Are Fuel Cells the Future?

cells can be used for more than just vehicles. Obviously they can be used for energy production and other methods, but we're mostly focusing on vehicles, right. So fuel cells? What are they? How do they work? What? What's up with this crazy thing? Do they really just generate electricity and water? Why don't we have this magical technology everywhere. We're gonna answer all those questions and more. So sit back and relax. Okay, this should be fairly obvious, but

maybe quick refresher. What's the problem with gas? Well, it pollutes. Uh. It's polluting both when you're trying to get at the raw materials. It pollutes when you're refining the raw materials into the fuel. It pollutes after you burn the fuel. Uh. And there's a limited amount of the stuff out there, and it's not always in places that are easy for us to get to. Also, it's relatively energy and efficient. Regular gasoline powered vehicle is only really going to operate

at like efficiency. You're not going to get well. And that's the problem with internal combustion engines, right, You're you're losing a lot of that potential energy due to heat. It ends up you're losing it by by heat. So instead of being able to harness that energy, we just end up releasing it into the environment. Okay, So when we're talking about a fuel cell vehicle, correct me if I'm wrong, But essentially we're talking about an electric vehicle

that has its mode of electricity production coming along with it. Right. So most electric cars, you'd say, you plug it into the wall, charge up a battery, and then you drive off. A gas powered car, you take your fuel with you and it, you know, makes things explode and that gives your power. Yes, this is sort of somewhere in the middle.

It's an electric car, but you're taking your fuel along with you, right, And fuel cells and batteries tend to get for for people who aren't familiar with the technology. It can be a little confusing because they both rely on a similar principle. They're electrochemical energy conversion devices, right, So these are devices just rall that off. These are devices that use an electro chemical reaction to generate electricity. So it's a chemical reaction that as a result, releases electrons.

That's what electricity is, you know, the flow of electrons. So we then harness this release of electrons through a circuit. We usually call this a load. We put a load on a battery and then those electrons can do work. So the classic example something that everyone does in their

physics classes. They build the basic circuit with a little light bulb, and then when you close the switch, so that you've completed the circuit the electronics right, assuming you built everything correctly, which is pretty simple to do, but you know, leave it to me, I can mess it up once. Once the circuit is complete, the electrons can flow from one terminal of the battery through this circuit uh doing the work, and then into the other end

of the battery. Now, with batteries, this electrochemical process results in an inert material. Once the electrons come back in and those those chemicals have finished their their chemical reaction. Uh. They usually will last you know, a good long while, depending upon how much load you're putting on the batteries. But eventually you get a dead battery, right, You've got a battery that no longer can create electricity sufficient for you to do any work. Sure, and sometimes you can

recharge that battery. Sure. Yeah, And that's essentially reversing that process. That's when you're instead of harnessing the electrons coming out of the battery, you're shoving electrons back in the battery, screaming the whole time until the battery has reached some level of uh, it's it's returned to the state it was before you expended all the energy. More or less, batteries, of course, lose their potency over time that less and less of the battery will recharge, so that eventually you

have to replace them anyway. You'll you'll realize that, like anyone who's owned any electronics for any length the time, it's like, you know, I remember when the battery life and this thing was great, but now it doesn't last half as long as it used to. And it's not just your imagination, you know, it really does happen and there are other things that can happen that make that that process go more quickly, which is something you don't

want to do well. Fuel cells are similar to batteries and that you have this electrochemical process, but they're different in that instead of having a set amount of chemicals contained within the unit, you have fuel going into the fuel cell to continuously replenish it, and that is what allows the electricity to continuously generate as long as you

have fuel to put into the cell. Okay, So the chemicals we often hear about in batteries or things like maybe lithium or like say lead in old nickel, cadmium, something like that. What are the chemicals we're talking about in a fuel cell and how do they actually produce electricity on the molecular level? Excellent question. Okay, so they they are these very exotic chemicals. Okay, you've got hydrogen. Stop me if I start getting like crazy here. You've

got hydrogen and you've got oxygen. Okay, so you've got what stars are made of. Yeah, and what we breathe, Yes, exactly. So hydrogen and oxygen. Now, there is a particular molecule that two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen will form if they all get buddy buddy with each other,

they call water H two oh. So basically, what you're doing is you're creating a chamber where hydrogen and oxygen want to get together, want being anthropomorphizing obviously, but they have a tendency to get together before they want to. So it's kind of like a tank with two sides, right, and you have a divider in between the two that keeps it from doing this just naturally. And what this divider has also on it, this is an electro light membrane. In the case of the fuel cells we'll be talking

about today, different fuel cells use different electrolytes. Uh. Some use them in membrane forms, some use some molten material. It all depends upon the actual type of fuel cell, but for fuel cell vehicles, they tend to be this this kind of permeable semi permeable membrane. It looks like like plastic wrap. Okay, so this is the electrolyte. It allows positively charged particles to pass through, but not negatively charged particles all right. Now, coded on this electro light

membrane is a catalyst. Now, a catalyst for those who don't remember. Their chemistry is something that facilitates a chemical reaction. It's sort of a third party negotiator. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things like, hey, let me make things a little easier on you. You know. It's the travel agent, let me introduce you to my friend. Yeah. So, in this case, with a lot of the permeable membrane um

uh fuel se else. It tends to be a really exotic and expensive material like platinum, but in nanoparticle forms. So you've you've crushed the stuff into particles that are a billionth of a meter in diameter. I mean tiny, tiny little particles, smaller than what a light telescope could pick up. All right, So you've coded this membrane with that stuff, and you pressurize the hydrogen, and you force

the hydrogen against this membrane. The catalyst tells the hydrogen, hey, I'll let you through, but you've got to lose those those electrons you're carrying. Hydrogen carries one electron, right, So the hydrogen ditches the electrons becomes positively charged ions. Because it's a positively charged ion, it can now pass through that membrane and get over to where all the oxygen atoms are on the other side. But if it has to lose electrons to become positive, where do those electrons go.

We'll see. First of all, the electrons really want to get back with those hydrogen ions right as the negative charges they tracked one another, but there's no way they

can go through that membrane. However, you've been clever. You've created a back door so that the electrons can scoot through the back door, rush down the hallway, maybe pushing some buttons along the way, and then get to the other side of the chamber and then recombined with their hydrogen buddies and the oxygen new buddies and form water. So in this case, you are actually harnessing the electricity by creating this pathway for the electrons to pass through.

That's the anode side of the fuel cell. They come in on the cathode side of the fuel cell. That's where the oxygen is and where the hydrogen comes into combine with the oxygen to form water. So you're end result with your basic hydrogen based fuel cell, assuming that you don't have any other funky things going on with the electrolyte. Uh is that you get electricity you get

water and you get heat. Those are those are your outputs, so you don't you don't have any other I mean water, vapor is a greenhouse gas, but you don't have any other, like toxic gases that are created as result of this reaction. So basically the processes. It's kind of like you tear children away from their loving parents and force them to run through a hall in order to get back to their parents. But as they run through the hall, they've

got to turn a crank. Or you want to go to a popular nightclub where all the the attractive young people are inside, but the bouncer realizes that you are not an attractive young person. I'm talking about myself here, and so you run around the back and find a back door to get in so that you can get into the nightclub exhausted. Yeah, you're on a hamster wheel generating energy for the young people to dance too. Yeah okay, yeah, which is which is that's how daft punk started? Cool

well known story in this process? Yeah what what the running toddlers and the electrons and Jonathan going to the back door of the club all having common is they don't produce greenhouse gases like well maybe water vapor book. Yeah, yeah,

but there's nothing nothing toxic. You don't have any There's no carbon dioxide in this kind of fuel cell depending I say in this kind of fuel cell, because there are other types, depending upon the electrolyte being used or the method being used, that do create some carbon dioxide

as a result. We'll talk about one of those in a little bit because it's one that kind of It was one of those news stories that exploded a couple of years ago when it first hit the text circles, and then I don't know that many people are aware of what actually it does. It was this mysterious energy generating device which turned out to just be based on not I shouldn't say just be based on but turned out to be based on fuel cell technology. But mainly

we're talking about hydrogen yep, yep. I mean you could talk about uh, methane based fuel cells. That's the other main type. And methane actually is more energy dense than hydrogen is, so that's one reason why you might look at methane instead of hydrogen. But that also can create some other gases as a result of putting it through the fuel cell, and the technology is a you years behind hydrogen based fuel cells, because that's where most of

the research has gone into. Okay, so you've got your hydrogen fuel cell set up and this is generating water, vapor, heat, and electricity. What do you do with that stuff? Well, first of all, each fuel cell is a tiny little thing on its own. Okay, So if you were to say, oh, my car has a fuel cell in it, your car would not go anywhere, like if your computer had a transistor,

right exactly. That's a good example. Yes, Because you're talking about something that can put out points seven vaults of electricity. That's not enough to do very much. So what you have to do is you have to have a collection of these fuel cells. That's called a fuel cell stack, and usually you have these separated by bipolar plates, which allow these various fuel cells to work together to generate enough electricity for you to do whatever the work is

that you've determined for that particular fuel cell. Right. So, once you have enough of them to generate enough electricity to do what you want to do, then that electricity obviously does whatever it's supposed to do. In the case of a fuel cell vehicle, it's providing power to an electric motor. So just as a battery would provide the electricity to an electric motor in a traditional electrical vehicle, the fuel cell would do that. For this one, the

water vapor would be uh would be essentially vented. You know, it's an exhaust, so you'd lose that and the heat would just be released to the atmosphere as well. Now, I should also say that fuel cells, the different types, operate at different temperatures for uh, the optimal performance. Right, There's some fuel cells that do really well at temperatures that are pretty typical for what you would find in

a car engine, so that would be okay. The membranes are a little a little tricky because some of them are very delicate, and as temperatures drop, the membranes become vulnerable to that. So that's actually a problem with some fuel cells is trying to figure out if you happen to be someone who operates the vehicle and say, our friends to the Great White North, a fuel cell vehicle might not be the best choice because that membrane could

be damaged in the winter. Right. That's the problem with a lot of fuel cells actually, and the larger ones that operate at much higher temperatures. I mean, because they heat up to six hundred or eight hundred degrees celsius. That's celsius, not fahrenheit. Kids. Um, you know it's heating that much, and then cooling it back down to room temperature can create a lot of corrosion within the materials

that it's made of. Right, you don't want to you don't want to have to shut it down more frequently than necessary, because when it's at the optimal temperature, it's it's performing like gangbusters. But then once you have to shut it down, then obviously you have to take in more energy just to cool it down and then heat it back up to get it to the right temperature.

So it sounds like even though we've heard about fuel cells mostly being used in application with cars, they'd actually be easier to use in sort of like a stationary UH system infrastructure, maybe powering a factory or something like that. Yeah, factory. Is there even power generation plans that use fuel cells? These are ones that tend to use the ones you're talking about, Lauren, the ones that operate at really high temperatures. They're really efficient and they put out a great deal

of power. But it also means that they cannot be used for applications like driving a car, because I don't know about you, but personally I start getting uncomfortable if my car gets over ninety degrees fahrenheit, and if it's operating at a hundred degrees celsius, I have a feeling

I would. I mean, even Atlanta summers are not that bad, right, So you can't really have something that operates at those temperatures in a form factor as small as a car without cooking the inhabitants of that car or making the car of some sort of material that would deflect all that heat, which would make the car heavier and require you to put more energy into it to actually make it move. It would be pretty awesome for cooking soup on the go, though, know that your soup would be

instantaneously cooked. Uh my intuitions as even more than a comfort problem. It just sounds sort of mechanically unstable. Oh sure, yeah, So those sort of applications would be for things like operating a big factory that requires a lot of power, or a power generation plant, or even being able to supply power to a an office building or a home. So one of the fuel cells that I kind of mentioned. This is the one I was talking about that made a big splash a few years ago and got a

lot of excitement around it. But then once people started figuring out how it was that really working, it was still exciting. It just wasn't as mysterious. It's called the bloom Box now the bloom box. A few years ago it was one of these things where people were really

vague about what was going on. It was a box that was generating electricity, and there wasn't a lot of actually, can't look inside it was it almost seemed like it almost seems it almost seemed like that the very early days of the the promotional material like it seemed like it could have been one of those wacky, uh, perpetual motion type devices or or free energy devices that never pan out. Because I don't know thermodynamics, it's hard to get around right, so laws, basic laws of physics are

difficult to break. So once it came out about exactly how it was generating power, people like, oh no, this totally makes sense. It's a it's refining a technology that we've known about for a really long time, and there are actual improvements that make it more useful. But it's not mysterious, right, it was fuel cells. Yeah. And just to put in I mean, we've known about fuel cells

since about eighteen thirty nine. One Sir William Grove invented the first one um based on his hypothesis that you know, you could reverse the whole process. Well okay, so he knew that that water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen by running electric current through it. He shot, hey, maybe we can do the opposite. Yeah, and it turns out I was right. That's electrolysis. By the way, when you use electricity to split uh water molecules into their

basic units, the hydrogen and oxygen. And in fact, that's one of the ways that people have talked about generating hydrogen. We'll get into that a little bit later. So in the case of the blue box or the bloom energy boxes, they're using solid oxide fuel cells. It's a little bit different from the ones that we're talking about with the permeable membrane. So the solid oxide ones operate at a

higher temperature than permeable membrane. So they work fine as a standalone unit that's connected to a building, but not necessarily a great choice for say a vehicle but they also are they also generate a little bit of carbon dioxide in the process, so it's a small amount compared to the amount of water that is given off, but it's still one of those things where you'd say, Okay, this is not it's not as desirable as say a pure hydrogen fuel cell in the sense that it's still

generating c O two, you know, and we generally think that if we can cut back on producing c O two, that would be a good thing. So let's get into some of the problems with fuel cells or challenges if you prefer if you want to look at as challenges as opposed to a problem. Yeah, this sounds pretty good. So basically, no emissions and all that. Why why don't I have a fuel cell car? Okay, a few different reasons. Uh, some of them are practical, some of them are environmental,

some of them are safety oriented. So, first of all, hydrogen is the main fuel we're talking about, apart from the methane ones that are still being looked at. Hydrogen is really what we're concentrating on with fuel cell. Well, that should be easy. You just go outside with the jar and swing it around to collect those clouds of hydrogen you see floating on Oh if only that were the case. Yes, it turns you get pure hydrogen. It's not easy because hydrogen in its pure form is in

really short supply here on Earth. Hydrogen is one of those things that tends to bond with everybody wants to be everyone's best friend. And so that's why if you've ever heard the term hydrocarbons, there are a lot of different ones out there. Hydrogen tends to bond with lots of stuff. Uh. Yeah, My guess is that most of the I don't know this. I imagine a lot of the hydrogen on Earth is in water. A lot of it is, but it's you know, it's in a lot

of stuff. So get that hydrogen means that you have to expend some energy to get the actual fuel, right, So you have to start doing calculations. How much energy do you have to expend in order to get the fuel you're going to use to create energy. If it ends up being the same amount or more, then obviously

you're on the losing side of that. Yeah. So if you imagine you go back and use electrolysis to get the hydrogen out of the water, you have to create electric current right to get pure hydrogen to put in your fuel cell to create electric current, So how are you getting the original and even your ideal fuel cell vehicle kind of thing would only be operating at maybe sixty six percent efficientc. So that's that's that's on the

high end too. Yeah. Yeah, So you're talking about how you're going to you're still losing some of that potential energy, right, some of it's just going into heat and not driving your car, so you have to worry about that as well. So there are all these things you have to take into account. One thing you could do is if you really wanted to, you could build a solar farm to gen right the electricity to zap the water to make the hydrogen to make the cars go, and the green

grass goes all around and around. So but I mean, there's there's obviously different ways, and there's some scientists are looking into new ways to harvest hydrogen that could pan out and end up being a solution to at least one part of this problem. But that's just one part. Right. Even if we did have unlimited access to unbonded hydrogen, we would have to have some kind of infrastructure in place in order to get the hydrogen to you, Joe

with your fancy fuel cell vehicle. No, oh, yeah, I imagine. I see. Hydrogen is probably harder to transport than something like gasoline or oils. You have to liquid. Yeah, you end up pressurizing this gas. Also, by the way, hydrogen a little bit flammable. So I don't know if you ever watched this video that went viral a few years ago about the Hindenburg more than a few years ago. Hey, some of us are too soon the humanity. Um. So, Yeah,

hydrogen is very flammable. It's very dangerous stuff, and and so there there are valid safety concerns about putting this stuff into pressurized canisters because you can't. Another problem. Part of the problem is because it's less energy dense than

other fuels. In order for you to have enough of it to make your car go as far as you wanted to, you need more volume, which means you and you can't carry unlimited volume because you don't have unlimited space, So you have to cram more and more of it into a pressurized canister unless you have a tartest. Unless you have the tardest where it's larger on the inside than on the outside. But I don't think the tartest runs on hydrogen. I would also imagine the tartest would

make most of this discussion opposite. Uh. Well, you know, alright, so barring any sonic screw drivers entering into the conversation, you have to have pressurized canisters to hold this stuff. And so there's a danger issue, there's a there's also the building the infrastructure so you can get the hydrogen to where it needs to be. That's obviously a multibillion

dollar problem, right to build out an infrastructure. We have such an established infrastructure, particularly in the United States, for for gasoline and then also for diesel fuel as well, but mainly gasoline for most of the cars that are on the road in the US that are at least, you know, consumer cars, not necessarily municipal vehicles or whatever. So building out that infrastructure is a huge financial practical problem where you've got to figure out where does the

money come from? Uh And and it's one of those kind of chicken or the egg issues where you know, until people have the vehicles, then no one wants to support the infrastructure. But you can't have the vehicle without the infrastructure to catch twenty two so a chicken or egg catch twenty two. Hey, I'm gonna just mix metaphors for the rest of this podcast. Um, why stop now? But the Yeah, so that's that's another problem. So you've got the risk, you've got the fuel supply, you've got

the infrastructure. That's another issue. Um, these are all non trivial problems. It doesn't mean that we should turn away from the challenge, because this is a very promising way of delivering energy in multiple respects, not just with vehicles. But it does mean we have to keep that in

mind when we look at the problem. Absolutely here in the U S. We we do have the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, which funds research into fuel cells and all of this this infrastructure and chemistry and physics of of the entire thing, with the goal of having a cost effective method of making this go by like right right. Some people have said that they it's it's a good start, but that the the program itself is uh, possibly more modest than

what the challenge requires. That's probably the best political way to say that. Um. There and there are other countries obviously that I don't know, don't mean to alarm you, but there are other countries besides the United States. I know, I've been lied to all my life. Some of them even celebrated New Years before we did. I just that's just that's just treason. Yeah, it's something the fourth of Law. Yeah, what's up with that? So uh, Anyway, we do acknowledge

there are other countries of the United States. Obviously, we live here in the US, so a lot of our our focus is on the US, but there are other countries that are also looking into hydrogen, some of which have employed more hydrogen vehicles than than you would see in the US. Uh percentage wise. There are hydrogen based

vehicles in the US already. A lot of them are again municipal vehicles, government vehicles, or or public transportation vehicles things like that, but there aren't that many consumer ones, just because there aren't that many places where you could refuel, you know. So that's until we solve that problem, then clearly that's gonna that's gonna hold things back. So an impression I'm getting is that we have to make this great investment to get the hydrogen we need in order

to power the fuel cell. So energy has to go into creating this fuel that's going to create the energy Obviously the fuel cell provides an emissions advantage, but is there any case in which it actually provides an energy efficiency advantage or is it always going to be at an energy efficiency loss to the benefit of lowering emissions. Well, this is a really tricky thing to answer because generally speaking, fuel cell vehicles tend to be more efficient than gasoline

powered vehicles. However, gasoline is more energy dense than hydrogen, so you've got multiple factors here. So how do you how do you measure that? You could measure it and how far you could travel on one full tank? Right,

that would be one way of saying it. So if you could have a hydrogen based vehicle and on a fuel full tank, it could travel further than your average gasoline powered vehicle, and you've got fewer emissions involved on the face of it, at least on the on just the vehicle side of this equation, the hydrogen one comes out ahead, right, literally ahead, because it can travel further. But then you have to look like you were saying at the back end, how how much energy? But see,

generating gasoline also requires energy. You have to expend energy to get the petroleum. You have to expend energy to refine it. You have to spend energy to ship that gasoline to where it needs to be. It's such a huge problem that, I mean like a or a huge consideration that I don't have an answer for you, simply because I don't have enough information from all of these different aspects to boil it all down. And finally, you know, make that bar graph right of which one which one

comes out on top? And and and even when you take a conventional electric batteries into the equation to um, you know you're you're charging those from a wall socket and where is that electricity? Is it coming from a coal powered plant or Yeah, we said that several times in this show because it and it bears repeating because it's one of those things that we easily take for granted. You think, oh, electricity, that's clean energy, you're not creating

any emissions. Well, it all depends on how that inner electricity was generated in the first place. Sure, And the numbers that I've seen on electric car bat mattery since I've mentioned the other two range from the of gasoline powered vehicles all the way up to depending on where you're getting that energy to charge the battery. Yeah, So I mean, like I said, there's a lot of different considerations here. It would also depend on how how are

we creating the energy where we're getting that hydrogen? Right, what what are we using to get to the hydrogen? If we're using petroleum based products or petroleum based fuel sources for us to be able to get the hydrogen, we've really just shifted the problem to a different side. Right. It's just like just like any power generation, you have

to look at where is that energy coming from? Ultimately the sun and even and even if even if you use a solar farm in order to to drive all this, then how are you creating those photovoltaics that are driving the solar farm? Yeah, well, I guess everything you'd eventually have to look at in terms of relative You know, it's going to take some energy to make this thing, but is it less than the Yeah, and are you

producing fewer emissions at the end? Now, it could mean that it may be that, you know, maybe getting the hydrogen requires less energy. Let's let's just let's just say for a moment that let's say we've found a way to get hydrogen. It takes less energy than it would take for us to get petroleum and then refine that into gasoline. However, maybe there's also the possibility that by getting that hydrogen it actually creates a more environmentally damaging

process than say petroleum getting petroleum would be. That's a possibility too. And then you were like, you have to sit there and say, well, from an energy perspective, now hydrogen makes sense, but from an environmental perspective it might not. You have to take all of that into consideration. I certainly accept that in the abstract, I am trying to

picture what that hydrogen environmental crisis would be. I'm not sure if ypathetically, if you're getting all your hydrogen from water and they're there are people who would make the argument of well, we've already got this water. This water location problem where there are places in the world that have limited to no access to clean drinking water and you're using water to create fuel. There's a perception issue there.

Even if you were to argue, well, just based on on logistics, getting water from this one part of the world to take it to this other part of the world that has less access doesn't make a whole lot of sense in any other practical application. It's still a perception problem. Yeah, of course if your cars produced water. So Joe just wants to and this is not a lie. Joe just wants to see a fuel cell an operation, and I have an exhaust pipe that's dripping water into

a glass, and then watch me drink it. That's what Joe wants. I mean, this is some literal conversation that we have had multiple times. And here's the thing. I do it because you're talking about hydrogen and oxygen combining to form pure water. It's probably cleaner water than I would get anywhere else. I mean, assuming that the that the exhaust pipe isn't made of pure lead or something like. Well, yeah, if I drink I'm like, it's delicious, but I'm blind. Now,

then obviously I've made a terrible decision. Never trust Joe. I think, well, if we wanted to talk a little bit, I actually can chat just a bit about the the Toyota vehicle. That's a concept vehicle. It's you know, it's a prototype vehicle. So we're recording this the week before Jonathan is about to head out to see s Yeah, and I'm going to get a chance to see one of these concept vehicles in person. I don't know which one, specifically I'm going to see because Toyota has actually made

a few of them. And just for full disclosure, Toyota is of course the sponsor of the show YEP so uh and and Toyota is not the only auto manufacturer that's created a fuel cell vehicle. There are others as well, but it's the one that I'm familiar with because I've been doing research for my trip and so uh. The they're using again pressurized hydrogen, just like we've been talking about to generate the electricity, but it also the ones

they're looking at also have a battery. So the reason why they have a battery is to augment the electricity given off by the fuel cell. So the battery helps the car start up from from going from off to on. It also helps in low energy applications, so when you're

accelerating to get to cruising speed. Once you at cruising speed, it switches over the fuel cell and then if you ever hit like a really steep incline in your car needs more energy, it will tap into the battery for extra power to provide the ownth needed to to take on whatever that happens to be. That's really interesting. So this is a different kind of hybrid than we're used to hearing about. Normally, a hybrid would be combination gasoline

and electric power. But like wall wall socket electric power, this is a hybrid of fuel cell fuel and electric power. Well, but it also sorry, but it also have wall socket electric power. Is the battery. It's not that the battery is also fueled by the fuel so no, No, The way it works is that you would charge your your

battery just like you would with an electric vehicle. It would also have regenerative breaking, so that when you were breaking, that would would start to regenerate that into to recharge the battery. But and I assumed that the fuel cell also could provide some electricity to recharge the battery. But that just seems silly. You know. At some point you're like, well,

you're losing energy on all of these these transactions, right. Um. Also, I'm wondering about the power output of this vehicle because if if normally we rely on a gasoline engine to back up an electric battery, then if we're relying on electric battery to back up a hydrogen fuel cell, well, I can tell you that according to Toyota, their f C h V A d V h V advanced. All right, So you've got pressurized hydrogen tanks that are essentially on the bottom of the car. This it's more like a SUV.

Do they do they glow purple like you. I'm sure you could get neon highlights if you wanted to, But they don't on their own globe purple and the gurple the globe purple on their own. You may need to seek shelter. Um. No, they don't glow purple. But they have these these tanks on the bottom of the car, and it intakes oxygen just as you drive, so it's pulling oxygen in from air intake vents on the front

of the vehicle on a full tank of hydrogen. Actually, technically I guess it's I think it's two tanks, because I think they have two side by side. But when it's fully fueled, this vehicle can go eight kilometers, which is about five sixteen miles, which is further than a

lot of gas line powered vehicles. I think about the average for gas For a long time, the the electric car industry, they were saying, oh, we need to crack that two hundred miles on a single charge, or else no one will ever want these things, and so it shows how far we've gone because with that battery and the fuel cell combination, that allows this vehicle to have a much further range than what you would get with just one or the other. And so at five sixteen miles,

that's that's pretty impressive. So I would say that I don't know how fast, I don't know what the top speed of this vehicle is, but it certainly has the change that uh someone would typically look for when looking at a vehicle h and so it's I think it's really an interesting approach. I'm really looking forward to seeing some of this stuff in person and talking. I'm going to get a chance to talk to some of the experts who developed the technology that was being used in

these vehicles, and that's also really exciting. The idea that I get to talk to some of the engineers who, you know, this is what they do. They developed these and refine them so that they can become a viable technology that we could use in the future. And that to me is I that's the best part of my job is being able to talk to the folks who actually make the stuff I talk about. So I'm looking

forward to it. But as I said, there are other auto manufacturers that are working on fuel cell vehicles, and of course, like I said, there are also some fuel cell vehicles that are out there already. There are also some vehicles that run on hydrogen, but there are combustion engines, so it's hydrogen as combustion as a combustible fuel as opposed to a fuel cell. Huh. I wouldn't even know what are what are the what's the output, like the emissions when you burn hydrogen? Uh, you know, I'd have

to look into all of that. I know that it's lower emissions than what you would get with gasoline. But I know that some some bus systems use hydrogen fuel for their buses. So instead of we're talking like large vehicles generally things that require a lot of torque, but not necessarily a lot of speed unless you're Kiana Reeves, in which case you can't get below fifty. Yeah, we know how it works, don't. We were alive in the nineties.

It's just wondering. I know, if you were old enough to get into the movie theater when that came out. I think we probably both saw that on HBO, not HBO. I saw it edited for television that's the best. What all the expletives are a lot of the vulgarity turned into those are the best? All right? Anything else you guys have to say about fuel cells before we wrap up? Oh yeah, I do too, you know. And that's the thing.

There are there are actually science kits out there that sell fuel cells where you can get like a little model car that runs on fuel cells. We should totally get one from the office. I would actually love a little little model like one of those table demonstrations they have, you know, like the clear ones, because a lot of

people have probably done it the other way around. You've tried electrolysis, right, like you run a current through some water and make little bubbles and cute bubbles, but this would do the opposite. Yeah yeah, so uh we'll look into that. But at any rate, if you guys out there have anything you want to say, you know, you want to join in on this conversation, or you want to see all the other stuff that we create and Forward Thinking, go to f W thinking dot com. That

is our home site. You're gonna find all the podcasts there, the blog posts, the videos are all there. And remember you can touch based with us on Google plus on Twitter and Facebook, our handle is fw thinking. We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,