242: A Hydrogen Boom?

https://youtu.be/M0UHj5rsQJQ

Matt and Sean talk about what’s creating a hydrogen boom. Will hydrogen finally find a niche in our renewable energy future?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How a Hydrogen Breakthrough is Closer Than Ever https://youtu.be/ISuUlc8widc?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi4At-R_1s6-_50PCbYsoEcj

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

On today's episode of still to be determined, we're talking about a boom in hydrogen usage. Whoops. That was a bad choice of words.

And let me get this out of the way right at the top. We are not trying to restart our Hindenburg discussion. No. The one that went on for weeks, hi everybody. Welcome to Still to be Determined. This of course is the followup podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell and Undecided with Matt Ferrell, of course, features a lack of decision making.

It also features Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I am also not Fat Merrill. I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And I've had a lot of coffee this morning. I can't tell. I'm also just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you today?

I'm doing great. Uh, before we got started, Sean was asking me about, uh, a trip I'm about to do. And yes, I'm not looking forward to doing the actual trip. I'm going to Mexico to visit a BMW plant. Yes. I have to get up at three o'clock in the morning to get to the airport. So I'm not looking forward to that.

I had a brief conversation with my partner about this. We were, uh, You know, here in New York, this episode will drop at the end of the coming week, but right now early voting in New York has opened up. So we went to vote and we were in line and we were chit chatting and somehow travel came up and I mentioned, Oh yeah, my brother's going to be going to Mexico.

And my partner said, why is he doing that? And I said, Oh, he's going to a BMW plant. And she said, Why? Why? That is so uninteresting. And I'm like, it's for his job. And she's like, how? And I'm like, you know what he does. She's like, Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. And then she said, wow, that sounds like quick turnaround.

That sounds exhausting. And it sounds like, like, oh, that, you know, that kind of travel is hard. And then I mentioned, and you just mentioned like your travel plans separate from all of our podcasting, Matt and I, believe it or not, occasionally actually socialize with each other. We have a bi weekly D& D role playing game that we play. And one of our players, uh, is Matt, is he your assistant? What is his job title? Production assistant?

Well, technically they both work for me. Yes. Uh, Lewis is my producer and Ollie is our assistant. Right. Yeah.

And Lewis will be going along on this trip. And Matt was saying, Oh, I have to travel and it's this many hours. And I happen to know that Lewis lives in Europe. And I thought, well, that's gotta be worse. So I said to Lewis, what does your travel look like? And if I remember correctly, 18 hours coming to Mexico, and 22 or 23 going back? And Yes. Oh my god. I feel so bad. I feel so bad. And it's not like he's going to But then I'm also going to be playing Germany.

It's not like he's going so that he can then lie on a beach. And No. Have Pina coladas, he is going no, to work it. So 18 hours. Yeah. It's a long trip though to have jet lag. 'cause your jet lag won't be that bad. Your time difference is gonna be what? Two hours? It's like three hours. It's like three hours.

So it's time difference. So it's not big deal. So it's like you might, it's gonna be like nine hours or something ridiculous. But his time difference is gonna be close to eight hours , I think, I think it's eight, I think it's eight or nine hours. It's probably eight or nine hours.

But at the same time he, he's gonna get his revenge because there's another trip that we're doing together. We're going to Germany and he's got like an hour and a half flight to get to where we're going in Germany. And I've got the long trip for that. So he's gonna get his sweet revenge.

So yes. And of course the two of them will be involved in preparing this episode for broadcast. So who knows what they'll do to our words as like if our. Matt, you and I may just be talking to each other at this point and our viewers and listeners will have no idea what the actual messaging is because it may just be overlaid like in that Simpsons episode where they add in Mr. Black. It may just suddenly be Lewis's voice filling in and saying like, yes, my boss is a terrible person.

We'll see. We'll see what happens when this episode drops. That's right. But on now we go to our discussion later on about Matt's most recent episode, which is about advances in hydrogen technology. And first we will be taking a look at our most recent episode. This is our episode 241 shining a light on the future of solar tech.

And we've been talking now, I mean, This happens occasionally where sidebar conversations of our episodes take on a life of their own and almost become the point of the podcast. We've had that happen now with, I mentioned it earlier, the Hindenburg, uh, and now we have a new contender. We have the cell towers decorated as trees.

And I mentioned that perhaps with the holidays approaching, uh, Christmas and the winter holidays of 2024, I mentioned, perhaps we should decorate these. Octothorpe jumped into the comments to say, I am 1 million percent down for decorating the fake cell tree. I think we've started a movement. I am too. I am too.

We're going to need a very tall ladder, but I think it'll be a lot of fun. Cocoa and marshmallows will be provided. There was also a part of the conversation last week in which Matt and I spoke, and Matt spoke very eloquently about it, about not letting efficiency, effectively, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't let efficiency be the only yardstick by which you measure efficiency. Technology that could improve things overall. Yes, something may not be as efficient as you would hope or as efficient in a way that you think doesn't match what we currently do, but you can't let that efficiency measurement be the only measurement that you do in whether to adopt something.

And Goshu jumped in to say, when talking about efficiency, if everything came down to efficiency, we would hardly have electricity at all today. Almost everything that generates power is doing so at a relatively low efficiency. Matt, what do you think about that assessment as far as what we would say, maybe not the current tech, but let's go back 50 years and say, okay, here's how we generate electricity. Is he right? Is it a low efficiency market of electricity production at that point?

It's, it's horrible. If you think about the efficiency of your car, it's like the efficiency of an internal combustion engine is horrendous. Now off the top of my head, I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's like 30 percent or something like that.

It's, it's ridiculous. The amount of power, when you look at the full like round trip of the gasoline being burned and then ending up turning the wheels, it's like, it's horrendous. And so it's like, if we were back then going, it's only a 30 percent efficient, this is not good enough. And like, we were just like, we're not going to do gas cars because of that.

It's we would be in a very different place than where we are today. It's, it's progress. It's like, we're just kind of moving the needle forward we're moving it forward we're moving it forward. We just kind of have to keep pushing that ball forward.

If I remember correctly, one of the more efficient modes of internal combustion engines is actually motorcycles where you get a much higher value of miles per gallon than you do a car. So By the logic of people saying efficiency should be the standard, we should all be riding motorcycles and mopeds. In fact, we should all be riding bicycles.

Another example is your stove, Sean. It's like people who have natural gas stoves, you know, the flame. You put your pot on it. If you just took a thermal camera and pointed it at it, the amount of heat that is just like radiating up and around the pot and going off into the environment, that's just wasted heat.

That is wasted energy that's not going into the pot to cook the food that you're trying to do. Or when you look at an induction cooktop, which is magnets, Almost all of that energy is going directly into the pot itself to generate the heat that's cooking your food. So it's just like, there you go.

It's like way more efficient to use induction than natural gas to cook your food. It's things like that. It's like in cooking with induction a hundred years ago, of course we're not doing that, but we can do it today because we now know how to do it effectively. We just have to keep moving that ball forward.

Now I have in my head, a steampunk vision of a hundred years ago, an induction stovetop, and what that would look like to somebody with those old timey magnets that's shaped like a horseshoe holding a pot and just circling underneath it.

No nonsense bennett had a suggestion, which I think fits not within like the strict conversation that we had. But fits within a conversation about a different episode of yours. He points out, what if you designed a tree that is a solar collector? Imagine the leaves, all solar collectors. You have the aesthetics of a tree and the benefit of solar.

With no roof panels, think Leonardo da Vinci and anything's possible. I like this from the perspective of, and this goes to something that is both controversial, probably not going to happen, but is a kind of sci fi real world project that I still scratch my head at and marvel at every time it comes up.

The Neom project. Yeah. This is the project. This goes back probably two and a half years now. The conversation you and I had the first time about this project. This is the Saudi Arabian royal family project to design a city that is just a single line in the middle of the desert. It is, I forget how wide.

I can't remember how wide either, but it's how wide, but it's more about how long it's going to be. It's not a cluster. It is a single line. It is supposed to be built with a fast transit system. So you can travel from one end to the other in about 20 minutes. It's supposed to cover, was it a hundred miles?

Something like that. Um, yeah. And it was supposed to be designed effectively. The, the quiet part of this is it would probably be designed as a playground for the rich. Think tax haven, super rich people go live in an environment where they don't have to do anything. It is currently being built.

I've seen videos recently about how it is uh, human rights y problematic. And, and also not what they were promising and not what they were promising and all of this feels, I have a feeling somebody somewhere in the design of this project, some member of the Royal family was largely from the perspective of President Kennedy made a bold statement by saying, by the end of this decade, we will land a person on the moon.

And I think that they. I intended this to be that kind of moonshot goal. Like we are going to build this sci fi city now. It's going to be this incredible thing using technology that does not yet exist as a challenge to get investment to move this forward. And I actually watched a video about it, which talked a bit more,

your video focused on, like, this is the tech that they are trying to do. This other video was an analysis of why are they saying it the way they're saying it. And that video went into a bit of the, you set this audacious goal in order to do this because Saudi Arabia, with its heavy, heavy dependence upon oil, needs to diversify their economy.

And so by setting up this goal with all these challenges and building new tech effectively is a way of, of like spurring on industry to say like, let's think in different and challenging ways because we aren't in a hundred years going to be able to lean on oil in the same way. So there's all of that going on, but something like this, the idea of a solar collector designed with aesthetics in mind, as well as

the tech, the purpose being we're collecting solar. Are you aware of any projects that go this direction? Have you stumbled upon those things that are like, Oh, the efficiency of this or the use of this is going to be next to nothing, but. Having a bunch of decorative trees in the lobby of a office building that has a lot of big windows and lets in a lot of sunlight, and you have these decorative fake trees that are actually solar collectors doesn't seem like a terrible idea given the way a lot of buildings that currently exist are designed. Stuff like this might actually find some footing. So have you seen anything like that?

And this is the kind of thing like when you hear this, you think, oh, I could see that in a sci fi movie that's supposed to be a thousand years in the future and there's all these trees that are actually solar collectors.

Cool sci fi idea, it's just so not practical, it's not happening, and no, I've not seen anybody doing this because it wouldn't, it really wouldn't work practically. But I have seen, there's a lot of wind turbines that I would say qualify in this, where it's like these beautiful almost art structures that actually generate electricity.

But they're just not, there's no way they would be efficient enough to generate enough power to really do anything meaningful. Like you wouldn't roll it out mass market, but it's like, oh, it's a beautiful structure that's actually doing something other than just being art. It's doing something beyond, which I think Is well worth it.

It's like, yeah, why not do that kind of stuff? You have these art installations that are doing double duty. So yeah, if somebody came up with this, it's like an, an art exhibit outside some museum that's actually helping to provide power to the museum, but it's also a work of art. Why not do this kind of stuff? But this is not the kind of stuff you will ever see for actual use. It's just not practical.

It feels like this kind of thing would be the icing on the fully adapted society cake, like a society that has reached a point where we've passed the tipping point and we're now fully dependent upon sustainable tech.

That feels like the point when artists would start grabbing this stuff because it would probably be very affordable, cheap, and find a lot of places to be planted in the ground. Like a lot of places that would say like, Oh, sure, we'll buy your art. Your art also happens to produce electricity, but the point of it is not just the electricity.

The point is more aesthetics than anything else. So, but I can't help it. The sci fi writer part of my brain just loves stuff like that. I love the idea of like walking through a forest of tinkling solar panel trees. I think that that's really cool. Yeah. There was also this from Roddenberg who jumped on the conversation from last week in which we talked about, Matt pointed out a company that was designing a train car that would lay down solar panels between the rails so that you could install solar panels on the way and we discussed, well, is that time well spent because one train passing over is probably going to pull so much debris in the air currents behind it that small stones, not even small stones necessarily, but the debris itself will probably destroy those solar panels very, very quickly.

And Roddenberg jumped in to say, wouldn't wind between the trains make more sense than solar on the train tracks. And again, this is something we've talked about. I remember we've had conversations about wind turbines on highways and near trains, which are designed vertically. So they rotate at a vertical access as opposed to a horizontal access and designed along exactly this.

And again, they'd have to deal with the debris aspect of this. There's a difficulty in putting something next to something that is moving at approximately 90 miles an hour, uh, and it not getting hurt. So has there been any development that you're aware of, uh, around this kind of tech?

No, not, not other than there's that company that is trying to market their turbines for highways, like putting them down the median between lanes. Uh, yeah. That makes sense in theory. So it'd be interesting to see how it works out in pilot projects, but that's the only thing I know of that's doing anything like this. My question about the trains isn't just like abuse they might take, but also just like, is there enough wind to even make that worthwhile?

Cause I feel like you have a train that's only going by a few times an hour versus like you live in New York city, you'd have subway cars going by train tracks like constantly versus where I live. I live near train tracks. There's like two trains a day. Right. It wouldn't make sense. So it's like, I don't even know if there's enough wind to make this kind of thing work.

What about train mounted solar panels or train mounted wind turbines? Is there anything in that vein? There are trains that are electric trains that are kind of starting to kind of spring up in little projects. Um, I don't think there's solar that you could generate off the top of a train, um, to really make it run completely independent.

Uh, but that is being tested. There are tests along those lines that I've, I've read about. I would think that the best use of that electricity wouldn't even necessarily be to run the train itself as much as supply sustainable electricity to the passengers aboard the train. We might want to be able to plug in their laptop and stuff like that.

It wouldn't be about replacing the power. It'd be about supplementing the power. Finally, there was this from Juliana who said, Matt, weren't you the person I saw a while ago who did a show including a sewage plant that was producing a coal substitute from their effluent? Maybe including other carbon conscious waste, the greener coal could be transported to areas where there are excellent coal plants and poor prospects for more sustainable energy production. This is another one I remember where it was, you take the poo and you make burnable bricks.

Uh, well, so it's not burnable bricks. Hold on. It's not burnable bricks. They're producing carbon and that carbon can be used any number of ways. It's not about burning it. It was about like, it was a process called hydrothermal carbonization, HTC. And so it's like you can, anything that has carbon in it, you can put it in this machine and it will turn it into the base carbon. Basically everything else kind of burns off, and so it's like you end up with this thing that could be turned into graphene. It could be used in any kind of number of ways, so.

That was what the video was focused on. This angle of it like as a coal substitute is not something I think would be really, really make sense or be a truly viable path because it's like there's so many other ways to generate electricity that would be Cleaner and better than this. But yeah, the company I've talked about isn't doing that from what I understand.

Yeah. This would be replacing, I mean, the argument is replace coal because coal is dirty. What's dirty about the coal is the carbon. So creating a coal substitute out of carbon and then burning that would just be carbon. So you end up with the same problem. There's a reason why coal power plants are basically disappearing around the world. It's just not an effective way to make energy anymore. There's so much better ways that we can do it.

On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent. This is of course how a hydrogen breakthrough is closer than ever. And this should make, and I'm curious, like you have been vocal in saying find the right tool for the right job.

And you've also been vocal in responding to people on, in the comments on your channel who say, how come you never talk about hydrogen? And you do. It's just that you talk about hydrogen when there's something to talk about, about hydrogen. And for a little bit of time, there hasn't really been a lot to talk about.

Do you want to talk about why it feels like hydrogen was not really a direct part of the conversation for you for it. It comes up occasionally, but it's not like solar. It's not like wind power. Why is that?

My attitude towards hydrogen has been shifting over the past four or five years. I've never thought it was going to be like a major player in the green energy movement. Just look at battery electric vehicles. It's like there was for a decade, like they were saying, hydrogen cars are coming, fuel cell cars. And it was very quickly apparent. Uh, no, they're not. It's the VHS versus Betamax wars. VHS, the BEV has clearly won that.

It's not happening in the passenger car market. So it's like, It's kind of getting more niche y over time as we're seeing, oh, here's a far better solution than hydrogen for project X or project Y or industrial use A and industrial use B. So it's kind of use cases kind of shrinking because it's taking so long for it to kind of get refined to the point where it could possibly make sense.

Um, that's part of the reason why I haven't done tons of videos on it on a frequent basis. I've been waiting for those kind of like kind of milestone markers of like, How can we make hydrogen greener to produce and make it more efficient to make it? Oh, here's a company that's doing that. Let's talk about it now.

A year and a half goes by. Okay, now it's time to do another update on it. So it's, it's one of those, I'm just kind of waiting for these different kinds of things that are knocked on hydrogen. Um, It's, you can't make it green. It's too, it's too inefficient to make it. It's difficult to store. And then how are we even going to use it?

It's like those three kind of pillars of hydrogen are the big knocks against hydrogen. And so I've been waiting for different milestones to hit on those three things to talk about updates. And so that's why it's, it's taken a while to kind of circle back around to it. And which one of those, those, you mentioned three basic like silos of looking at hydrogen, which one of those does this one touch on?

This one touches on the storage. It touches on the generation and the storage, those two. It doesn't really touch on the use at all. It's, it's mainly focused on how can we make it greener and more efficient and how can we store it efficiently? It's, it's mainly on those two. That's in fact, what our first commenter jumps on.

Greendale jumped in to say the production side is eventually solvable. An entire video should be done on hydrogen storage because it interacts with everything, in my humble opinion, this is the real blocker and that's touches on what you just mentioned. We have had some hydrogen storage videos in the past. I can't remember when the last one was, maybe a year ago. And it was about liquefied hydrogen if I remember correctly. Do you want to talk about that? Is there been an update on that?

It's, we've done videos on where like You can use ammonia in place of hydrogen for like transportation and storing it and things like that. And then you can kind of crack it. Um, those we've did a video on that. There's nothing like, again, there's no real update over the past year. Um, pilot tests happening, but it's more about waiting. How does it work and out guys, but it might be another year or two before we find out. Um, it was like a year and a half, maybe two years ago that I did a bunch of videos on solid state hydrogen, which I talk about in this video.

Um, It's definitely, it's being used, it's out there, it's just a matter of like how much is it catching on, how are they rolling it out, um, because I do agree with Greendale, it's, it's When you look at like what companies like Hysata that I talk about in this video are doing around making hydrogen production better, greener, more efficient, it's like you can look at that and go, it looks like that of all the three pillars, that's the one we're probably closest on figuring out.

Storage is the one that has me kind of going raising an eyebrow because part of the problem with the entire system is it takes energy to make the hydrogen. So you're losing efficiency there. Like we talked about the Natural gas stove versus an induction. So it's like you're losing 20, 30 percent of your electricity use in creating that hydrogen.

That's a big knock right there. And then in storing it, it takes energy to compress it into a vessel. It takes energy to put it into that solid state, uh, uh, storage system. So it's like, well, how much, More efficiency or you're losing there. So it's kind of like, that's the big, that's the big riddle for me on the storage side, if they can figure that out or not. It's, to me, it's still not clear if they're gonna crack that nut or not.

A little bit of a way back machine here from Henrik, who shares, I recall designing a hydrogen generator for a company I worked for in 1974. It was based on a windmill, plus generator, plus electrolysis, sending out oxygen and hydrogen.

It never became a product. This was during the oil crisis time. I love the anecdote. I love the casual. I recall designing a hydrogen generator for a company I worked for. That's audacious, like just a very casual throw-out. I also love that this was 1974. I will let people in on a little secret. That's the year of Matt's birth.

So Henrik thank you for joining in on the conversation and for paying attention to the episodes. I think it's really cool when people who have firsthand knowledge of the history of these forms of tech. This is not a 21st century solve. This is not a 21st century, you know, like somebody in 2015 said, I know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to start saying we should use hydrogen. This is something people have seen as an opportunity for half a century, for more than half a century. This goes back and I am not trying to restart the Hindenburg conversation. Don't do it. Don't do it. Hydrogen was being used. It's the early 20th century for things like flight.

This is not a new tech. This is an old tech that has, doesn't have the teeth yet to find a place in our current energy needs. But if you had to bet money and I'm not asking you to invest Matt, but if you had to bet money, there will be a niche market relying on hydrogen for its energy storage needs. Oh, I would say as like, if I was going to be a betting man and say, I'd only bet a dollar, it's like, I'd bet a dollar and say, it's going to find a niche.

It's like, it seems silly to say it's not going to find a niche anywhere. Um, that kind of absolutism of like, it's absolutism that it's not going to work anywhere. I find silly because there are industries and use cases. Think about making steel. It's like, you can use hydrogen steel production and you can help decarbonize steel production.

It's like, it's like there are use cases. for this that go beyond, oh, it's not an efficient way of storing energy. It's like, well, it may not be an efficient way to store energy, but it may be in the best way for us to decarbonize something like steel. So it's, it's one of those again, coming back to the, there's no one tool to rule them all and not one technology to rule them all. It's like, Right tool for the right job. And it's a matter of can, what, what niches can hydrogen find where it makes sense? That's the big question.

This comment from MM stood out to me. I think a lot of fossil fuel companies are using hydrogen to preserve their infrastructure and remain in business. In other words, they are pursuing it to try to remain profitable, not because it is a good solution.

I wanted to share this comment mainly because I think that this is probably true across the board for a lot of corporations. Would you agree with that, Matt, that companies may be, the needle may be slow to move, but when it starts to move, it very often is because somebody somewhere sees an opportunity to make money.

Yeah. I mean, at the heart of it. Yes. All of these massive fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. Some of them are investing in huge wind farms, and solar farms, and hydrogen production. And it's not because they have better angels on their shoulders saying we have to stop burning things.

It's more of a Hey, we can see making a profit there. We need to diversify. We see that fossil fuels are going to be phased out in the coming century, so we need to find a future thing that we can invest in. It makes perfect sense why they're doing it. I would have a slight nitpick on saying to preserve their infrastructure.

Because there currently is no hydrogen infrastructure that has to be built out. Like the whole storage systems, how we transport it around, uh, how you make it. That's all kind of new. I would think that the comment that was pointing about like the corporate economic infrastructure, like keeping themselves Solvent as a company, I think is what the comment is referring to.

Yes. That is true. Yes. So my take is, I don't have an, uh, like, I don't think fossil fuel companies need to go out of business. I don't have that attitude. It's like, I want them to stop burning fossil fuels and making it. I don't necessarily want them to go out of business. So it's like, if they find a profitable way to shift from what they're doing today to something way better.

Go for it. Do it. Um, but I do agree with the sentiment that a lot of them are pushing a lot of money behind, you know, talking to politicians and pushing agendas forward, trying to get hydrogen an edge that it may not deserve yet. That, that is a problem, which I do agree with the sentiment of they're just trying to preserve. They're trying to maybe artificially preserve their status when they don't deserve it. That I would agree with.

Yeah. In any paradigm shift, there are the mathematics that go into why somebody pushes for a new thing. There are infinite number of reasons as to why the calculations are too complex. There are too, there are too many variables from every Perspective to be able to say, what is the one cause?

And I would think this falls back a little bit into, again, the idea of don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If some people are making the right decision for bad reasons. At least they made the right decision. And if you see people pushing back against change because they don't agree with your reasons, look for the reasons that would help them find that change.

So in some cases, I think the pro sustainable energy, Advocates are going to these companies that are responsible for massive amounts of carbon emissions to make arguments about, okay, you're here doing this because economically it makes sense. Let us talk to you about how in a hundred years, economically, it will benefit you to start transitioning now.

And those companies making that transition, maybe for what other people would say are callous, selfish reasons. Well, at least they made the right choice. Even if it's for reasons you don't agree with. That's a part of this that's sometimes hard to swallow. Seeing somebody do the right thing for what you think is a bad reason can sometimes sting.

It can sometimes feel like, like, Oh, I really wish you were doing this because the angels on your shoulder won the debate. But ultimately, if your, if your goal is to get the outcome, go ahead.

I was going to say, that's exactly my point is like, I agree with you, like the outcome, there's, there's an obvious outcome that seems like we're heading towards. And as long as they get there, I don't care how you got there. The problem with the fossil fuel industry is they have such deep pockets. They're making, using that money to make influence. with governments that could push hydrogen stronger than it deserves to get, you know, like it's passenger vehicles, hydrogen passenger vehicles.

It's not, that's not happening, but yet you still have some countries and governments pushing that. And that's where it's like, it might be fossil fuel money pushing that agenda. artificially which is where it's like this is where the tension is between people that hate fossil fuel companies because they're doing stuff like that versus if you took that out of the equation and they're making moves towards this stuff because they see profits it's like yeah who cares it's like go for it if it makes sense go for it it's a does it make sense or is it getting artificially inflated because they're putting their thumbs on a scale in a way that's kind of skewing things In a bad direction.

Finally, this comment from Tim Murray, he gives a kind of big picture analysis of hydrogen versus other sustainable tech. Hydrogen seems to be struggling with the same issues it did 20 years ago. End to end efficiency is poor and storage is difficult. There are advancements, sure, but not the way solar, wind, and batteries have.

We're already past the point where we'll see hydrogen in cars. Batteries have won that. Will we see it in larger applications where batteries aren't good enough, like large trucks or construction equipment? The trouble is that batteries keep getting better too. Take the 5 to 8 percent a year improvement we've been seeing in battery tech and run it for another 10 to 15 years, and you have something good enough to cover most of the uses above.

Will hydrogen be able to solve its problems and become established in those niches before then? Maybe. But given that it's still struggling with problems we've known about for a while, I have my doubts. I thought this was a very sober and well shared assessment of everything, uh, and, and I imagine that this is, you know, based not only on what you've said so far, but in our conversations offline, um, that you land in agreement with Tim's assessment of all of this.

100%. Like, I couldn't have said it better. It's like, Tim Murray, you nailed it.

So listeners, viewers, what do you think about all of this? Is there something in our conversation that you think we missed or do you want to weigh in on any of the points that we've made so far or the points of the commenters that we've talked about so far? Let us know in the comments. As you can tell, the comments drive the content of this program and they also help shape future episodes of Undecided with Matt Ferrell.

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