Hydrogen fuel cells have several advantages over electric batteries.

Why hydrogen could fuel the future of transportation

Environment

Why hydrogen could fuel the future of transportation


this isn't who wins? This is a solving a pathway to dick carbonized transportation. We think electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are complementary when it comes down to it, the objective here has to be transforming our total transportation system and making it a zero carbon path that is commercially viable, deployable across all sections and segments. Mhm There's an awful lot of historic discomfort around things like the hindenburg. That's, that's one of the folks always reference, you know, and what we've seen consistently is that, you know, if you treat hydrogen in a well organized and and respectful manner as we have in all industrial gasses, which is a perfectly reasonable fuel to you, education is critical for people just to even understand that Toyota sells a fuel cell vehicle, it's not just about Toyota to bring the solution, right, This is about the whole hydrogen economy, that's out there, right? So when you think about what makes fuel cell vehicles work is you have to have the hydrogen, you have to have the stations and you have to have the vehicle. So in the same way that we're building momentum, the rest of that hydrogen economy is also building momentum. Now, companies have their own sustainability goals and their own targets, it's the customers and the end users that are actually pulling others forward because they're saying in order for us to meet the goals that we've said to our shareholders by 2030 or 2050 we need to have these technologies, I think that's why people feel like that, the momentum is really here now and the time time is now when we produce hydrogen by electrolysis, you split a water molecule and you split into hydrogen and oxygen and in a fuel cell, what we do is we put our our hydrogen back into the fuel cell And it recombined hydrogen, uh, and the, the oxygen and doing so, an electron runs around an external circuit and that is the electrical charge that you, you you gather, we've been working on fuel cells for about 25 years. So it's not a new thing. The difference between maybe a battery electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles, not that much right. You know, you're using the same sort of electrification. It's got the same electric motor, you're having similar, you know, controls that are on it. It's just the difference of how big of a battery you need on there or if you're using hydrogen as your source of energy to actually move you forward. The advantage of a fuel cell electric vehicle, it can refuel very quickly. So it's a very similar experience to say, a diesel vehicle, you can refuel it in 15 minutes and whether that's a truck or a bus or a train or ferry. And also the higher power requirements because in order to have a fully electric truck, for example, you would have to have a significant amount of batteries that would be heavy and that would reduce the payload. And so all of those customers that are in commercial vehicles and trucks, they're using those trucks for a purpose, right to deliver goods and if you reduce the amount of goods that they're able to deliver, that's a bad business model for them. So, um, in those larger vehicles and applications, that's why our fuel cells are an advantage over battery electric challenges in the fuel cell space has been infrastructure. So you need to be able to refuel these vehicles. That's one thing, the other is the cost, both the initial cost of a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, um, and the total cost of ownership now that's been coming down significantly over time and will continue to do so, I think there's a couple elements. One is the cost of hydrogen itself, Green hydrogen for example, which is hydrogen that would be made from renewable energy. Part of that, we've seen the cost of renewable energy, the wind or solar have obviously come down tremendously. And that's a big input into the cost of producing hydrogen and producing that great hydrogen. So you need the cost of the fuel to come down and then you also need the cost of the equipment with any emerging technology. One of the big challenges is that manufacturing piece. So high cost of manufacturing, especially in in new technologies is quite common. So moving into that industrial scale production, you know, large scale standards that we would see in any other manufacturing industry improvement against, you know, manufacturing errors and things like that drive costs then rather dramatically. So as you have a maturing in the technology and the supply chains around the components improved, you also get significant cost savings there as well as those just pure manufacturing games that we see in every sector. When we think about sort of the generations of developments of fuel cell stacks and modules, we are now getting a point where, you know, we have that level of power and efficiency that are coming out of those platforms to really be a good cost solution for, for the applications that are being put in as a hydrogen economy. You know, we have to think about how all the different sort of players come together and actually help to help the issue. As one team, there's a lot of interest in hydrogen hubs right now, a lot of them around the country, a lot of states and a lot of areas are looking at it. They want to get in on the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen hubs are really important for the industry. For the whole hydrogen an economy. I think the scale, in most cases, you're looking at being able to produce hydrogen on site. We've seen that on a smaller scale at things like a porch. So there's all different kinds of equipment and support. You have the trucks, trucks, they are taking the goods back and forth. But you also have terminal tractors, you also have other pieces of equipment that can be fueled with hydrogen policy or other things make a difference that backing in and encouragement that confidence from from whether it's the state or the federal government or even other entities that want to support this. Just help to give a little bit of a lifting hands and say, hey, we believe in this even in those sort of maybe transitional times to make sure that that were being supported the way to help us see us through to the end. I think water is like that basic fundamental of life. You know, it's like without water, we don't live, right? And I love that it's water that's being used to create this oxygen hydrogen that's being used to sort of support mobility, right? So that for me is like personally a very beautiful picture of this fundamental of life that we need to be standing with. Something that can be fundamental in your mobility and transportation, right? And something that is in abundance here on earth.