Sea Control - Sea Control 394 - Powering EABO with Walker Mills & Erik Limpaecher

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

Links1. "Powering EABO – Aluminum fuel for the future fight," by Walker D. Mills, Jacob Clayton, and Erik R. Limpaecher, Marine Corps Gazette, August 2022.2. "Need Fuel? Marines Should Make Moonshine Hydrogen," by Walker Mills and Erik Limpaecher, Proceedings, November 2021.3. "The Promise of Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel at the Intersection of Climate Policy and Lethality," by Walker Mills and Erik Limpaecher, Modern War Institute, December 27, 2021.4. "Cocaine Logistics for the Marine Corps," by Walker Mills, Dylan Phillips-Levine, and Collin Fox, War on the Rocks, July 22, 2020.5. Sea Control 303 - The Case for Seaplanes with David Alman, by Walker Mills, CIMSEC, December 19, 2021.6. "Climate Action 2030," Department of the Navy.7. Sea Control 220 - On Contested Shores with B.A. Friedman & Timothy Heck, by Walker Mills, CIMSEC, January 3, 2021.8. “Secure Alternate Fuel Environment (SAFE) Concept – Fuel for Contested Logistics in an Era of Climate Change Adaptation,” Defense Energy Seminar, Naval Postgraduate School, December 7, 2021.9. Making Hydrogen Fuel Anywhere: ONR Tests Prototype to Power Marines in Expeditionary Environments, Office of Naval Research, February 14, 2022)

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills is here today as a guest, and he's joined by Eric Limpocker to discuss alternative fuels to support expeditionary advanced space operations. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruber. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you.

You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website, simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control.

My guests today are fellow Sea Control Host Walker Mills and his co-author, Eric Lindpacher. We're going to be discussing a tree of articles they've written on expeditionary energy in support of expeditionary advanced base operations. So the most recent of these articles was entitled, Powering EABO, Aluminum Fuel for the Future Fight, and it won the Marine Corps Gazette's 2022 Major General Harold W. Chase Prize Essay Contest. So Walker, Eric, welcome. Walker, I think the audience knows you from the, I think at this point, literal dozens

of podcasts you posted for us. But Eric, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners? Sure. And thanks for having me on the podcast. SimSec is on my short list of podcasts to listen to, so I appreciate being able to come up and share my ideas. I've been working in DoD energy for 20 years. I graduated from Marine Corps OCS in 2000, Princeton University with electrical engineering

and finance degrees in 2001. I actually declined my Marine Corps commission because several angel investors gave me an opportunity to start two companies, building power electronics for the power grid and for the U.S. Navy. I ran one of those companies as CTO for 10 years, and then I moved up to Massachusetts to help start the energy systems group at Lincoln Laboratory, because I thought that DoD kind of provided the best opportunity to work on tough energy technologies that would make a difference. Well, thank you again for joining us. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Walker, can you start by describing the dilemma the Marines face regarding operational energy or just logistics in general as they try to execute EABO? Sure. So I don't want to kind of belabor the point on what EABO is, because I know we've touched on that in other podcasts and most of our listeners are probably familiar.

But the short version is that to address the threats in the in the Western Pacific, the Marines want to be a stand in force. So EABO, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, is kind of the operational concept that Marines are using. And to be clear, it's still kind of under development and getting fleshed out. And there's been a robust debate in CIMSEC and in other publications about what it is, what it isn't, what it should be. But what it will probably look like is small, relatively small units of Marines operating forward in the first island chain and doing some combination of aircraft support, firing anti-ship missiles, doing reconnaissance and counter reconnaissance has become one of the buzzwords. And to be also to be clear, I think it's a great concept. But one of the gaps, or I guess I should say unsolved as of yet, issues is logistics. So if you're putting Marines forward on these remote or potentially not remote islands, because you're worried that traditional assets would be targeted by your adversaries, long range missiles, land based aviation and submarines. That also means that all of the traditional ways that you would support those forces through amphibious vessels, logistical ships, army watercraft, et cetera, are also vulnerable in the same way. So you're putting these Marines forward, and it's not, I think, quite clear how they're going to be sustained.

And you kind of layer that problem on top of the reality that the Pacific is absolutely huge, right? We use the kind of phrase tyranny of geography. It's super far away from everything, you know, thousands of miles from bases on the U.S. West Coast, really far from Guam, far from our our logistical bases in Guam and some of the stuff that we got going on in Singapore and super far from Diego Garcia. So you've got to get a long way to resupply these guys already. Once they're getting resupplied, you know, they're already inside the West. That's the enemy's weapons engagement zone. And we know because, you know, we've seen in open source stuff that there's Chinese military leaders making it clear that in a potential conflict, they would try to attack U.S. supply chains. Commandant General David Berger has really been beating the drum about logistics. You know, one of the phrases that he'll throw out is that logistics is going to be the pacing function for operations in any Pacific conflict. We've seen that reiterated by other Marine leaders and other services. You know, I've seen the Navy and the Army Special Operations Command, Transportation Command have all and their leadership has all been kind of beating this drum for like logistics.

How are we going? We've got these new operational concepts. We've got this kind of design for how we think we might want to fight a conflict in the Western Pacific, but not how we're going to get the stuff in the men and women that we need to get there and how we're going to sustain them in a fight. So it seems like everybody's talking about it. And there's a couple of what I would consider kind of innovative or more traditional options, you know, the Marine Corps and the Navy are working together to get this new type of warship out, the LAW, the Light Amphibious Warship, that's going through some issues. Who knows if and when we'll see it. There's been some talk, including some by myself, about seaplanes and how seaplanes or amphibious aircraft could help solve some of these issues or a little bit more innovative options like uncrewed logistical vessels or semi-submersibles kind of based on a narco submarine design. And then there's also, I think, a really clear direction in demand reduction, right, which is a fancy way of saying that these marines are going to have to use less stuff than they might in normal operations. Or there's another phrase, 21st century foraging, how much can they locally source or kind of forage, et cetera. So I think it's kind of an open question and the way that we're going to solve some of these issues are all of the above. And operational energy is a really big part of that.

As a whole, you know, Marine ground forces don't use a ton of energy compared to other parts of the DOD, like aviation gobbles up the lion's share of the DOD's energy use, but it's still really critical for ground forces. You know, if you're doing reconnaissance and counter reconnaissance, or you're trying to shoot anti-ship missiles, enemy combatants, you need reliable and robust energy sources for your high power communications, for your radar, for your sensing, and all of that stuff. everything down to your water purification to sustain your force. We've seen over time, and this was in the Marine Corps' expeditionary energy strategy from around 2010, that basically year over year, the DOD and the Marine Corps' energy use goes up by about 1.5% a year. So that adds up to over 175% since Vietnam. And those are, like I said, 2009, 2010 numbers. So it's higher now. And I think we can reliably assume, projecting out, that that requirement's only going to go up. Every time we say we want another small UAS or we want a new tactical tablet or more

computing at the tactical edge, that is going to increase the energy requirement at the individual level, at the small unit level. And then when we talk about things like technology for fighting in the electromagnetic spectrum or lasers or directed energy weapons, you know, those things require tons of energy and they require high peak output of energy. And then when we talk about fighting in different environments, you need more HVAC equipment, more heating and cooling, not even, you know, even if you're willing to kind of forgo that for the individual level, you know, a lot of that heating and cooling is for the computer systems. So I just think overall, we have this good expeditionary advanced base operations concept, but it's not quite clear how we're

going to sustain those forces. And I think the logistical demands for energy are going to be perhaps more important than any other single component. And those are only going to go up. So that's why I think, you know, looking at alternative fuels and alternative energies are really, really important for how we can kind of reduce demand or figure out creative ways to keep those forces sustained. So I hope that kind of gets at the question, Jared. No, that was great. I will pause here for the listeners and just point out the link section or the notes section of this particular episode I sense already is going to be a rich text.

I was going through, not ignoring you, but furiously Googling in my phone, writing down all the articles that we're going to need to link to at the bottom. So far, I've come up with your article, Cocaine Logistics for the Marine Corps for War on the Rocks back in July 2020, the case for seaplanes, Sea Control 303 that we did with David Allman, the USMC Expeditionary Logistics Strategy, on top of the three articles that we referenced at the top there. But Walker, what's the current US military demand for petroleum products based on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq? And then do we have any data from Ukraine? Yeah, so I don't have any data from Ukraine, except to say that the demand is higher than what

the Russian military demand is higher than what they can seem to provide. You know, Eric and I are going off of fairly easily discoverable open source information you know i'm not using anything from uh in inside the dod that's not publicly available um but one of the statistics we cite and this is from a 2009 um a 2009 study so it's probably higher now um but it is a data point is that in afghanistan at some points uh the fuel the average fuel use got as high as 22 gallons a day per deployed soldier, airman, Marine, et cetera. So 22 gallons of fuel per person per day used across the force structure in Afghanistan, which is pretty crazy. And it's probably higher now. And you compare that to like the second world war, and it was about one gallon per day

per deployed soldier. And then beyond just that enormous amount of fuel, you have to think about the logistics behind it, right? Because a lot of the fuel that US and coalition forces were using afghanistan was coming by sea into pakistan and then it was trucked into afghanistan and it was vulnerable both to the whims of uh the u.s and pakistani political relationship um and also to attacks and then there's the cost right so in 2019 the u.s spent about 12 billion dollars buying petroleum fuels for the dod and it's done by the the dla the defense logistics agency And that assumes a cost of about $2 or $3 a gallon when they buy it. And it's probably going to be a lot higher this year. And I believe they already asked Congress once or twice for extra money to cover the higher cost of fuel recently. But then there's this concept called the fully burdened cost of fuel, which is the idea that disclosing the number that you pay to buy bulk fuel from the supplier doesn't really totally cover what it actually costs.

um because the transportation to the final user potentially at the tactical edge you know in afghan at some remote fob in afghanistan is a lot higher and so eric and i found that several sources that indicated that it could be several hundred dollars um and there was even an army report that indicated at some points the cost to deliver a single gallon of fuel to the end user could be as much as a thousand dollars you know and there were examples of of delivering fuel with aircraft, you know, dropping it out of on pallets out of the back of a C-130 or bringing in bladders, which is just extremely expensive and an efficient way to do it. And then there's also kind of the human cost, right? Attacks on fuel convoys was a major source of casualties

in both Iraq and Afghanistan. So fuel and our reliance on fuel is, it's expensive. We use a of fuel, and it's also a vulnerability. Eric, we'll shift gears a little bit to a little bit more technical discussion. What was MIT's recent breakthrough discovery related to hydrogen? Actually, first, I want to give a shout out to the Lethal Luminaries. They're a group of forward-thinking Marines and sailors and civilians who've helped us develop what we call the Secure Alternate Fuel Environment concept. It's a concept for future DoD operational energy based around locally and regionally produce hydrogen and synthetic fuels. And there's a Naval Postgraduate School briefing on the SAFE concept. Maybe we can put a link to that briefing in the show notes.

I want to start with an analogy. So traditional fuel system is you get crude oil drilled out of the ground. That's your feedstock. You then refine that into gasoline or diesel. That's stored in a gas tank. You have an internal combustion engine that then produces some mechanical motion, right? So that's the traditional fuel system in powertrain. One of the technologies we're pursuing, we're using water and aluminum as the fuel feedstock. So instead of crude oil, you're using water and seawater and aluminum.

And we figured out a way to mix them together to produce hydrogen, and hydrogen is the fuel. So instead of gasoline, you have hydrogen. And then the hydrogen goes through a fuel cell, which is poorly named. It doesn't actually hold fuel, but it converts hydrogen plus air into electricity. So think of it like the engine.

So instead of crude oil to gasoline to a gas tank to a combustion engine, we have water and aluminum to hydrogen to a fuel cell to electricity so that that's the powertrain that or one of the power trains that we're looking at enabling because it has you know both logistics and operational benefits uh there are about a dozen companies now developing aluminum as a fuel many in the united states one in israel that we've identified and the dod has been using hydrogen all the way back as early as world war one there are about 6 000 flights of hydrogen-fueled air

airships that were used for artillery spotting and surveillance. The fuel was produced in factories in France. In World War II, the Army used caustic soda in what they called the M1 hydrogen generator, a wheeled vehicle that produced hydrogen to fill barrage balloons to protect critical areas, including over the beaches of Normandy after the landing. And using aluminum as a catalyst to produce hydrogen was discovered in the 1970s by Professor Jerry Woodall at Purdue University. As I mentioned, there were a number of organizations, General Atomics, Army Research Lab, a number

of small companies developing aluminum to hydrogen fuel systems. The European Union just announced a big joint research project to try to use aluminum for energy storage, potentially to address some of their energy security challenges that they have, especially coming up this winter. So we at Lincoln Lab are working mostly, we're working a bit with the Army Research Lab Fuel, but mostly with a version of aluminum fuel that was discovered in a lab accident on MIT campus. Onar had funded a project at the MIT Beaver Works Lab where undergrads were building a

hydrogen production system using the wood all aluminum fuel technique a student happened to leave a few aluminum bb gun pellets and some indium and gallium metal sitting on a hot plate during the day when he cleaned up the other day and dumped some of that into a sink all of a sudden the water in the sink started steaming he went to his advisor and they realized that he'd figured a way to basically strip away so if you look at a soda can the shiny surface shiny silver surface actually aluminum rust or aluminum oxide and what the student discovered was a really simple way using literally you know paper shredder and easy bake oven to uh to strip away that aluminum rust and allow it to react with water um and when you put the aluminum in water about half the energy

that's in the aluminum comes off as heat and the other half comes off as hydrogen you can use the heat for various things we've had one student who did a made a field nest system for heating up field rations using the heat and then the hydrogen can be used to either produce aerial lift or run through a fuel cell to produce electricity, or you can combust it as well to produce heat. There's a whole host of applications ranging from fuel mess to water purification to high altitude balloons to mobility and electricity production. So we at Lincoln Lab, as a DOD, federally funded R&D center, have been focusing on using that fuel and developing that for DOD applications over the past few years.

What are the advantages of converting to aluminum-hydrogen as a fuel source versus petroleum? So they're both operational and logistics benefits. So let me start with operational benefits. So first of all, because we're using a fuel cell, not a combustion engine, you're not exploding gasoline in order to produce your mobility. Instead, you're using this fuel cell, which is an electrochemical process that takes hydrogen and air. And as a result, it has a much, much lower thermal signature and much lower acoustic signature. And there's some publicly released data from the Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center showing a General Motors truck that had been converted to hydrogen fuel cell to a Humvee. And the Humvee is glowing in the IR, and the General Motors hydrogen truck looks like the background in terms of thermal signature.

And it has something like one-tenth the acoustic signature of that Humvee. So, you know, in an area for operational concept that is doing recon and counter-recon, thermal and acoustic signatures are very important. Another benefit is range. So Lockheed Martin, for example, has a stalker, which is used by the DoD. It's a fuel cell version, fuel cell powered version of the Group 2 UAV stalker has three to four X range improvement over the battery powered version. And that's an actual operational system. And that also produces provides new capabilities. So the ability to inflate high altitude balloons allows you to put all sorts of interesting payloads into the sky to support operations in austere environments. So operational side, signature, range, and some new capabilities.

On the logistics side, I think it gives commanders and logisticians many more options because it gives you the ability to locally source your fuel feedstock and produce your own fuel. So you can envision Marines falling in on a cache of aluminum. There's actually, because aluminum is traded globally in the commodities market, there are massive stockpiles of aluminum in countries all around the world that the commodities traders use for, you know, hedging the market. So you can envision, you know, falling in some on some cash or, you know, locally purchasing it from a scrapyard or procuring it somehow

or even, you know, eliminating waste by converting dunnage into fuel. And because the conversion process basically strip away that rust layer is relatively simple, you know, you can envision with the right kit some four deployed Marines, you know, taking some of that feedstock and turning it to fuel. The other logistics benefit is that hydrogen is one of the key elements in making all sorts of materials, right? Any sort of hydrocarbon has hydrogen in it. So if you can source your carbon as well, you can make synthetic fuel.

The Fischer-Strohp synthetic fuel process, you know, the Germans produced 47% of their petroleum during World War II using coal hydrogenation. And so, you know, you can make synthetic fuels, you can make synthetic rubbers and plastics and all sorts of materials once you have a ready source of hydrogen. So both operational and logistics benefits by being able to produce hydrogen in an austere environment. Now, what are the challenges of that conversion versus what we think of for petroleum? There are a couple kind of technology challenges, but there are also several organizational challenges. The biggest one is what we call the supply-demand trap. So think about the logisticians and the platform acquisitions people. At one point, I briefed the deputy commandant for installation and logistics in the Pentagon,

and I turned a soda can from the Pentagon mess into hydrogen fuel on his desk in 15 minutes. And he's like, this is amazing. I said, thank you, sir. Do you think the logistics community are going to invest in this? He said, heck no. And I said, well, why not? And because I, as a logistician, and he was really thoughtful about it, he said, I, as a logistician, am not going to push forward a new fuel until I see a very strong demand signal from the platform acquisition folks. And he recognized that hydrogen is already in the DoD inventory.

There are three DLA national stock numbers for hydrogen. So, you know, it could be delivered. Most of that hydrogen goes to NASA. But, you know, hydrogen is in the DoD inventory. But like, you know, the DCNL was saying, you know, logisticians are not going to supply that new fuel until there's a strong demand signal. When we talk to the platform acquisition people, they see the benefits, you know, the benefits I mentioned earlier, thermal signature, acoustic signature range of switching their platforms to hydrogen. But they're not going to necessarily stick their necks out and write a spec for a new fuel until they see it being supplied, let alone all the training and operations and maintenance considerations that come along with that. So even though there are both operational benefits for platforms as well as logistics benefits,

we need somebody at a senior level to kind of step forward and say, yes, because we see benefits on both sides, we're going to move forward together and start to enable those benefits by having logisticians and operations and platforms people moving out together. So that's the first challenge. I think there's also a challenge in terms of kind of people understanding the technology development process. As another analogy, the first gas turbine and gas engines were patented in the 1790s, and it wasn't until 1870, so 80 years later, that the first commercial liquid fuel internal combustion engine was made available. And so that's an 80-year development process, 90-year development cycle to get a new fuel and a new energy source to market. Now, obviously, with today's technologies, we can go much faster, right? Fuel cells are a very mature technology.

They're commercially available. Even though they're not really seen in the United States very much, there's significant hydrogen fuel cell market activity in Europe, in Australia, and in Japan and South Korea. But in using that for DOD operations, and also especially in terms of using aluminum, which is a much more recent discovery of the fuel, So there's a process and risk reduction effort that needs to happen to get from TRL 4 in the lab to something that's TRL 9 being used in operations. So setting expectations in terms of how those capabilities are going to progress and the level of funding and level of effort and level of engineering time needed to make that a reality, I think, is another challenge. Third challenge is a conversion to platform.

So I'd say the hardest, probably the latest, the last type of platform that we will convert to hydrogen is ground vehicles. There's a large legacy fleet of ground vehicles. You need to rip out their gas tank and their combustion engine and put in compressed hydrogen tanks and a fuel cell. You can get that technology from Toyota and General Motors and others, but it does require a pretty significant retrofit. I would say things like Group 1 and 2 UAVs, which are already electric. They're already running on batteries. Rip out the battery, replace it with a compressed hydrogen tank and a fuel cell, and you can extend their range significantly. Dismounted infantry, if you give them a fuel cell that's been ruggedized to work in the dirt and mud and give them some hydrogen storage mechanism, you could potentially reduce their battery load. Watercraft, because you have ready access to water, could be relatively more straightforward to convert.

But depending on the platform and depending on the amount of legacy fleet, the conversion is another challenge. A fourth challenge, I would say, is this kind of organizational shift from Iron Mountain concept of logistics to a new concept of distributed logistics, caching, scavenging, fuel cell production, right? There isn't the force structure to do that, right? You know, we estimate that, you know, with a Marine Latour Regiment, if you added some number of Marines to that, you could enable them to make their own hydrogen fuel. And you could then reduce the number of personnel needed from, let's say, the Military Seal of Command and, you know, other parts of Transcom and DLA to supply them patrolling from long distances. But, right, that force structure, you know, would need to change in order to enable that. So another challenge is that hydrogen is a gas, and people are more familiar with transporting liquids. So that's not high tech.

People transport hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and all sorts of other gases. Industry uses massive quantities of hydrogen in the oil and gas industry. But for people in the DOD, logisticians in the DOD, that's not something they're familiar with. So that's another kind of training, education challenge that needs to be overcome. And then lastly, I would say a perception of safety. So people always envision the Hindenburg. It turns out the Hindenburg disaster was not because of the hydrogen. It was because of the envelope.

The Spirit of St. Louis, the first aircraft that Charles Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic, actually was made out of cloth, not out of metal. It wasn't until aluminum sheeting was invented that people started making the aircraft out of metal. What they did instead was they had cloth and they painted airplane dope, which was this highly flammable but waterproof material on the aircraft. And the reason that a lot of Lindbergh's competitors to fly across the Atlantic were killed is because when their airplanes crashed, the airframe caught on fire because of the highly flammable airplane dope. Same exact thing is true with the Hindenburg. If there's a once frame from the video, we can see the hydrogen kind of escaping, right? It's on fire, but it's escaping vertically out of harm's way.

It wasn't until the airframe caught on fire. Because of that one accident, people have a perception that hydrogen is inherently unsafe. I believe it's safer than petroleum, largely because it's lighter than air. So there's a great video online of a test that University of Miami did. They had a hydrogen-fueled car and a gasoline-fueled car, and they intentionally leaked and ignited both of them. And on the hydrogen-fueled car, all the hydrogen is escaping vertically away. The gasoline fuel car, gasoline on fire is pooling underneath the vehicle and before long, the entire vehicle is on fire. So with proper handling, with proper safety mechanisms, I think that hydrogen could actually be a safer energy source than gasoline.

But there's this perception largely because of Hindenburg and that people are worried about safety. All right. Well, mind blown on the Hindenburg piece. That was all new information for me. That was awesome. I do have a more practical question, I guess, because we're talking about moving the hydrogen forward. But I think in a lot of these places where you talk about marines foraging, scavenging, whatever they're going to be doing, we're talking about aluminum that might need to be moved forward. What does the aluminum look like if we're packaging up and shipping it? Is DOD heavier than the petroleum product that you're trying to move? Is it lighter?

Because all of our experience with aluminum is obviously the listener can't see the can that I'm holding up right now. But we're all used to seeing that. So, like, what are we actually shipping for to the Marines, aside from what they may be bringing with them in their MREs or whatever? So, aluminum actually has twice the energy compared to diesel. Obviously, you lose some of that by, you know, doing the reaction and then the conversion to electricity. But the numbers are actually pretty significant. And I can't quote the numbers here on this line, but we estimate that, you know, let's say converting the Marine Littoral Regiment from petroleum to aluminum as its fuel could actually save a significant amount in terms of total volume of fuel transported. Not to mention the fact that you could source your fuel, your feedstock locally, right?

There's a massive industry, massive market for aluminum all around the world, including in the Pacific. As I mentioned, the commodities market caches and stores aluminum all around the world. So there's a potential to source your fuel feedstock more locally and therefore reduce the transportation distance. Not to mention the transportation safety. We're envisioning you're transporting aluminum, which is rusted. It's not reactive with the water. It's not until you get closer to the edge where you do that conversion process. And so as much as people might be concerned about hydrogen, you're not producing the hydrogen until, you know, right before you need it.

So there's relatively little storage of that. And then the aluminum, same thing. You're not turning that into a fuel, not making it water reactive until closer to the edge. So there's lots of things to figure out here in terms of how distributed logistics would work, how local self-production of fuel would work. It's a completely different way of thinking about logistics, but I think it does have a lot of potential in terms of improving safety, reducing risk, reducing transport volumes, you know, reducing the need to transport fuel over the beach, all those sorts of potential benefits. And then a final question for you. What size are the aluminum reactors that you're talking about creating? We think it's feasible to transport all the equipment, let's say for the MLR, on existing MTVRs or tow them behind JLTV's M-Racers. So all the existing vehicles that the MLR is already planning to use, we think it would be feasible to build out an alternate fuel system using those existing platforms. Obviously, there's a lot of R&D still needed to build those capabilities, but the numbers seem to pencil out.

And that's the other opportunity that I didn't mention is that the Marine Corps is literally in the middle of a forced redesign effort. So if there was ever a time to insert some new platforms that use alternative fuels or try some experiment with something new, like now is the time the Marine Corps is building units, like Eric mentioned, the Marine Littoral Regiment that would be like perfect, perfect to experiment or use alternative fuels. I know we got the lay down on all the different challenges and obstacles, and Eric and his office have certainly been kind of running into these as they try to move this project forward. But I also think there's kind of a moment of opportunity. opportunity. Unfortunately, one of the things that created this opportunity is the debacle with the Navy at the Red Hill bulk fuel storage facility that held like up to 250 million gallons of bulk fuel in Hawaii. And it was leaking into the groundwater and making people sick, both families and naval service members, but also members in the local community. And thankfully,

in March, the SECF said that they were going to drain that facility and replace it with kind of vague, unclear exactly what it's going to get replaced with. But I think that creates a specific opportunity to look at, okay, so that was the hub basically of our hub and spoke bulk fuel architecture in the Pacific. Is there something better that we can replace it with? And I think more generally, there's a lot more awareness, not just in the United States, but also around the world of kind of the importance of climate policy and it's leaking into military policy. And I think often there's a lot of pushback there like hey the military just focuses on lethality and climate's kind of out of our ballpark but recently in response to um an executive order you know the

services are all coming up with their own climate strategies the department of the navy came out i think it's called climate action 2030 um and they have a bunch of targets there i think it's just that the hydrogen hydrogen is a fuel and aluminum to hydrogen process is a way where we really have this intersection of climate policy and lethality, which is the name of one of the articles that we wrote. But we have both tactical benefits in the way that the vehicles perform. You have the reduced logistics demand. You have benefits in range. And then you also have a more climate friendly fuel that also, by the way, if we're hosting fuel and energy resources on the territory of allies and partners, you can't have another Red Hill in Japan or Singapore or the Philippines

or Australia. So I think there's an opportunity there also to work with allies and partners that are leading the way on hydrogen for their own domestic industries and to build a constituency for hydrogen as a fuel, both in the military for operational and lethality concerns, but then also So, you know, for kind of a more responsible climate policy and building on some of that political capital to to get this done when maybe there wasn't that political constituency before. So to piggyback on that, our allies are very much moving forward with hydrogen. So I think the United States is the only one of the five allies that does not have a national hydrogen strategy. Japan is trying to become a, quote, hydrogen society. they uh you know it's a whole government effort because they they see themselves as energy insecure

and they see the benefit of being able to produce hydrogen in a dozen different ways and as well there are many countries in the pacific that are kind of ramping up their hydrogen production in order to feed the japanese market the australians because they have so much coal and natural gas and renewables are trying to become a quit hydrogen production powerhouse in europe there's Even before the current crisis in Ukraine, there was a push to basically replace Russian natural gas and the European gas pipeline with hydrogen. There are some technical challenges. You need to coat the pipes so that they don't corrode. But there's been significant investment in Germany in investigating that technology.

There's been massive investment in France, the United Kingdom, in building out electrolyzers, which produce hydrogen from electricity. So there's a significant opportunity, I think, to tap into both that innovation that's happening and those logistic systems that are being built out if the DoD wants to kind of future-proof and add on some new capabilities, particularly in the Pacific and in Europe. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Walker Mills and Eric Wimpacher. Walker, where can we find you online? And what seven writing projects are you working on simultaneously right now? I'm on LinkedIn at my name, Walker Mills. You can find me on Twitter at WD Mills 1992.

And, you know, I love talking about this stuff. So I guess you'd say the DMs are open is what Twitter users say. Right now, the two big biggest things I'm working on is I'm scrambling to finish my long overdue NPS thesis on maritime counter-narcotics in the Caribbean. So hopefully have that done within a month. And then I'm working, I'm doing revisions right now on a book chapter for the second volume of On Contested Shores, which is a book on amphibious operations. The first volume was edited by Tim Heck and Brett Friedman, and we had them. I think actually I hosted them on the podcast to talk about it, and then I'm going to be helping out editing the second volume and then also working on that chapter. So that's what I'm working on.

Thanks, and Eric, same questions for you. Where can we find you and what's your next project? So I'm both on LinkedIn and on Twitter at Power Eric. I need to spend less time on Twitter. What I can say is I'm particularly interested in continuing to develop these alternate energy technologies for the DoD, particularly the Marine Corps. Got a soft spot in my heart for working with Marines. Appreciate them really being forward leaning and forward thinking. I see this as kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity with force design to really adopt some new technologies and impact the force.

In terms of other projects, I'm particularly interested in finding ways to apply technology that had been developed for the DoD to the climate change and environmental needs as well. Thank you again for joining us. Listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Oh, help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Hey, hey, pulling the alley. Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Pulling on the shimbo now.

A porter of a porter gin. Oh, hey, hey, pulling the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red. Oh, pulling on the shimbo now. Oh, help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. We'll be right back.