Wakey-Wakey

Wakey-Wakey

One of my favorite movies is The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins. The obvious reason for my affection is that the subject is motorcycle speed racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats of Western Utah. Any movie about motorcycling is of interest to me, but this one holds a particularly special place in my heart. It is about an old New Zealand codger named Burt Monro from Invercargill on the South Island, who spends his life souping up a 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle and fulfilling his dream of racing it and setting a world speed record on the salt flats. This all happened in the 1960’s, so the movie is a quaint period piece that gives a unique dual perspective about life down under in those days and life in the American West in the same period. I have already made a point of noting that the 1960’s and movies and series of that era are particularly interesting to me (the 60’s were my coming-of-age decade and also when my love of motorcycling first blossomed). There is the added interest since I consider Utah one of my special places, having owned homes there and ridden out of there for fifteen years. I specifically recall a motorcycle ride we made through The Great Basin of Nevada, ending up in Wendover, Utah, the home of the nearby Bonneville Salt Flats.

In an early scene in the movie, Burt literally shacks up (he lives in a shack) with a nice lady from the social welfare department and he brings her tea in the morning with the salutation, “Wakey-Wakey!” This is followed by him having a severe case of angina for which he gets prescribed Nitro Glycerine pills. This may sound like an outdated prescription for heart disease, but nitro pills remain to this day a mainstay of treatment for severe chest pain due to coronary artery blockage. The visualization of blasting through a clogged coronary artery is a strong reminder to do all you can to keep plaque out of your system if you can. Flossing takes on increased importance in such a world.

The aspects of this movie that make it a great film for anyone, even those who are not motorcycling fans, is that it is a great story about the indomitable human spirit. Burt Monro, a pensioner with very little money and no serious resources to perfect his speed-inducing inventions, uses bubble-gum and bailing wire fixes to every problem he encounters and makes them all work for his machine while maintaining both a determination to succeed and a pleasant and engaging demeanor for all those who might seek to help him in his quest. He is a testament to the human spirit and that makes this an uplifting film for anyone.

I thought about Burt this morning because it is a sunny Friday and while I have Handy Brad working on my Moroccan Fountain project, Bob the electrician has come and gone, having fixed a new smart-home switch on my patio so that I can finally once again control the lighting out there. I feel as though I have already accomplished a lot today so I will reward myself with a motorcycle ride after a conference call I have to have with Switzerland in a few moments.

But the call with Switzerland was another in a series of wake-up calls to me about our little hydrogen company. While we have been scientifically grinding through the inventions process at our Scottish laboratory and testing facility (a slow process under the best of circumstances), the rest of the world is pumping up the hydrogen story to the point where the world is starting to beat a path to our door. We now have somewhere around a half dozen strategic partners in play looking at us to some degree or another. This is not quite a bidding war…yet. But it has all the earmarkings of a situation that could catch fire and turn into a bidding war if we play our cards right. Ideally we would have people who felt that ours was certain to be the winning technology and that we were both on the right path to get to that rewarding finish line and that we had the wherewithal to get the job done of completing the development of the products that flow from the technology. This is less about being a low-cost producer and a manufacturing wiz (that can be brought in from a strategic partner easily enough) and more about the convincing of people that we have solved the major problems and have a defensible and unique approach to getting the job done. While anything is possible in the scientific R&D arena and something new might leapfrog our or anyone else’s technology, but if the absolute measure of competitiveness is the operating cost as measured by the amount of energy needed to make a kilogram of hydrogen, there is only so much room for competitive pressure. We have gotten our ceramics down below a level of 45 kW/kg. Most of the commercially available solutions are between 50-60 kW/kg. There are many variables that add to these numbers, but here’s the thing. The Second Law of Thermodynamics was defined in 1850 by Rudolf Clausius, built upon the foundation laid by Sir Isaac Newton in his Laws of Motion. According to that law, the lowest level that can be achieved in synthesizing hydrogen from water (the basis of electrolysis) is 34 kW/kg. We have reason to believe our cells can do the job, once totally optimized of only a few kW’s higher than that minimum. That’s will be hard to beat.

Naturally, the real story is always far more complex than a single number and everything from cell durability, the availability of materials needed to make the cells, the complexity of the fabrication process, the lifespan of a cell (like durability, but more about degradation rates), the capital cost of cells relative to other systems, and the ever-annoying issue of scalability of the system. Making something that works great in the lab or “on the bench” is one thing and making this work for large industrial uses are two very different things. All of that is on the diligence list for strategic partners, but the big first hurdle is the operating competitiveness. We have known and believed that we had the best solution for some time, but what is changing is that attention is getting focused on hydrogen synthesis, and others are quickly increasing their awareness of the space for better or for worse.

I am not immune to getting excited about building a successful company even though I am trying to learn how to retire. But less than the possibility of financial gain, I am excited to be in a spot where the world has decided for the right reasons it needs to be. We are about as confident in ourselves as Burt Munro was and unfortunately are equally resource constrained. Nevertheless, it’s a real hoot to be in the line of fire when the rest of the world goes Wakey-Wakey over something like hydrogen.