"Hydrogen = Energy Independence"

Last year the US Senate passed a much smaller infrastructure package than was initially part of the overall bill. Much of the climate protection and clean energy aspects were stripped out but one of the big winners in the $1+ trillion Build Back Better bill was hydrogen (H2). At the Hydrogen Shot Summit (August 2021) Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, took the floor, "As with many emerging technologies we need to invest in the entire hydrogen value chain to bring down the cost and overcome deployment barriers. That is why I made research, development, and demonstration of these technologies a central part of my Energy Infrastructure Act, which passed the Senate earlier this month as part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

In that bill we fund $9.5 billion in research, development, and demonstration of clean hydrogen. And we tasked the Department of Energy to develop a national strategy and roadmap to get us to a clean hydrogen economy. This includes $8 billion for hubs across the country to accelerate hydrogen production from all energy sources and facilitate its delivery and use across all sectors of the economy.

"Hailed by President Joe Biden as a key tool to tackling the growing climate crisis, almost all energy funding in the bill will go to advancing “grey” H2 production from fossil gas". Hydrogen is like a "silver bullet". Apart from hydrogen being a reliable solution to climate issues, its flexibility allows hydrogen to be the base component of fuel types for ICE vehicles, HFCVs, aviation and marine applications. With the ability to switch out fossil based fuels with hydrogen or hydrogen based liquid fuels - it opens up the doors of opportunities for massive new employment in construction, engineering, processing, delivery, production and storage facilities for grid balancing. “Clean hydrogen is a game-changer. It will help decarbonize high-polluting heavy-duty and industrial sectors, while delivering good-paying clean energy jobs and realizing a net-zero economy by 2050,” said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a release about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) new Hydrogen Energy Earth Shots Initiative.

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The Economy of Things - in most cases - determines the successful or not so successful outcomes of endeavors. Unfortunately nature and Mother Earth do not operate on economical terms. Something works or something doesn't work - payoffs or costly destruction. This is the "nature of things". Where man has subtracted from one resource - it interrupts one of many other Eco-systems in the adjoining area or down stream. Building a reservoir to control water flow and produce clean energy destroys wild life and affects land erosion and interrupt vast Eco-systems that we don't immediately see has a direct influence on the world around us. This interruption process can take years or decades to become obvious to the discerning "eyes of science" until finally there is some catastrophic event where 100s die, millions in property damage or animal groups get close to extinction and the costs of such survival takes backseat.

Just like the original purpose of wind, solar, BEVs and eventually HFCVs were originally developed. The cost of creating solutions to clean up our environmental mess, clean our air, reduce CO2 emissions, reduce melting ice caps and limit rising waters was not a NYT front page headline until Elon Musk took front stage and turned the "Clean and Green" march against climate issues into a "us against them" war on Wall Street to benefit himself and Tesla shareholder's pockets. Green Energy, Climate Solutions, Renewable Energy and Zero emissions used to be a solutions game - now it's turned into a money game. The landscape has been divided - BEVs on one side, HFCVs on the other - wind and solar vs hydroelectric and geothermal and the battleground is now on thermal and electrical efficiency, compression rates, transport and operating costs, safety handling and government subsidies - or not - and 0-60 speed times. Lest we forget the conspiracy theorists claiming the oil giants are controlling it all - and Musk is just a front for Panasonic.

The message in the movie "Armageddon" becomes obvious. The world has to be threatened by its extinction before vast change is implemented on a global scale for survival. Then and only then - we as a race become unified. Once the wheels of decline are set in motion - it gets worse before its gets better. Its like fighting against gravity - it has only one outcome.

During the first global wave of the Covid Pandemic lock down NASA satellite photos appeared on the Internet of Beijing, Los Angeles, NYC, Paris and Rome. All major cities that have massive emissions levels due to population concentration and millions of one car commuters each day. these photos were taken after 2 months of the global lock down. Factories shut, industry comes to a standstill, no planes flying, buses in stations, trains in the yards, trucks barely rolling and for the most part cars are immobile in the driveway. The world was forced to focus on one thing and one thing only - survival - protecting one's own. Going outside was consider a threat. The numbers of Covid victims mounted into the millions, daily deaths around the world in every country by the thousands. What so many observed that finally caught the attention of NASA was the air around the major cities started to clear up! The very purpose of our "Green March" was happening before our very eyes - even without the "eyes of science" confirming this phenomenon. The air around us became transparent once again. For the first time in humanity - the world became unified for one purpose - pleasant or not. And look what we were able to accomplish. The NASA photos went viral. What was the "Before" lock down shots of each location showed cities shrouded in clouds of pollution, the "After" photos showed the actual cities themselves due to the disappearance of smog clouds only two months into the lock down. Thousands of people sent in their own photos of local neighborhoods and cities before and after. It was a global cleansing. 

Several years ago a dear friend of mine - one of Wall Street's Great - advised me when I was learning the investing ropes about a law when it comes to investing - "Don't fight the Tape". After I struggled for months investing into stocks that "looked good" losing my shorts while he's making massive gains year in and year out - little did I know - many years later after I took the deep dive into hydrogen 13 years ago this same wisdom also applies to nature and change in the wind. You cannot will your way into a result. Though many try....

For the past 200 years we have abused all of the natural resources that have been in abundance to generate power, produce heat, energy for manufacturing, all our chemicals while developing fuels for transportation across the entire spectrum. We live in a finite world - it only has so much spatial mass - there are only a limited amount of barrels of oil that can be pumped AND there is a certain amount of clean air and water on this planet. There is no back up. You cannot "fight the tape" on this matter! Enter Gravity...

Questions arise - "How much oil is left?" "How big are our natural gas reserves?", and "Could we ever run out of gas for our cars?".  Then a new discussion around the world became abuzz - set off by dramatically changing weather patterns in the past 20 years, scientists began warning about global warming and the increasing melting of the ice caps due to increasing temperatures due to increasing levels of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere - rising water levels in the ocean due to melting ice caps due to warming temperatures and increasing intensity and randomness in weather phenomenon. Raging wild fires has now become, "A season".

The concept and benchmark of "1.5 Celsius" was cast in 1972 in Stockholm during the first "Earth Summit".  Green Energy was born. There were no proof sheets, no diagrams nor working models or previous technology that had been established by the greats of NASA or the DOE to even quantify such a global undertaking. It became a time of deep exploration - like a "Space Race" - great risk taking, out of the stratosphere engineering, bending the rules of science and clean slate manufacturing. It was a time for many firsts. 

Denmark had already been well on its way with the development of the wind turbines dotting the landscape to bring down the cost of electricity in the 1970s. This Wind technology of Denmark was not the vision of powering the world as its influence of Renewable Energy today. Once NASA started experimenting in the 70s with Wind Turbine projects due to the fuel crisis and the oil embargo placed by OPEC - the US started taking a hard look at wind power as an alternative towards energy independence. In the 70s solar power on a small KW scale was being developed in the US, France and Italy. It was neither efficient nor cheap. When Germany and Japan became the leaders of installed solar power in the late 90s - China took over that lead of installations and manufacturing in 2011. With government subsidies and cheap labor - China lead the world in solar prices, technology and manufacturing. In 1977 the US government organized the National Lab of Renewable Energy (NREL) - renewable energy in the US was born.

Natural resources are geography dependent.  Oil in Saudi Arabia, Texas, Russia - hydroelectric power dominates in China and Canada - wind power is prevalent in the North Sea - sunshine in Africa. In the push for solutions to fight climate change, re-establish balance in a global environment while and weening the world off fossil based 24/7/365  power supply and while trying to eliminate CO2 emitting fuels for transportation - electrification is the hot topic that has taken the forefront of possible solutions. Renewable wind and solar offers an advantage as a non-emitting power generating resource but the efficiencies, unreliable weather patterns, only 22% of day can be used for electrical power conversions with solar and wind comes and goes.

In the impatient world that demands results now - the push for RE is now starting to reveal its true colors. Shutting down an entire power plant and replacing it with unreliable RE is becoming and impossible task to manage. The sun is shining during the day - people are at work. High supply and low demand. They come home and electrical demand goes up and the sun goes down. Wind comes when it comes. The more we electrify with RE the more intermittent power generation is quickly becoming unmanageable. Grid controllers are shifting RE power cross state borders to offload and curtail expensive RE power to any utility capable of absorbing the extra power to prevent local blackouts. Instead of driving costs down - utilities are creating charge backs to cover the expense of curtailment and offloads.