Considerable time and effort has gone into pursuing the federal government’s plan to spend billions of dollars to create several regional hydrogen hubs. News about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) center’s selection process has been hard to come by, particularly because potential applicants were not made public at the time of the agency’s informal cutback to late 2022 and many potential developers, for competitive reasons, have chosen to play their cards very close to the vest. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll publish for the first time the full list of DOE’s 33 animated proposals, examine some of the plans that were combined in an effort to produce a stronger joint application, and share a bit about the concept papers that didn’t Don’t take the informal DOE cutoff.
The United States has made clean hydrogen a priority, with the federal government’s Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) initiative aimed at accelerating the process. As we pointed out in Part 1 of this series, the DOE opened $7 billion in funding in September 2022 for the development of several centers. For the first stage of the center selection process, DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstration (OCED), which will administer funding for the hydrogen center, required interested parties to submit concept papers on their planned projects. Of the 79 papers that were submitted, 33 were encouraged in late 2022 to submit a full application by the April 7 deadline. (Note also that projects that were encouraged to submit a full application were not required to do so, and projects on the discouraged list were still eligible to submit a full application.)
Clean hydrogen can be produced in a number of different ways. It can be run with water through nuclear or renewable energy electrolysers, producing hydrogen and oxygen. Separately, low-carbon hydrogen can be produced by passing natural gas through SMRs or ATRs (steam methane reformers and autothermal reformers, respectively) and capturing and sequestering most of the carbon dioxide (CO).2), resulting in low lifetime net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A clean hydrogen hub, then, is “a network of clean hydrogen producers, potential clean hydrogen consumers and connecting infrastructure located in close proximity.” In our initial blog we were able to identify more than half of the projects that the DOE encouraged to submit a full application.
