Webinar on Fuel Cell Product Applications and Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on Fuel Cell Product Applications and Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure presented on April 2, 2013.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, please press star then 1.

You will be prompted to record your first and last name. Today's conference is being recorded. If there are any objections, please disconnect at this time. I'd now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Linda Bluestein.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Hi, this is Linda Bluestein. I'm the co-director of the Department of Energy's Clean Cities program. We're very pleased today to be able to host this Webinar with our colleagues in the Office of Fuel Cell Technology.

First, we're going to hear from three people. First we're going to hear from Peter Devlin and second John Christensen and third Greg Moreland. Now all three of these speakers are going to be working off the same presentation, but they're going to be going in order starting with Pete Devlin so I'll go ahead and introduce the speakers.

And then following the presentation, we'll take questions. It'll be time for questions and answer period. First—my first introduction is Pete Devlin. He's a colleague of mine here at the U.S. Department of Energy and he's worked at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Transportation Technologies for 14 years.

And of those 14 years, he's worked half on engines and half on fuel cells which he's going to talk about today. He's the deployment manager for fuel cell technologies and he's going to talk about early markets for deployment and the transition toward more on road fuel cell vehicles.

Secondly, we're going—he's going to be followed by John Christensen who supports the DOE Fuel Cell Technology Office Market Transformation Program. And he's a consulting engineer to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and spent most of his 28 federal career with the Defense Logistics Agency.

The last eight is R & D chief, I'm sorry, that was National Renewable Energy Office as opposed to laboratory. In that capacity, he led the successful deployment and demonstration of over one hundred fuel cell forklifts at three defense logistics agency depots and an Army base.

John helps coordinate much of the interagency activities regarding hydrogen and fuel cells. Third, we're going to hear from Greg Moreland who's employed at SRA International where he supports the U.S. Department of Energy's Fuel Cell Technology Office as well.

And Greg's responsibilities have been focused on the market transformation of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and accelerating commercialization of fuel cells and hydrogen generation project.

In 2010, FCTO honored Greg with the DOE Hydrogen Program R & D Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the market transformation of fuel cells and hydrogen infrastructure.

Prior to that, he had a 30 year background working for Ford Motor Company in various roles and also with various industry organizations. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Pete so that the team can complete this and we can go on and have more of an interactive discussion. Thank you.

PETER DEVLIN: Okay, thanks a lot, Linda, appreciate the intro and thanks for everybody who's joined us today. First slide I just want to point out a couple photos. First of all those little boxes on the bottom there those are stationary fuel cells of about 300 or 400 kilowatts each.

And they're used for distribute generation, I don't know of any that are actually used for a grid power. So, that's well established there's millions of hours of operation time. They're offered with warranties and so forth.

So, what I want to talk to you today about is transportation applications. And a couple of things we've done on the top corner there the picture of a dispenser station in California that we did with Chevron Oil Company just as a demonstration.

Over on the left you see a stack and what we mean by a stack is a bunch of membrane electro assemblies put together and then literally tie rodded into each other to make the power. And for those of you unfamiliar with Pam on the lower right hand side is kind of a schematic of how it works.

And basically you got oxygen on one side and hydrogen on the other side and the membrane passes through an ion and on the anode side you collect all the electrons from that hydrogen to make an electric circuit.

Okay, so I want to point out why we're interested in this technology and we spend a lot of time and for that matter a lot of money in developing it. This is an analysis by Argonne National Lab but it shows the different well to wheels carbon dioxide emissions for different kinds of vehicles and different kinds of fuels.

If you just look at the top in your typical gasoline vehicle today, there's 450 grams of carbon dioxide associated with operating the vehicle per mile. You go further down in the whole portfolio of DOE, ERE technologies—vehicle technologies you can see that the CO2 is getting lower and lower.

Then you get down to the green bars and you notice that even distributed natural gas production to make hydrogen has a considerable reduction of about 50% of the greenhouse gas when compared to today's vehicles.

And it gets better if you look in biomass gasification and ultimately if you look at renewable sources like the electrolysis either from high temperature power or from solar power, solar PV. So, there's a lot of reasons to be interested in this technology from a carbon dioxide reduction standpoint as well as criteria pollutants.

This is emerging technology and you can see by the chart on slide 3 fuel cell patents, U.S. Fuel Cell patents have the lead in all the other advanced energy technologies and it continues to go up.

The patent distribution is pretty widely disbursed after you get past United States and Japan as shown by the pie chart. Japan has a good amount of the worldwide patents. United States is still in the lead but there's still plenty of competition. Over a thousand fuel cell patents were issued in 2012.

The next slide you can see that there is a number of worldwide players shipping fuel cells. We've got over 20,000 units shipped in 2011, significant increase over prior years. Japan is very committed to residential fuel cells and have assisted through subsidies with getting these installed in 30,000 residences in Japan.

Germany, they have a lot of effort in hydrogen infrastructure for vehicles and they have considerable amount of small fuel cells being shipped as well, 22,000 total. The European Union which covers 17 European countries including Germany is also funding quite a lot of R&D and the countries around Germany and in the European Union are shipping, the UK is a leader, France is a leader, Spain and Italy.

South Korea has very aggressive plan to create a fuel cell industry in their country and create jobs for South Korea. In China, they're experimenting with EVs and EVs with fuel cells on board and have a number of fuel cell shuttle busses that they have demonstrated at their world expo last year.

So over to the right you see the players, the main players in fuel cells being shipped. Japan has most of the units being shipped, but remember that Japan is—a lot of those numbers are focused on small 1 kilowatt residential systems.

So, you got to bear that in mind also it's heavily subsidized. United States is still a big leader but not shipping as many units as Japan. As far as hydrogen infrastructure, and that's probably the biggest question of fuel cell electric vehicles is getting enough refueling infrastructure to build enough confidence in vehicle users to make the plunge sort of speak and deploy vehicles.

In Japan they have a very aggressive plan, they have autos, they have oil fossil fuel companies wind up to put a hundred hydrogen stations in place in four urban areas and you can see all of the players there.

The oil companies are committed to making hydrogen available at their four quart gasoline and diesel stations. Each to mobility lots of public involvement that means that government's involved.

They intend to put 5,000 vehicles on the road in the next several years and they have a strong, robust gas supply and fuel cell electric vehicle backing from places like Daimler and Wyndai and Air Lockheed.

The UK, the United Kingdom, hydrogen mobility was rolled out recently. It's intending to make UK a leader in fuel cell electric vehicles and the use of them. There's a lot of work going on in and around London.

They're focused on London and Hyundai's already committed to do some deployments there. Scandinavian Highway Partnership linking the Scandinavian countries and using some of their strengths in terms of their incumbent or local or domestic industries like H2 Logic, Copenhagen H2 and then there's some autos as well Nissan, Toyota, and Hyundai.

So, you see over on the right side a planned hydrogen stations—United States being in the middle—the density of stations in operation and planned are much higher in places like Germany and Japan than they are in the U.S.

And so we're trying to focus in certain parts of the country that have the most interest and being the first to market. Estimated worldwide sales for vehicles and busses by pipe research is on the right side and there's a lot of industry executives stating that they think that this will be the next big commercialized vehicle.

In the DOE we've spent a lot of time and effort and I mean we being all of our industry and university partners that do all the research for us and we've been able to reduce the cost of a fuel cell typically material cost substantially by 35% over the last five years and 80% over the last 11 years.

So, at high volume manufacturing, 500,000 units a year, we're now able to say that we're in the $50 a kilowatt range for the entire system where as we were at 275 in 2002 and you can see the projections based on different manufacturing rates.

There's a pretty steep curve when you get to 100,000 per year. It drops significantly into the zone where you could actually commercialize a vehicle and be competitive. Our ultimate goal is still $30 a kilowatt. That would put it on a par with today's incumbent engine technologies.

Hydrogen sources I mentioned natural gas and that may be the best source for the initial launch of commercial vehicles. The reason being it's the cheapest and it's readily available in almost everywhere in the U.S.

But, let's not forget renewable sources and ultimately replacing fossil sources with renewable in a diverse portfolio of renewable so that we never get in the U.S. in the situation where we now rely on one feedstock for such a huge amount of energy.

So, natural gas reforming we think is a big, you know, launch point, biomass gasification and not too far behind it, we're very hopeful the electrolysis can do quite a lot with solar and wind, particularly in the early years when we can use the intermittency of solar and wind to balance the use of the asset.

And then further out is very much in the research stage or photo electric chemical, high temperature electrolysis, STCH is solar thermal chemical hydrogen and photo biological actually making hydrogen from algae.

So, there's no lack of different sources of hydrogen and even for low carbon sources. Currently, there is a lot of hydrogen being made in this country although most of it, 46.3%, about half of it is used for petroleum refining to desulfurize diesel and gasoline to meet the current regulations.

Ammonia is primary feedstock for ammonia and that continues to be a big market for hydrogen. So, there's hydrogen around and even in urban areas that could be used for initial launch. I feel sort of like vehicles.

I mentioned an early part—oh, first of all there's 9 million metric tons of hydrogen produced a year. Most of the pipelines that are in, you know, the golf region Texas, Louisiana, and also some in California, these are big areas for refining gasoline and diesel.

We do have 50, over 50 fueling stations, hydrogen fueling stations, in the U.S. used for various purposes which we'll talk about in just a minute. So, two main options are delivered from a central site or distributed using small, natural gas reformers or small electrolyzers to split water.

Central is viable only for a close endpoint users and what I mean by that is you can't truck too much hydrogen too far with—I mean you can't truck hydrogen too far without running into the cost of transporting the fuel is not economical to make a business case.

Other options that we've looked at and we'll describe in a minute here, things like tri-generation where you're making power and heat and also slip stream of hydrogen. So you can actually have heat and power for stationary uses and hydrogen for mobile uses.

And also we have some work going on in waste—industrial waste water, waste water treatment plants and landfills. Over to the right you can see that there's little triangles. You can see there's a number of production facilities that mention unintelligible the gulf area.

And then the natural gas interstate pipeline is extensive largely going from the gulf area to other parts of the country. Okay, tri-generation, this is a project we did with the California Energy Commission and Air Resources Board in California.

And this is the idea of making combined heat, power and hydrogen fuel. It's currently in use. It's in Fountain Valley, California. It's being used to dispense hydrogen into prototype vehicles that are being tested in Southern California associated with major automotive research centers Daimler, Toyota, and others.

Over to the left here the real essence of this is your transforming chemical energy into electrical energy and in the process with that circled spot there you can make hydrogen and past that through as a fuel while you're making the heat and the power.

So, this answers the chicken and egg question. I don't want to deploy a fuel maker in an area that has not commercialized vehicles extensively because you'll never get your money back and this simple way chance of stranded capital.

I wanted to mention safety codes and standards because we think it's so important in particular in these early years when we're basically experimenting with commercializing at scale. And that's when it becomes critical. We have an extensive safety program here. Lots of code officials have been trained. You see there's 23,000 first responders.

Also want to point out we have lessons learned data base and Web Site. This is a non-attributed resource where you can find out what's working and how it worked and how things like incidences are avoided and it can be—it is voluntary.

You can put it in if you have a hydrogen station and tell everybody else that's dealing with it—situation and how you managed it. So now I'd like to turn it over to John Christensen he'll be talking a little bit about some of the early markets and some of our plans of the future, John.

JOHN CHRISTENSEN: Thanks, Pete, and thanks, Linda. So as Pete said I'll be summing up the impact of the program. Talking about the R&D portfolio at DOE and then shifting—focusing on the transportation sector as well as our collaborations with DOT.

As you can see in the chart from the left, we've come a long way with the PEM Fuel Cell reduction in cost of 80%, 35% since 2008, platinum reduction by five times in seven years which of course is a major cost driver.

The durability has more than doubled in the last six years. We found in the case of electrolyzers which is a renewable way to produce hydrogen from water, an 80% reduction in those stacks. And then you can see the patent break down which Pete had talked to earlier. And on the right we do some early markets pre-commercial demonstrations ourselves within DOE and the Market Transformation Program that Pete leads.

And between that program and some era funding, we've been able to put $70 million out of DOE investment and have $200 million in industry investment in revenues, including purchases, as you'll see, both backup power, emergency backup power and lift trucks without any government investment after our demonstrations were done.

As you'll see on the next slide our R&D portfolio kind of hits three areas in applications backup power, stationary power at the top, followed by the fleets, busses, specialty vehicles which is really where we start with in the transportation area- care and handling equipment unintelligible trucks—areas where we can take advantage of a single hydrogen infrastructure and build out from there and put demand against it.

And then ultimately moving on to the government fleets and the commercialization, light-duty vehicles and then finally the third area and portable power is somewhat on a path itself. And down at the bottom you'll see that in hydrogen fuel as Pete talked about.

The reforming of natural gas provides affordable hydrogen for the early markets but we have ongoing R&D as we discussed to move into larger production of hydrogen, renewable production of hydrogen as well.

And over the next slide, we're going to drill down into transportation and I'll begin by saying that we really are in sync with most of the automobile manufacturers in fact the two charts on the right are General Motors charts.

But starting with the top half you can see there's been a steady move toward vehicle electrification from internal combustion engines to hybrid electric vehicles to battery electric vehicles, plug in hybrid electric vehicles and then on to fuel cell electric vehicles.

And as we get into larger vehicles and larger ranges, that's where the OEMC from the electrical vehicles—effective fuel cells electric vehicles taking a lot of that area. In the bottom half you'll see another GM chart that really just kind of speaks to battery electric vehicles and how 150 miles of range from a system mass effectiveness that they are certainly the way to go.

But as you get beyond that 150 mile range, you can see that for the same amount of mass of energy storage, the fuel cell electric vehicles tend to be favored. On the next chart, we'll talk a little bit about some of the external collaborations that we've had in the transportation sector.

Obviously, DOE has put a lot of funding into research development demonstration. As you can see from the left, there are platinum whiskers, tiny nana-particles on palmer out croppings of a membrane electrode assembly.

I think the point here is that we're able to get much more surface area and therefore much less platinum required—80% reduction since 2002 and of course that platinum is a precious metal and that make the vehicles that much more affordable. But as we do our R&D, we want to continue to feed deployment activities and in this case it's the DOT National Bus Program which has been ongoing for several years.

Many of you perhaps in the Clean Cites have a bus program demonstration, fuel cell bus program demonstration in your area. If you look at the bottom left of this chart, you'll see that by and large the fuel cell bus program is able to demonstrate twice the fuel economy of diesel busses, increase in durability, and certainly the mean time between road calls is huge as we've been able to show a 41% increase in miles from that.

And I guess that's it for me. I'm going to now turn it over to Greg Moreland who will take it from there, Greg.

GREG MORELAND: Yes, thank you, John. I'll be presenting the next several slides until final summary when the—when I'll be returning the microphone to Pete for wrap up. As John mentioned earlier the success in fuel cell systems for forklifts, we are building on this commercial success through a assisting the commercialization of fuel cell systems for other specialty vehicles and airport, seaport and industrial applications.

These include both on road and off road vehicles. Hybrid battery fuel cell drive train has a potential to electrify the vehicle fleets in these locations, replacing mostly diesel fuel internal combustion engines. This slide highlights a project we kicked off last week to develop and demonstrate hybrid battery fuel cell baggage tow tractors.

Baggage tow tractors are a type of ground support equipment or GOC used at virtually all airports. This is roughly a $5 million project but DOE providing $2.5 million of funding and the other partners providing $2.5 million of funding.

The partners are shown on the upper right and they include Hug Plug Power, Charlotte, Federal Express, Nuvera, and the Oakland and Memphis Airports. The first phase of this project will develop and test the hybrid battery fuel cell power system which at 20 kilowatts is slightly larger than the typical forklift fuel cell power pack.

If successful, the second phase will demonstrate these units under real world airport operating environment with 10 units at Federal Express's Memphis Airport location and 5 units that Federal Express's Oakland Airport location.

Also a key component to be demonstrated in this project is the hydrogen fueling system a steam methane reformer or SMR is manufactured by Nuvera. This hydrogen generation appliance will be capable of providing 20 kilograms a day of hydrogen reformed from natural gas.

We believe a critical part of this industrial and commercial fleet strategy is to align hydrogen supply with demand and we believe that the combination of both—and also taking advantage of natural gas is going to result in affordable hydrogen for these industrial sites and at seaports.

Next slide, please. Seaports are rich opportunities for clean energy products that can improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gases and decrease oil usage. Because seaports represent some of America's most polluted areas emitting annually, more than 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, 47,000 tons of criteria pollutants, and consuming 1.8 billion gallons of petroleum.

Seaports handle a majority of cargo shipments in America. Many ports are located in urban areas and many ports are located in nonattainment areas for criteria pollutants. Many of the ships supports are able to use poor quality diesel fuel.

As an example of a port's contribution to the overall air quality of an urban area, it is estimated that roughly 40% of the LA Basin's criteria pollutants can be traced to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

A portfolio approach that delivers a coordinated and cross-cutting deployment strategy and integrates various advance clean energy technology can address the challenges involved with the seaport.

Next slide, please. This slide shows the vision for the strategy that applies a portfolio approach to a port location. Using an array of clean area technologies, a major US seaport, and the data in this slide comes from the port of Los Angeles, could reduce the CO2 emissions by 725 tons, its oil usage by 8 million gallons and criteria pollutants by 9000 tons.

The various clean energy technologies are shown on the left, and the scale of reductions to greenhouse gaps pollutants, criteria pollutants and diesel fuel on a percentage basis are shown on the right.

The clean energy technology applications include, Number 1, resilient stationary power for cold iron and anchor chips, Number 2, cargo handling equipment—the forklift trucks that we talked about earlier, Number 3, trucks with battery or fuel cell electric drive trains, Number 4, biofuels for rail systems or ship board.

And then we can look at the intermittent to renewable technologies of solar panels, energy storage and offshore wind. And then finally, ship board APU's. Looking at the right hand side, these clean energy technologies could potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60%, criteria pollutants by about 100% and reduce diesel fuel by more than 20%.

Next slide, please. This slide provides information on the electrification of heavy duty and medium duty trucks. These projects will be demonstrating the potential to electrify heavy duty and medium duty trucks. Fuel cell recharges could be a value proposition for heavy duty, medium duty and possibly light duty electric vehicles.

The primary benefit is to substantially increase the zero emission driving range to these vehicles to levels that fit the missions of these cargo transport fleets in areas of severe non-attainment and traffic congestion.

The vehicle technologies program has made three awards to demonstrate heavy duty and medium duty electric trucks. On the right hand side is a Class 8 unintelligible truck, a vehicle that hauls shipping containers from the seaports to the nearby rail yards.

Vehicle technologies is awarded two projects, one to the port of Los Angeles and one to the port of Houston to demonstrate 23 heavy duty E-trucks with hybrid battery fuel cell recharger systems.

On the bottom left hand side is the picture of a medium duty, or Class 6, package delivery truck. Vehicle Technologies has awarded the project to the Houston area council to demonstrate 30 battery medium duty delivery trucks. Multiple units are important for these projects for both data collection, and also in terms of providing these sites with affordable hydrogen usage.

Next slide, please. Moving to light duty vehicles, the auto makers continue to be supportive of fuel cell electric vehicles. Several slides ago, Pete talked about the world-wide effort underway. Here is an example of recent activities announced by Hyundai, Toyota and Honda, and also a picture of the vehicles of these auto makers.

Next slide, please. Here are some announcements of formalized collaborations by several auto makers that have been released earlier this year, including the announcement of a Toyota-BMW collaboration, a collaboration between Daimler, Ford and Nissan, and finally a collaboration between Volkswagen and Ballard.

Next slide, please. Many states are supporting hydrogen and fuel cell initiatives involving both stationary power applications and transportation applications. We're not going to be discussing stationary power programs at the state level today because of time constraints, but we will be talking about some activities at the state level.

Shown here are two meaningful state programs, California and Hawaii, that are including fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEV's, in their transportation strategies. The California state program is widely known. It has demonstrated more than 560 fuel cell electric vehicles and busses since 1999 with about 230 vehicles currently operating.

These vehicles have been driven more than five million miles and have provided transportation to more than one million passengers. California stakeholders plan to have 20 hydrogen stations in operation by the end of this year, reflecting an investment of about $34 million. The California Energy Commission is proposing to invest $20 million in the next two years to further develop the hydrogen infrastructure.

Hawaii is pursuing H2I, or the hydrogen initiative, which is an agreement signed by 12 stakeholders to establish hydrogen as a major part of the solution to Hawaii's energy challenges. Goals include unintelligible into hydrogen fueling infrastructure on Oahu by 2015 to support initial deployment of government and industry fuel cell electric vehicle fleets.

General Motors has already placed 15 FCEV's on Oahu. Projects are in place to demonstrate renewable hydrogen for geothermal and wind energy on busses on the big island of Hawaii.

Next slide, please. In California, many private and public stakeholders have been actively pursuing plans to launch and grow the hydrogen fueling infrastructure for the past several years. This slide illustrates some of the road mapping that has been complied.

There are eight public hydrogen stations at this time—Emeryville, Burbank, Torrance, Newport Beach, University of California's Irvine, Fountain Valley, West LA and Thousand Palms.

Like I said earlier, there are plans for an additional 12 new or upgraded stations. These include Beverly Hills, Diamond Bar, which is an upgrade, Harbor City, Hawthorne, Hermosa Beach, upgrading the Irvine station, Irvine north, Laguna Niguel, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Sacramento and Westwood.

The California stakeholders are looking at five clusters to launch the market, including Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, Torrance and nearby coastal cities, the southern coastal area of Orange County, Berkeley and South San Francisco area.

You can roughly see those areas which are shaded in green on the boxes to the right. The plan is to have a total of 68 stations by 2016, forty-five stations in cluster communities and 23 connector and destination stations.

Groups like the California Fuel Self Partnership have done extensive modeling over the last couple of years to identify the right number of stations. The California stakeholders have more than ten years of experience placing cars with customers and building and operating hydrogen stations in California.

The over-arching goals in California are by 2015 to have the California major metropolitan areas to be zero emission vehicle-ready, by 2020 to have a California zero emission vehicle infrastructure that can support up to one million vehicles, and by 2025 to have over 1.5 million zero emission vehicles in California.

Next slide, please. The left hand side of this slide highlights some recent activities by a couple of auto makers to assist in the development of hydrogen fueling infrastructure in California.

These auto makers are examples of tactics and approaches that include both fleet customers and auto dealership retail customers as early adopter targets for fuel cell electric vehicles. The auto makers have indicated they are pursuing both fleets and retail customers as early adopter fuel cell electric vehicle customers.

The right hand side shows how Fuel Cell Technologies Office market transformation is supporting the fleet side of the early adopter equation. Working with the General Services Administration, or GSA, and the representatives of several federal agencies, we have identified metropolitan locations for GSA federal fleet units.

As showed on this slide, the GSA fleet totals 4672 vehicles in the 12 metropolitan areas where California is studying the potential for placing fueling stations.

Last month, we held a workshop with GSA and the federal agencies to discuss how federal agencies could be early adopter customers of fuel cell electrical vehicles. We are providing information to the California stakeholders doing the modeling analysis to the hydrogen infrastructure plan.

Next slide, please. Our GSA fleet mapping is also including Hawaii and the northeast states. Hawaii is not shown, but we know that the GSA fleet in Oahu totals more than 2,000 vehicles, and there are also more than 200 vehicles on the big island of Hawaii.

Because the auto OEM's have shown interest in the northeast as potential early adopter markets for fuel cell electric vehicles, specifically the Boston, Hartford and New York City metro areas, we have also road mapped the federal locations in the northeast states.

Here is the Connecticut road map of thoroughly owned or leased building sites. As shown on the balloon in the middle, there are 320 GSA fleet vehicles in the Hartford area. Next slide, please. Here is the Massachusetts road map of federal owned or leased building sites. There are 980 GSA fleet vehicles in the metro Boston area.

Next slide, please. And here is the New York road map of federal owned or leased building sites. There are 1577 GSA fleet vehicles in the metro New York City area. Much more needs to be done before federal agencies are ready to purchase fuel cell electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel, but we have started the discussions with the appropriate federal agencies to begin the steps to accomplish this goal.

Now I'm going to turn the discussion over to Peter Devlin to summarize the presentation.

PETER DEVLIN: Okay, thanks Greg and John, I appreciate that. Okay, so as a wrap-up, I'd just like to point out some things that may be could trigger some discussion on, you know, how can this effort work with Clean Cities?

Basically, we'd like to have Clean Cities work with us to inform all the stakeholders and the general public about progress and local and national events. That's something that Clean Cities does very well, and we'd like to tap into it, frankly.

Fact sheets—we have a number of fact sheets. We're putting together more and more. We work with expo displays, we'd like to work with Clean Cities on that coordinating various events all over the country, and in particular, these focus areas.

Lessons learned case studies—if you have some ideas on that, we've got some business case analyses that show how to minimize the amount of time and permitting how to utilize codes and train code officials properly, and how to apply standards, and probably most importantly, how to obtain public acceptance in areas that we think should be targeted for early commercialization.

Outreach activities such as information Webinars and public acceptance actions were strong proponents of questionnaires asking the public what they think, what they know, what their concerns are, and collecting data on early deployments and aggregating it to a credible amount, such as the average public, you know, potential user can see what the date is telling them in terms of durability, reliability.

Those kinds of things are key for this area and for these new deployments. So vehicle deployments—you heard a little bit about some preliminary planning on federal fleet deployments.

This is our action based on all these very near term OEM announcements in which the automotives and some truck fleet manufacturers, some truck manufacturers, are starting to talk about, you know, actually deploying them in the US. So, we'd like to consider different meetings from stakeholders, safety training and awareness is very important.

We had emergency response training in Hawaii a couple of months ago, over 100 emergency response officials were trained and it was very well received. Awareness of what's possible in, you know, specific areas in kind of your neighborhood, and how can we work together to make things happen.

So with that, I would like to say thank you and open it up for questions on behalf of DOE and our team here, thanks again, Greg and John. We'd like to open it up for a few questions.

SANDRA LOI: All right, thank you. Dory, could we go ahead and open up the lines for questions, please?

COORDINATOR: Yes. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then 1. You will be prompted to record your first and last name. And to withdraw your request, press star 2. Once again, to ask a question, press star then 1 now.

PETER DEVLIN: Okay, I have a question here that—the question is to Greg. Greg, unintelligible stations in California didn't include UC San Diego? Is this one not public? I don't know the answer to that, do you know, Greg or John?

GREG MORELAND: I don't know the answer to that either, other than it probably isn't a public station. And that's just my speculation.

JOHN CHRISTENSEN: Yes, I think I've heard of that station, I don't think it is public. But it certainly, as Greg talked about, we're looking at—or California is looking at not just clusters, but corridor stations and destination stations, and certainly San Diego would be a destination station.

PETER DEVLIN: One of the things we talked to about our federal partners is making stations publicly accessible, and that's a big issue for a lot of DOD sites, and we're trying to work through that, so we'll continue to try to make things happen in public access areas.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thank you. Dory, are there any questions on the phone line?

COORDINATOR: Yes. Our first question comes from Dick Ramo, your line is open.

DICK RAMO: Thank you, and thank you all for the presentation. It's very interesting. If I may do a little bit of a commentary, because I've been at this for a long time, it seems to me that the various departments of the government are not working in tandem.

For example, the Department of Energy funded an excellent first responder training program, and it needs to be renewed, and there needs to be some money put behind it to get it out, because I agree with you. As the alternate fuel agenda moves forward, we're finding especially in rural America that there's a lot of folks that don't know what to do in case of an emergency.

Secondly, we did a study, California Hydrogen Business Counsel did a study some time ago which showed all of the hydrogen fueling stations in California, tried to match them to where customers might be so as it would work within an appropriate radii, and in doing that, we discovered that a lot of the stations were open for demonstration only and then were closed.

Are we getting a handle on how all this can work together so that we're working in unison, and not starting and stopping?

GREG MORELAND: Well, I'll take a shot at that one. I think the first one was a comment, did you want a response on that, or are you just…

DICK RAMO: No, I just think you're right on on the training, but I hear you're doing something in Hawaii. Is that different than the one, the total comprehensive package that the Department of Energy put together through NAFTC, if it's already been done, why do we reinvent it?

It's an excellent program that covers every alternate fuel including hydrogen, and they really do a nice job and they keep it updated, and it's been funded and approved by the Department of Energy.

So I just—I hear people saying they're doing this training and that training, well golly, we've got one, let's make that one work for everybody and skip reinventing the wheel every five minutes. So I guess it's a commentary.

GREG MORELAND: Okay. On your second point, demos are closing and stations are not continuing—we've had this problem with the DOE Fuel Cell Technologies Office with our learning demonstration, which was intended to be a, you know, finite time, and what we've done there is work with the local stakeholders to try to redeploy the equipment.

And there's some redeployments going on, there's one from Orlando, Nassau's picking up part of that, and we just work with every local area that's interested in picking up at least the equipment and deploying it somewhere else for hydrogen dispensing.

So hopefully, that won't occur again, at least not related to that technology validation demonstration project we had, but that is a concern all over the country as we try to commercialize here. Where is the demand coming from? Will there be enough vehicles?

Our strategy is to try to get finite fleets identified that could be converted over where you know how much fuel you need. You can size your refueling equipment accordingly, and not risk stranded capital as a first strategy, recognizing we all want fuel available whenever we want it by privately owned vehicles.

DICK RAMO: Peter, just real quickly, you know, there are many companies out there that are putting in natural gas infrastructure. You can rattle them off on one hand, of course Clean Energy, I mean, there's a lot of them. And they already have natural gas there, they already have ways to get in and get out and handle traffic.

Wouldn't it be good to set up alliances with some of these cross-country natural gas station and fuel providers to help get the infrastructure in place quicker? Most of these folks do intensive internal review of where the vehicles are and what might be converted. It just seems to me an alliance of those folks would really move this puppy along.

PETER DEVLIN: I agree. Thank you for that suggestion. We'll look into it, it sounds like a real good fit.

DICK RAMO: Thank you.

PETER DEVLIN: You're welcome.

COORDINATOR: At this time I have no additional questions.

PETER DEVLIN: Okay, I'd like to thank unintelligible and Sandra Loi particularly, also Linda Bluestein for giving us the opportunity to address Clean Cities' coalitions, and look forward to meeting with you and working with you in the future.

SANDRA LOI: You know, we actually have two more online questions. Do you all have a few more minutes just to go over these real quick?

PETER DEVLIN: We do.

SANDRA LOI: All right. There's a question about the cost per GGE slide. Was that production method method agnostic?

PETER DEVLIN: I'm sorry. I'm trying to go back to it now.

SANDRA LOI: Sure, yes, please go ahead.

PETER DEVLIN: Whoever pointed that out, could you give us an idea of which slide they're referring to? I'm not seeing it here.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, well, let me give you the other question real quick.

JOHN CHRISTENSEN: I think it's Slide 7, Pete.

SANDRA LOI: Sorry, go ahead.

PETER DEVLIN: Seventeen?

JOHN CHRISTENSEN: Slide 7.

PETER DEVLIN: Seven, sorry.

GREG MORELAND: Also Slide 8 has a reference in it, too.

PETER DEVLIN: Let's start with seven. All right, let's go to eight. Okay, eight has got a reference here, low volume stations, two to three hundred kilograms. This is for—it is not agnostic. It's really a calculation based on natural gas, costs and reforming costs, both, you know, at the central reformer or the distributed station.

So these are early options for low-cost fuel. As I mentioned, natural gas provides a pathway for that first commercialization, but also remember that in Slide 7 we talked about rolling out renewal unintelligible feed stocks and methods in future. Next question?

GREG MORELAND: And I think the other part of that answer, Pete, if I can, in a fuel cell electric vehicle, you've got substantial efficiency improvement with the engine, versus an internal combustion engine. So, you know, that can translate into a higher price for the hydrogen and still be competitive with the cost of gasoline.

PETER DEVLIN: Yes, that's a good point. Ballpark, you're looking at, for today's conventional internal combustion engine a 50% energy efficiency improvement, with the fuel cells they, you know, roughly cut that $7 and $5 in half on a—well, if convert it to cents per mile.

SANDRA LOI: Great. Thank you so much for answering that. And one of the other questions from one of the listeners today was, when will you all have an exhibit that can be placed at an auto show?

PETER DEVLIN: Yes, we have booth—a kind of traveling booth and somebody who sets them up at auto shows, at material handling shows, ground support equipment shows. So we have a display that's getting out there, we've got a list of expos that are planning to provide a booth that we could let you know about.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, that would be great. I was actually thinking between that list, and then I know you mentioned you have several fact sheets and case studies, I'm happy to send out an email afterwards with a link to where the Webinar will be archived, in addition to links to where all of this information lives. If you have that handy, I can share that with all the participants today.

PETER DEVLIN: Sure, no problem.

SANDRA LOI: That would be great. And Dory, do we have any more phone questions, before we end the Webinar for the day?

COORDINATOR: Yes. Our next question comes from Ted Russell, your line is open.

ED RUSSELL: Hey, this is Ed Russell, from H Cat. I was the one who asked about the agnostic production method. Can you hear me okay?

PETER DEVLIN: Yes.

ED RUSSELL: Okay. Thanks for the Webinar, guys, that was really, really informative. The question about the production agnosticism—we in Hawaii are now looking at initial roll-out of a state-funded hydrogen station, so that's in the works. And in order to do that, we're going to be looking for what has worked at other places in the business places, and the business cases that haven't work.

So if you have any information that you can release to me, I'd really appreciate that. We're trying to get the information that's relevant back to the state legislature within the next week or so.

PETER DEVLIN: Okay. We'll find what we've got and get it to you, okay?

ED RUSSELL: Thank you.

SANDRA LOI: Are there any further questions on the phone?

COORDINATOR: Yes. Our next question comes from Michael Mulcahy. Your line is open.

MICHAEL MULCAHY: Yes, hi. I apologize, I'm late in entering this seminar, Webinar. But I got the tail end, and I just wanted to make some comments. I used to work with the CEC, and I was involved in alternative transportation fuel technology research and development there.

And 22 years ago is when we were trying to push hydrogen fuel as a viable clean air technology for vehicles, and the program was structured at and targeted at fleets and demonstrations and so forth. And it went nowhere, and the reason for that was because of the political load.

I handled all the gaseous fuels, LPG, CNG and hydrogen, and we struggled on getting hydrogen into this country, the BLR, which is the equivalent mass in Germany, was reject—you know, we had a traveling expo and we couldn't get them to come to Sacramento. And so, there is a real struggle there.

I'm wondering if there's anything being done on the front on the political side. As you know, we have a chicken egg syndrome, not having demand, trying to create supply, so on and so forth, and the previous gentlemen on his question regarding CNG fueling stations—there are hydrogen fueling stations that are concurrently set up with some CNG, like for small bus lines, for instance in Palm Desert.

Sunline has a hydrogen CNG station, and they're doing a marvelous job of providing that service, but again, demand is not there. So, just as an example, where a grass roots political movement circumvented large order politics to a local level and they overturned the system, what is being done to address these political barriers that we have in front of us with regard to this transition?

PETER DEVLIN: Okay, what we've been doing at DOE is, we've been watching the things going on in Congress with regard to bills being introduced. There was one introduced late last calendar year which gave a very generous 50% tax credit for anyone willing to site a hydrogen station.

That, I understand, didn't go forward, but I doubt if it's the last attempt. And that's the kind of thing that we've been telling our legislative affairs people in DOE every time we get a chance, needs to happen to help the infrastructure get established.

In the meantime, we continued to push with our resources on fleet deployment that make business sense, and we have a number of them that because—between the shell gas cost and rising cost of diesel, even make fuel consumption reduction, or energy consumption reduction, possible. So we're pushing on both sides. There's only so much we can do about the infrastructure.

We can only point out when it would make sense for a national policy, but on the other side, we can show business cases for fleets. If you utilize a reformer or other refueling asset at a very high rate, you know, 80, 90%, the cost of the resulting fuel goes down dramatically and you can see potential competitive, or even competitive today in case. So we're pushing on both sides trying to move forward.

MICHAEL MULCAHY: Yes, I just want to say one thing about that. The—unfortunately there is, again, this—you talk about business case, a business case can be made and obviously, in early years when we were involved there, you know, there was a lot of unintelligible that was required, but today, you know, it actually is cost-competitive, with fuel prices being high.

There still is the issue of this, you know, the political process where large corporations come in and actually effectively kill part of the programs, and things of that sort. So it's been a monumental problem. I told you I was involved in this 22 years ago. I've seen the CNG industry trying to evolve. It's still not where it should be.

You know, it's obviously been quite—there's a huge infrastructure for CNG, and I understand the east coast is pushing for hydrogen infrastructure, and they're just doing it sort of independent of, you know, outside forces.

So I just see it as a real struggle. And I was just wondering if there's, you know, it's kind of the same old song for me, what you just said, unfortunately, but good luck, I guess.

PETER DEVLIN: I agree, it is a big struggle, but we carry on, you know? Thanks.

GREG MORELAND: You know, what's happened recently is that there have been some commercial breakthroughs with the fuel cell systems for forklifts, with the backup power, you know, some really strong success stories, in some cases a very good business case.

And you know, that's, you know, something that we can build on and part of the strategy for specialty vehicles is to, you know, build on the success that we found for the forklift specialty vehicles.

And potentially, with fleet customers, you can align the hydrogen production at a scale that really fits the fleet. And you can—you look at a lot of near term deployment opportunities. So it's just not light duty vehicles that we're looking at. We're looking at a whole portfolio of vehicle applications.

JOHN CHRISTENSEN: And we recently had a workshop at Argon that was focused on lessons learned from the CNG vehicle roll-out.

SANDRA LOI: Great, Dory, any other questions on the phone?

COORDINATOR: At this time, we have no additional questions.

SANDRA LOI: Wonderful, thank you. Well, thank you for joining us today, thank you to our speakers for taking the time to present today on this topic, and we will be posting a recording of the Webinar, as well as a copy of the slides on the Clean Cities Web site, on our Webinar archives page.

I will send an email out to all participants with a link to that that should be up within the week, and I will also send an email with links to where you can find the fact sheets, case studies and lists of conferences and expos where this group is planning to be participating for your reference.

And feel free to reach out to me, Sandra Loi, you probably received the email about the Webinar from me. If you have any additional questions, then I can help field them to our presenters. So thank you again, have a wonderful week, and we'll talk to you all soon. Thank you.

PETER DEVLIN: Thanks, bye.

COORDINATOR: Thank you for joining today's conference. That does conclude the call at this time. All participants may disconnect.