Canadian Transit “Think” Tank Presenting Fluff & Denials To Mississauga Council – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 3rd February 2025, 02:46 pm

Over a couple of the last months of 2024, part of my time was spent looking at the bizarre situation of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC). That’s resurfaced, as the Mississauga hydrogen bus trial is going forward despite having zero merit, and CUTRIC’s founder and head Josipa Petrunic is presenting to city council February 5th. Among the virtually information-free contents of the 26-slide presentation is a ‘refutation’ of points that Michael Raynor and I have made, especially his presentation to Council last year.

City councillors should be asking themselves and CUTRIC the following questions:

1. Why are they engaging with a sole sourced advisory agency that is recommending sole-sourced hydrogen buses sold by one of its Board members?
2. How much will the real cost of hydrogen as a fuel be?
3. How reliable will the supply of hydrogen be?
4. How reliable will the hydrogen buses be compared to battery-electric and diesel?
5. Can comparable warranties and service plans be procured for hydrogen buses as for diesel and battery-electric buses?
6. What will they learn from this pilot that can’t be learned from talking to the 21 transit agencies that trialed hydrogen buses and abandoned them for electric buses?
7. What certainty do they have of continued supply and servicing of fuel cells from Ballard given its financial problems?
8. What certainty do they have of continued supply and service of fuel cell buses from New Flyer given its financial challenges and the failure of similar firms which attempted to do both battery-electric and hydrogen heavy vehicles?
9. Given the lack of reliability of hydrogen supply, hydrogen refueling, and hydrogen buses, what will the impact on service levels for citizens and actual costs?
10. Does CUTRIC have sufficient staff of sufficient experience and education to provide useful guidance on transit decarbonization?
11. Most importantly, will hydrogen buses be remotely low-carbon, the entire point of the exercise.

Based on the following review of CUTRIC’s almost content-free, 26-slide presentation deck for a ten minute deputation, the council should cancel the deputation and tell CUTRIC to go back to the drawing board and bring back a substantive status report with schedule, costs, issues and risks instead of a sales pitch for CUTRIC, a history lesson, and a bunch of denial of problems with their modeling and data.

The Problems With CUTRIC

As a reminder of the challenges, CUTRIC is using inaccurate information and flawed modeling to push hydrogen buses into transit agencies across Canada. Further, it’s the only approved organization to get 80% of the costs of its ‘studies’ funded by Canada’s Zero Emissions Transit Fund. No actually competent firm can compete, so no transit organization in Canada is getting good guidance.

At the time I was digging into this, their Board of Directors and membership had deep conflicts of interest. Enbridge was on the Board and is pushing hard for hydrogen as an energy carrier, as it gets zero revenue from battery-electric solutions. Ballard Power was on the Board and pushing hard for hydrogen for energy because it only sells fuel cells for hydrogen, and would get zero revenue from battery-electric solutions. New Flyer was on the Board and was pushing hard for hydrogen as it is the only approved seller of hydrogen buses in Canada, so would be sole-sourced for them, and also receives more per hydrogen bus.

The membership list is equally problematic. The three companies listed pay the highest membership fees of any category, and are joined by two more natural gas firms, Fortis BC and Fortis Alberta, which once again get nothing if battery-electric buses are chosen.

Sole-sourcing reports leading to sole-sourcing procurements with a Board and membership with deep conflicts of interest stinks in and of itself and is clearly leading to deeply skewed results.

For example, Brampton paid 20% of a $15 million price tag to CUTRIC and their sub-contractor Deloitte to get a report that jammed 400 hydrogen buses into a blended fleet. Canada’s Zero Emissions Transit Fund paid the other 80%, $12 million, which means Canadian taxpayers paid for the effort. Raynor and I identified $1.5 billion in errors and intentionally skewed modeling in a $9 billion cost estimate to support the pretense that a blended fleet would be the cheapest.

• $1.1 billion for modeling that pushed hydrogen bus acquisition out so far in time that discounting due to inflation reduced their costs by 40%
• $200 million extra for gray hydrogen costs that are in line with real world actuals for trucked-in hydrogen
• $100 million less for replacement of batteries in battery-electric buses as batteries in real world fleets are lasting much longer than projected and costs in the 2030s will drop significantly
• $25 million extra in costs for hydrogen fuel cell replacements as they are lasting only 3 years in real world fleets
• $25 million extra for carbon pricing for gray hydrogen which was entirely excluded from the cost case by CUTRIC
• $10 million extra for hydrogen storage and refueling facilities as CUTRIC had low-balled that cost based on global data, ignoring the costs of the hydrogen liquification components they had included.

All of this was documented in excruciating detail with references to global data sets, governmental reports, peer reviewed publications, and the like in the series of articles I published last year. CUTRIC and Deloitte’s report was literally indefensible.

CUTRIC’s conflicts of interest prevented it from fixing the deep errors in the report, fixing its own governance, and working to be a useful member of Canada’s transit community. Instead, Petrunic hired a social media PR agency which she appears to have fired when they told her that what she wanted them to do was a bad idea, and instead published a lengthy and dyspeptic post on LinkedIn doubling down inaccuracy, defending CUTRIC’s flawed modeling and adding a healthy dose of vitriol and ad hominem.

CUTRIC’s Status Report Is Content-Free

So now Petrunic is showing up in front of Mississauga’s council to spend five minutes providing a technical update on the meritless hydrogen bus trial she talked them into over the last few years and five minutes on “Misinformation Clarification.” The slides are a delight.

The first couple are about CUTRIC, naturally, as that’s clearly what the councillors are interested in. Oh, wait, that’s what Petrunic is interested in, not her audience. The third is a timeline of CUTRIC’s eight years of pushing for the hydrogen trial, including at least one funded feasibility study.

The fourth is a slide about the eight years of wasted time, money, and talent costing millions in direct expenditures and money that have led to 2025.

The fifth is feasibility studies past and future and who is paying for them. So far, it’s a lengthy history lesson and given that Petrunic only has five minutes on the agenda for this, she’s undoubtedly going to run out of time before telling the councillors anything of value.

Finally, on page six there’s a ‘status’ report.

I’ve run a lot of major programs and developed and delivered a lot of status reports on multi-year initiatives with up to billion dollar price tags. This is one of the most content-free status reports I have ever seen. This is supposed to be a technical update, but there’s exactly zero technology and zero detail, just claims to have successfully achieved all objectives.

A good program status report includes a forward projected schedule, which this doesn’t have. It includes forward cost projections, which this status report doesn’t have and is sorely lacking. It includes an issue register articulating issues identified and overcome and outstanding issues, which this report lacks. It includes a risk register of risk sorted by magnitude and including mitigations, which is completely absent from this report.

A useful program status report would have a slide for each of the six bullets on this single slide, as well as a schedule slide that extends beyond 2024, a cost concerns slide, an issues slide, and a risks slide, possibly with the biggest risks having a slide of their own.

The last slide in the section is on coverage, with a small handful of articles and presentations, and understandably excludes anything published in CleanTechnica.

This is a sales pitch for the Mississauga hydrogen bus trial that excludes anything which could give councillors either useful information or insight and presents a likely inaccurate picture that everything is rosy.

The Problems With Hydrogen Being Low Carbon

As a note on the green hydrogen supply, that’s being procured from Enbridge — once again the same Enbridge paying the highest membership fees to CUTRIC and on the Board of the organization — from a small electrolyzer that Enbridge built in Markham, 60 kilometers away from Mississauga’s transit depot. That 2.5 MW electrolyzer has a capacity of producing up to 1,000 kg of hydrogen a day. It is supposed to be a utility-scale power-to-gas facility, turning Ontario’s fairly low carbon electricity into a lot less energy in the form of hydrogen and blending it with natural gas to decarbonize its product.

Let’s put that in context to make it clear that this is more greenwashing, just like Enbridge’s now 14 years of pushing renewable natural gas that makes up only 1% of its transmission and distribution volumes. A thousand kilograms of hydrogen has 142 gigajoules of energy, so this equates to 52,000 gigajoules annually, assuming the electrolyzer and other equipment is in operation as much as is intended (a bad assumption with hydrogen). Enbridge distributes 2,300,000,000 gigajoules of natural gas in Ontario annually, so in the best case, this is 0.002% of the gigajoules delivered, even more of a rounding error than renewable natural gas.

It’s worth noting that hydrogen has a much lower density than natural gas, so the blended hydrogen delivers less energy per billion cubic feet than natural gas does, meaning that even at 20% blending rates — which this is orders of magnitude away from — only 7% decarbonization of energy occurs.

The Mississauga pilot intends to use some of the hydrogen from that facility, which brings up a few points. The first is that per its documents it requires 30 kilograms of hydrogen per bus per day and is planning to operate 10 hydrogen buses. That means 300 kilograms of hydrogen a day, or 30% of the total maximum output of the Enbridge facility. This means that Enbridge is going to reduce the homeopathic dilutions of hydrogen in the natural gas network even further.

The second is the greenhouse gas intensity well-to-wheel of the hydrogen buses. The hydrogen is being generated intermittently when there is surplus electricity in Ontario, which given its grid means at night when its nuclear plants need something to do. That is indeed low-carbon electricity, and it’s cheap electricity as well, given Ontario pretty much needs to give it away to avoid surplus baseload generation charges from neighboring jurisdictions, something that’s been plaguing the province for a couple of decades given it has too high a ratio of electricity from inflexible nuclear generation.

The 60 km distance becomes a factor. The only way to get the hydrogen to the transit depot is with a hydrogen tube truck. Depending on the design of the refueling facility — unstated and critical — a truck might be able to carry 280 to 380 kilograms of hydrogen. Calling that sufficient for the purposes is reasonable, so about one Class 8 semi truck a day will leave Markham for Mississauga and return for a 120 km round trip.

Given highway speeds and a diesel drivetrain, that’s 0.15 tons of carbon dioxide or equivalent for transporting the hydrogen. Given the alternative of ten diesel buses traveling 300 km a day and emitting around 0.3 tons of CO2e per day each, that’s not unreasonable. In the future, the semi could be electric, so this could be eliminated.

However, there’s another aspect of greenhouse gas emissions and hydrogen. It’s a potent greenhouse gas and it leaks. Reports from governmental agencies and from peer reviewed journals that have measured leakage find that small electrolysis facilities like Enbridge’s leak 2% to 10% per day before remediation, and after remediation still leak 2% to 4%. As hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and must be transported at pressures equivalent to 3 to 7 kilometers under the surface of the ocean or at temperatures 290° colder than room temperature in liquid form, every time it’s handled 1% or more leaks. Further, testing in South Korea of hydrogen buses after a refueling station explosion last year, and cars during regular testing, found 15% of the vehicles were leaking hydrogen.

The combination means 5% to 10% of the hydrogen Enbridge manufactures in its Markham facility is likely to leak across the multiple touch points inherent in pumping it into tube trucks, pumping it into refueling facilities in Mississauga, pumping it into buses, and then operating the buses.

If hydrogen weren’t a greenhouse gas, this would be simply a problematic economic issue and an even more problematic safety issue, but it is. That it would interfere with the breakdown of the potent greenhouse gas methane — the primary component in natural gas — was identified in 2000. The first quantification was published in 2021 and an improved one by an international group of researchers was published in Nature in 2023.

Hydrogen is 12 to 37 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide over 100 years and the more relevant 20 years, respectively. All hydrogen that leaks will cause 37 times as much warming for a couple of decades after it is leaked than carbon dioxide.

300 kilograms of hydrogen a day leaking 5% would result in another 0.5 tons of CO2e per day, 60% of a single diesel bus’ emissions. At 10%, that’s a ton a day, as much as three diesel buses.

This isn’t subject to better engineering because of the pressures involved and the tininess of the molecule. The biggest component that fails in hydrogen solutions are seals on compressors, due to the requirement for very tight mechanical tolerances, high and changing pressures, and thermal degradation as the gas is compressed and uncompressed, causing significant temperature changes.

Operational Risks & Issues With Hydrogen Buses

Enbridge has released no public data on the operational uptime of its Power to Gas facility, but the history of small hydrogen facilities is a history of regular downtime. Quebec’s similarly costed hydrogen electrolysis and refueling facility in Quebec was out of service for a full third of the hours in the four years of the now abandoned hydrogen car trial, about 500 days in all. South Korea saw its hydrogen refueling stations out of service for 1,100 cumulative days over two years. California’s hydrogen refueling stations, in the six months of highest use before they stopped reporting usage and maintenance data, were out of service for 20% more hours than they were actually pumping hydrogen.

Operational costs for small hydrogen facilities are adding a lot to the cost of hydrogen, between the lack of supplies of hydrogen endemic globally to the 15% to 30% cost of capital for annual maintenance of the facilities. Enbridge is likely experiencing these costs, and at $5.2 million for the facility, that’s $0.8 to $1.6 million a year, adding another $2 to $4 to its costs of manufacturing and delivering hydrogen.

Real world experience with small electrolysis stations finds that not only are they sources of hydrogen leakage, they are much less efficient than the hypothetical numbers published. Reports are showing 50% more to double the electricity required per kilogram of hydrogen, which impacts all cost cases significantly.

Mississauga is intending to enter into a fuel as a service contract with Enbridge, something Enbridge has been pushing for hard as it is facing the existential threat of electrification that will make its entire business model obsolete. Whatever the cost of manufacturing the hydrogen, trucking it, and maintaining the refueling infrastructure is, Enbridge is probably going to cost it below a profitable point for ‘trials’ because they want to get transit agencies hooked on it.

The capital cost of the trial, by the way, is expected to be in the $40 million range per city documents, but with Canada’s Zero Emission Transit Fund footing 50% of the bill. Note that as hydrogen isn’t and can’t be zero emissions, Canada shouldn’t actually be paying for it.

Regardless, Mississauga will end up paying for the real costs of maintaining the hydrogen buses — 50% greater costs for maintenance per California’s bus fleet reported results — and eventually the real cost of hydrogen, which will remain expensive to manufacture, distribute, and pump.

The Misinformation Non-Clarification

And so to the “Misinformation Clarification.” If you expected CUTRIC to actually provide citations to international studies or any credible sources in their deck, you’ll be sadly disappointed. That section involves 14 slides, yet is expected to be delivered in five minutes, a remarkable ratio of slides to time as the normal ratio for rapid presentations is a slide per minute and the normal rate is 3-5 minutes per slide.

Even so, the slides contain almost no substantive content, and what little is there is misleading, misinformed, or simply wrong. The first 11 slides in the section repeat the claims they are questioning and mostly say “Incorrect” with exactly zero further explanation or citations. Here’s an example.

Incorrect? Here’s a fairly complete list of hydrogen bus trials over the past 25 years. Note the striking consistency of trying hydrogen and giving it up for battery electric instead.

1. Vancouver (1999): 3 buses had high capital and maintenance costs and trials were ended.
2. Chicago (2000): 3 buses experienced high capital and maintenance costs, and three-hour refueling times so trials were ended.
3. Ottawa (2000): Wisely looked at the failures in Chicago and Vancouver and said, not us.
4. Perth (2004): BP put gray hydrogen into Daimler buses. Abandoned with no hydrogen buses in Australia today.
5. Reykavik (2005): Ran 3 buses with EU money for 4 years, then mothballed them when the money ran out as they were too expensive.
6. Whistler (2010): 20 buses failed due to freezing water emissions and high maintenance costs; abandoned in 2014.
7. São Paulo (2010): Trialed hydrogen and chose electric.
8. Oslo (2013): Operated briefly before switching to electric buses, targeting full electrification in 2023.
9. San Remo (2014): Switched to electric trolley buses, abandoning hydrogen.
10. Flanders (2014): Transitioned to electric-only strategy.
11. Hamburg (2019): Returned 4 hydrogen buses, bought 183 electric.
12. Wiesbaden (2021): Returned 10 hydrogen buses due to infrastructure issues.
13. London (2022): Hydrogen buses deemed too costly and complex compared to electric in report, and couldn’t do all routes.
14. Liverpool (2022): Couldn’t run hydrogen buses due to lack of green hydrogen.
15. Montpelier (2022): Hydrogen bus six times costlier to operate than electric.
16. Pau, (2023): 6 hydrogen buses were too expensive and failure prone.
17. Vienna (2023): Canceled order because hydrogen system offered didn’t meet requirements.
18. Bakersfield (2023): Hydrogen bus destroyed in a refueling fire. Also damaged $3 million fuel pump. California’s hydrogen bus fleet 50% more expensive to maintain than diesel.
19. Palma de Mallorca (2023): Leaking refrigerant crippled five hydrogen buses.
20. South Tyrol (Ongoing): Hydrogen buses 2.3 times costlier than electric.
21. Tarragona (2023): Abandoned hydrogen procurement in favor of electric buses.

What exactly is Mississauga transit going to learn by trialing hydrogen itself that can’t be learned by talking to the almost two dozen transit agencies that tried it and abandoned it? 2.3 to 6 times more expensive full lifecycle. Less reliable. Hydrogen supply challenges. Refueling challenges.

Mississauga is about to learn exactly the same lessons at great expense.

It’s not worth trying to figure out what CUTRIC means on any of these slides, because they aren’t making any arguments with data and logics, just denying things.

Finally at the end of the deck there’s some data. One claim is that green hydrogen buses are lower emissions than battery-electric buses, which is a remarkable assertion given the GHG work-ups above. The claim is based on a need for diesel heaters in the buses, which is true for New Flyer battery-electric buses because they are inferior. Leading practice globally in cold cities is better insulation on buses, heat pumps, and radiative electric heaters. That’s what they use in Harbin in the north of China where they have two-month long ice sculpture festivals, for example. The concerns about range are temporary as battery energy density continues to climb as battery prices fall, so long range, warm, fully electric buses will do the job just fine, thank you very much.

The reason why hydrogen buses don’t need them is that fuel cells are inefficient and give off heat that comes from the costly hydrogen. Instead of burning inexpensive diesel or running hyperefficient heat pumps, hydrogen buses consume expensive hydrogen, which is like warming your home with spirit lamps filled with expensive scotch.

You won’t get insulated electric buses with heat pumps and radiative heaters from New Flyer because it’s made the bad strategic decision to provide any drivetrain imaginable, driving up the cost of its battery-electric buses with the spillover from hydrogen manufacturing costs and making inferior battery-electric buses because they aren’t focusing on doing that. Basically it’s just shoving batteries into the same frame that it puts diesel engines or fuel cells in instead of building high quality and optimized electric buses. You can get heat pump buses from BYD.

My assertion is that for every hydrogen bus New Flyer sells in North America, it loses three battery-electric bus sales to firms like BYD, with its factory in California racking up hundreds of units of battery-electric buses in the past couple of years. Quantron, a European truck manufacturer, tried the New Flyer route, selling both hydrogen and inferior battery-electric trucks, and went out of business, leaving IKEA Austria’s fleet of delivery vehicles with no parts or servicing support. New Flyer’s strategy is leading it directly to the same end, following on its very significant fiscal challenges of a couple of years ago.

The deck is also inflating the full lifecycle emissions of battery-electric buses because its modeling is still stuck prior to global experience that electric vehicle batteries are lasting 40% or more longer than predicted. CATL is delivering EV batteries today with million-mile or 1.6 million kilometer warranties, much longer than the full driving lifecycle of a battery-electric bus. On the same note, CUTRIC is pretending that fuel cells last much longer than they actually do, with global data on high duty cycle heavy vehicles showing 2-3 years before significant degradation. CUTRIC’s modeling pretends that fuel cells and batteries have to be replaced in the same number of years, when that isn’t remotely true.

The EU’s end of year status report for its hydrogen programs for 2023 pointed this out, indicating that while eight-year warranties and five-year full service plans were available for battery-electric buses, only 20-month warranties and plans were available for hydrogen buses. They also pointed out the complete failure of their fuel cell longevity program, IMMORTAL.

In other words, once again CUTRIC is skewing the data toward hydrogen buses, in three different ways. First is by lowballing hydrogen greenhouse gas emissions, second is by asserting the worst case battery lifespans, and third is by pretending that fuel cells last as long as the prematurely truncated lifespans of batteries.

Then there’s a lithium-ion battery energy density chart. It misses the point that it’s both energy density and price per kWh that matter, pretending only the density matters. It also misses the continued innovation in battery chemistry that’s seeing significant increases that will be commercialized for heavy vehicles in the coming years, including CATL’s doubling of current lithium-ion energy densities in a battery it’s delivering right now. There are multiple firms delivering silicon anodes which substantially increase battery energy density, and those will be common in a few years.

Then there’s the whining about the impacts of purported misinformation. If CUTRIC wasn’t riddled with conflicts of interest, wasn’t badly governed, wasn’t intentionally skewing studies toward hydrogen buses, and was competent, then there would have been no series of articles about their repeated failures to deliver good guidance to Canadian transit organizations.

One point I noted late last year was that in addition to having a Board of Directors laden with conflicts of interest, the Board was also bigger than the entire staff of CUTRIC. It appears both of those have been ever so slightly adjusted, as perpetual money loser Ballard — no profits ever and an average of $55 million in annual losses since 2000 — is no longer represented on the Board per CUTRIC’s website. It’s still a member, per the website, but per the Wayback Machine, that page hasn’t been updated since at least April of 2024, so it’s possible that many members have departed as many had indicated that they would at the CUTA conference last year.

The takeaway regarding Ballard is that it is the sole supplier of fuel cells to New Flyer and it is losing so much money that its viability as a company is seriously in question. The past three years have seen reality setting in around hydrogen for energy and so there will be many fewer investors willing to prop it up with continued capital, and its limited revenues don’t nearly cover its expenses. Mississauga’s and New Flyer’s expectations of continued warranties, parts and support for Ballard fuel cells are not aligned with the shaky fiscal reality of the firm.

Basically in the 26-page deck there are two slides with actual information on them, one of them is wrong, and the other — charitably — incomplete. If I were Mississauga City Council I would tell CUTRIC to go away and write an actual status report and not waste its time with this piece of skewed fluff.

Statements Regarding Expertise

CUTRIC will likely attempt to assert that I and others commenting on the hydrogen trial, such as Michael Raynor and Paul Martin, are not experts in transit or hydrogen transportation when the reality is that the reverse is more accurate. That’s certainly the tone of Petrunic’s LinkedIn post defending its efforts.

I’ve been researching, analyzing, synthesizing, and publishing on transportation globally for all transportation modes and all articulated decarbonization solutions for decades. My first essay on transit that I remember was a UofT undergraduate assessment of the Sheppard subway line in the mid 1990s. In just the past five years I’ve published projections of maritime shipping decarbonization, aviation decarbonization, and hydrogen demand scenarios through 2100 based on my assessment of all of the technologies and economics involved. In addition to this site, my work has been republished in a few peer reviewed journals at their request, published in Forbes, and published on other sites as well.

This has led to me being asked to participate in three book projects in the past couple of years. Dr. Joe Romm, a leader in the Clinton-era DOE and now working with leading climate researcher Professor Michael Mann in the University of Pennsylvania center for climate communication, asked me to do a technical edit of the 20th anniversary edition of his book The Hype About Hydrogen, publishing in April 2025. The team working on the second edition of the book Supergrid Super Solution: A Handbook for Energy Independence and a Europe Free from Fossil Fuels, asked me to participate in providing edits and content, including on the sections regarding hydrogen vs electrification. The editor of Proven Climate Solutions: Leading Voices on How to Accelerate Change asked me to contribute a chapter on decarbonizing aviation, another place where hydrogen is often touted, and I’ve done the analysis, alongside luminaries such as Mark Z. Jacobson, the driver behind 100% renewables for 147 countries globally by 2050, and Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org.

I was also requested to serve on the advisory board of the Swedish RISE Institute study on decarbonizing European road freight, the 2035 Joint Impact Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Reducing Pathways for EU Road Transport, alongside David Cebon, professor at Cambridge and founder and director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, and Volker Hasenberg, the head of hydrogen for Daimler.

My perspectives on global decarbonization have led to innumerable requests for presentations on multiple continents. Perhaps most pertinently, I presented between the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and Jeremy Rifkin, who is the author of the energy illiterate but very influential The Hydrogen Economy in the second quarter of 2024. Additionally, I have presented on various aspects of decarbonization including transportation due to requests at Columbia University, Tsinghua University, California Polytechnic State University, the India Smart Utilities Week conference, and numerous other events. A key event in Brussels in October saw me on stage with the Belgian energy minister, a European member of parliament, the editor of the Irish Times, and the chair of the grid innovation technology association currENT Europe.

As noted in the conflicts section, I’m engaged as an expert witness in lawsuits against Toyota in California due to my publications on the failures, costs, and climate challenges of hydrogen for transportation. I am regularly engaged by firms and investment funds to provide expert guidance.

This is not to say that I assert that I’m correct on all things, but merely to say that a lot of third parties globally consider me a credible voice on decarbonization analysis. As I say regularly related to my scenarios projecting domain decarbonization through 2100, I don’t claim to be right, I just claim to be less wrong than most.

Paul Martin is a professional chemical process engineer with a three-decade career building modular chemical processing pilot plants with regular experience working with hydrogen and is a founding member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition. Michael Raynor was until recently a managing director of sustainability and thought leadership for Deloitte (although clearly not involved with the challenged Brampton study). He is the author of four books on strategy and innovation as well as the founder of a firm focused on addressing hard to abate climate challenges. I’m only engaged related to CUTRIC because Michael asked me to look at it based on my expertise.

Meanwhile, CUTRIC has fewer staff members than Board members. The staff members almost uniformly have very short professional careers and very short times working for CUTRIC despite its decade in existence. Its biggest study, the deeply challenged Brampton effort, had to be subcontracted to Deloitte because CUTRIC did not have the resources to execute on it. The model they claim to have in its third iteration was originally brought to them by one of the staff members they subsequently fired and which they lost during a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, leading to them having to rebuild it from scratch. It’s a weakly staffed organization with an arrogant and weak leader who takes credit for the work of others then fires them if they disagree with her or request to be treated respectfully.

CUTRIC simply isn’t a credible or respected organization compared to its critics.

Statements Regarding Conflicts of Interest

At present I own no electric vehicle stocks, having just divested the last of my TSLA during my current portfolio rebalancing, and am not engaged in shorting hydrogen stocks or indeed any stocks. I have no investment positions in any competitors to New Flyer or Ballard and have generic renewable energy ETFs, not specific competitors to Enbridge. My clients in the past year have been renewables developers, green infrastructure pension funds, venture capitalists, family wealth funds, energy storage startups, aviation startups, and the EU for an EU-Canada methane emissions mitigation dialogue. I am currently engaged as an expert witness against Toyota in California for its false and misleading advertising regarding its Toyota Mirai having the same reliability as a standard internal combustion car based on my global research, analysis, and publications on hydrogen for transportation. Finally, I am a principal in a UK-centric firm founded last year to deliver rapid, lightweight digital twins for water and road assets as they are challenged by climate change and aging infrastructure.

While clearly Canada’s transit agencies need reliable advisory services which CUTRIC is not providing and Deloitte working through CUTRIC is not providing, I have not approached any transit agencies offering those services nor have I been approached by them. While I would be quite willing to assist transit agencies and cities professionally, I am not engaged in doing so and am not pursuing this, as my clients and firms are global and my research and analysis is productive and consuming.

I have no skin in Mississauga’s — or Brampton’s, Edmonton’s, or Winnipeg’s — decisions regarding purchasing hydrogen buses. My motivation is to prevent cash-strapped Canadian cities from wasting money repeating hydrogen mistakes that have been made and abandoned globally, and to ensure that transit users in Canada get reliable and cost-effective service.