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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC. And joining me is EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons. Also joining me is Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. And joining us are two fine folks, one of whom is actually a CRTP award-winning award winner. And so on today's show, we're going to be talking about hydrogen and hydrogen buses and the future of rural mass transit here in Humboldt County. And joining me is Jerome Qiriazi.

JEROME QIRIAZI:

Yep. Hello, everyone.

WHEELER:

We are talking about mass transit in Humboldt County and the difficulties of mass transit and some of the not shifting goalposts of this, but some of the things that we're trying to achieve, which is both to deliver people to their destination in a reliable and on-time fashion, and also doing it in a way that furthers our greenhouse gas goals, furthers our efforts to address climate change by doing it in a low-emissions way. Humboldt Transit Authority, of which Jerome, you are an employee, has identified hydrogen buses as part of this solution, and hydrogen buses, I should say, are just kind of one part of this larger suite of things that HTA is doing to both increase ridership, increase efficiency, give people places on time, but this is an exciting one for us, so we're going to dive deep into hydrogen buses today. And Peter, you have been kind of leading the charge on hydrogen in Humboldt County for decades, so you are intimately involved both in this project, but you're kind of also the inspiration for a lot of this work.

PETER LEHMAN:

Well, thanks, Tom. Yeah, we've been at the Schatz Center, we've been involved in hydrogen for 35 years, and most of that work has been somewhere else in the Bay Area and especially in Southern California, and it's really rewarding to bring it here to Humboldt County.

WHEELER:

All right, so when we're talking about hydrogen buses, what are we talking about here? It's a fuel source. But if folks are not familiar with hydrogen as a fuel source for for buses, what is what is a hydrogen bus? Jerma, I'll throw that to you.

QIRIAZI:

First, yeah, I think first as hydrogen goes as a fuel, one thing to keep in mind is it's a carrier, it's an energy carrier. So it's a way for us to carry energy that we've produced renewably. So that's one thing to keep in mind. There are no hydrogen pockets of hydrogen that we can extract and mine in the earth. We have to produce hydrogen ourselves with another energy source. And Peter will probably get into that in a little bit. In terms of hydrogen buses, so hydrogen buses are electric buses. They're, there's not a lot different in terms of the rider experience or the driver experience or how they sound from a battery electric bus. The only difference is they have a fuel cell on board that keeps the batteries charged. So they have an electric motor, they have batteries. The amount of batteries they have is smaller because they have an onboard generator. The fuel cell uses hydrogen stored on board as the fuel that runs through the fuel cell stack and converts that hydrogen into electricity and then keeps the batteries charged as the bus is driving.

WHEELER:

So, Peter, why is hydrogen a particularly appropriate fuel source for for buses in Humboldt County that might kind of experience challenges that other bus systems might not experience in a more urban landscape?

LEHMAN:

We've chosen hydrogen fuel cell buses, as Jerome pointed out, they're electric buses. They just have this fuel cell on board, as Jerome explained. The battery electric buses that exist right now in America, and HTA has a couple of them, are just not sufficient for a lot of the routes that HTA serves. So the battery electric bus that HTA got to begin with was unable to do the RTS route, the route from Eureka to Trinidad to Scotia back to Eureka. It ran out of energy before it made that complete route. And a fuel cell bus does that easily, and not only that, but HTA is initiating, Jerome can talk about this, a new express route from Eureka to Ukiah, and we have to get from Eureka to Ukiah and back to Eureka on one tank of hydrogen. And a battery electric bus couldn't come close to doing that route, but a hydrogen bus can.

WHEELER:

So hydrogen has a higher fuel density than a battery could achieve?

LEHMAN:

In short terms, yes, it does. And it's interesting that for this project that we've undertaken and this new route, this Redwood Coast Express route, we realized that the hydrogen buses that exist today wouldn't make it. So we negotiated with the manufacturer, New Flyer America, to build a new fuel cell bus that has a bigger fuel cell, a bigger motor, a bigger battery, and more fuel storage, and can make the trip from Eureka to Ukiah and back, 320 mile trip, and still have some fuel left over. And this bus is going to be a real positive technological improvement for transit agencies all over the country.

MATT SIMMONS:

I think another advantage of hydrogen fuel cells is how quickly they can refuel. So can you talk a little bit about that?

LEHMAN:

Yes. So a battery electric bus has to be charged, just like a battery electric car. A fuel cell bus can be totally refueled from empty to full in about 8 to 10 to 12 minutes, depending on the circumstances. But a fueling time that is very similar to what diesel buses have now. So if you're running a transit agency and you've got to fuel a lot of buses, hydrogen bus is a big advantage in that case.

QIRIAZI:

Another advantage is providing heat in the in the bus so for fuel cells similar to an engine they produce waste heat when they're converting that hydrogen into electricity and so because of the higher energy density of storing compressed hydrogen on board and that you can still get a longer range even after the the losses of that fuel cell running and you can use that waste heat just like we do on a car engine to provide the heat in the bus cabin so you're not draining the batteries on a battery electric bus to achieve that so all of those things combined make it to where we can get a 400 mile bus today with hydrogen whereas getting 400 miles off a battery electric bus requires perfect conditions and not operating in Humboldt County

COLIN FISKE:

So I have a question that I want to ask, but I want to premise it by pointing out, as I often do, that everyone should ride the bus no matter what the fuel is. And even right now with diesel buses, it's way fewer emissions to ride the bus than to get in your car. So everyone ride the bus. That said, Jerome, you talked about hydrogen as a carrier of energy. So I wondered if you or Peter could talk about what the current source of that energy is and what the hopes for the future are, and how we might be developing sources locally.

QIRIAZI:

I'll start off. Sure. So I think, so right now, the vast majority of hydrogen that is available for purchase by companies that manufacture and supply hydrogen is all derived from natural gas. So it's, it's splitting that natural gas molecule apart and pulling the hydrogen off of it. And then liquefying it, storing it, and then trucking it to a place. Right now, most of that trucking is also on diesel trucks. And right now the state requires any hydrogen that we purchased to be 33% renewable right now, the really, the only source of renewable hydrogen is through renewable energy credits that incentivize the production of renewable natural gas through municipal landfills or through dairies, and so you kind of offset that the carbon intensity from the hydrogen going forward, the goal is to produce hydrogen from clean electricity. So either solar or wind, and that is a long-term goal that the state is really pushing hard to achieve. And then also the state's low carbon fuel standard will start to regulate hydrogen as a mandatory fuel, which, what that means is in order for anyone to sell fuel, hydrogen as a fuel in the state, it will have to meet the, the increasing, increasingly higher carbon intensity requirements of the low carbon fuel standard.

WHEELER:

Peter, maybe you can talk about what the future of maybe generating hydrogen gas in Humboldt County could look like, because I don't know if folks have heard, but there is a proposal for a large offshore wind energy development off of Humboldt County's coast, so we can have that renewable power that could be powering the electrolysis to create the hydrogen here locally.

LEHMAN:

It certainly could, it's getting somewhat ahead of ourselves because that offshore wind project is still years away, so that's not going to happen soon here in Humboldt County. There are a number of companies, large gas companies do have plans, are building plants right now to generate hydrogen from renewable energy. So the change is starting. It's going to take years for that change to really be complete. We make a lot of hydrogen in this country. Almost all of it is used for other things, for metallurgy, for fuels, for foods. Very little of it right now is used for fuels. We make 10 million tons of hydrogen in America right now, so it's a merchant gas.

WHEELER:

So, this conversation could feel a little theoretical, except for the fact that you've won a grant, something like $39 million from the state of California for this work. Jerome, can you tell us about that grant application and what you are going to fund with it?

QIRIAZI:

Yeah, that's through the California State Transportation Agency's Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program. That is the largest chunk of funding that the state provides mass transit agencies, either rail or bus, with the funds needed to build capital projects, including extending rail or adding bus infrastructure. They are an increasingly important source of funding for this transition to zero emission fleets that transit agencies are being mandated to do under the Innovative Clean Transit Regulation. We got, as you said, $39 million. That is funding the construction of our hydrogen fueling station, the purchase of 11 hydrogen buses, the construction of a mixed transit center with housing in Old Town Eureka.

WHEELER:

How much is actually going towards Earth Center construction?

QIRIAZI:

We have $10 million that goes towards the transit center. That $10 million will be leveraged by a housing developer who will provide the funding source for the housing that would go on top of the transit center.

WHEELER:

This is all very cool. Peter, as I understand it, we are innovators here in Humboldt County. We are kind of ahead of the pack, right? All transit agencies are going to have to get to zero emissions by the end of this decade, but we are leading the way in this project, and that the state of California is watching us, and we're kind of a test case. Can you talk about the role and responsibility of Humboldt in showing what can be done?

LEHMAN:

It's true, HTA is a leader for small rural transit agencies in California. The manager, Greg Pratt, is to be commended for getting ahead of the game, acquiring these buses before he had to. The state of California, the governor's GO-Biz office is actually using HTA as a test case and studying how things go in the development of this project. One of the issues for us in writing the grant and now in writing the request for proposals for the station, which we just issued the other day, is the operating costs that will go with it. The maintenance costs and the fuel costs are not small. For a small rural agency to afford those costs is going to be an issue. How HTA manages that, we're going to be a role model for other agencies.

QIRIAZI:

Yeah, I'll elaborate on that. The Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development procured a consultant that's been working very closely with us. We've been meeting with them almost weekly just around the challenges and developing that request for proposals, issues that we're seeing around or concerns that we see around operating and maintaining the station, fuel costs. They've convened an interagency working group of numerous state agencies. The Public Utilities Commission, the Air Resources Board, CalSTA, various others. And we're meeting monthly talking about near-term strategies we can come up with to tackle some of these challenges and make sure that we're successful and other rural agencies are successful.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report talking about hydrogen and hydrogen buses and the future of rural mass transit here in Humboldt County.

FISKE:

So a question that I have that I think is related to that, HTA operates a large number of different routes, right? There's sort of the main Redwood Transit that we talked about before, there's the new Redwood Express line going to Ukiah, but you all also operate the Eureka Transit System buses, and now you're doing a lot of the work on the Arcata buses. I wondered if you could talk about how are the challenges different on the different types of routes? Is the plan for all of the buses to be hydrogen? Would some of the in-town ones be battery electric? How does the different routes interact with the technology requirements?

QIRIAZI:

Yeah, like you said, we operate more classic inner city loop routes, which they have lower miles. They're easier to operate. They're less demanding on the vehicles. And then we have very compared to others across the state, fairly extreme service routes out to Willow Creek, down to Ukiah, down to Sohum. RTS is a very demanding route as well, going from Scotia to Trinidad. So those long, what we call inner city routes, so Willow Creek, Sohum, RTS, Battery Electric, we just haven't had success with tackling those with Battery Electric. The in-town ones, Arcata and Eureka, Battery Electric is definitely capable of doing those, although squeaking by. So in terms of the largest battery that Gillig, who's our primary manufacturer that we buy buses from, the largest battery we can get from them, they can complete a full day's work with when the batteries are new, coming in with about 20% of battery remaining. And so the reality is what is shown on paper has really not materialized in the real world. And we're seeing that from a lot of transit agencies. And we're seeing a huge shift from two years ago to now, where most transit agencies were assuming they were going largely Battery Electric, and now they're starting to increase the percentage that are hydrogen. Another challenge that we have is that the only commercially available hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is a big city bus. But we use different vehicle types in our fleet as well. We have what are called larger cutaways that go out to Willow Creek, and we have smaller cutaways that will operate down to Sohum or more locally. Currently, we have a request out to the Air Resources Board to develop a prototype version of these cutaways to help fill this part in our fleet that can't be achieved by Battery Electric and a city bus is not appropriate for. We also got funding to do a prototype over the road coach, like your Amtrak bus that we're hoping to start running down to Ukiah in the next couple of years. We have that funding depending on what the timeline looks like. We'll have the first one in the United States running on our roads here in in Humboldt County. Cool.

FISKE:

For the non-transit nerds, could you describe what a cutaway is?

QIRIAZI:

Thank you. It's your smaller, your smaller bus. So it's not the big buses that you see operating in Eureka or RTS. It's your smaller, they have fewer seats.

WHEELER:

So, are you looking at other jurisdictions? Are there places where you're taking inspiration for what Humboldt County can do? Are there other places that are ahead of us, frankly? What are the lessons that are being learned from other jurisdictions that you are taking back to Humboldt County?

LEHMAN:

Yeah, the bus agency in the East Bay, AC Transit, has been running fuel cell buses now for over a decade. They have worked really well. The bus that we tested here, the New Flyer bus, came from AC Transit.

WHEELER:

Tell the story about that- that test.

LEHMAN:

So the bus was trailered up here with a full tank of hydrogen, we ran it on a regular RTS route with all the stops, and we ran from Eureka to Trinidad, down to Scotia, back to Eureka. We used less than half a tank of hydrogen to do that. That was really impressive, and the efficiency was, we got over eight miles per kilogram of hydrogen. A kilogram of hydrogen and a gallon of diesel have about the same amount of energy, so very good efficiency. That's another thing about fuel cell buses, they are more efficient than diesel buses, and of course they're clean. The only exhaust is water vapor, and they're quiet. They're really nice buses.

WHEELER:

Can you talk about the efficiency, especially when we are maybe pulling from gray hydrogen, right, which is a derivative of fossil fuels? Is this going to be actually more fuel efficient than a diesel bus?

LEHMAN:

The fact is that on a greenhouse gas basis, that even if you use hydrogen made from natural gas, as Jerome was describing earlier, the emission of greenhouse gases for the whole process is less than it is for a diesel bus. Once we get to the point where we are using renewable hydrogen, then we'll have a transportation system that is not completely but virtually greenhouse gas free.

WHEELER:

So, Peter, you've been working on this for decades. How does it feel to get to this point where, you know, decades of work has led to actual adoption of hydrogen buses, $39 million to get 11 buses from the state?

LEHMAN:

Fantastic. It's fantastic. That's a good way to describe it. Yeah, the progress that's been made in the time we've been working on hydrogen is amazing. We built hydrogen, well, we didn't build the car, we retrofitted a small European city car to run on hydrogen that was introduced in 1998. We built a fuel cell, and the fuel cell we built at best generated 10 kilowatts of power. The fuel cell in these new buses that HTA is going to get is smaller than the one we built, and it will generate 100 kilowatts. So more than a factor of 10 in power density increases in that time.

WHEELER:

Is there anything that an average person who's not going in and buying a bus, is there anything in this public discussion of the relative trade-offs between a battery-powered electric bus and a hydrogen-powered electric bus, is there any discussion that might be relevant for them in their own car purchases? Peter, I know that you own an electric car, and so maybe hydrogen is better suited for some purposes and batteries are better suited for others.

LEHMAN:

I think we'll need both technologies as we advance as a society, but yes, if I had to guess, I would think that battery electric vehicles will probably predominate for light duty vehicles, but for heavy duty vehicles, even medium duty vehicles, things like buses or long haul trucks, I think they're going to be fuel cell.

FISKE:

And to switch the perspective from the driver to the transit rider, is it correct to say that a transit rider probably wouldn't notice the difference between a battery electric bus and a fuel cell bus?

LEHMAN:

That is absolutely true, yeah. They'd have no clue.

FISKE:

And both much quieter than a diesel bus. Yeah.

LEHMAN:

Yeah, they're very quiet.

WHEELER:

I've only written on a battery electric bus, but boy, I like it a lot. It is, it is a smooth ride. It's quieter. I feel like it's a more spacious bus. Maybe that's just because it's, it's a newer bus than the rest of our fleet. But if you ever have a chance to write on HCA's electric bus, I would really encourage people to do it. I thought it was fun. Maybe that's an exaggerated exaggeration, but I had a really good.

FISKE:

Riding the bus is always fun.

WHEELER:

That was fun. Yeah, Matt. Yeah.

SIMMONS:

I guess I'm curious, like, what are the hurdles still remaining to making this a reality? Like, when can I expect the first hydrogen-powered electric bus to be able to catch it in Eureka and ride it to Arcata or whatever?

QIRIAZI:

Well, we're going all things working out. We should see our first hydrogen bus at the end of this year. We'll be fueling it with a temporary fueling solution. And after testing it, I would expect that we'll be able to start running it on our RTS routes by mid of mid 2025, mid next year. The hydrogen station is projected to be completed around summer of 2026. And the remainder of our buses will kind of trickle in over summer and fall. So they probably would start hitting our streets carrying passengers towards the end of 2026.

WHEELER:

So the hydrogen fueling station is not going to be at the future earth center.

QIRIAZI:

Correct. Correct. Now it'll be at our yard, our maintenance yard that's over by Target. So we're over on 2nd Street and V Street.

WHEELER:

And I heard that there was potential for individuals, maybe like Matt's dad, who has a hydrogen car. He's also a listener. Hey, Matt's dad for over the fence.

QIRIAZI:

Yes, so we are hoping we'll be able to afford that. We'll see what the bids come in, but we are asking for those bidding on constructing the station to propose the cost of having a, what we call over the fence light duty. So it would be, if it's constructed, it'll be on first street and you know, just a couple blocks away from target and it would be open to the public 24 seven and you would pull up to it like any other gas or diesel pump. Yeah, we're also looking to, we are also, so both state and local fleets are also under an advanced clean fleets mandate. They have an accelerated timeline to transition their fleets to zero emission. There's a lot of fleets locally that are interested in exploring hydrogen, again, because of the limitations of battery. And we're also opening up our yard to be a place where they can test these fuel vehicles to test them and also be a potential backup fuel source should they decide to jump in on that.

FISKE:

fuel. What about private companies running heavy-duty vehicles, trucking companies, and that kind of thing? There's another mandate for that, to transition to zero emission. Have you talked to any of those folks about it?

QIRIAZI:

We haven't talked to any medium and heavy duty fleets yet. We do want to reach out to them. I think we're waiting to see what our fueling station will look like and also to see if we get additional funding from the state to allow fueling heavy duty vehicles at higher pressures. That's a whole nother discussion. If all that comes to fruition, we'll better understand what we can offer fleets. And then we want to start reaching out to them. That said, outside of your class eight large semi trucks that are just a bit too big to navigate in our yard, we are considering being open to private fleets as well to come into our yard, but more like as a backup resiliency fuel source.

WHEELER:

Well, is there anything that we haven't asked, or is there anything that we should cover before we close?

QIRIAZI:

I'd say HTA is extremely fortunate to have the Schott Center in their backyard. In talking with other transit agencies that have gone through this or are currently going through our procurement process and trying to figure out how we navigate the world of hydrogen, there's essentially only one other consulting company in the United States that can come close to the Schott Center, and we have both. The fact that the Schott Center is basically in our backyard and able to be responsive, we're extremely, extremely lucky. So I really appreciate it.

LEHMAN:

Thanks. Yeah, I talked yesterday, my colleague Greg Chapman and I talked yesterday to an old student of mine who is now working for the Santa Cruz Transit Agency and they are getting 53 new hydrogen buses and they have yet to issue an RFP for their station and the buses are due pretty much all at once in three months at the end of the year. So they are scrambling.

QIRIAZI:

So I just sent them our copy of the RFP.

LEHMAN:

He told me they have copied it.

QIRIAZI:

They're largely going with a different transit agency, but yeah, just because of their timeline.

WHEELER:

Well, so while you're thankful for shots, I will say as a transit rider, I'm thankful to the humble transit authority because we have a really great group who are constantly trying to figure out ways to make it easier to ride the bus. But something that we didn't capture in the show is you can now just tap your card to ride the bus. It's a lot easier if you've never in the bus and you don't have to worry about finding coins in your purse or something like that to get on the bus. You can just tap your card, get on the bus, finding new ways to make it easier to ride the bus and also leading the way in decarbonizing mass transit. So thank you to HTA for all of your good work as well. Thank you. All right. With that, thank you Fess. This has been another episode of the Eco News Report. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North coast of California.