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I'm David Nazar.

Cars, SUVs, busses, trucks, ships, locomotives, aircraft.

They all need a source of power, obviously.

However, in this divisive day and age, when many say we're depleting our natural resources and we must reduce our oil drilling and our reliance on fossil fuels, a valid argument and many others argue we must have oil and energy independence also a valid argument.

Well, where does that leave us?

What could be an environmentally friendly energy alternative?

How about hydrogen?

Later in this broadcast, we're going to take you on a tour of an amazing hydrogen lab.

First, though, joining me now to discuss all of this and answer some tough questions is Dr. Jack Brower.

Dr. Brower is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Irvine in Orange County, California.

And Jack is the director of a National Fuel Cell Research Center.

Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Jack Brower.

Thank you for having me.

So before we get to talk all about hydrogen, just tell us about you.

You've got an unbelievable resume.

I gave the most abridged version.

Lets know about you.

Well, I grew up on a farm in San Diego area, a rural place where I had to work a lot.

And I always complained to my dad and mom.

How come I always have to work so hard?

But I look back on those days as being wonderful for my growth and for my work ethic in the end.

And interestingly, when I invited my friends over, they thought, Hey, this work isn't so bad.

It's kind of fun.

And then how did you work your way into hydrogen?

Well, I always had an interest in energy, even driving, growing up on the farm, I used to love to work on the tractor and the mechanical equipment.

And I always thought about these things, even though I didn't have any background yet in these things.

And I thought they were the most interesting things to work on.

And so when I went to high school and did well in math and science, I thought, Man, this energy field might be a really interesting one for me to get into.

And so even as an undergraduate studying mechanical engineering, most of my projects associated with various classes and everything were associated with energy technologies.

I also grew up going on camping trips with my family, and so I loved the outdoors.

So I also wanted to always do something that would reduce pollutant emissions and that would increase the air quality associated with energy conversion devices.

And so it's always been a passion of mine because I love the environment and because I thought it was very interesting tech.

All right.

Now to the discussion.

Can you explain and remember, for a dummy like myself exactly what hydrogen is, how it's used, and also, what's a hydrogen fuel cell?

Tell me all about that.

Sure.

Hydrogen is a zero emissions energy carrier that we can make from many renewable and clean energy resources.

The main way that we will make it is by electrolysis of water.

So we will use sun and wind, electricity to go into an electrolyzer that will split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

This is going to be the main way that we make hydrogen in a sustainable fashion.

And then we can store that hydrogen for long periods of time.

We can send it through pipelines or in trucks to various other locations, and then we can reconverted with zero emissions in a complementary electrochemical device.

This is a device that takes the hydrogen that you made earlier together with oxygen to make electricity with zero emissions.

All it does is it converts the hydrogen and oxygen back to the original water that you started with.

So it's a virtuous cycle.

And the way that a fuel cell works is it breaks down the hydrogen on one side and gives up electrons and it sends ions across the membrane and the other on the other electrode electrolyte interface.

We have oxygen reacting with the ions and consuming electrons, and that flow of electrons is what we use to power our devices, power the grid, power, cars or other things.

Why, in your opinion, is hydrogen vital?

Why is it the future, Jack?

Well, we've already had policies around the world that have supported the subsidy originally and cost lowering of revenue, renewable sun and wind power, especially.

So all around the world now, sun and wind power is the cheapest form of primary energy.

The problem is that we can't use it always when it's available and sometimes when we want it, it's not available.

So we have excesses of sun and wind power at some times and we have deficits of sun and wind power at other times.

And we can use various technologies to store and give us back that renewable energy and batteries were the first thing that we as nations around the world invested in.

And the cost of batteries have come down quite dramatically in recent years.

So we have sun, wind and batteries very important for our sustainable energy future.

But there are some features of energy storage that we need in society that batteries are not well suited to accomplish.

And I have a few of those that I'd like to highlight.

The first is long duration storage on the electric grid.

So when we use a lot of sun and wind power, we have to actually store some energy from certain seasons, especially in the spring, for example, and return it 6 to 9 months later, like in the fall and winter months.

So that long duration storage can be well accomplished by hydrogen but not easily accomplished with battery energy storage.

Another thing is that hydrogen is very lightweight, so freight applications that require a heavy payload.

Things like ships and trains and long haul trucks, these kinds of things are not easy to make zero emissions with batteries, but they are easy to make zero emissions with hydrogen or hydrogen derivative fuels.

One final thing is that you may know that in California now, we have challenges with getting all of our renewable electricity from the eastern part of the state through the mountains and deserts to where we live.

And as a result of wildfires and as a result of public safety power shut off events, our grid has become less reliable.

So hydrogen has the opportunity to allow us to take that sun and wind power in via wires, but also pipes making our renewable grid more resilient.

So these are some of the things that hydrogen can do for us and that we need for a sustainable and reliable energy infrastructure.

You also have, you can call it really a unique, almost amazing UCI project at University of California, Irvine.

I hope I have the name correct.

US first power to hydrogen to power.

That's the project.

Talk about that.

Yes.

This is a demonstration on our campus in which we take solar electricity, put it through one of those electric lasers that splits water using the electrical energy and introduce that hydrogen into a natural gas pipeline, deliver it to a combined cycle power plant to partially decarbonize it.

Proving that you can actually have this virtuous cycle that I talked about earlier, and it's the first place in the U.S. that ever tried doing this.

There were some places in Germany and in China and in Japan that beat us.

But it's the first time in the U.S. and what we did proves that you can take renewable electricity in storage in the form of hydrogen and reuse it later to do this storage of renewable energy, delivering it at an time of day.

I have a challenging question for you here on this program.

We don't censor ourselves, or at least I don't censor myself.

I ask tough questions.

I expect my guests to answer questions.

I greatly appreciate when they do.

Here's the question.

I know you're collaborating with SoCal Gas.

In SoCal Gas is defense on this project.

They take care of millions of residents in California and are good at what they do.

So kudos to SoCal Gas for working with you.

I guess to decarbonize, it's a word we could use.

With that said, as you know, there are many SoCal Gas critics.

They insist this company is mired in controversy.

There have been the lawsuits, a history of greenwashing.

Google that you can read all about, SoCal Gas, and certainly in my reporting, not being honest with the public.

What do you say to all that?

And it's some of the criticism I just mentioned, Jack.

Is it justified?

Explain that.

So let me say, first of all, that SoCal Gas, in my experience, and you will have many others that can confirm, is one of the most progressive gas utilities in the country and even recognized around the world for their investments in clean energy technologies.

On the other hand, they also have had controversies and have been involved in schemes I suggest historically that have been that can accurately be characterized as greenwashing.

In addition, I think they have been much too slow to adopt a fully decarbonized plan for the future.

As a matter of fact, they came out with a plan almost a decade after.

We have already already had a plan to decarbonize the electric grid.

So so the slowness of their adoption of a zero emissions policy I think is also worth criticism.

They would argue that it's much more difficult to decarbonize these things like the gas system than it is the electric system.

And maybe there there is some truth to that.

But using the hydrogen vector, I think they have an opportunity here.

They have an opportunity here using hydrogen to completely decarbonize all of their operations and to deliver only renewable gas to their customers.

And if they and I know they're committed to this, at least they have already stated so many times publicly.

And so I'm hoping that this vision and the investment in hydrogen will make a difference and make a difference both for the company, because they can really decarbonize and for their acceptability amongst the general public.

Jack, you get the final word.

Just 30 seconds left in this interview.

I apologize.

Just explain why fossil fuel usage is bad.

As you know, so many people, particularly in this day and age, say we need oil and gas.

We need coal.

What's your take?

So first of all, there is not enough fossil fuel in the ground to last for many generations.

So we are stealing that resource from our posterity.

And every person should care about the fact that this resource, which took millions, 200 years of millions of years for the Earth to naturally make, and we're going to use it in a couple of hundred years, that's just not sustainable.

Secondly, every time we convert some of that fossil fuel, we have criteria pollutant emissions which are dramatically affecting people's health and air quality.

To the extent that, you know, people are going to hospital more, they're experiencing days off of work, they have asthma attacks and they're dying prematurely.

This is a dramatic impact of using fossil fuels.

And then finally, we have greenhouse gas emissions that come from all of these fossil fuel conversion systems.

And we need to eliminate all of these.

And we can if we focus attention on what's next, we need solar, we need wind, we need batteries and what's next, hydrogen, that will allow us to decarbonize all these application, the difficult ones like the freight, the difficult ones like the long duration storage and the like.

Dr. Jack Brower, thank you so much for really a great interview.

So greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

And now we take a visit to your university, Dr. Jack Brower, UC Irvine, to tour your lab and meet a fellow colleague of yours.

This is the National Fuel Cell Research Center, or NF CRC, as it's known.

This highly specialized research facility is part of the Advanced Power and Energy Program on the campus of the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Arenas and is part of the faculty here.

Arena is with the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Irvine, and she is also the associate director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center.

Getting here took a lot of energy on a road well traveled for this 35 year old scientist.

Southern California is worlds apart from where Irene Wozniak's life began.

I been in America for my for the last 20 years.

I came to America when I was 15 years old.

But before that, I grew up in Ukraine with my family.

And since I remember myself since age four or five, I've been fascinated by chess.

And I started playing chess early, participated in chess tournaments, and became a chess champion.

At the age of seven, Irina won her Ukraine district championship, and then she competed at nationals.

You could definitely say this born chess champ was also a born scientist, just helped develop a lot of her critical science skills for what she terms her future science brain, things like her decision making and technical training, her proficiency in math and physics, even her strategic and spatial planning.

Irina was well on her way to great success in the Ukraine, and then Irina's life dramatically changed.

When I was eight year old, my father passed away and and it was economic crisis in Ukraine at the time.

So my mother made the decision to come to America to seek more economic security here.

Me and my brother joined my mother here in America.

When I was 15, six years later.

And this this moment is is quite was quite memorable for me, first of all, because I haven't seen my mother for six years.

Second moment was that I arrived to the United States the night before 911 and taking taking a cab from JFK to to Manhattan.

I, I remember like it was now when my mother showed me the skyline of Manhattan.

And at a time she she pointed to me that this is a Twin Towers.

Raining debris on all of us.

A few hours later, the Twin Towers were gone and she and her mom had just witnessed the horrors of 911, just a few miles away from the World Trade Center, Ground zero.

Irina was in shock.

My first day in America that that would happen.

So.

So it took me several months to process the tragedy.

But I also got to see New Yorkers being together, helping each other.

And and so I saw the kind of the United States at its worst and at its best.

As I read, his life finally began to normalize.

She got reconnected with her chess.

She enrolled in the world famous martial chess club and even had a private chess coach.

I represented the United States on many international events.

I was on the United States chess team for many years.

I played ten U.S. chess championships, and at the same time, I was pursuing education in engineering.

So I had to two lives chess life and scientist life.

Irina began the scientist life.

She speaks of studying engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic University, now part of NYU.

However, Irina says her visit to China in 2008 for a Beijing chess tournament changed her future science life.

That's when Irina began her quest to find out anything and everything about the environment or in this case, how to save the environment, given the horrific air pollution she witnessed in China, an environmental crisis still looming in China today.

That really impacted me, impacted my thinking.

And what is it that I want to do in the future?

And it made me realize that there are so many sustainability problems and air pollution problems that need to be resolved here in China at a time.

But the United States also had air pollution problems.

So I decided to invest my time and my energy to pursuing the degree in engineering, in renewable energy.

So in 2009, Iryna joined the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University, where she first began researching hydrogen fuel cells, then emerging technology and potentially good alternative and trying to achieve carbon neutral zero emissions.

Iryna continued her science studies at UC Berkeley as a post-doctorate fellow.

Then she was named an assistant professor at Tufts University, eventually making her way here to UC Irvine so she could team with world leading renewable energy scientists and further her research about things like the environment, clean energy and hydrogen.

Iryna was first hired as an assistant professor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department and also as the associate director of the NSF CRC, where we meet her today to discuss what else hydrogen.

So what is hydrogen?

Hydrogen is an energy carrying gas.

So you think about hydrogen, It's it's H2.

So it has two atoms of hydrogen, right.

And it stores energy in a chemical bond.

So if you think about an energy carrier as hydrogen, the advantage of it is that it when you convert it to electricity, for example, it doesn't produce any greenhouse gas emissions.

So but in its purest form, hydrogen does not exist in our atmosphere.

So how do you make hydrogen?

Well, if you think about water, right.

Water is H2O.

So what?

It has hydrogen in it.

So the only thing you need is to separate hydrogen from oxygen from water.

So if you have water, you have hydrogen.

Another advantage of hydrogen is that it's it has really high energy content.

What do you mean by high?

If you think about one kilogram of hydrogen, its energy content is equivalent to one gallon of gasoline.

And that's something, right?

Well, some hydrogen is made through the process called steam methane, reforming.

So how methane, which is greenhouse gas.

Right.

And you add water and through this reaction, you form hydrogen.

And so in further steps, you form more hydrogen.

But that's how 99% of hydrogen is currently made.

And now joining us is Iryna Zannier via Zoom.

You just heard her in the field report and of course, a past guest on this program.

Iryna, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Obviously, we have to talk about the story of Ukraine and the situation there now.

You've been dealing with this for the last several months since we spoke with you.

How's your family back in Ukraine and how's your Zot Funder website going?

Thank you, David, for asking.

Thankfully, my family is safe and doing well.

Of course, I'm worried about the situation in Ukraine.

And as as we discussed before, we can do have this program to host Ukrainian time, this displaced academics here at UC Irvine.

So we already gather hundreds of thousands, thousands of dollars.

And then we are ready to host those academics coming here to why.

And so I'm really excited to have this opportunity to talk about this program.

And we worked really hard to to fundraise, and we continuously fundraise through that funder to bring more academics here to safe haven before they can go back to Ukraine to rebuild their economy and education system.

You know, it's interesting you mention Irene of scientists and academics.

I don't know if many folks know this.

I didn't know this until I started researching a bit.

I had no idea Ukraine was really a hub, I mean, a hub of education throughout Europe, particularly Kharkiv.

This destroyed city that was pummeled and shelled by Putin and the Russians.

I had no idea that.

That's right, David.

Kharkiv was the academic center along with Kiev in Ukraine.

So you had a Kharkiv Aviation Institute, which is most likely destroyed now.

But it did have a big international population of students because it was world famous for aviation studies, because if you think about the Ukraine, it's a big aerospace producer.

For example, it produces largest airplanes in the world called Antonov.

So now, now the students and displaced academics from from, let's say from this heart to Aviation Institute have nowhere to go.

Studies this continued.

So that's why we are trying to do something here this year, trying to help them out.

Okay, let's get back to hydrogen.

Iryna, we just spoke with your colleague, Dr. Jack Brouwer.

He really gave such an amazing explanation of hydrogen and his take from your perspective, why is this the best energy option?

Well, if.

Well, let's let's let's look at the hydrogen from the perspective also with the events happening now, the war, Russian war in Ukraine and geopolitical situation in Europe, for example, where many countries are dependent on Russia and its natural gas and where is natural gas used is not just to to warm up the homes and to use natural gas for cooking.

Natural gas is used in heavy industry and most mostly you make hydrogen from natural gas and then you use this hydrogen to to make ammonia, to make steel to to make other chemicals.

And so without hydrogen as our natural gas, we we're going to have this whole industrial sector being shut down.

So we really need hydrogen for that.

And there is no really easy way around it.

So that's why if you think about Europe and its dependency on Russian natural gas and hydrogen, it's really a difficult situation.

And and hydrogen has the potential because it's a clean fuel.

As you heard my colleague speaking, Professor Jack Brewer, it's really clean molecule, so it only emits water if it's converted in electric chemical systems.

So it has potential because it's used in in all this heavy industry and there is no way around.

Batteries cannot do it right.

You cannot use battery to make ammonia.

So the only thing we need to do is to reduce hydrogen, clean away not from a natural gas, but from water.

So you take electrolysis, you take water, electrolytes, water, produce the hydrogen and clean the way using solar or using wind.

So that's the beauty of hydrogen.

It's really clean.

Final question, Iryna, is this studying the research, the implementation of hydrogen, so to speak?

Is it a US thing?

Is it a worldwide thing?

In other words, who's taking the lead on this?

Where is the future of hydrogen going to be?

Is it going to be in Europe?

It's going to be here in the United States.

It's going to be in your backyard in Irvine, where.

That's a really great question, David.

And Europe.

Europe is is leading in hydrogen because, well, actually, their dependency on natural gas and all that geopolitics drove them to invest more heavily in the clean technologies.

And you think about hydrogen has a potential to democratize our our energy economy because countries that have a lot of solar energy and wind will be will will have also the capacity to produce locally hydrogen.

So think about countries in South America or in North Africa.

Those countries will be empowered.

And so we'll see a lot of this transition from from classic kind of oil countries to more the more democratic way of sourcing energy.

And while we see a lot of desperation happening in Europe, in the United States, then their infrastructure unveiled by this administration has released has $8.5 billion investment into clean hydrogen hubs.

So we will see this disbursement coming out this year.

So we'll see large investment in hydrogen infrastructure here in the United States.

And that's why what we do at UC Irvine matters because of U.S. roads.

We have a tradition of 20 years or so pushing the research boundaries of enabling hydrogen technologies, working with government agencies and other relevant stakeholders to enable hydrogen economy.

So I think we have a bright future here and also in Europe.

Dr. Irina Zelnick with UC Irvine, thank you so much for a great interview.

Thank you, David.

And, of course, a great thank you to your colleague, Dr. Jack Brauer, with UC Irvine, the director of your lab.

Tell him hello.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions and comments or story ideas so we can hear from you or direct message me at David is our news on Twitter.

That's @DavidNazarNews on Twitter.

I'll get back with you.

And be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.