have federal agency, an agency
that actually has commercial fuel-cell
cars here.
So how does that work? So when you step
on the gas pedal you'll have fuel that
flows in on one side of the fuel cell,
and I have sample here this is the heart
of the fuel cell and then you have air
that comes in the other side. And we have
basically no combustion, you're not burning.
We have a pretty archaic system now, we waste
a lot of that energy content in the fuel
as just heat. But you produce
electricity directly. Simple, simple
version here. And the oxygen from the
air combines with part of the hydrogen
to produce water. So we have been funding
this at DOE for decades as you know. And
just to give you an idea we have
optimized this heart of a fuel cell. So
this size is about enough to power a
lightbulb.
So you can get an idea of how much power
you can get. And you can stack these so
these are modular, scalable. They're
small enough to power your laptop, your
cell phone.
They're large enough, in a typical car
you might have 300 of these. It replaces
the engine, it's just about this big. And
the largest fuel cell in the world is
now in Korea 60 megawatts or so. So very
large to provide power for industrial
applications. And again no combustion,
direct electrical production, and so much
more efficient over twice as efficient
compared to today's gasoline vehicles. So
what about hydrogen? So if we go back to
hydrogen, hydrogen actually is the most
abundant element in the universe, I think
most people are aware, 75% of the
known mass of the universe is hydrogen.
It also has the highest, one of the
highest energy contents of all known
fuels. It's actually three times more
than gasoline but that's on a mass or
weight basis. It's a light, very light gas.
So if you look on a volume basis it's
actually worse than gasoline. Gasoline has
has a lot of energy density by volume
but hydrogen is not found easily free
in nature. You have to produce that
hydrogen. And so it's an energy carrier
not a source. But you can produce it from
diverse domestic resources, so natural
gas, coal, gasification, nuclear heat,
renewables obviously. And you can use it
in a number of applications. So we talked
about fuel cells but you can use
it today,
petroleum refining and fertilizer
production are their largest uses of
hydrogen. But in food processing even
cosmetics it's basically a very well
known chemical commodity. And if you look
at where we produce hydrogen, we already
produce more than 10 million metric
tons per year, mostly from reforming
natural gas. We have more than 1,600
miles of hydrogen pipeline, a lot of
people don't realize that. You can see
almost every state actually has large
central hydrogen production facilities.
In terms of hydrogen stations there are
now 25 retail, completely retail stations.
You can go pay with a credit card and 12
to 25 plants in the Northeast. About a
hundred in the works in California right
now. So we talked about hydrogen it
takes energy to produce hydrogen, but
because the fuel cell is so much more
efficient on the total well-to-wheels
or life-cycle
goal greenhouse gas emissions is what we
really need to look at. We don't overhype
the hydrogen and fuel cell advantages
and we look at the total of energy that
it takes and emissions from producing,
delivering, storing and then converting
that hydrogen to fuel. So we across the
offices at DOE continue to update these
analyses, this is hot off the press, just
one snapshot in time. Because this will
continue to evolve. But we look at all
the different technologies that are now
out in the market. These are some
examples and look at the range so today's
conventional gasoline vehicle gives you
about 450 grams of co2 per mile, to give
you a baseline. And then we look at the
range of co2 per mile for all of these
different technologies, so we can see
they're all beneficial, they're all the
road. And we're already starting to
reduce our total life cycle emissions.
And now for the first time in history we
have commercial fuel-cell cars on the
road and even if you produce that
hydrogen from natural gas we get this
question all the time,
you still have a total well-to-wheels
emission because there's zero carbon
from the tailpipe. Reduction of about
50% and then of course as you
go to renewables, California requires 33%
renewables now. You can see
that we're continuing to reduce the
amount of greenhouse gas emissions. So of
course the big question is cost. So let
me quickly cover the cost status and we
have a number of technical targets. So the
bottom line is we have to get, be
competitive with other technologies.So
whether it's the fuel cell, $40
per kilowatt is our target. Whether it's
the hydrogen, in this case $4
per kilogram and you might see kilogram
or gallon gasoline equivalent used
interchangeably because it just so
happens that coincidence of nature that
one kilogram of hydrogen has the same
energy content as one gallon of gasoline.
So unlike other ethanol or others where
you have to do a calculation, that's it's
roughly the same. And then for
hydrogen storage as well these hydrogen
is stored in tanks on board the vehicle.
They go through bonfire,
gunfire, drop testing, crash-testing. Very
extensively tested for safety obviously.
And so let's look at where we are today
compared to where we need to be. So we
have depending on the volume and Mark
talked about manufacturing which is
really critical, so we have to increase
the volume and market penetration so at
low volume you know there aren't very
many systems out there, only about
a thousand or so commercial cars
now in the U.S. So you can see the
cost is low, it's still much too high.
Same with the hydrogen at the station,
same with the hydrogen storage. If we can
get the volume, get mass market
penetration we get closer to our targets
and we keep continuing to make progress.
So we need to get volume and we get
market penetration. So what's very
exciting just in the last couple of
years we have buses now, a fleet especially
in California over 15 million passengers.
So these are in passenger service. We
have forklifts in the last couple of
years as well, over 10,000 we're tracking.
Major companies Walmart, Coca-Cola, FedEx
are using hydrogen fuel-cell forklifts.
Of course, zero emissions inside warehouses is one big
driver and, millions of hydrogen
refuelings. I mentioned Walmart, Coca-Cola,
FedEx. One of the fuel cell developers said
that every 12 seconds one of their
customers is refueling with hydrogen, so
we're getting lots of real-time
experience and also hot off the press, the
Superbowl had a fuel cell mobile
lighting unit instead of a diesel
generator that was providing light. So
early markets were seeing. And Germany
just announced plans for the world's
first hydrogen fuel-cell train that is
supposed to be in passenger service next
year.
Japan is one of the major leaders. I was
actually here while ago, this is the
world's largest town Fukuoka running on
hydrogen. They have a hydrogen pipeline
coming from a steel plant. I walked
over this street by the way and a museum
with fuel cell, they have a apartment building
with fuel cells. A station. A bus. Vehicles.
So regional deployments. And besides
transportation, fuel cells are making
headway in the stationary sector as well. So
critical loads such as banks, credit card
companies, supermarkets twice already
this has happened to me where I was at
the grocery store and all the lights went
out.
So in terms of perishable loads, grid
resiliency, we're seeing fuel cells take
off. And the new World Trade Center is
going to have over four megawatts of
fuel cells powered by natural gas. So you
don't have to use hydrogen you can use a
number of different fuels. Aand this just
gives you idea again of electrical
efficiency. So their are a number of different
technologies, from EPA this shows you
again the benefit, one of the benefits
of fuel cells with very high
efficiency conversion of fuel to
electricity. So we publish an annual
reports every year which tracks the
growth. You can see steady growth in
hydrogen and fuel cell technologies over
the years. 60,000 fuel cells were shipped
worldwide in 2015. Most of this is this
green area in the stationary sector. And
people are usually surprised to learn
that it's small residential fuel cells.
Most of those are in Japan. Over 170,000
major companies like Panasonic, Toshiba,
these fuel cells especially since
Fukushima provide power for the home.
They run on natural gas and provide hot
water so we're seeing a growing market
in hydrogen fuel cell technologies. Now
the big question is hydrogen
infrastructure. So I'm going to end with
a couple of comments there and talk
about what can we learn from
history if we look at infrastructure? So
if you go to gasoline in the late
1800s, we had a vast
infrastructure for kerosene for lamps.
And when we moved to electric lighting,
that kerosene infrastructure became
available for
gasoline, and we had cans, barrels, you see
this guy getting gasoline out of this
barrel. We had pharmacies, general stores
where you could actually go and buy a
little bit of gasoline, so it was widely
available. Many diverse options. And this
guy is riding his bicycle transporting
gasoline and pay no attention to the
fact that he's smoking here, so not much
in terms of safety codes and standards.
And we actually had a number of
different home refueling methods. So we
had a gasoline tank. You had a hose
and you could refuel at home. In fact
between 1900-1915 there were about 70
different home gasoline fueler models
on the market. So what history showed is
that we had a phased introduction of
different fueling methods. We had no
concept of today's gasoline station. We had
dispersed methods, curb pumps drive-in
stations and then finally the self-
serve stations that we know today. So
while states are putting in hydrogen
stations, we now have one in DC that we
just opened in collaboration with the
National Park Service to fuel our cars
that we have here. And California, states
are putting in regular retail
stations. And to complement that we
issued the H-Prize to allow for a
smaller option, again that concept of
providing that hydrogen easily
accessible. Small community fueling
whether it's forklifts or cars. And so
we're very excited to soon be able to
announce the one million-dollar prize
winner. So as we move forward information
sharing is really critical, and we
launched H2 Tools which is a one-stop
shop for sharing hydrogen information. We
trained over 36,000 code officials. You
can see the different regions across the
country where we're getting most of the
interest in terms of the website. And we
need to continue sharing that
information and we also need to make
sure that we tell the story in terms of
the portfolio approach. So we really need
all of the technologies. It's
not only one over the other,
not an either/or situation. We need
batteries and fuel cells. We need
electricity and hydrogen. Aand we need
we're looking at number of new options
as well so net zero carbon fuels taking
solar or wind producing hydrogen so you
can basically take water, apply
electricity, split the water to hydrogen
and oxygen, combine that hydrogen with
carbon with co2 to produce net zero
liquid fuels. So a number of options. And in
terms of the newest vision that's
gaining momentum worldwide, we're calling
it here at DOE H2 at Scale. And
the so-called big idea concept proposed by
our national laboratories. Here the
concept is, you can use renewable or
other technologies obviously, clean
technologies for the grid and you can
either continue with batteries
which as a means of storage, so electrons
to electrons, or you can produce
hydrogen and when the sun is shining the
wind is blowing and then store that
hydrogen. Either feed it back to the grid,
provide real-time grid services,
compensate for the intermittency of
renewables or you can inject that into
the natural gas pipeline. Some countries
are doing that now. Produce that hydrogen
for vehicles, synthetic fuels as i
mentioned, biomass. Number of other
approaches that are, where hydrogen is
needed. Such as the ammonia production
industrial applications or you can of
course go directly from those renewables
to hydrogen generation. So it's a way to
decouple what we think of it in terms of
our conventional
stovepiped sectors. So finally, what can
you do to help us? We have as of course
everyone on the street knows, hydrogen
the simplest lightest element. The atomic
weight is 1.008.
And Congress believe it or not
introduced National Hydrogen Fuel-Cell
day as October 8 and you can help us
by celebrating National Hydrogen
Fuel Cell Day. This past October we had a
National Press Club event. We reached
half a million people, again people just
don't know that much about hydrogen and
fuel cells. And I think it's the only
element that has its own national day. So
thank you again for your interest and
please help us to increase your H2 IQ.
Thank you.