Quick: What was the biggest failure of the clean tech bubble that burst over a decade ago? Was it Solyndra, the innovative solar panel company that went belly-up in the face of cheap competitors? A123 Systems, the pioneering lithium-ion startup that was eventually sold for pennies on the dollar to a Chinese auto parts manufacturer?
Arguably, neither.
No, the real failure was biofuels, which today still burn in the engines of cars and trucks across the U.S. Corn ethanol, in particular, was touted as a way to create jobs and support American farmers while reducing the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It accomplished the first two action items, but rigorous research has shown that corn ethanol produces as much or more climate-warming emissions as just burning gasoline.
Hydrogen risks repeating the same mistakes, and the Biden administration’s plan for regional hubs isn’t helping.
That’s not to say that the universe’s lightest element doesn’t have a potentially bright future. Difficult-to-decarbonize industries like ammonia and steel are obvious targets, and producing enough hydrogen to satiate those sectors could bring the price down to the point where it makes sense to use it elsewhere.
But until that happens, there’s little chance of hydrogen becoming as common as gasoline. Electric vehicles’ head start is almost certainly too much to overcome.
Solution in search of a problem?
Transportation is a key part to the $7 billion hydrogen hub program, but it’s not the sole focus. In that way, the federal government seems to have learned from the biofuels era. It’s still present, with all but the Heartland hub investigating the matter, but the emphasis is on trucking, shipping and aviation, not commuting. Various hubs are going to investigate hydrogen’s application to steel and glass production, oil refining, cold-climate space heating, and fertilizer production.
That’s a lot of shots, and one or more of them may hit the back of the net. But it also might be too many, making hydrogen look like a solution in search of a problem.
And maybe it is. Hydrogen has been the clean fuel of the future for at least 30 years. Hell, I wrote a seventh-grade research paper on the topic. Its title — I kid you not — was “What to do with alternative fuels,” with an entire section devoted to hydrogen. We’re still asking the same question today, and judging by the approach of the hydrogen hub program, it doesn’t appear that we’re any closer to answering it.
Hydrogen has a lot going for it. It burns relatively cleanly in everything from turbines to cylinders to industrial burners (though doing so produces a fair amount of NOx pollution). And we can use it to generate zero-emission electricity using electrolysis. We can produce it from natural gas and water, both of which are plentiful. But no matter how you make hydrogen today, it’s expensive.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) could help bring costs down. The BIL created the regional hydrogen hubs, and the IRA offers a subsidy of $3 per kilogram of hydrogen in addition to tax credits for which the fuel could qualify. The hope is that if hydrogen can find markets and achieve commercial scale, it will get past its awkward adolescence.
Blue hydrogen’s false promise
Yet the hydrogen hub program repeats one of the biofuel initiative’s key mistakes: It prioritizes political points over practical progress.
Take the use of natural gas at the Appalachian, Gulf Coast and Midwest hubs. The most common way it’s used to produce hydrogen, through steam reformation, releases lots of carbon dioxide that has to be captured in order to qualify for tax credits.
Carbon capture is a well-understood process, and one natural gas power plant in the U.S. even experimented with it for a few years. But then it was shut down because it was too expensive to run. Plus, methane isn’t the best feedstock for hydrogen. When it leaks from wells and pipelines, it warms the climate 86 times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Those leaks mean that so-called blue hydrogen could leave a global warming footprint that’s worse than coal.
It’s a striking parallel to the corn ethanol program: A new fuel source is promised to reduce carbon pollution, but it ends up being worse once the entire life cycle is analyzed in greater detail.
So why is it even being considered? Because like the biofuel program, the regional hydrogen hubs have become a political pawn used to bolster legacy industries and placate the politicians beholden to them. Oil and gas benefits because it might find another buyer for methane should countries decide to stop burning it. Power generators and natural gas utilities benefit because they can run it through their existing turbines and pipelines. Natural gas utilities further benefit because they can sell it to existing customers in the same way: a gas to burn to heat their building.
Yet all of those ignore the fact that hydrogen, when compared with natural gas, both leaks more readily and can impose different stresses on existing pipelines and equipment. Retrofitting natural gas infrastructure sounds appealing because it’s familiar and benefits entrenched industries, not because it’ll be cheap. It almost certainly won’t be.
If there’s a bright spot to the hydrogen hub experiment, it’s that green hydrogen (made from renewable power) and pink hydrogen (from nuclear power) are finally getting a chance to bring costs down and find suitable markets.
A decarbonized future will probably require hydrogen in one industry or another, and the regional hydrogen hubs’ scattershot approach may yet bear some fruit. The risk, though, is that some of it will be rotten and risk spoiling the rest.