The Department of Energy’s $7 billion plan to create a system of “hydrogen hubs” across the United States is concerning because much of the hydrogen will be produced from non-renewable, emissions-producing sources. The Sierra Club supports hydrogen made only from renewable sources: wind, solar, and geothermal energy.
The proposed hub for serving New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania would be called Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (MACH2).
The Biden Administration’s stated goal is to use these hydrogen hubs to “accelerate the commercial scale deployment of low-cost, clean hydrogen,” yet before clean hydrogen can happen, this plan calls for scaling up the production of hydrogen via emissions producing methods.
The creation of truly green hydrogen must be powered by renewable energy, and this can be accomplished only via the separation of hydrogen from water, a process called electrolysis. However, even after hydrogen is produced, it must be stored and transported carefully. At the same time, hydrogen containers and pipelines must be built to higher standards than for natural gas to withstand hydrogen’s capability to escape and worsen global warming.
We all need to be cognizant of the facts and how to better use federal funding to create truly green hydrogen. The funding for the hydrogen hubs project will come through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The seven proposed “hubs” involve regions of historical energy production, such as Appalachia where stores of natural gas will be tapped to produce hydrogen.
This process converts water and methane into hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2). According to the plan, as much of the CO2 as possible will be stored to prevent its release into the environment and global warming. This technology is not perfect, nor can we count on the energy industry’s commitment to the expense of making this process as reliable as it could be.
Another concern is that scaling up fossil fuel infrastructure to produce non-green hydrogen could dwarf what little green hydrogen production there is. According to the Department of Energy, 98% of all hydrogen currently created in the United States uses fossil fuel as the base component.
It is also concerning that the hubs that are dependent upon natural gas are also planning to control CO2 production using carbon capture (long-term storage), a highly problematic technology. It means that rather than perfecting alternatives to CO2, the United States would try to put the problem under the carpet.
Some proponents of the hydrogen hub plan have argued that these hydrogen hubs will help create a market for hydrogen, including green hydrogen, and therefore are worth the emissions tradeoff. The production of hydrogen using natural gas leads to the creation of greenhouse gas emissions. The production of hydrogen from nuclear energy (pink hydrogen), which is also in the hub plan, perpetuates the upstream emissions and health problems from uranium mining and downstream problems from nuclear waste.
Another argument is that green hydrogen, with this level of federal support, will one day become a fuel of choice; but this would require a huge and expensive infrastructure system with complicated pipeline and storage systems. We don’t need to go that way, and in fact, we have already made the choice to go with renewable electricity as our basic form of energy, replacing fossil-fuel based-energy.
Still, hydrogen does show potential as a form of fuel storage. Unneeded renewable energy can be used to produce green hydrogen via electrolysis, and this hydrogen can be stored and tapped when grid demand peaks or for special uses, such as long-haul trucking and railroading. This is where using renewable energy to create green hydrogen makes the best sense.
There are other underexplored alternatives for energy production. Geothermal heating and cooling systems have been employed with great success by exploiting the differences in surface and below-ground temperatures.
Some see the hydrogen hubs as priming the pump for eventual green hydrogen production, while others see them as a windfall for the fossil fuel industry that will tether us to fossil fuels through costly investments in infrastructure and lead to an insubstantial increase in green hydrogen production. If we allow ourselves to become too dependent on hydrogen, we will not be able to cut greenhouse gases and will commit ourselves to the use of infrastructure that would not qualify as part of the renewable grid we hope to create.
A discussion of the seven proposed regional hydrogen hubs and their pros and cons can be found in the electronic section of this newsletter.