The most-requested teaser to start this fresh new year is probably the Blue Gas/Tesla Killer one from Jimmy Mengel, in an ad for The Crow’s Nest ($99/yr) — and today I’m finally getting to it. If you’re keeping track, we first saw these “Blue Gas” iterations of the ad around December 18 (though different “Tesla Killer” ads for different kinds of batteries or motors have cycled through our stories here several times over the past few years).
The spiel is all about something he calls “Blue Gas”, and it’s a little bit reminiscent of all the natural gas vehicle teaser pitches we saw eight or ten years ago… but the technology is a little different. The ad starts out with Mengel’s visit to California to try out a “blue gas” car in person, in a place where it’s poised to, he implies, take over the trucking industry…
“On the road out here you’ll see more Priuses and Teslas than in any other city in America. But this has nothing to do with either.
“In fact, here at this unknown site, salt-of-the-earth truck drivers are making the carbon-free energy revolution possible.
“You see, this gas station is at the epicenter of a $2.5 trillion revolution in energy.
“One that involves a weird form of fuel known as ‘Blue Gas.'”
So what is this magical blue gas?
“It doesn’t involve lithium or batteries or rare earths.
“It doesn’t involve solar, wind, water, biofuels, or any other form of renewable energy you’ve heard of.
“And of course it doesn’t involve oil, coal, or any other fossil fuel.
“Best of all, it’s 100% emissions free…
“It takes moments to fill up…
“And it’s 300% more powerful than oil.”
So that sounds perfect, right? No long recharge waits like for an electric car, not dirty like oil or gas. Magical!
How, then, does one make money from this technology?
“My research shows that one $3 stock at the epicenter of the ‘Blue Gas’ revolution is set to trade higher than Tesla.
“Delivering earth-shattering gains of 11,666%.
“Not nine years down the road. Or even five years.
“A massive catalyst in the next few months, that I’ll reveal today, is ready to launch its share price vertical.”
Drooling yet? Don’t worry, that’s mostly the marketing — these gains never, of course, show up overnight… and, sadly, such information is never held solely in the hand of one dude who’s selling a newsletter for 99 bucks.
Which doesn’t mean it won’t be a worthwhile investment to consider, of course, just that we should get the daydreams of 11,000% returns in a few months out of our heads first.
How about some more clues to lead us to the prize?
"reveal" emails? If not,
just click here...
“The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, two of the nation’s largest shipping points, are now deploying a fleet of “Blue Gas” trucks…”
So at this point it’s pretty clear that Mengel is talking up hydrogen fuel cells… which he does “reveal” later on. Fuel cells are not particularly new technology, but they have made some jumps forward in recent years.
And like all new transportation fuels or strategies, the easiest way to start is with local fleet vehicles — garbage trucks, delivery trucks, and other vehicles where fuel is a major cost and where they travel in a small enough area that they can depend on a very limited refueling infrastructure.
And this is positioned as competition for electric vehicles, and particularly for Tesla….
“The Budweiser company Anheuser-Busch is now planning a complete makeover of its truck fleet. It wants to be completely emission-free in the next few years.
“And it’s using ‘Blue Gas’ to make that transition possible.
“That’s why the beer giant recently bought 800 tractor trailers fueled by ‘Blue Gas.’
“That’s almost the entire company’s shipping fleet.
“Just to round it out, it purchased a mere 40 trucks from Tesla….
“When it comes to heavy-duty trucking power, ‘Blue Gas’ beats Tesla hands down.”
But it’s not just big fleet trucks that are going to switch over…
“Today there are only 11,000 vehicles powered by ‘Blue Gas.’ We’re on the ground floor.
“But according to the big car giants…
“There will be over 10 million ‘Blue Gas’ vehicles on the road in the next few years.”
I wouldn’t say that’s the stance of the “car giants” … but it is the goal of some governments and other bodies that are pushing for fuel cell adoption — the last conference included that 10 million vehicle “pledge” (in ten years).
And apparently there is some progress in building out the infrastructure…
“Just a few years ago, there were virtually no “Blue Gas” stations. Today, there are 300 worldwide.
“But as more gas stations switch from serving oil to “Blue Gas”…
“That number is projected to surge to over 5,000 in a few short years.”
That same International conference included the goal of 10,000 fueling stations to serve those ten million vehicles, with a real push from Japan… not surprising, since Toyota is the major automaker that’s most invested in hydrogen fuel cells.
And he goes into why hydrogen fuel cells are a better option…
“Unlike batteries… the engine technology behind ‘Blue Gas’ is:
“Safe and non-explosive.
“Takes under five minutes to refill.
“Lasts days or even weeks.
“And it’s incredibly lightweight.
“In the race for clean trucks, trains, and buses, “Blue Gas” is second to none.”
A big part of the reason why he thinks it’s going to be big is that China is pushing fuel cell tech forward…
“China’s ‘Elon Musk.’ recently made a stunning announcement…
“In short, he called for a complete shift in China to ‘Blue Gas.’
“And when this guy speaks, the Chinese government acts.
“After all, he was responsible for the country’s electric car revolution to begin with.
“The Chinese are committing a stunning $66 billion to back ‘Blue Gas.’
“In fact, the world’s largest ‘Blue Gas’ station just opened in Shanghai.”
And what’s the stock? We finally get a few clues…
“… the $3 tech stock that first began this revolution 40 years ago.”
And some hype, for good measure….
“This Is More Lucrative Than Any Pot Stock I’ve Recommended
“Even more than Bitcoin and other cryptos…
“That’s because it’s moving to the epicenter of the trillion-dollar electric vehicle revolution…
“A historic trillion-dollar energy shift that’s already transforming the way that millions power their cars…”
That “40 years ago” bit is relevant, this company is somehow connected to the “father of fuel cells”…
“… except for a few ‘niche’ markets like submarines or spacecraft, fuel cells weren’t used much.
“They simply weren’t inexpensive and small enough for everyday cars and trucks.
“In 1987, everything changed.
“One energy legend, now known as the ‘father of fuel cell technology’, made a historic discovery that put…
“Fuel Cells on the Inevitable Path to Energy Dominance”
And he talks about some fuel cell stocks that surged last year, Plug Power (PLUG), Proton Power Systems (PPS on the AIM in London), and Hydrogenics… and Hydrogenics was bought by Cummins (CMI), which leads Mengel to anticipate a “buyout surge” that will lead to a takeover frenzy for his favorite secret stock…
“A buyout frenzy is underway on small companies that are deploying the technology.
“And I’ve identified the next big takeout target…
“The tiny $3 stock I mentioned today, the one founded by the innovator behind the fuel cell revolution.”
Other clues about this one $3 stock? We get this…
“… after signing $200 million worth of deals with China’s largest engine and auto parts companies…
“It’s the frontrunner for the world’s biggest fuel cell market…
“In Shandong province alone, it’s rolling out 2,000 fuel cell buses.
“And this company is supplying it all.”
So who’s our little target? What’s “the $3 tech stock that first began this revolution 40 years ago?”
This must be little Ballard Power Systems (BLDP)… which is not a $3 stock anymore, and hasn’t been for more than six months (it was right around $7 the first time I saw this teaser ad, about six weeks ago), but it is connected to (the late) Geoffrey Ballard, the father of the fuel cell and founder of the company… and it would not be surprising if they just repurposed the spiel from a recommendation that was made a few months earlier to Jimmy Mengel’s subscribers (that’s just a guess, but it’s pretty common practice for newsletter ad copywriters).
Geoffrey Ballard left active management at Ballard Power almost 20 years ago, and, in fact, formed another company that was subsequently sold to Plug Power, another oft-touted fuel cell company, but he certainly left a legacy at BLDP.
And yes, China is a big market for fuel cells (and everything else, pretty much), and Ballard does have an “in” thanks to the fact that they sold out part of the company to form a Chinese joint venture with Weichai Power.
All of the fuel cell stocks have gone bonkers at one point or another in the past few months, driving this particular one up above $10 for a while (the stock touched $12 last week, though it’s below $10 again now)… so what’s the story?
Well, frankly, the most obvious thing you note upon a quick look at the financials is that Ballard is trading like one of the crazy cloud software stocks — at a valuation of $2 billion, it’s trading at more than 20X sales, is nowhere near profitability, and is expected to grow sales at about 35-40% a year as they sell fuel cell stacks into their buses/trucks joint venture in China as well as for existing markets (backup power, forklifts).
The future is very much lined up with China and their technology transfer to their Weichai joint venture (agreed to in early 2018), which is causing some fears and also some profit lust — which probably explains some of the surge in the past few months, as trade war fears have ebbed a bit and the stock has more than doubled in the past six months.
Not for the first time, I should note. The stock has been teased in the past as fuel cell excitement has heated up, and it has surged a few times before — particularly in 2014 and 2017. So the warning signal for investors is that things didn’t work out very well for those who bought Ballard Power the last couple times it surged quickly higher like this.
As with Plug Power and Fuel Cell and the rest of the industry, presumably a lot of the future for Ballard depends on what governments or larger companies do to push forward with hydrogen fueling stations… either in China or the US, or elsewhere… and whether alternative energy makes it far enough that generating, storing and transporting hydrogen ends up being efficient and feasible on a large scale (the government lays out some of the challenges here, in case you’re curious).
There’s some interesting bigger-picture thinking here from a couple years ago that makes some sense to me, though I’m far from being an expert on the science. Hydrogen is a challenge both because of the energy cost to create it, and because it can be challenging to store and transport safely (though natural gas and gasoline are also a challenge on that front, to be fair, and, yes, lithium batteries pose fire risks).
So the dream is that refueling stations will create their own hydrogen from electrolysis instead of having to set up a transportation infrastructure of pipelines or trucks for liquid hydrogen, and that hydrogen generation would take a lot of electricity — hopefully, for the sake of reducing reliance on fossil fuels, electricity from solar and wind and other relatively clean sources… though there are other ways to generate hydrogen as well, of course, with probably the most likely first wave using natural gas as a feedstock and fuel. Though the real hope for the next few years is not from hydrogen-powered cars, it’s all about those predictable and restricted fleet vehicles like port trucks and delivery trucks and buses — which should ring a bell for those who hoped for great riches from the natural gasification of trucking fleets a decade ago.
As an aside… remember Clean Energy Fuels (CLNE) and Westport (WPRT), the standard bearers of the natural gas transportation revolution that was heavily talked up just after the global financial crisis? They’re still around, and still generally growing revenue, but their share prices are down ~90% from their story-driven highs of early 2012, and I’d be surprised if they regain those highs in my lifetime.
So maybe hydrogen ends up being a better solution for a battery-powered fleet (hydrogen fuel cells are essentially batteries that get their charge from hydrogen, with the real advantage being that fuel cell refueling is faster than recharging, and the fuel cells have longer useful lives)… though the established electricity infrastructure (power lines, etc.) and lack of a hydrogen infrastructure means that hydrogen would also presumably have a pretty short time period in which it could “win” over batteries (assuming, of course, that battery technology continues to improve).
Ballard’s latest quarterly presentation is full of future promise but not terribly inspiring on the financial front. Yes, the promise is real, things could work out well… but right now, they aren’t. There’s an interesting Bloomberg interview with Ballard’s CEO Randy MacEwen here, essentially pointing to 2021 or 2022 as the first time investors begin to envision a future profit for BLDP, and 2025 as the forecasted beginning of the rapid growth trajectory that he envisions.
So, again, this is buying the future — or, more specifically, buying one future in which hydrogen fuel cells build on their early success in forklifts to take a huge market share in heavy trucks and buses, and hoping that Ballard will lead in this future. That’s been promoted many times in Ballard’s history, and past dreams haven’t materialized, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible this time… just that we should check our assumptions and be skeptical of the promotions. I don’t know whether this hydrogen fuel cell future will come, or if Ballard will remain a leader, but I’d bet on it continuing to be a very volatile ride.
Thoughts, comments, questions? Let ’em loose with a comment below… and thanks for reading!
Two points:
If you used the blue gas to run an engine deigned to use that fuel it could be used to charge the batteries in a Tesla as it runs, thereby eliminating the waiting time to charge its batteries.
Secondly, whether charging a Tesla or energizing an electrolysis process to produce hydrogen you are still need to use some amount of fossil fuel in either application. All you’ve done is to relocate the harmful emissions.
Wait to see teslas million mille battery. Likely with etn superconductors.
Might as well use propane, a liquified natural gas. Much easier to store than hydrogen, and powers engines in much the same way as gasoline, but with a cleaner burn. Propane is available in most cities and towns. The real issue with carrying hydrogen to power a vehicle is that the storage of enough fuel is daunting. At what pressure? 3000 psi or higher? And, if hydrogen is used, why not use it as a burning fuel? It generates steam when burned. Why bother with a fuel cell or batteries?
You suggest why not use Natural gas (methane) or propane. Their combustion or use in a fuel cell generates carbon dioxide, the very greenhouse gas we are trying to eliminate. Hydrogen combustion or fuel cell conversion is carbon-free. Hydrogen does have a storage problem and must be contained in a heavy tank to contain the pressure. Then there is the Hindenburg effect named after the German lighter-than-air hydrogen-filled Zeppelin that exploded over New Jersey in 1937. While some fear the fate of a lithium fire in a collision with a Tesla, a hydrogen fire is even more fearsome and likely.
Why would you want to burn hydrogen? To use it as a conventional fuel in an internal combustion engine? A fuel cell is so much simpler with no moving parts and much higher efficiency.
Hydrogen manufactured from seawater by electrolysis from solar, wind, or hydro electric sources does not add to greenhouse gases. It becomes the liquid “battery” to store electric energy for transportation and conversion back to electricity at the point of use.
I only see two problems: storage and explosive hazard.
The Hindenburg did not explode. In the films, you see the rapid burning of the outer skin fabric and the paint, which was very flammable and may have accelerated the fire with the Thermite reaction (the pigments were Iron oxide and Aluminum).
NOx emissions when u burn hydrogen, thats why!
Thanks for the background research. You are definitely helping to avoid the landmines and overhyped promotions. You are much appreciated.
Thank you for your most valued insight into the companies that are teased by the many “expert researchers” that proliferate the web and end up in my mail box. I’ve been seduced several times in the past years and have never made the money that is so “sincerely” promoted. To have found Gumshoe is a blessing so keep up the great work in letting us investors who like me are not expert in understanding the nuances of the many stocks that are touted be better informed and with that less likely to lose what little we have.
Typically a propane powered passenger car would weigh between 1.5 to two tons. This car would have a range of 75 to 100 miles. If you replaced it with a fuel cell engine and ran it with blue gas you would get 2.5 to three times the range. It done correctly you could get a 350 mile range from a blue gas car. The energy efficiency of a propane engine is around 25 percent. For a fuel cell engine this goes up to 80 to 90 percent. Locally some farmers have converted some of the farm Propane engines to run off of was gas. Water gas is made by passing water over AC or DC electrodes and producing a combination of hydrogen and oxygen mixed together in gaseous from then compressing it to about 1000 PSI. In college I looked at a old VW beetle that was converted to propane. It had a 160 mile range if you ran it at a slow highway speed of 45 to fifty MPH. In the city it’s range was about 125 miles. I graduated with a minor in mechanical engineering and for awhile was a member of the Society of Automobile Engineers SAE. The downside of blue gas is that blue gas 35 passenger cars would be storing gas at 5000 psi and blue gas 70 trucks would be storing gas around 10,000 psi. This would make the use of blue gas very problematic.
The blue car in the ad looks like the name plate on the fender says fuel Cell in chrome lettering and is closer to the $3 price
True ZERO…..FirstElement Fuel. That Dude Jimmy Mengel stopped by a Valero gas station in the LBC to fill up that stupid Toyota Mirai that he’s driving as seen here https://www.toyota.com/mirai/fuel.html . Satellite and other street pics taken by google doesn’t lie. Oh…here are some more for y’all to see from the teaser. https://www.motortrend.com/news/fuel-cell-fix-making-hydrogen-from-ammonia-at-the-pump-technologue/
thanks for being the true voice in this workd of hype and bull shit
I watched this presentation in May and then went onto my own research to find this Tesla killer. I came across a company named NIO and purchased shares at just over $3. Onwards and upwards.
Thanks for all your research man. Top Man.
NIO was at$13.22 on July 1, 2020. How did you get it close to $3?
Fuel cell battery expensive because Pt group metals are used as catalyst.
While output voltage is around 0.7 V you deal with multi cell battery and actually every cell should be monitored for prevention drying or flooding.
I have invented recently Li- hydrogen and Li-water batteries which are hybrid of battery and fuel cell. These batteries provide estimated 1000 miles driving range under battery weight is equal 200kg. With full stored energy estimated
250 kWh.
Sounds very impressive. Are there any companies implementing your new design?
Can these be purchased for any car?
The primary weak link for fuel cells is the coating on the interface between the oxygen and hydrogen. Currently there is not enough platinum or palladium in the world, even coating at the nano thickness level to make anywhere close to millions of cars or trucks a year.
Another weak link is freezing. I have not heard of any fuel cell maker that has solved this issue.
Apparently someone just has, my dad was telling me about it yesterday! ha
D’you mean I had to sit through that half hour or more bucket mouth’s spiel only to find out it would cost me $49 to find out what you just told everyone? That Mengel guy is such a repetitive, boring Bozo! Thanks for saving me $49. I already have some of the other hydrogen stocks he mentioned. I know all about hydrogen. And it’s *not* “blue gas!” Blue hydrogen is hydrogen made from natural gas, with the CO2 captured and sequestered. If the CO2 is not captured then it’s gray hydrogen. Almost all hydrogen is gray, because there are few if any plants that capture the CO2. Hopefully all hydrogen will eventually be green hydrogen, made by electrolysis with renewable electricity.
Toyota Mirai’s are not selling very well because there are so few filling stations. And there are so few because there are so few fuel cell vehicles! So they’re giving a $15,000 hydrogen credit card with the purchase. But that don’t matter if there are no filling stations!!
What would you say is the best hydrogen stock right now?
20 years ago I was asking the question why homes couldn’t be using fuel cell technology (I tend to be a little avant-garde). If they are good enough for cars now, I am wondering the same thing now. Also, why couldn’t bigger units be placed near train tracks and power lines to provide peak capacity relief, or even extra full time capacity.
With the trade war with China, is this advance endangered?
The email teaser Jimmy Mengel is out again. Could FCEL be the next stock on the list ? There is no other $3 stock list based on my search.
As far as I can tell the ad hasn’t changed, so it’s not likely to be about a different company now. These ads keep getting used over and over if they work, sometimes without updating and without regard to how outdated the info might be when you see the ad.
thanks Travis. Really appreciate your prompt response as always 🙂
I’m impressed with what I’ve read. I’m trying to find a ticker symbol for Blue Gas but to no avail. The reading suggest you will find this information as you read. The world is changing indeed. I’m not up to speed on all the science.. I’ll continue to subscribe to get a good understanding. But, I truly would like to get in on the stocks as early and cheap as possible
Thx
Did you ever locate a ticker symbol for it? I found and article that says its BLU but that doesn’t seem to stand true
BLDP up in a major way after a contract with a large German truck builder.