Biden administration announces $7 billion for hydrogen hubs

There’s no one solution to the climate crisis — it’s gonna take action at all levels of public and private life. And decarbonizing this economy will take lots of different strategies.

That’s why the Biden administration announced Friday that $7 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is going to seven different “hubs” spanning 16 states to — as the White House puts it — “accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen.”

Altogether, the Biden administration said the seven hydrogen hubs will “catalyze” another $40 billion in private investment and eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

Most of that will come in what Beth Trask at the Environmental Defense Fund calls “hard to decarbonize” sectors of the economy.

“That includes heavy industry, like powering steel factories, and producing the alternative fuels we’ll need for long-distance transportation,” she said. “But we really have to get hydrogen right.”

To that end, the hubs will use different strategies to make and use hydrogen. 

“The opportunity is, when hydrogen is used, there are no greenhouse gas emissions released,” said Alex Kizer with the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation. “And the challenge is how to produce hydrogen in low-carbon ways.”

And that challenge is a big one, said Sean O’Leary. He’s a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute.

“The hydrogen hub that’s being announced for our region … is based on blue hydrogen,” he said, using a term that refers to hydrogen produced from natural gas. “And so to that degree, it represents a perpetuation and increased reliance on natural gas and fossil fuels.”

The Biden administration said part of the new projects will be finding safe ways to capture and store CO2 emissions leftover from making hydrogen this way.

Minh Khoi Le, the global head of hydrogen research at Rystad Energy, said the scale of an experiment like this is unprecedented.

“That is the biggest single fundings that we see governments around the world has given to hydrogen,” he said.

Le said that’s why this investment is a big deal for the U.S. and for the planet.