A first in Colorado: Hydrogen Day

Why does Brian DeBruine think that hydrogen will ultimately prevail as a transportation fuel?

An event called Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day has been held at various places in the United States since 2015. Nothing was staged in Colorado, however.

On Sunday, Oct. 6, that will change with a gathering from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver. The campus is in the National Western Complex near the intersection of I-70 and I-25.

The key instigator of the gathering is Brian DeBruine, who created and remains the key energy of the Colorado Hydrogen Network. Big Pivots sat down with DeBruine for a brief conversation about the event, hydrogen and Colorado on a recent afternoon.

Why are we having Colorado’s first conference devoted to hydrogen now instead of last year or next?

For the last few years, we’ve wanted to celebrate the National Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day, which is October 8. That date was chosen because of the similarity of 10.08 to the atomic number of hydrogen, which is 1.008. It wasn’t until this year that we really had enough progress with hydrogen here in Colorado to have something to show. This year we do.

What will be in the show and tell?

We have 25 companies, universities, state agencies and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory exhibiting. We’ll have 32 educational and non-technical posters that answer most of the frequently asked questions about hydrogen. Why do we need it? Where do we get it? Does it take a lot of water? Is it safe? All those things.

We will have vehicles, including that of Brendon Doner, who has a hydrogen Toyota Mirai that he bought in California. Brendon rents this to anyone who wants to try driving a hydrogen vehicle. Hydrogen fuel is provided by a mobile hydrogen fueler from a company called ElektrikGreen located in Lyons. You can rent Brendan’s Mirai through Turo, which is a peer-to-peer car-sharing company. He’s doing this because he believes in the technology and wants to promote it.

You mentioned water. That’s always a subject of a keen interest in Colorado. Does hydrogen take a lot of water?

No, your average hydrogen fuel station uses about 1/6^th the water of your average restaurant. Also, it takes three and a half times as much water to make a gallon of gasoline as it does to make the equivalent amount of hydrogen.

Splitting water with electricity is not the only way to get hydrogen. The world is now learning that hydrogen occurs naturally underground and can be recovered with simple wells. There’s quite a bit of work on this natural hydrogen happening here at the Colorado School of Mines and the U.S. Geological Survey.

A relatively new Colorado-based company called Koloma has raised more than $300 million, including grants from Bill Gates’ Energy Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to pursue natural hydrogen wells. See also Canary Media article about Koloma

Hydrogen can be obtained in many ways. Water is absolutely not an issue.

Are all these ways green hydrogen, or are some of them gray hydrogen?

In the past, hydrogen was all gray, made from natural gas, because it was economical to do so and nobody cared. We weren’t using much hydrogen. In the future, that’s not going to be the case.

Hydrogen from water, using renewable electricity to create it, is green. The hydrogen wells are green. Even pulling hydrogen from old petroleum wells is green because the carbon never leaves the ground. The hydrogen is created underground through a chemical process and brought through palladium membrane filters to make it clean. In the future, all hydrogen has to be clean or there’s no point in using it.

I had not heard of hydrogen wells before? Can you tell us more about that?

This is really interesting. As it turns out, hydrogen occurs naturally underground. Scientists didn’t believe that it would accumulate because it’s such a light and a volatile element. They thought it would just permeate through the ground and be gone. Moreover, the equipment they used to find other gasses, including natural gas or helium or whatever, used hydrogen as a carrier. So they were always ignoring the hydrogen.

Scientists started saying, oh, wait a minute, we think hydrogen occurs underground. For example, in Turkey, a natural vent has burned for hundreds of years. They think it was the original source of the Olympic flame. when people realized that hydrogen occurs naturally underground, they started looking for it and developing it to use as a resource.

I’m curious about your personal journey, how you ended up deciding that you want to spend this point of your life in championing hydrogen. What led you to that?

Well, I’m an engineer. For 36 years I worked for Honeywell Aerospace. Being interested in science and other things, I started seeing this development of the hydrogen cars like the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo Fuel Cell that are being sold in California, and thinking, wow, that is really a fantastic way to get internal-combustion engine vehicles off the road.

I also started seeing the advantages of hydrogen EVs over battery EVs. Although battery EVs are easier to put in place, because there’s electricity everywhere, hydrogen has a key advantage in that hydrogen vehicles provide the same performance and convenience as gasoline or diesel.

For battery EVs the biggest bugaboo is the time for recharging. A lot of people think, oh, someday, that’ll be really fast, but it won’t, because it has nothing to do with the battery. It has to do with the huge amount of energy that you need to put into a car really quickly.

I started getting concerned about the climate. Many of us understand we absolutely have to convert 100% of gasoline and diesel vehicles to some kind of zero-emissions technology whether it’s a battery EV or a hydrogen EV. I decided that a champion was needed here to help move this forward in Colorado.

So I went around Denver talking to NREL and the Colorado Energy Office saying, “Hey, what can I do?” And we came up with the idea of starting a nonprofit organization that could be a platform to just gather everybody together that was interested in promoting this technology so they could communicate, we could work together, and we could try to start building this market. I’ve been at this five years now. I don’t get paid for doing it. It’s a labor of love. Frankly, I couldn’t stop.

You have mentioned NREL twice, including the fact that they will be at your event on Oct. 6. How deep is NREL’s research in hydrogen?

Well, NREL, which stands for the National Renewable Energy Labs, is one of 17 national laboratories operated by the Department of Energy. As the name implies, NREL’s charter is to perform research and development of renewable energy.

Of course, NREL is deeply engaged in hydrogen. They have a light-duty hydrogen fueling station at the NREL campus as well as a heavy-duty fueling station. And the difference is that the heavy duty station produces much greater amounts of hydrogen and at much higher flow rates. NREL is very interested in promoting hydrogen, and that’s why they, of course, are happy to associate with us and work on trying to establish this community here in Colorado.

If memory serves me, a hydrogen station was planned in Fort Collins, at the Powerhouse. Do you know the status of that?

I do. That’s a little bit of a frustrating story. I worked with NREL back in 2020 just before covid to get that station donated to Colorado State University. That station was being operated out in Washington D.C., but was being scrapped by Nel, the company that owned it and NREL here was in charge of decommissioning it.

So NREL contacted me. They said, “Hey, Brian, we ought to get this station moved here to Colorado.” We spent about four months convincing Nel that we weren’t going to blow ourselves up and we finally convinced them to donate the station to the Colorado State University, which they did in October 2020. Unfortunately, it’s taken four years now to try to get permits in place. It had nothing to do with safety. It was all aesthetics. The CSU Powerhouse is located next to a park (along the Cache le Poudre River), and so the city was worried that this was going to be ugly or noisy or both.

As it turns out now, the major components of that station are finally going to be incorporated into a fuel station as part of a $9 million Federal Highway Administration grant for three hydrogen stations that we were awarded in January this year.

See also “Are these three public hydrogen fueling stations in Colorado just the start?” Big Pivots, Jan. 12, 2024.

In 2016, NREL’s Matt Post took Marjie Griek on a ride in aToyota Mirai at an event at the Colorado National Speedway. Photo/Dennis Schroeder, NREL

Remind me, where will the three stations funded by the Federal Highway Administration be in Colorado?

Colorado State University is the prime contractor for this grant, with deployment being executed by a startup company, New Day Hydrogen. The three stations will be located near the three CSU campuses in Colorado. In addition to the CSU Energy Institute location in Ft. Collins, the second station will be near the CSU Spur Campus in Denver, and the third near the CSU Pueblo campus. They may not necessarily be on the campuses but they’ll be affiliated with CSU.

One criticism of hydrogen fuel cells that I hear has to do with the amount of energy needed for the process of creating it. That the energy used to create it outweighs the benefits of having a lighter weight in a vehicle than a battery. In this, it negates the value of hydrogen for large vehicles such as trucks and busses. How do you respond?

Efficiency isn’t the issue here. The internal combustion engine is, only 20% to 40% efficient, and we live with that. The real issue is that we need to offer people zero-emission solutions that provide the same performance and convenience as gasoline and diesel if we have any hope of them adopting Zero-Emission Vehicles (ZEV).

Battery cars are different. They’re more convenient if you can fuel at work or home and just drive around town. For long trips or towing trailers or for heavy loads, battery EV’s are less convenient. Public opinion polls by four of the big polling agencies show that only 20% to 40% of US drivers have any intention of ever buying a battery EV. Yet the world must convert 100% of vehicles to zero-emissions. So we’ve got to offer alternatives that people will actually buy.

Now, for commercial vehicles like delivery trucks, bucket trucks, or flatbeds like tow trucks, those vehicles are typically driven all day long, and they also don’t get very good mileage, plus a big vehicle takes a lot longer to charge than a car. Refueling or recharging time has to be as fast as gasoline or diesel. Batteries just don’t suit this application. So commercial vehicles will be some of the first users of hydrogen fueling.

Hydrogen has the advantages of faster refueling and longer range and better duty cycle.

Do you see a future in which the hydrogen fuel cells will ultimately prevail over battery electric?

Absolutely. I think the “killer app”, as I’m calling it for vehicles, is going to be a plug-in hybrid fuel cell. In other words, it has both a battery and fuel cell in it, and if you want to charge it at home to just go to the store or work, or whatever you can do that day-to-day, but if you decide to take a long trip, now you have hydrogen as a backup, like a range extender, so you don’t have to worry about having to stop every 150 miles for 20 minutes to charge the battery. In the long run, I predict plug-in hybrid fuel cell vehicles are what we’re going to see.

By the way, Honda just came out this year with their CR-V model called e:FCEV, which is a plug-in hybrid fuel cell. They’re going to be selling that in California. And Stellantis, which is a big automaker in Europe, has a small van that’s good for plumbers and electricians. It runs half on battery, half on hydrogen, and so you can use either one. That really gives you incredible flexibility.

My impression is that California leads the United States in hydrogen fuel cell efforts. Where does Colorado stand in the national context?

California, thanks to (former) Gov. Schwarzenegger, had the foresight to put out $100 million to get fuel stations built to get this whole thing started. Unfortunately, they’ve had some problems. Rather than making the hydrogen on site with electrolysis, they’re using delivered hydrogen, and they’ve had delivery issues. And they also haven’t had much competition for that hydrogen, and the prices have just gone through the roof.

What’s different here in Colorado is we have much cheaper electricity. It’s about half the price of electricity in California. So we can make hydrogen on-site using electrolysis at a price that’s going to be competitive with gasoline. Making hydrogen on-site also means we’re not going to have interruptions in supply.

Unfortunately, whether we’re considering battery or hydrogen electric vehicles, they’re more expensive right now because they’re new technology. However, the state of Colorado has done a great job putting in place a number of tax incentives, as well as other incentives to help lower the cost of these vehicles so that fleets can start using them.

This includes the Colorado Clean Fleet Enterprise, the Clean Transit Enterprise, and the Community Access Enterprise, which is for infrastructure. Colorado also adopted the Zero Emission Vehicle Rule, which incentivizes automakers to promote zero-emission vehicles.

Colorado has really stepped up to the plate. They’ve really done a great job of trying to help move this technology forward.

Colorado’s first Hydrogen Day will be held at the CSU Spur campus Hydro building in the National Western Complex near I-70 and I-25 in Denver.

Final question, what is the next shoe that will drop in hydrogen? Is there a coming milestone of some sort?

The problem we’ve got with hydrogen is that there’s no market, and by market I mean multiple suppliers and users and infrastructure. And so everybody that wants to enter this market faces a “chicken or the egg” stalemate. You can’t put up a fuel station until you’ve got users for it, and the users can’t buy the vehicle until the fuel stations exist. One of the big missions of the Colorado Hydrogen Network is to help establish that market, to bring together the suppliers and the users and the infrastructure at the same time, the same scale, the same place, to start the market.

One a market gets started, other people can enter the market, and it can really take off. Until that happens, we’re at a stalemate in this country. I hope more champions like the Colorado Hydrogen Network will try to help get this market going.

Thank you, Brian and I expect I’ll see you at the CSU Spur Campus at the Hydro Building on Sunday, Oct. 6.

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