Video Url

Below is the text version of the webinar titled "2013 and 2014 Hydrogen Student Design Contests," originally presented on January 14, 2014. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can access the presentation slides.

Alli Aman:
We'll go through a few housekeeping items before I turn it over to today's speakers. I just want to remind everybody that this webinar is being recorded, so we will have a recording along with presentation slides up on our website within about 10 business days.

I will send out an email as well once those are posted to our website. Everyone is on mute, so please submit your questions via the question function box on GoToMeeting, the panel, and we will cover all questions during Q&A session. But I do encourage you to submit those questions as the presenters are speaking because we will cover those at the end of the presentation.

We also have multiple speakers today so if you have a direct question for someone who's speaking please just indicate that when you submit your question, and also, I encourage you all to check back to our website as this is a monthly webinar series and sometimes we have multiple presentations in a month.

So definitely check back to the DOE fuel cell website for future webinars because they do happen often and I also encourage you to sign up for our newsletter that is—that we submit every month and it does keep you in the loop of things like this as well. So I encourage you to sign up for that on our website as well, and on that I'm gonna turn it over to Greg Kleen. Greg Kleen is the acting education and outreach team lead for the Fuel Cell Technologies Office. Greg?

Greg Kleen:
Thanks, Alli. So I just want to say that the Fuel Cell Technologies Office has been proud to support the Hydrogen Student Design Contest for several years and we're excited about that. Last year's contest featured outstanding entries, particularly by the University of Birmingham and the University of Kyushu, and those designs will be highlighted in today's webinar.

In addition we're going to be introducing this year's contest.

[Next slide]

Alli, if you want to go to the—so—well so this slide shows the webinar overview and at the end we'll be doing questions and answers, and if you want to go to the next slide, Alli?

[Next slide]

So now I would like to introduce Emanuel Wagner. Emanuel is working as a program coordinator for the Hydrogen Education Foundation in a variety of areas such as membership communication and development, education and outreach, and research and analysis.

He has worked as the contest manager of the Hydrogen Student Design Contest since 2011 and Emanuel holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany in Political Sciences and with Economic and a master's from the University of Potsdam, Germany in political science. So with that, I'd like to welcome Emanuel.

Emanuel Wagner:
Well thank you Greg and Allison very much and welcome everybody to the webinar today. I would also like to thank the Department of Energy of course for their support of the contest and for putting on this webinar. You can go to the next slide.

[Next slide]

The Hydrogen Student Design Contest which I will discuss in just a minute is one of several projects of the Hydrogen Education Foundation, and the Hydrogen Education Foundation, or HEF for short, we're a charitable, non-profit organization. We're based in Washington, D.C.

We're dedicated to promoting clean hydrogen technologies through student scholarships, innovative national competitions like the contest, also fuel cell and hydrogen events, and other educational programs that basically encourage environmental stewardship, help improve America's energy security, and help create green jobs.

And so I believe, you know, many of you in the audience are interested in some or all of these goals. So if you want to learn more about what we are doing you can either go to our website, HydrogenEducationFoundation.org, or if you want to just get updates on hydrogen developments around the world or on the HEF activities consider just liking the Foundation on Facebook, or you can follow us on Twitter at @h2andyou. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

So if you haven't heard about the contest before just let me briefly explain what it is. The contest is an annual competition for undergrad and graduate students around the world and it challenges student teams to design hydrogen energy applications really for real-world use.

For the most part the competition has a strong technical focus but it really includes a lot of other sections and, you know, from engineering, architecture, economics, environmental science, political science. So there's something for most students and that's why we encourage teams to consider—take that into consideration. Next slide.

[Next slide]

So just a brief comment on the history of the contest. It was launched in 2004 and receives government support and financing from private entities, and past themes range from anywhere from residential fueling; hydrogen communities; developing, designing commercial sites; stationary fuel cells to power parks; and so forth, and some of the designs actually became actual stations or actual appliances.

For example the 2005 winning design was partly financed by Chevron and is now the hydrogen fueling station at the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University. The participants come from around the world and the number of teams participating range from anywhere from two dozen to more than 50 teams.

The students—so why basically participate? You can—you get a number of benefits out of that. For example there is a big prize. It's a competition so there is a prize. The winning team or teams will receive a travel stipend and conference registration to a major conference. Last year it was the ACT Expo, the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Washington, D.C. This year it will be the ACT Expo 2014 in Long Beach, California.

The winning team or winning teams will hold a presentation at a session on that conference. Also the designs, the top designs will be entered into a journal, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, which basically is a vehicle for exchange and dissemination of basic ideas in the field of hydrogen energy for engineers and researchers, and it's a very interesting, very good publication.

And we basically—during the development of the contest we encourage other prizes to develop. For example a webinar like this was done last year and this year. Last year we had the two, the top three teams of the contest to present their designs at this DOE webinar. This year we have the University of Birmingham to present and so we are looking for opportunities to highlight the participants and winners where possible. So for you as a student it's a great way to get in front of industry representatives at a conference and get your name out, and get some face time with potential employers.

And on the other hand you also get great experience in designing, for this year a fueling station with commercially available technology, you get feedback from industry experts, and you gain a lot of experience in working with real world applications. So you and your university will gain a lot of visibility and have some things to put on your resume as well. The next slide.

[Next slide]

So just talking about last year's contest before we actually have the presentation from the University of Birmingham. We have received generous support from several companies and government agencies, so DOE and NREL of course have supported the contest but also Toyota and Mercedes Benz provide financial support to organize the contest and send the teams basically across the world.

Furthermore we have received a lot of in-kind support from the International Association of Hydrogen Energy and the associated journal which I mentioned; also media partners were CCAT, the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, and I believe Alex Barton, one of our judges may also be on the call; Renewable Energy World and Fuel Cells 2000 have also spread the word for us, as did the Northeast Electrochemical Energy Storage Cluster. So next slide.

[Next slide]

Okay, so the theme for last year's contest, the 2012-2013 Hydrogen Student Design Contest, was the development of a hydrogen fueling infrastructure in the Northeastern United States. In short the challenge for student teams was to develop a feasible plan, and you can go to the next slide…

[Next slide]

…for creating a hydrogen infrastructure by only using commercially available technology designed to facilitate fuel cell travel between and within major metropolitan areas in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. Next slide.

[Next slide]

And we decided to do that back then because of, you know, a lot of—some major auto manufacturers had announced back then that they would be offering fuel cell electric vehicles commercially by 2015 and, you know, while those cars are out it's not going to—nobody's going to buy them if there's no way to refuel them, and so while that is something that is being addressed in California, back then, there wasn't something publicly known or developing in the Northeast, and so we tried to have students develop such a plan.

The infrastructure, in order for the infrastructure to develop you have to basically have fueling stations and they have to see demand, otherwise nobody's going to build them. And the cars are only really going to sell if the customer knows there's infrastructure out there and so it's what people call the classic chicken and egg problem, and in order to address that we basically asked students to develop a fueling infrastructure plan that allows fueling for the first few cars and then basically grows in concert with the increasing numbers of cars on the roads. So next slide, please.

[Next slide]

Okay, so we had basically five different sections that students had to address which were all inter-related. So they had to—the students, the teams had to analyze possible hydrogen sources and fueling locations, then present an infrastructure development timeline or a roll-out scheme over the time period from 2013 to 2025, then include an economic analysis of the station build-out, and then address and review codes and standards, and present a marketing and education plan. And rather than me going into the details of these requirements I basically will let the students as a team, the team from the University of Birmingham, kind of present their design and they will address what they basically put into their plan.

So just a final comment here on the next slide.

[Next slide]

We had more than 25 teams registered for the contest. Fifteen teams provide an abstract and, of those, we have the top five teams on this slide. And now we will hear from the honorable mention team, University of Birmingham, and afterwards I will present a very short summary of the grand prize winner, Kyushu University, who wasn't able to attend this webinar today, sadly.

[Next slide]

So without further ado, welcome the honorable mention winner of the 2012-2013 Hydrogen Student Design Contest, University of Birmingham, and guys, take it away.

Daniel Symes:
Hello everyone, I'd like to thank the DOE for their kind invitation today to present here. We are the Centre for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Research and we will be presenting our submission from the 2012-2013 Hydrogen Student Design Contest.

Our research center is a U.K. Research, 50 Ph—post graduates—sorry, can you go back a slide, please.

[Next slide]

The next slide, very good, thank you, sorry. Our—that's right, our—we have 50 Ph.D., post graduate researchers spread over three universities consisting of the University of Nottingham, Loughborough University, and headquarters at the University of Birmingham.

We are the largest group of hydrogen fuel cell PhD researchers in the United Kingdom currently. Our presentation is titled, "Development of the Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure for the Northeast United States." Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

I would like to introduce our presentation team. I, Daniel Symes, will be giving the introduction to the presentation. I will then be passing on to James Courtney who will be presenting the bulk of the presentation on the phase roll-outs of the hydrogen refueling network. He will then pass on to Amrit who will talk about the regulations, economics, and marketing of the project.

Our background, our skills range from scientific fundamentals to hydrogen infrastructure and so we've got a way different diverse set of skills here. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

So I'll be presenting the aims and objectives in the next slide. James Courtney will then talk about the three phases for fueling station roll-out and the subsequent hydrogen production supply chain required. Amrit will then summarize the regulations applicable to the roll-out of hydrogen refueling stations, discuss the economics of the project and, finally, the marketing and outreach strategies required to aid the public adoption of fuel cell vehicles.

I shall then summarize our key findings and conclusions to the project and we will welcome any questions at the end of the presentation. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

So the aims and objectives of the project was to produce a refueling network which could sustain a network of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the Northeast coastline of the United States.

Data was supplied to us by the organizers up to the year 2020 and was extrapolated up to 2025 for four scenarios ranging in fuel cell vehicle market penetration in the U.S. as defined in a 2006 DOE report. Scenario four has a high market penetration for fuel cell vehicles which anticipates 1.7 million fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2025, and scenario one shows low market penetration for fuel cell vehicles, with only 300,000 vehicles on the road by this time.

We have also to take into the account the amount of hydrogen required for this and that's the key part of our study here. I will now pass on to James Courtney who will talk about the roll-out of a fueling network. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

James Courtney:
Good afternoon, my name is James Courtney and I am a Ph.D. researcher here at the University of Birmingham. Today I will be explaining how we saw the transitioned development of the refueling network across the Northeastern seaboard of the United States and how we saw that this development could be split into three defined stages, and principally also looked at the further after the project which we called phase four, which really involves the legacy and the development of the free market economics within the refueling network across the geographic area.

Phase one we saw develop really between the years of 2013 through to 2015 and it's really focused on developing a functional corridor which facilitates a transport across the geographic area.

Phase two concentrated on the five years between 2015 and 2020, and was really the—tied to deployment of the refueling network to facilitate an early market to start the penetration into the mass market of transports across the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Phase three saw the five years of 2020 to 2025 and was really concerned with the transition from an early market to one of free market economics and consumer convenience.

In the next few slides I'll be taking you through each of the phases, talking about how we had objectives within those phases and then subsequently on how we aimed to achieve those objectives and to facilitate deployment. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

Phase one we saw as really establishing a foothold across the seaboard and establishing a skeleton network between Washington and Boston. We also concentrated on the area of Albany as there is such a lot of fuel cell research concerned in that area.

We also wanted to really get over the chicken and egg scenario that is established across the hydrogen infrastructure which Emanuel referred to earlier, and we see phase one as really the bar in allowing those eggs to actually hatch into a fully-developed market.

To facilitate a skeleton network across the area we saw we needed to concentrate on seven different locations; the main metropolitan areas across the seaboard. These were Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and then Albany.

If we position refueling locations within those locations we could facilitate a fully-working and fully-usable network for those hyper-early adopters, so university professors, research groups, and really keen individuals. Subsequent to this in tier two we wanted to cement that period and introduce it to early adopter consumers before tier three, which is the final stage of establishing an early market in the locations.

To facilitate this and to really harness a quick roll-out we were focusing on the use of portable refueling stations. These portable refuelers could quickly be established in a location, and subsequently at that location a permanent site could be built at the same time that refueling is currently available. Once that permanent station was completed that portable refueler could move onto the next stage, the next tier, and actually facilitate the growing network across the area. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

As you can see from this slide it shows that we have the different types of refueling stations identified and the way that we saw that hydrogen supply could be concentrated. Simplicity was seen as key during this period as we distributed an on-site production of hydrogen was seen as essential.

This is not to say that we are not developing the full market of hydrogen distribution across the area. However, it was seen that it was easier to implement this across the whole of the network very, very quickly. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

Phase two principally focused on establishing the early market and then subsequently penetrating into the main transport market of the area. Again, as like phase one, the phase is split into three tiers of importance. Tier one would be concentrating on cementing that position of the early market, allowing a future access to a large market through geographic expansion of the network.

This saw the number of sites that we want to develop from 18 to 28 in tier one and 28 to 75 during tier two, and then in tier three we see a shift in philosophy, away from a geographically important selection and much more into increasing the capacity of the network to provide for an ever-increasing penetration to general transportation market. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

We see a dramatic increase in demand for hydrogen which we predicted during phase two in these years and to match that we have selected a wide variety of hydrogen production techniques. This is so that we can actually make sure the market is robust in hydrogen supply and is not susceptible to fluctuations in the price of hydrogen, which could be detrimental to the ongoing use of the market.

Subsequently from this we see that this would inspire private business actually to increase its incorporation into the development of the network and so there's less direct development of the network going on from the centralized system. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

Phase three we denoted as the transition from a developmental network into a full commercialization of hydrogen refueling and really governed by mass market economics. Again, we have split this phase into three tiers which are principally concentrated on the incorporation of private business into the supply chain; tier two was the consumer specific development of the infrastructure, expanding the capacity of the network and trying to drive increased demand in fuel cell vehicles, and tier three we saw as the complete commercialization of the network and developing links into separate areas so we can actually incorporate our developmental market across the whole of the United States. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

As you can see, as we transition to free market economics the hydrogen supply, and the nature of which is very broad, and the selection of the types of refueling locations and refueling methods has changed to reflect that and much more concentrating on rather than targeted areas for development of the network but relying on private business to select individual locations on local economics and the success of the actual location.

Thank you for your attention. I will now pass you on to Amrit Chandan who introduced our work on the regulations involved with hydrogen and our education and outreach program.

[Next slide]

Amrit Chandan:
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amrit and I will briefly talk about the regulations, economics considerations, and marketing and outreach efforts that we must take to see the roll-out of the hydrogen infrastructure. So onto this, onto the regulations.

Currently worldwide there's actually quite a lot of experience with hydrogen usage as a material, as it's used in many industrial processes, and what this means is that there are currently a lot of regulations already in place. However, what we found in our study is that some of these regulations can actually be a barrier to the entry of the fuel cell vehicle and hydrogen infrastructure and this is because the regulations are not designed for use in this capacity.

For example some of the regulations stipulate that the minimum distance of hydrogen storage vessels to the closest buildings, and what this actually means is that, yes, the regulations can be followed and we can identify sites; however, it's very complex and so this will actually limit the number of private companies that will come in.

So the key finding from our study in this area is that the regulations drastically need simplification so that they're easy to understand and sites within the city can be found to such a degree that we can have the same frequency of hydrogen filling stations as we find with gas stations. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

In our economic considerations it's actually really difficult to predict where the infrastructure will be in the future. So for the purpose of our study we decided to use a fixed price model of hydrogen costs, so we chose—we chose our hydrogen cost based on the current price of gasoline in the U.S., which is around $3.40 a gallon, and this equates to roughly $6.75 per kilogram of hydrogen. And what we've found is that the hydrogen economy—hydrogen infrastructure would be profitable by around 2030 and will break even in 2040.

However, as we've said, this model is quite simple, so in reality we need actually a variable price model. So looking at the range of scenarios it's definitely clear that there is, that the hydrogen infrastructure will be economically viable in the future. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

On to marketing and outreach. So our study found that actually the most important aspect will be to have a strong education program and the reason for this is that the current—the target market for fuel cell vehicles, the current target market, are actually currently in school.

So in order to reach this current target market it's really important that we educate and make them aware that hydrogen fuel cells is a thing and in this regard it will probably require some quite high-level direction from the government, such as the introduction of school programs.

We also found that initially it would be really important to educate people who will have direct contact with hydrogen such as emergency services and other people who need to know about hydrogen and its implications such as insurance companies and regulators.

Overall we feel that initially the infrastructure will have to be marketed by local government to make people aware that the hydrogen for such exists on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and so we have an example poster here on the left showing something that could be shown on the billboard for instance.

However, in the future it will be most likely the case that individual companies will market their own infrastructure and vehicles, and this makes the most sense. So the key finding from our study is that education and public outreach will be the most important for the adoption of the hydrogen infrastructure and the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I'll pass you now back to Dan who will conclude our presentation. Next slide, please.

[Next slide]

Daniel Symes:
Thank you, Amrit. Now in conclusion this report here which we have conducted is showing that it's geographically and economically suitable to implement a hydrogen fueling infrastructure on the Northeast coastline of the U.S.

There is, however, boundaries and barriers to this which—and strong leadership is needed from Federal and local governments, and this will help to direct fuel cell location selection and stabilize a steady and consistent hydrogen supply chain to these refueling stations.

It will decrease the regulation complexity which currently exists and hopefully lead to education which will increase the uptake of fuel cell vehicles. We are at a crossroads currently and as recently as last week Toyota at the Electronics Consumer Conference said that they are going to release their fuel cell vehicle in 2015 and these vehicles are going to need a hydrogen infrastructure in place for this to be a success and it be adopted by the general public.

So our motto is action is needed now. Our full report can be found on the Hydrogen Education Foundation website, and we'd like to thank you all for listening to our presentation. Thank you.

[Next slide]

Emanuel Wagner:
All right, well thank you guys so much for your presentation and for your submission, of course. For the audience members please if you have any questions at this point type them into the 'questions' box on the control panel.

Alli already mentioned that but you may have missed it early on. It should be on the right-hand side of the screen. If you don't see it you may need to click on the little red button to show the entire panel and then just type them into the questions box.

We'll answer all the questions at the end of the presentation and right now while we don't have anybody representing Kyushu University I'm just going to briefly mention what their design was about. If you—actually if you, as I already mentioned, if you want to look at the contest submissions go to the HydrogenContest.org website and look under '2013 contest.' The top five submissions are there, so you can follow that and look into the designs in more detail. So next slide, please.

[Next slide]

All right, so the Kyushu team's design basically included two key concepts, two key components: one regarding the station design and the other one regarding the deployment of the stations.

They proposed a sort of a dual station strategy, dual station design approach which means that they would co-locate their hydrogen stations, one, with existing gas stations wherever demand is expected to be significantly high to basically justify that kind of investment and —Alli you can click on the slide, yeah.

So their approach is modular meaning that they initially approach stations with a 400 kilogram per day off-site delivery approach, and then once those 400 kilograms per day do not—are not enough anymore they are allowing for an expansion to 1,000 kilograms per day—if you click on it one more time—yeah, with an on-site component.

So basically instead of having the delivery they're proposing using on-site steam reformation to produce that kind of amount of hydrogen, and that basically allows for the station to grow somewhat organically with the demand and reduce the up-front investment cost.

[Next slide]

If you go to the next slide we have also a portable station design for areas of low demand, which basically is a station of 40 kilograms per day able to expand once fueling demand, again, picks up in the area. And if you click on that, you'll see on the bottom that the original portable stations can then be moved to another location, then the gas station gets an off-site station integration. And then if you click one more time and you have the price that they estimate for—from the initial portable station to the gas station, to the offset station.

And then one more time, it allows an expansion to an even larger—to an even larger system and one more time, I think there's one more advance—and that basically allows, again, for an organic conversion or an organic expansion of the systems considering that, you know, some areas will see much more demand than others and that kind of takes care of that.

[Next slide]

If you go to the next slide the other component of the design is that they propose a clustered infrastructure build-out similar to what was proposed in the recent California Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Roadmap and they basically—so the Kyushu team started out with developing an early cluster in the New York area—if you click one more, one time, exactly—in their phase one they were saying that they want to increase awareness and visibility of the technology and doing that in New York in the New York area they see is the best way to do so.

Beyond that they are proposing an expansion in the second phase—and so click one more time—to other urban areas in the Northeast, judging that these areas would see a lot of potential drivers invest a significant demand for the refueling stations.

Now that already looks like a lot of build-outs but, again, that's over five years and their approach is to first build around urban areas and then expand from these—from these urban areas into the suburbs and then later to rural areas.

They projected that with their plan, by 2020, 94 percent of people in the area would reach a station within 15 minutes, which would only improve in their proposal by 2025. If you click one more time you'll see the further expansion, right. So their proposal basically has the benefits of a combination of a flexible station design and the flexible deployment design.

It allows for an organic growth of the station while the fueling demand in the area increases, so actually click one—yeah, flexible design and further expansion of the station; highly accessible; and reducing the need for high up-front investment and rather than station—but rather build out the stations by the demand, which also provides a clear path for financial return for investors.

So, again, if you're interested in the design of course they would be much better to actually propose—explain their design but if you have interest in looking at their design, look at the contest website and if you have questions we would be happy to forward them to the team as well or answer them as best as we can.

[Next slide]

So, with that, you see here the two winning teams at the ACT Expo, Alternative Clean Transportation Expo, 2013, Washington, D.C., and both teams awarded—received their awards from representatives from the Department of Energy, Mercedes Benz and Toyota. So next slide, okay, thank you.

[Next slide]

At this point I want to close and segue into the 2014 contest and talk about the teams and the rules and guidelines. So as we've talked about earlier this is an annual contest and in last year's contest the designs proposed, practically all designs proposed portable stations for areas of low demand and we also heard that early drivers will be limited in range by the lack of infrastructure, and so this theme to us is one of the key obstacles that need to be addressed or that needs to be taken as an important step for greater adoption of hydrogen transportation. As in developing drop-in fueling stations that basically allow for a greater range in areas of low penetration and address these concerns of range anxiety.

The focus of these stations is that they should be comparatively inexpensive to produce in great numbers. They require—they should require low maintenance and easy permitting and be easily transportable to another location once the demand in an area is large enough to justify an investment into a stationary fueling station.

So rather than me talking all the time I kind of want to introduce an industry representative and have him present why such a system is important and so I'm very glad that Jacob Krogsgaard, the managing director of H2 Logic has accepted to speak today.

[Next slide]


H2 Logic is a company that has a lot of experience in developing transportable fueling stations and, remarkably, has done so profitably. So Jacob himself has a Bachelor of Science—is a business development engineer—Bachelor of Science from Aarhus University in 2006, that's in Denmark. And he's the co-founder of H2 Logic and CEO since 2003 when it was founded and manages 40 employees.

He is also a board member of H2 Holding APS, of the Hydrogen Innovation and Research Centers, and a member of the PEM Fuel Cell Strategy Group under HydrogenNet.dk. So Jacob, for the benefit of our audience could you please provide us with your high-level industry perspective on the hydrogen infrastructure development and the need for transportable stations?

Jacob Krogsgaard:
Yes, Emanuel, thank you and greetings from Denmark. It's very exciting to be here. So by building a sufficient hydrogen infrastructure to start the commercial deployment of fuel cell electric vehicles is really the critical factor in order for these vehicles to become a success.

As one of you mentioned the Volvo, the Toyota, and Honda, and also Hyundai have committed themselves to have vehicles ready in 2015, while it only makes sense to base vehicles on the market when refueling infrastructure is available. So since 2003 at H2 Logic we have been building hydrogen stations for various countries around Europe. Just for the record, actually, H2 Logic we are a privately-owned company; as I said we have around 40 employees.

We are not owned by any oil or gas company. We are owned by the four founders and actually we are a spin-off of a project at Aarhus University 11 years ago. So that could be an exciting motivation for you guys to enter a study project like this because, you never know, it might turn out to be a business for you one day.

But anyway when looking at the chicken and the egg dilemma that we've been addressing in this conference, building a small hydrogen station with the costs associated today is a bad business. Building a large hydrogen station and assuming that has a high utilization is a good business; however, getting to the high utilization takes a long time and only building a few large stations doesn't give the sufficient network density, so that's the chicken and the egg dilemma.

So one of the solutions that we are pursuing, and others in the industry as well, is really to standardize smaller hydrogen stations and cut the costs for them. And the cost for a hydrogen station is not just the CAPEX station. It's also the transportation cost, the installation cost, and the operation cost of the station, and all of that combined is what gives the business case.

So as described by the two very good projects before, having small hydrogen stations at an attractive price is the necessary point. However, there are also some critical points that we have to keep in mind like the customer is the king. So it doesn't make sense to make a hydrogen station that doesn't give customers a full tank or fast fueling because then they will not be pleased and they will not buy FCVs.

So there is a standard called SAE J2601 where basically following this protocol you can make a safe and reliable and fast refueling in three to five minutes, fueling vehicles and giving them a range of 300 miles or more, and that is really what we also have to fulfill. There is a lot of precooling and a lot of control included and that's why hydrogen stations today are expensive. But I really look forward to see some of you student groups coming with some excellent inputs of how that can be done even better.

So hydrogen stations, they can get hydrogen supplied from—as gaseous, even liquid, if they have a large quantity. They can have on-site production. Many of the stations we have built in Europe have had on-site production from electrolyzers because we have a growing amount of green electricity in Europe, especially in Denmark we have a lot of wind power, and there is also hydropower around Europe.

In the U.S. on-site production would probably be from natural gas or distributed to the site. Also keep in mind that these different locations where hydrogen stations will be installed, every site is different and the footprint can vary a lot, so making a small footprint is also really, really important.

Making stations drop-in or moveable, we actually made a video where you can see the link at the bottom of the presentation and that's on You Tube, and that's showing an installation of a hydrogen station within 48 hours. We—that's our normal standard of installing hydrogen stations.

That can only be done if you transport all the hardware in some kind of containerized solution and that also gives the customers the possibilities to move it from a location when you hit the maximum capacity of your station and then move it to the outskirt of the city, and then build a station with more capacity at that same site.

So that was kind of the industry point of view. At one important point when you look about the business the ideal payback from an operator's point of view, that's five to seven years, and that's, of course, extremely difficult, so that could also be some solutions where you—where you kind of look at fleets, so deployed fleets of—leased together with hydrogen stations to get a critical mass fast.

I think that's more or less my introduction here. I'll not try to give you any solutions and when you look at the video don't see that as a conclusion but see that as an inspiration. And I really look forward to being on this committee and looking at these great inputs and reports from these students. So thank you.

Emanuel Wagner:
Okay, thanks Jacob, and Jacob will remain on the line for questions. Next slide.

[Next slide]

So Jacob has already touched upon a few items and I will provide a little bit more of an in-depth description of the requirements of the 2013-2014 Hydrogen Student Design Contest.

The contest has seven sections which all need to be addressed in quite some detail. Of course please—you know—when you develop your design, even when you develop your abstract, please take a very close look at the rules and guidelines. There are a lot of requirements, there is a lot of information there that you just need to read through and at least think about, and later on address in the development of your—of the design.

Some of the requirements, as Jacob mentioned, like the fueling protocol, are described there, so if you haven't gotten all the numbers down there, that's okay; you can look that up.

The most important section of the seven sections, however, is the design of the station as I already described. It is required that for this contest the system should initially provide 100 kilograms of hydrogen per day and should be able to refuel at least six cars per hour. So that means initially, and at least, so those are the minimum requirements. You can go beyond that, and that may give you a different kind of points, but this is the minimum that you need to meet. The system must be able to either produce the fuel on-site or get the hydrogen delivered, of course, but also compress, store it, and dispense it.

So it's a fueling station, so it has to do all of that. It must refuel vehicles at 700 bar—not 350 but 700—and do so from empty, from an empty tank to a full tank in five minutes.

All of the stations need to be unmanned, of course, so they need to have a communications system, internal censoring, it needs to be smart, it needs to be accessible remotely, there needs to be an HVAC system,  and safety components that all need to be laid out and described.

When you are designing the system be sure to keep the following key features in mind. As mentioned, it needs to be transportable, that's why we call it a drop-in station, and entirely relocatable within one week.

So that's not a super-hard requirement because, as you've seen, you know, others can do that in 24 hours or 48 hours, but we give you one week from basically starting the relocation until it's available again and that does not include the transport time itself. So it would just be the construction again.

It also needs to meet the standard ISO container limitations. That's a key component that if it's a standard ISO container it's easily transportable which, again, is one of the key features. It must be modular, so you should be allowing for add-ons to increase the fuel supply to more than 100 kilograms somewhat easily.

If the station owner determined that they want to not quite build a stationary fueling station at the site but just, you know, approach—basically add on to the station that they have there, you should be able to supply more kilograms per day, and so think about how you can do that.

Furthermore the station needs to be affordable so that it requires standardization of the components and an easy integration so that it allows for mass production and thus allows for economics of scale to kick in. Just the easiest way, I think, to think of it is—just think of it as the first Model-T.

The current stations are fairly expensive and often custom designed, so there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile from a user perspective, as Jacob said, the customer is king. So the system must create a positive fueling atmosphere. So think about visual design of the station: lighting, color schemes, all of that.

You know it doesn't have to be your regular, old computer. It could be some kind of fancy Apple, Mac kind of design. You know, so think of that. Beyond the design components and the requirements your teams also need to develop a cost and economic analysis, which includes everything from capital cost to operating cost, to information about maintenance cost, requirements for maintenance, and then estimates for the market price for your fifth, your one-hundredth, and your five-hundredth station.

So you need to develop that and then we provide you with a fixed price for the delivered hydrogen of $7.00 per kilogram. Furthermore, Jacob already said that five to seven years for a pay-back period. We require that it should not exceed 10 years but, you know, the lower that range is, the better.

The safety analysis must include a failure modes and effects analysis, ways to mitigate risks, and a list of applicable codes and standards. Of course that's very important.

An additional requirement or section is the siting. We are requiring for this one for you to pick any location in the United States, ideally near a road of course, to site your station and address the local requirements and conditions at the site and provide some sort of narrative or an explanation how you—or how your station addresses that and if it fits all the requirements at that site. So you can pick any station, ideally one that is somewhat accessible and has a good amount of cars going through there but it doesn't have to be California. It could be anywhere in the U.S.

Finally operation, the sections on operation and maintenance, environmental analysis including a resource, emissions and noise analysis, and a customer education and interface design section are also required. All the information is in the guidelines. I don't want to go into that in too much detail but take a good look at that. The requirements there are fairly self-explanatory, I think.

We also have a section on optional features, so you may integrate optional features to basically find ways to reduce the costs of your station, to further reduce your costs, or to provide additional revenue streams.

For example, you know, hydrogen is an energy source carrier, so in some areas as mentioned—you know—I don't want to give too much but there's some ways of how you could potentially create additional revenue streams aside of fueling and that may help to reduce your return of investment or the pay-back period.

So as mentioned details on all these sections are provided in the rules and guidelines, and those are available on the contest website.

[Next slide]
Now you can ask questions about these sections or any requirements really at any time; either now during the webinar or later by sending an email to EWagner@ttcorp.com. You find all that information on the contest website as well.

Of course when you're developing your design make sure to include all source and data materials, cite them, and we do encourage consultation with industry professionals. They can give you additional information, so reach out to them, talk about them—talk to them about what you're doing and a lot of people will be able to—will be happy to help you.

Okay, so if now you are a student or if you're a professor and you're interested now in participating in the 2014 contest the next abstract deadline is January 15, now that's a little short if you are hearing this for the first time but we also have a late abstract deadline.

The only difference between those two is basically that if you submit an abstract tomorrow you'll get feedback a little bit earlier than if you submit your abstract by January 31. There's no other difference. They are not graded—think of the abstract as you need to lay out your proposed approach and your design and with the descriptions of the key system components, challenges that you see, any preliminary schematics of how the components will be integrated in the system but they are not graded, so it basically provides you with a—with feedback from the judges.

So that may help you to either adjust your design or continue on what you proposed. It may help you just think of ideas that previously you hadn't thought about. So that's kind of what this is—why this abstract deadline is there but it's—you know—if you don't provide a four-page abstract what you get is just less feedback, you know, and therefore less useful information from the judges.

So of course I want to bring also up if you are an industry representative and you're interested in becoming involved in the contest you can also contact me via email or by phone. All information is on the contest website.

Other important dates I just want to bring up shortly, March 21 is the submission deadline for the final entry; April 15 is the announcement for the contest winners and the ACT Expo 2014 in Long Beach, California is May 5-9, so you can go to the next slide. I think we have about 10 minutes for Q&A and I'll hand it back to Greg.

[Next slide]

Greg Kleen:
Thanks Emanuel and thanks to all of the speakers for doing a great job. Yeah, we do have a few questions here. The first question would be for Jacob. To keep hydrogen at $6.75 per kilogram, or the equivalent of gasoline, what federal, state, local policies and incentives do you recommend in order to keep station operators viable until 2013—or 2030, which they put as a profitability date? So any comments on there would be appreciated, Jacob.

Jacob Krogsgaard:
Well that's an absolutely excellent question and it's putting your finger on a weak point here because the sales price or the benchmark sales price of hydrogen for the U.S. and Europe is actually 50 percent in U.S. and 100 percent in Europe.

So I don't know the specific states and if there's any major difference in gasoline prices, so I'll have to hand that over to Emanuel or someone knowing more specifically about that in the different states of the U.S., but just from my understanding electrolyzers on-site is really tough when you look at U.S.

Greg Kleen:
Okay, thank you. Another question here is could the hydrogen fueling station be used for fueling industrial and specialty fuel cell vehicles such as heavy duty and medium duty trucks and buses in addition to light duty fuel cell vehicles? How about the University of Birmingham? Did you look at that at all, using industrial applications?

James Courtney:
Thank you very much for that question. It is—it's James Courtney responding to that specific question. It's a really interesting part of the development of the infrastructure is how much to consider what's already going on; what industries use hydrogen for at the moment, and what they might use them for in the future.

So specifically at the moment in the U.S. you see the adoption of fuel cell forklift trucks and this is why we incorporated specifically the areas of Albany into our initial skeleton network because the industrial use of hydrogen really forms a baseline.

It's very hard to predict how consumers might take up a technology and it's very difficult to kind of plan a trajectory on that, but if you can plan to the industrial use of hydrogen it gives you a baseline to work from, and so we tried to incorporate that by kind of enveloping the areas where we saw the increased industrial use at the moment.

For example in Washington there's several very big areas where they're using fuel cell forklift trucks at the moment and where you see other uses which could be described as industrial such as public transportation and buses and so and so forth, that could be quite essential.

Hydrogen has been used as a natural reagent in the chemical industry for 100 years or so now and when we looked at how things had been done specifically in Europe when we're looking at past examples there's actually quite a considerable hydrogen pipeline infrastructure in Europe at the moment.

It's not quite so thick within the United States but looking at the pipelines and the industrial backbone for supplying those reagents was one of the inspirations when we really looked at rolling out the infrastructure.

Greg Kleen:
Okay, yeah, thank you. Here's another question for the University of Birmingham, I guess. They ask, why can't you just put hydrogen fueling pumps onto existing gasoline stations?

Amrit Chandan:
Yeah, so this is Amrit Chandan from University of Birmingham answering this question. In our plan we actually identified many sites where hydrogen fueling stations could be put onto existing forecourts and in actual fact this is actually pretty desirable because you've already got—a lot of these stations already have to comply with regulations.

The biggest barriers as I mentioned in the presentation really is specific codes and regulations, for example, like the distance that a hydrogen storage vessel has to be from buildings. So in the future, hopefully, the regulations can be loosened so that existing forecourts would be able to house hydrogen refueling stations as well.

Greg Kleen:
Okay, I guess here's another question for the University of Birmingham. I'm sure you had some preconceived notions when you got started. Were there any surprises that you've learned as you prepared your contest submission, for example, I mean the number of stations maybe drastically different than you expected or the types of stations? Was here any kind of "aha" moments as you kind of went through your contest submission?

James Courtney:
Hi, it's James, James Courtney again here answering that question. As for surprises, well we didn't really have any surprises when looking through developing the actual network. I think really the surprise came when we looked at the baseline, what was in effect—what we call phase zero in our project, and just how much activity and use of hydrogen is already going on in that specific area?

And so actually when we were looking at, designing that first initial stage, which is really the most important stage in developing this network, the surprise was just how much was there available already and the methodologies in the areas where to produce the hydrogen and how many sites were available. We produced a map of phase zero hydrogen production and really it is very well-suited.

There is a lot of capacity there for the production of hydrogen already and that was really our biggest surprise when we approached the project because we thought the production of hydrogen was going to be one of our biggest obstacles.

Greg Kleen:
Okay. And then another, I guess one other question for the University of Birmingham is there could be quite a few potential teams here that are thinking about doing the contest and haven't done it before. Do you have any advice for these teams as they're—as you're forming your group and forming you contest submissions? Were there any challenges or lessons learned that you could share there?

Daniel Symes:
I would say if I was doing it again is make sure you structure your team early and begin the work quite early. You can never quite anticipate how much research there is you can do to back up your data and [inaudible].

So from a project manager's point of view I would say make sure you get your team organized and make sure you get the communication network in control.

Greg Kleen:
Okay, and here's a question for Jacob is is there a major safety concern for the distance when adding on a—oh, I guess when adding on a hydrogen station to a gas station? So maybe—maybe Jacob or maybe University of Birmingham for this one.

Jacob Krogsgaard:
Jacob here for a small comment. I do agree with University of Birmingham on that point that safety distances are today critical in the U.S. You have the NFPA defining the distances to building and to other potentially explosive equipment. I do think that will be changed as an ISO working group—1988—is also looking into that but that will not be done before 18 to 24 months.

Greg Kleen:
Okay. I guess I think we're out of time here so maybe I should turn it back to Alli here so she can wrap up the webinar. Thank you everyone for all the speakers and thank you everyone for your questions.

Alli Aman:
Yes, thank you to today's speakers. I know we're working with multiple time zones, so thank you so much and just a reminder that this webinar has been recorded. So a recording, along with the slides that we're viewing today, will be up on our website within 10 business days; however, I will send an email out once those are posted, so definitely look out for an email from me and, again, I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter on the website and check back for future webinars as we do host them monthly. So thank you, Emanuel, thank you the University of Birmingham and Jacob, and I appreciate your guys' time. Thanks so much.

Emanuel Wagner:
Thank you.