Below is the text version for the "Megawatt-Scale Tri-Gen System Produces Clean Hydrogen, Electricity, and Water at the Port of Long Beach" H2IQ Hour webinar held on May 30, 2024.
>>Kyle Hlavacek: Hello, and welcome to this month's H2IQ Hour webinar. Today we have an overview of the Tri-Gen Megawatt-Scale System, a first-of-its-kind triple generation system producing renewable electricity, clean hydrogen, and water directed from biogas. My name is Kyle Hlavacek with the Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, supporting stakeholder engagement and other outreach activities.
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I will now hand it over to Pete Devlin, DOE technology manager for HFTO's systems development and integration subprogram, to introduce our presenters. Pete, all yours.
>>Pete Devlin: Thanks a lot, Kyle. And thank you all for joining us. It's a great pleasure to have this presentation. The California Tri-gen facility's the world's first megawatt scale tri-gen facility that uses a fuel cell to produce 100% renewable electricity, heat, and hydrogen for a fueling station. It also produces water for the car wash.
Using renewable biowaste, this facility provides nearly 2.5 megawatts electricity and generates more than one ton of hydrogen each day. The hydrogen is then used in a fueling station to support Toyota's operations at the Port of Long Beach. While this is the first megawatt-scale facility of this nature, our office has helped to support the world's first tri-gen station a decade ago at Fountain Valley, California.
So today, we get to hear that vision really take off on a larger scale, without DOE funding. Congratulations to Toyota, FuelCell Energy, and all the partners involved. And incidentally, visit the HFTO website today to find opportunities to partner with DOE on hydrogen and fuel cells. Join us in our journey to transition to a clean energy economy that serves every American.
So, with that, I'd like to introduce and turn it over to Tony Leo from FuelCell Energy and Mark Yamauchi from Toyota. Thank you. Take it over. Thank you, guys.
>>Tony Leo: All right, we're going to start off with Mark, and I'm going to share some slides. And go ahead, Mark.
>>Mark Yamauchi: Great. Thanks, Tony. Thanks Pete. I'm here to, I want to give you a little background of how this project came to be. And when we just, the context of this all is our sustainability goals for, not even North American, but our global goals. Let's start off in 2015 with the Toyota Environmental Challenge 2050, which consisted of six goals.
First goal being 95% reduction of tailpipe emissions by 2050 of our vehicles. Second goal is zero CO2 from the life cycle of our vehicles, of our products. Third challenge was to have zero carbon for our—all of our facilities. Fourth challenge is to optimize and minimize water. The fifth challenge is materials or circular economy. And the sixth one is biodiversity.
So, as we move on our journey towards reaching our 2050 goals, we set a milestone in 2035, an interim milestone to be carbon neutral for our plants. And in North America, we're shooting for all our facilities by 2035.
Globally, we've also established a science-based target plan. And we are also working towards newer reporting requirements such as the CSRD European requirements and carrying forward the upcoming SEC disclosure rules and similar rules in California and New York. So, we need to address our total emissions for not only scope 1, scope 2, but also scope 3. But it's quite—from a stationary standpoint, we have been making most headway in our scope 1 and scope 2 emissions so far today. Next slide, Tony.
Thank you. So let me just talk a little bit about our hydrogen fuel cell technology. We've been, Toyota's been working on fuel cell technology for well over 20 years. And we now have our light-duty vehicles, our Mirai, which is the blue vehicle shown in the center image there, that's being sold in California and in other markets outside the United States. Developing fuel cell buses, industrial equipment, forklifts, and medium-duty and heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles as well. Next slide please.
So, hydrogen fuel cells certainly help us to—help support our goals of zero carbon, but it's not the only solution, right? So we take a portfolio approach. And why? Because Toyota has a very broad and diverse customer base with multiple needs. So, at this point in time, we all know the end game is zero carbon. But we need to get there to get there, as they say.
So, it's hard for people to immediately jump into a zero-emission vehicle due to infrastructure or use case issues. So that's why we're offering as part of our portfolio hybrid electric vehicles, continue to offer advanced hybrid electric vehicles such as the RAV4 hybrid. Plug-in hybrid vehicles, such as the Prius Prime, the RAV4 Prime. Fuel cell electric vehicles, such as our Mirai fuel cell electric vehicle.
As I mentioned we also have announced that we will be doing a version of the Crown fuel cell, a Crown vehicle in a fuel cell electric model in areas, regions outside the United States. And yes, we are also offering battery electric vehicles, our first one being the bZ4x.
And there will be more to come there. But we feel that this portfolio approach can meet the needs, the everyday needs of a larger number of customers, and thereby reach—have a more significant, quicker impact on lowering carbon emissions by reaching out with more people with the same amount of limited, some of the limited resources our industry's faced with such as lithium for batteries. Next slide.
Let's talk a little bit about North America. From a stationary standpoint, our emissions profile is—consists of over 120 facility sites in North America, which is 13 factories, three port processing facilities in the United States, R&D and design facilities, parts distribution facilities, and regional sales and training facilities. This totals a corporate footprint of over 30,000 acres and over 35 million square feet of building space. Next slide.
Amongst that, one of the three port processing facilities we have is in the port of Long Beach, California. It's our oldest and largest port processing facility. We've had a partnership with our landlord, the Port Authority of Long Beach, since the 1960s. It's a 114-acre site, and 148,000 square feet of building—consolidated operations building. It processes somewhere between 180,000 to 200,000 vehicles a year.
And what I mean by processing is the vehicles are accepted through shipments from our manufacturing plants in Japan. Worldwide, really. And they're driven off the vehicle. Staged. And then they're picked up on demand. They're washed—they're fueled, washed, and then any accessories can be installed, such as roof racks, suspension kits, wheels, floor mats, owner's manuals, those window stickers you all see. And then they are sent to our dealers locally via class 8 automobile transport trucks or via rail for across the country.
Because this facility is our oldest, it just has grown over the years. And we continue to add leased property and structures to the building, to the site. And it became very inefficient for us. And if you know anything about the Toyota production system, we're all about efficiency and elimination of Muda or waste. So that would drive everyone nuts when we have a less-than-optimal processing flow.
And another point came up, and this is in California. And our buildings were no longer in compliance with the updated seismic codes. So, a decision was made in the mid-2010s to consolidate operations into a new set of operations buildings. So, from a sustainability standpoint, we have our Environmental Challenge 2050 goals and our milestone for carbon neutrality. So, anything we do, any investments we make, we want to make sure that we're aligning with those visions.
So, we're looking at how can we get to zero carbon operations. This facility is also the sole source of import for the light-duty fuel cell vehicles, the Mirai that I mentioned. The first generation came to the United States on the boats filled with hydrogen. We knew that this upcoming second-generation Mirai would, the fueling responsibility was going to be ours to deal with. So we had to, as part of a new operations facility, provide the infrastructure to fill a hydrogen fuel cell. And oh, by the way, we need to find out where we're going to get the hydrogen to fuel the vehicles.
In tandem with that—in parallel with that, excuse me, we had been working with PACCAR to develop a pilot program for our heavy-duty fuel cell electric trucks. And we needed a location to fill those demonstration fleet. And to prove that we were integrating—to validate, if you will, the integration of our sustainability through the design and delivery of the new building, operations building. We are submitting to U.S. Green Building Council for LEED certification.
The building was completed in 2022, and this is an artist rendering of that building. You can see all the vehicles are around it that we process. And you can see there in the back, on the orange fence, that's not our vessel but that's where the berth is that we use to offload our vehicles. Next slide please.
So, let's talk a little bit about hydrogen, I mentioned how we've developed our hydrogen fuel cell vehicles over 20 years—developing, and we continue to develop that technology. But from a stationary standpoint, we had to, we knew that we were going to be bringing the prototype hydrogen fuel cell vehicles into the United States. And we just can't bring them in and not have a support system for it.
So, our Torrance headquarters in 2001, we went in on a program to develop hydrogen support modifications. And we had to develop a service and maintenance facility for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which had never been done before. So it's very interesting working with the fire department and the fire marshals at the city of Torrance. And they really partnered up with us, because everyone's scratching their head. It's a lot of applications for—they knew how to deal with hydrogen in industrial applications, but you know, what do we do for vehicle maintenance and servicing? We also installed a fueling station on-site with an on-site hydrogen generator in 2001.
So, along the way, we also heard about a fuel cell energy project that was done in Oxnard, California, with Gills Onions plant, that was a demonstration project that intrigued us. And then as was mentioned, the DOE-funded Orange County Sanitation District–FuelCell Energy tri-gen demonstration project came to our attention. We thought, well, that's interesting. They're using basically waste in both instances to create hydrogen. So, we thought maybe that might be of value to us at some point in time.
One of the things that we were fortunate in Torrance is we had one of the two main hydrogen pipelines in the United States. One of them happens to be running right in front of our old Torrance headquarters campus. So, we worked with the pipeline carrier to tap into that pipeline that was installed, and to fuel a 1.1-megawatt PEM fuel cell that we used for peak shaving at our Torrance campus in 2012. That was the world's first 1.1-megawatt pipeline-fed PEM fuel cell. So, that was pretty exciting for us. At the same time, we also used a pipeline to feed a light-duty fuel cell vehicle fueling station and worked with Shell to install that on our Toyota property.
So, you may have heard in 2014 we relocated all of our headquarters operations to Plano, Texas, in our new North American headquarters. And as part of the integrated design, we included infrastructure for future campus hybrid electric system to be "hydrogen ready". Now it's just the bones and framework, if you will, for the infrastructure. But we're focusing on hydrogen fueling and mobility projects right now on the west coast. But we'll be ready for it in the middle of the country in Texas when—from an infrastructure standpoint, when the time comes.
And as I mentioned, in 2016 we started forming plans for our new TLS Long Beach operations building, fully integrated sustainability into the design of the project, along with the Project Portal class 8 heavy-duty fuel cell truck program and incorporating renewable hydrogen fuel and dispensing needs there.
So, the challenge was, or the opportunity for us was again, how do we provide zero-carbon electricity, power for the new building? How do we fuel the fuel cell light-duty Mirais and heavy-duty trucks that are upcoming? And where do we get the hydrogen from? So, oh yeah, remember in 2007 and 2011, this company named FuelCell Energy had this tri-gen, this molten carbonate fuel cell technology. So, we partnered up with FuelCell Energy in 2017 and entered into a long-term hydrogen power purchase agreement. We'll talk with them more about that later.
So, in 2019, construction begins on our TLS operations building and heavy-duty fueling station. Again, construction begins in 2021, and in 2022 the building is complete, the fueling station is complete. 2023, the commercial operation date was achieved for Tri-gen, and we had our first fueling at the end of 2023. And we celebrated with a grand opening in May.
So, what I'm trying to show here is the point, we've been looking at hydrogen and how we can leverage the technology to meet both our mobile and our stationary decarbonization goals. And it's very exciting for us because we're looking at—we found a solution that was tailored, that we tailored to the needs and opportunities for our TLS Long Beach operations. Next slide.
So, it's an overview, again, FuelCell Energy. I mentioned we entered into a hydrogen power purchase agreement with FuelCell Energy. So, we're just offtakers of the product of Tri-gen. FuelCell Energy owns and operates Tri-gen. It's a 2.3-megawatt molten carbonate fuel cell. I mention molten carbonate because it is a different type of fuel cell than we have in our vehicles. Vehicles are—a low temperature PEM fuel cell is used, not molten carbonate. Again, the hydrogen power purchase agreement, we are, we can purchase up to 1,200 kilograms of hydrogen production capacity per day. It can provide all of our electrical power requirements for TLS operations building, which is only about 400 to 500 kilowatts. The balance of the power, the balance to 2.3-megawatt capacity, is sold to—FuelCell Energy sells to the local electric utility.
What we love about, what our CFO loves about this project is that the electric costs that we're—the cost of electricity that we're purchasing from FuelCell Energy is almost half of what the local utility charges. And the hydrogen cost is also very, very competitive.
An additional feature is that Tri-gen has, the power from Tri-gen has the ability, if there's a grid outage—because we're powering, Tri-gen is powering our facility, not the grid—if the grid goes down, TLS operations will continue to run, and is islanded from the grid. That said, when Tri-gen is down for maintenance, or any reason, basically the grid is backing up Tri-gen. So, we have more redundancy and resiliency built into this project.
And oh, by the way, Tri-gen—we've talked about electricity, and we've talked about the hydrogen production, we're also utilizing the water production to actually produce water from the exhaust of the Tri-gen, is being captured. And up to 1,440 gallons a day to use to wash, to supplement the water for the car washing that I had mentioned before.
Again, commercial operation date was in October 2023. And we are not only providing, if you think about this, renewable fuel, zero-carbon fuel, for fueling Mirais and trucks, but we can use the renewable zero-carbon electricity that's produced, that's powering our entire operations, when we have to charge, when we are charging, or fueling if you will, the imported bZ4x and Lexus RZ battery electric vehicles.
So, it's—again, we're trying to take advantage, we are taking advantage of multiple value streams from this technology. In some, the future of the heavy-duty fuel cell trucks, not only from importing the Mirais but, and we have our demonstration fleet of PACCAR trucks. But we are in line, we have placed orders for ten PACCAR fuel cell electric trucks to deliver vehicles from the port of Long Beach to our local L.A. region, Southern California dealerships. And 20 trucks to deliver parts to our dealerships in Southern California. Next slide please.
This is an overall diagram, kind of a flow diagram, of how all this works. And FuelCell Energy has contracted with a biogas supplier, or generator actually, in Victor Valley, California. Where they take food waste and organic waste and process it through an anaerobic digestor and create biogas. They clean it up to pipeline standards, to renewable natural gas standards, inject that into the natural gas pipeline distribution system. And it is extracted in Long Beach about almost 100 miles away to feed the Tri-gen fuel cell.
The Tri-gen fuel cell does its magic, which Tony will explain here in a minute. But again, the products that we are taking advantage of, up to 1,200 kilograms of hydrogen a day to fuel light-duty and heavy-duty stations. [Inaudible] is 2.2 megawatts of electricity, about 400 or 500 kilowatts of that goes to TLS Long Beach, our operations up there on the top, the rest goes to the grid. And then there's the 1,400 gallons of water a day.
So, with that, I'd like to turn it over to Tony, who'll dive into all the awesomeness that is Tri-gen.
>>Tony Leo: Thank you, Mark. First, I'll give you a little bit of background on FuelCell Energy for those of you who don't know. We've been around for, since the late 60s actually. We have about 600 employees around the world. We're based in Connecticut. But we have facilities in Europe as well as Canada. And we see our purpose as decarbonizing power and industry and producing clean hydrogen. And we have a variety of different platforms that do those things, and I'll walk you through them. About 600 employees. We have been producing commercial fuel cell power plants since the early 2000s. And really excited to introduce this tri-gen technology commercially.
So, as I said, the company was founded in 1969, primarily to do R&D on electrochemical systems, fuel cells and rechargeable batteries. And as we went through the '70s and '80s, the company's focus shifted to one of the basket of technologies we're looking at, the carbonate fuel cell. And with a lot of help from the U.S. Department of Energy, we developed that technology to the point where we could start producing it commercially, and shipped our first commercial unit in 2003. And that was actually to a biogas application at a brewery in Japan.
And about that same time, we pulled back on our carbonate work with DOE, because it was commercial, and started to work on solid oxide technologies with DOE. And that also has evolved into the introduction of commercial products just a couple years ago. And so on the path, along that pathway, we started to look at some of the interesting things that carbonate fuel cells could do. And one of them is this coproduction of hydrogen.
And as Mark mentioned, and as Pete mentioned, the first sub-megawatt demonstration of that, and I'll talk a little bit about that, was at the Orange County Sanitation District facility. And that really demonstrated the technology. We learned a lot from that, and that's what led to this first megawatt-scale commercial deployment that we're talking about today.
So, we have these two electrochemical platforms, carbonate and solid oxide. And we've developed a variety of different approaches to the energy transition using these platforms. Of course, the carbonate traditional product has been power generation, typically combined heat and power. Carbonate—unique electrochemistry also allows us to use it for carbon capture, capturing from an external source.
And in fuel cells in general, it's fairly easy to capture the CO2 that the fuel cell itself would emit. And we call that carbon recovery. And we're deploying that for customers who need on-site CO2 production, for example, and utilization, along with power and heat. And then we have tri-gen, where we're coproducing hydrogen and power and water.
And on the solid oxide, we are also looking at using it for power generation as well as hydrogen production through electrolysis. So, if you think about hydrogen, we actually have two platforms for producing hydrogen. One is the solid oxide, and the other is tri-gen. And they're both good in different situations. The solid oxide electrolyzer uses power and water to make hydrogen. So, if you have access to water, if you have access to clean, inexpensive power, that's a good option for hydrogen production.
Tri-gen uses a fuel, natural gas or biogas, as we're using at Long Beach. It uses a fuel to make power and hydrogen. So, if you're in an area where power is expensive, tri-gen could be a good option because you actually get a revenue stream from that. If you're in an area where hydrogen—if you're in an area where water is difficult to get, such as the Port of Long Beach, which from time to time is in a severe drought situation, the coproduction of water can be a tremendous benefit for tri-gen. So, two different approaches to making hydrogen that are really, really effective, depending on the project particulars, if you will.
So, to dive a little bit deep into how fuel cells work, the carbonate in particular. Fuel cells and batteries, they all work the same way in the sense that you know, one electrode produces electrons. Another consumes them. You hook a wire between them, and that's the power. And you complete that circuit with an ion that migrates between the electrodes. In the case of our carbonate fuel cell, that ion is a carbonate ion. So, we actually have an electrolyte layer that has a molten carbonate mixture in it, and those carbonate ions are what complete the circuit between the fuel electrode and the air electrode.
So, the fuel electrode consumes hydrogen. And the air electrode consumes oxygen. But there are additional things going on in the carbonate fuel cell. Because we developed these products at a time—which is still the case—when there wasn't a lot of hydrogen available as a fuel, we designed them to run on commonly available fuels, like biogas or methane, natural gas. So, we actually convert the natural gas to hydrogen inside the fuel cell stack.
This is a steam methane reforming reaction. But instead of having a separate steam methane reformer, we do the reforming inside the fuel cell stack. And the key advantage to that is that when you want to reform methane to hydrogen, you have to provide water and you have to provide heat. And a steam methane reformer actually uses a lot of water, and it burns extra fuel to produce that heat. When we do that reaction inside our fuel cell stack, the heat and the water come from the fuel cell reaction.
So, it's a really sustainable way to make hydrogen, even from natural gas. About half the carbon footprint of a conventional steam methane reformer. So, we convert that natural gas, that methane, to hydrogen inside the fuel cell. We use the hydrogen, the fuel cell reaction produces water, and that's the water that we are exporting. And so that's how the basic cell works.
The way our system, our standard system is configured, is very, very simple. We heat up the fuel. We humidify it, so that it doesn't convert to carbon as it gets up in temperature. We send that humid fuel into the fuel cell stacks. In the fuel electrodes it's converted to hydrogen. About 70% of that hydrogen is used to make electricity. And the leftover 30% is typically used to make heat for the process. We have to heat the incoming air, so we leave a little bit of hydrogen leftover. We send that to a catalytic reactor with cold air, and now we have the hot air for the intake of a fuel cell.
For tri-gen, we have made no changes at all to the fuel cell stacks. It's our standard stack. But we've added some equipment to the basic process. So we add equipment to take the gas that's coming out of our fuel electrodes. It's got that leftover hydrogen. It's got the product water. We cool it down and condense out the water. We recycle some of that water. The rest we can export as we're doing at Long Beach. And that's—once we've dried that gas, we extract the hydrogen through a conventional pressure swing adsorption hydrogen purification system.
Now, we've extracted a lot of the hydrogen at this point, so we have less waste heat than we typically do, because a lot of the energy went away with that hydrogen. But we do still have some waste heat. And we also have to find another way to heat the incoming air. And so, we have had to add heat exchangers to the system to do that.
So, this is what the components of the system look like. So, the first thing we do is we're connected to pipeline natural gas, which is delivering through the common carrier the biogas that's been upgraded. So we have to clean that, take out the odorants. And that's step one, point one, those two vessels there.
We then have to get it saturated with water, and those are the two towers that you see at point two. We then have to heat it up to the fuel cell temperature, and that's the heat exchanger you see there at point three. The heat exchanger is also heating the incoming air. And so that's a big air-to-air heat exchanger, which is why it is so big.
And then we send the warm humid fuel into the fuel cell stack, where the reforming reaction occurs. The power generation reaction occurs. At point five we convert that DC power coming from the fuel cells to AC and step it up to the right grid voltage. The exhaust that's coming out of the fuel electrodes is that moist leftover hydrogen stream. We recover the water from it and then send it over to point seven, which are the vessels that you see there for the pressure swing adsorption purification system.
So, this summarizes some of the overall general sustainability benefits of making hydrogen this way. Again, we can fuel it with natural gas. We can fuel it with biogas. A lot of our projects in California, for example, are at wastewater treatment plants running on on-site biogas. Carbonate fuel cell is particularly good at running on biogas. It doesn't mind the CO2 dilution.
So, if you look at some of the sustainability benefits, the power that it produces, it runs very efficiently. So it typically has a lower carbon footprint per kilowatt hour than the grid. So, we actually avoid CO2 emissions compared to the grid just by the clean power that we're producing. Even on natural gas, on biogas it's like 10 times the sustainability benefit from a CO2 standpoint.
Also, the fuel cell makes no nitrogen oxide, so there's no NOx production. So there's a significant savings on the electrical side versus the grid NOx emissions. We produce less heat with tri-gen than our normal system, but we do produce half a million Btu per hour the customer could use to enhance the sustainability and to avoid some boiler emissions. And the hydrogen that we produce, as I said, is already half the carbon footprint of the typical steam methane reformer produced hydrogen even on natural gas, and if you fuel it with biogas, you avoid more than 4,000 tons a year of CO2 emissions compared to an SMR.
Significant NOx reductions, because SMRs also produce NOx. And it doesn't use water. In fact, it produces water, that 1,400 gallons a day of water that Mark mentioned. So, a lot of sustainability benefits to using this device because of its various product streams.
So, let's talk a little bit about the Fountain Valley. This was a system that we put together with DOE funding. It had a number of different project participants that are all listed there. It really did take a village to have this project come together. A lot of people working together. It was a three-year demonstration project at the water reclamation, wastewater treatment plant at Orange County Sanitation District in Fountain Valley, California.
It ran on on-site biogas fuel. So, biogas coming from a wastewater treatment digester is typically 60% methane, 40% CO2. To make that natural gas grade, you have to extract the CO2. We don't need to do that. We just need to clean the sulfur and dry it out. We can use that fuel on-site. So we produced about 100 kilograms a day. And we actually had an on-site vehicle fueling station. So, we produced vehicle-grade hydrogen, filled cars, and operated from late 2010 to mid 2014. And then started to really sharpen our pencil and think about what a commercial megawatt-scale version of this would look like. So, this was a really, really exciting and key project in kicking off this technology.
So, Mark has already done a pretty good job describing the Port of Long Beach site, it basically really—as he described is a really, really good fit for what Toyota was looking to do at that location. And this is just another schematic of what we're doing there. We're basically taking the remotely generated anaerobic digester gas that's upgraded to natural gas standards and taking it as directed biogas into the system, producing power that is serving Toyota's needs. The balance goes to Southern California Edison under the BioMAT feed-in tariff, so in terms of the CEC rules this is considered completely renewable power.
And the hydrogen is used as Mark described. And we, you know, we really weren't thinking much about the water production of tri-gen until we got into discussions with Toyota and realized they use a lot of water for washing cars at that facility. So, this is another sustainability benefit that is really significant, particularly at this location that is so drought-prone.
So with that, I'll open it to Q&A.
>>Pete Devlin: All right. Thank you Mark and Tony. We've got a few questions here. I guess the first one's more of a statement. The question is, what are the prices, guarantees, and cooperative agreements? Need all that. I'll leave that to you guys to do that offline. Sounds like somebody's interested in the technology. The next one is how long is the pipeline? Is it just for this facility, or has it got other uses?
>>Tony Leo: Well, the hydrogen we produce now is used just by Toyota. They're our only customer. So, I'll throw it to Mark to see if Toyota, Toyota would have to be interested in opening up the station to the public.
>>Mark Yamauchi: Yeah, so is the question, you said pipeline…
>>Pete Devlin: Yeah, how long is the pipeline for this facility, and is it just for this service, or is it actually providing biogas to other places?
>>Mark Yamauchi: So, I was wondering if you were talking about the output pipeline or the input pipeline. There is a pipeline that…
>>Pete Devlin: The input.
>>Mark Yamauchi: … next to Tri-gen to the heavy-duty fueling station and from there about a third of a mile pipeline that goes to our light-duty Mirai fueling station within our operations site. The pipeline that's from the anaerobic digestion, biogas generation site in Victor Valley is a normal natural gas pipeline distribution, transmission distribution system. And it's, again, just about 100 miles away.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, so it's not a dedicated pipeline for biogas. Once they upgrade it to natural gas quality, as long as we track and can demonstrate that for every Btu we use at the site they injected a Btu in Victor Valley, that's how that accounting is done.
>>Pete Devlin: Very good. So the next one is, are there standards or requirements related to the biogas composition? You know, like contaminants that could be introduced to the pipeline? Or is that all taken care of?
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, there are standards for what the biogas producer has to do to qualify as pipeline-quality gas. There's also some bookkeeping around what they're making the biogas from. Different types of organic materials have different values in this BioMAT feed-in tariff program. So that's part of the administration as well.
>>Pete Devlin: OK. The next one, I'm not sure if you guys can answer. But how does the tri-gen account for all the methane, carbon monoxide, and VOCs emitted upstream? And I'm not sure you guys know that, but wellheads together, pipelines and transmission facilities, and that's not I guess, not just this particular project, but natural gas to go into a high-temperature fuel cell. They say it emits thousands of tons of carbon dioxide and hundreds of pounds of benzene and other volatile organic compounds every year. You guys got any comment on that?
>>Tony Leo: Well, there's a lot of discussion these days about the natural gas distribution leakage, and the global warming impact of that. And so if you think about it, we are avoiding a tremendous amount of methane emissions by taking the methane that's produced in that anaerobic digester and not just allowing it to be vented or flared, right? So, there's, in this particular case with this particular fuel, that's typically you know, this is considered really a carbon-negative fuel.
Now, the numbers that I'm hearing for the typical leak rates for the natural gas distribution system, add maybe one kilogram of hydrogen for every kilogram of CO2. It's on that order of magnitude. So I think we'd still be at least carbon neutral, factoring that in. And I'd like to think the natural gas industry is very busy at reducing the leak rate from that infrastructure. And I hear they are, so that's a big discussion point.
>>Mark Yamauchi: Just let me, we are working to establish a new CARB pathway to validate the carbon intensity. So the [background noise] well-to-tank carbon intensity of the hydrogen fuel and electricity that will be used to basically fuel the electric vehicles. So that is really trying to take into account all these factors. And preliminary results are, it's a nice negative number. So negative carbon intensity.
>>Pete Devlin: So, the next one, I think this one's for you, Tony. There's been a lot of progress in development of both solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers. Is tri-gen possible with solid oxide versus molten carbonate technology? And if so, how do the two approaches compare?
>>Tony Leo: It is possible in the sense that, you know, our solid oxide power generation system also uses internal reforming. So it has the same benefit that I mentioned. It converts methane into hydrogen very efficiently. And it also has some leftover hydrogen that could be exported. Carbonate is a better approach to tri-generation than solid oxide, because in our solid oxide system we are able to run with a very, very high fuel utilization. I mentioned that in carbonate, we use about 70% of the hydrogen that we produced to make power, so we have 30% left over. In our solid oxide, we use about 90% of the hydrogen that we make to produce power. So we have less leftover hydrogen. So, it could be done. But it seems to make more sense in carbonate.
>>Pete Devlin: Are there any additional safety precautions such as hydrogen sensors that are installed in the facility?
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, there are. I don't know if I'd say additional, but there certainly are all of the safety monitoring and containment equipment that are required by the NFPA and the existing codes and standards.
>>Pete Devlin: So next one is, is the environmental impact related to using natural gas, including leakage along the way, in this case I think they mean methane. And are there plans to reduce that, or I think that's what they're getting at.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, I think that's sort of the same as the first question, right? The leakage emissions.
>>Pete Devlin: OK, are there publicly available life cycle analyses? Yes there is. Please go to our website and you will see that. Oh, I missed one. Here's one. Can we visit the site? I'll let you guys answer that one. I visited before. It's a fascinating place.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, you know, you can't just stop by unannounced, but we do give tours. So, if you want to reach out to Mark or me, and we can definitely arrange something.
>>Pete Devlin: I recommend it to anybody that asks that question. I visited and it was just amazing. Have you or anyone you're aware of considered an application like this for cruise ships? Seems like it might be interesting given the extensive waste streams and therefore abundant biogas. I think they mean on a cruise ship. Plus the big demand for power and heat, all in very close proximity. I guess you'd have to have an anaerobic digester on your cruise ship.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, and I'm not aware of anyone who's done that. I mean, we have looked at fuel cells for marine propulsion. We've actually done some projects with the Navy. They make a lot of sense because of the high efficiency. But I don't know if it would make sense for a cruise ship. Right now, I think they're mostly powered by oil, right?
>>Pete Devlin: Yeah, yeah. OK. So somebody asked—
>>Mark Yamauchi: That said, you know, Toyota is looking at decarbonizing our transport fleet, marine fleet. The various technologies, one of which would be hydrogen fuel cells. So, but not thought about creating the hydrogen on board. Just utilizing it.
>>Pete Devlin: All right, they're asking for your contact information so they can visit the site. And you guys can just put that in the chat, I guess. OK. Let me go over to the chat and see if we have anything. Real quick. All right. Isn't there energy required to produce the biogas? Even if it's delivered by a supplier, how economic is it?
>>Tony Leo: Isn't—well, there is some energy required to produce biogas. For example, in our projects where we actually have a fuel cell at a wastewater treatment facility, in addition to it providing power to the wastewater treatment facility—they need power, because they're stirring the sludge in the [background noise] digester, and they run other operations—we also provide heat, because the digesters need heat. They need to be kept at a certain temperature. So there is some power used. And that is factored into, as Mark said, we've done pathway analyses and we're updating that now, based on the latest tri-gen information. And we still come out with a negative carbon intensity.
>>Pete Devlin: This is a fun one. I think it's for you, Tony. But would it be possible to take the oxygen output from an adjacent electrolyzer to feed tri-gen instead of air, to reduce or eliminate NOx? I don't think you have to worry about that. But go ahead. This would be where you'd have methane waste and dedicated renewables, or electrolysis at the same site, for example.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, you could do that. I don't, you could do it. But I don't know that, the fuel cell is getting all the air that it needs. So, the oxygen might boost performance a little bit, but.
>>Pete Devlin: Yeah. Yeah. So this one's for you, Mark. Has Toyota done any work on hydrogen fuel cells for marine vessels?
>>Mark Yamauchi: Again, you know, I think we are looking at utilizing that technology to power our marine fleet. That's very preliminary right now. We feel, especially as a lot of ports are looking for, to eliminate… coal buying, to eliminate emissions at berth. We're trying to skin that cat in various ways.
>>Pete Devlin: This one might be pretty hard to answer. But what are the production costs, dollars per megawatt hour, dollars per kilogram or gallon equivalents. You guys want to comment on that? I doubt if you want to give a direct quote.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, I wouldn't want to get into the specific cost for this Long Beach project for a variety of different reasons. But what I'll say in general is that if you think about the cost to produce hydrogen from tri-gen systems, it ranges from low to really high, in the sense that if you have inexpensive fuel and you have very expensive power, and you can sell into that expensive power market, those two levers mean that you can produce relatively inexpensive hydrogen. If your fuel's expensive or if you can't sell the power, then it goes the other way. So, and in that situation, maybe electrolysis is a better option. So, it really is a function of fuel cost and what you can sell the power for.
>>Pete Devlin: So, here's one for you Tony. During the process startup, how do you get CO2 on the cathode side? [Inaudible, crosstalk] basically know the answer, but.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, to start up the system, we have a startup heater that heats everything up. And then once you start making power, the CO2 that the cathode needs comes from the anodes. So the fuel exhaust, it's a really good question actually. After we strip out the water and strip out the hydrogen, we send that gas back. Now it's mostly CO2. We send it back to the air electrodes, because the air electrodes want that CO2. We don't need it during startup, because we only need it when we start making power. But as soon as we start making power, the CO2 comes from the fuel electrodes.
>>Pete Devlin: Thank you. Were there any difficulties in permitting this system?
>>Tony Leo: I would say no more than usual. I don't know, Mark. If you have a—
>>Mark Yamauchi: I think the only thing I can say, you know, what we love about this sort of project or opportunity, is you know—we're doing something different. It's not just the status quo. We are making step change. Innovation. But lessons learned, we find that when we're in that position, and kind of moving the needle, and pushing the envelope, we find ourselves in the spot of some regulations, policymakers, you know, ordinances.
And I mean, it's, a very simple example is U.S. Green Building Council, right? Which is, you know, a voluntary program, right? But trying to get them to provide us, give us credit for this awesome tri-gen. And it just didn't fit into the way they were looking at things. There's several times we've run [inaudible] these organizations, they go hmm, this is [inaudible], yes? How do we deal with it, right? So I think it just, it's not bad or good. You get yourselves in that position, and it's an opportunity to work with them and to help them appreciate this new technology.
>>Pete Devlin: Thank you, Mark. So last question I think we have time for, and that is if you could share your thoughts on 45V, and those who don't know what that is, that's the IRS's tax credit for low-carbon hydrogen.
>>Tony Leo: Yeah, we have lots of thoughts on 45V. First of all, we're looking forward to it. I think the question is more around the draft rules that came out, which we have provided public comments on. And so we certainly agree with the intent of those rules, which is to make sure that the clean hydrogen is as clean as advertised. And in our comments, we talked about the fact that we think that that objective can be met with some less stringent rules. And I don't think we have enough time to go into the details. But that's kind of where we're coming from.
>>Pete Devlin: Thank you. So I've got a little infomercial for you. If you're interested, anybody, you can subscribe to the HFTO news. Go to our website, energy.gov, and go ahead and sign up for the newsletter and get all the latest stuff that's going on in and outside of the government.
And with that, I'd like to thank Tony and Mark very much, and the participants and audience. It's been great. Good luck in the future. Thanks for everything.
>>Tony Leo: Thank you very much.
>>Mark Yamauchi: Thanks for the opportunity.
>>Pete Devlin: Take care.
>>Tony Leo: Have a great day, everybody.
>>Pete Devlin: You too. Bye-bye.
>>Tony Leo: Bye.
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