Hydrogen, the initial element; odorless, tasteless, invisible, ubiquitous but unavailable on its own. It’s found only strongly bound to other elements, particularly oxygen.
Colorless but colorful. “Black hydrogen” is produced by electrolysis of water from coal-fired generation. “Gray hydrogen” is from reformed natural gas. “Blue hydrogen” is produced from gas, with CO2 captured and stored. “Green hydrogen” is hydrogen electrolyzed from renewable electricity. “Pink hydrogen” is electrolyzed from nuclear-produced electricity.
Constellation Energy, piloting the largest nuclear generating fleet in the U.S., has drydocked its billion-dollar plans to produce pink hydrogen, fearful that without a federal government subsidy, it will produce red ink. Hydrogen Fuel News reported June 5, “In coming months, the US Treasury Department will be providing guidance to clarify how H2 suppliers will be able to qualify for a subsidy as high as $3 per kilogram as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Companies like Constellation Energy and its nuclear hydrogen plan have been waiting for these rules to be released since the law was first signed in August 2022.”
If Constellation concludes the Treasury guidance doesn’t pencil out to profits, the Baltimore-based energy company could abandon its hydrogen plans, the hydrogen news site observed: “Constellation has now announced that the future of its pink H2 project will be decided on the types of limits that will be imposed by the Biden administration, which is facing pressure from environmental groups and some lawmakers to ensure that this plan focused on decarbonization will indeed be an environmentally friendly one. That said, determining what constitutes environmental friendliness has yet to be determined.”
Last March, Constellation launched a 1-MW demonstration project at its Nine Mile Point nuclear site in Oswego, N.Y., to “help demonstrate the potential for hydrogen to power a clean economy. When produced at scale, clean hydrogen can be used to make next-generation energy for otherwise hard-to-decarbonize industries like aviation, long haul transportation, steelmaking and agriculture.” The company got $5.8 million from the Department of Energy for its demo project.
The Treasury rules will determine Constellation’s pink hydrogen future, not market conditions. Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said, “The uncertainty around the regulations has brought us pretty much to a full stop.”
At the same time Constellation was getting wobbly about pink hydrogen, DOE unveiled its U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap. Despite decades of hydrogen hoopla, DOE’s roadmap looks rather restrained. As E&E News reported, the DOE strategy “lists dozens of actions to be taken through 2035 by policymakers, industry, regulators and others to promote the production, transport, storage and consumption of low-carbon hydrogen. Overall, the fuel could slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent through 2050, relative to 2005 levels, DOE said.”
DOE said it foresees U.S. hydrogen production of “10 million metric tonnes (MMT) of clean hydrogen annually by 2030, 20 MMT annually by 2040, and 50 MMT annually by 2050.” As E&E notes, that 2030 figure is just about the same amount of elemental hydrogen as is now produced in the U.S. by conventional, allegedly “dirty,” technologies. Presumably, moving production to cleaner technologies will reduce conventional production by some, perhaps equivalent, amount.
At a press call, DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the roadmap for “clean” hydrogen calls for a “colossal effort” and could create up to 100,000 new jobs by 2030. Again, in context, that’s pretty modest, as the U.S. economy produced 7.1 million new jobs in 2022, or some 475,000 per month.
The DOE hydrogen plan has three strategic aims:
- Targeting “high-impact uses” of hydrogen, including “the industrial sector (e.g., chemicals, steel and refining), heavy-duty transportation, and long-duration energy storage to enable a clean grid,” with a possibility of hydrogen exports.
- Reduce production costs, to “catalyze both innovation and scale, stimulating private sector investments, spurring development across the hydrogen supply chain, and dramatically reducing the cost of clean hydrogen.” This includes “targeting critical material and supply chain vulnerabilities.”
- Creating “regional networks,” to “enable large-scale clean hydrogen production close to high priority hydrogen users, allowing the sharing of a critical mass of infrastructure.”
All of this, according to DOE’s roadmap, will require action across the federal bureaucracy, “including the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, and Treasury, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in close coordination with the Executive Office of the President.” What happened to Health and Human Services and Homeland Security?
–Kennedy Maize
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