The Hydrogen Hubs Have Been Chosen. Who wins? Part 2

On Friday, October 13th, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the seven winners of its $7 billion Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) competition, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to spur the creation of a viable hydrogen economy. My article on the clean-hydrogen juggernaut can be found here.

According to DOE’s press release, “Clean hydrogen is a flexible energy carrier that can be produced from a diverse mix of domestic clean energy resources, including renewables, nuclear, and fossil resources with safe and responsible carbon capture. Its unique characteristics will allow the H2Hubs to substantially reduce harmful emissions from some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy, such as chemical and industrial processes and heavy-duty transportation, while creating new economic opportunities across the country. It could also be used as a form of long-duration energy storage to support the expansion of renewable power. By enabling the development of diverse, domestic clean energy pathways across multiple sectors of the economy, clean hydrogen will strengthen American energy independence.”

The qualifiers “can be” and “could also” are relevant – there should actually be more qualifiers in this paragraph – as most of the applicants’ technologies and production methods cited in the press release are unproven and, at present, prohibitively expensive. True, the goal of the H2Hubs initiative is to bring down the cost of hydrogen. But that only happens if the technologies work, and don’t actually make matters worse for frontline-community members in particular and the climate crisis as a whole.

Desperation is clearly a driver behind the clean hydrogen juggernaut. Last March, when U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced the 2023 synthesis of its climate change reports, he warned that the rate of temperature rise in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years; that concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years; and that it will take a quantum leap in climate action to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything everywhere all at once,” Guterres said.

The desperation, as well as the clean-hydrogen frenzy, is transatlantic and has ignited an “elements race” of sorts between the U.S. and the European Union to gain research and market advantage in the clean-hydrogen space. After the U.S. Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last spring, with its $369 billion in clean-energy funding, officials in Brussels announced that a European Hydrogen Bank would be created to subsidize its nascent industry in low- or no-carbon hydrogen.⁠ The goal, according to the European Commission, is to lessen the cost gap between renewable clean hydrogen and fossil fuels, eliminate oil imports from Russia, and achieve climate neutrality by 2050.⁠ Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if it was also able to draw clean-energy investment opportunities away from the U.S.

In my investigative story on hydrogen, I included material that took the temperature of the current pro-hydrogen push and put it in historical context. That material did not make it into my editor’s final cut; it was deemed to be “old news.” The fact that hydrogen has been “the next big thing” for decades yet has proven time and again to be a money-guzzling chimera is highly relevant, it seems to me. So here it is:

Joe Romm has seen today’s hydrogen frenzy before. A physicist, founding editor of the blog Climate Progress, and expert on clean energy technologies, Romm had just joined the Department of Energy as Assistant to the Deputy Secretary in 1993 when he was invited to his first energy briefing. It was on hydrogen. There had been a breakthrough at one of the national labs in hydrogen fuel cells, which use the chemical energy of hydrogen to cleanly and efficiently produce electricity with only water vapor as emissions, and the data looked promising.

Romm was sold and helped usher in what became a 10-fold increase in DOE funding for hydrogen research and development. “At the time, people were talking about the possibility of a hydrogen economy. I thought that it was a reasonable [proposition,] and as Deputy Assistant Secretary I made sure to keep the hydrogen fuel cell budget high,” he told me recently.

Romm was a booster all the way through the 90’s at DOE, he said. When George W. Bush was elected in 2000 he left DOE but, still gung-ho about the promise of hydrogen, he pitched an article about it to the National Academy of Sciences. Published in 2004, “The Hype about Hydrogen,” defended continued DOE research into hydrogen as a potential substitute for oil but was essentially a well-researched and eviscerating critique of the gas’s near-term prospects.

What happened? I asked.

He laughed. “I did the thing people don't do. I read all the literature and talked to the experts.” In the end, Romm concluded that to make hydrogen safe, competitive with dirty fossil fuels, and widely available, “multiple miracles are needed” that aren’t going to happen any time soon, if ever.

“My problem was with the people who were wasting money on a transition to a technology that was a long way from being worth that kind of investment.”

Twenty years later, with money spigots in the US and Europe on full blast, there are still no miracles in sight and many obstacles remaining.

Michael Liebreich, the founder of BloombergNEF (New Energy Finance), and one of Europe’s leading energy analysts, has scrutinized hydrogen’s current prospects and reached similarly dim conclusion. To borrow one of his Twitter poetics from February of this year: “[N]othing will change the physics and thermodynamics of hydrogen: low density; escapey; explodey; embrittley; NOx-producey if burnt; [and] greenhouse gassy.”

A few months prior to this tweet, at the World Hydrogen Congress in Rotterdam where he gave the keynote address, Liebreich thanked his hosts for their bravery in inviting him and then proceeded to swing the hammer. Referring to the hydrogen race going on between Europe and the U.S. Liebreich said he’d lived through five economic bubbles in his career “and I’m afraid to say I start to recognize the pattern.”