By Phred Dvorak
The Biden administration’s climate push has gotten little love from the other side of the aisle.
Many Republicans have railed against the government’s subsidies for wind and solar, excoriated its support for electric vehicles and decried moves to curb oil and gas.
But one clean-energy candidate has broad support from some of the reddest parts of the U.S.: hydrogen.
Take the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, a largely Republican-controlled region that is home to many of the oil and gas refineries in the U.S.
Backers of hydrogen in that area include Rep. Randy Weber (R., Texas) and Rep. Clay Higgins (R., La.), a Freedom Caucus member who describes fossil fuels as “the lifeblood of our modern society.” Both support a Houston-based hydrogen program vying for a piece of $7 billion in federal grants, though they voted against the legislation that made the grants possible.
“Hydrogen works well with oil and gas,” says Weber, a former air conditioning company owner with a Texas drawl who notes that he has lived within 20 miles of his current home in the Galveston area all his life. Hydrogen “is not a threat to our Gulf Coast,” he says.
Weber says he still thinks the spending in the legislation that included the hydrogen grants was excessive, and frowns on government aid for things such as electric-vehicle charging networks. But he favors funding to help hydrogen businesses get started.
In a polarized energy debate that often pits renewables and their Democratic backers against fossil fuels and Republican interests, hydrogen is emerging as a big-tent fuel.
Hydrogen doesn’t produce carbon emissions when burned, and companies are looking at it for use in cars, power generation and steel manufacturing.
One feature is that it can be produced using either renewables or fossil fuels. Many environmentalists warn that the flexibility could end up hurting the climate by prolonging the use of oil and gas. But it is also a reason for hydrogen’s bipartisan appeal.
“I think hydrogen’s going to be the bridge from the renewables to the fossil fuels,” says Susan Shifflett, executive director of the lobby group Texas Hydrogen Alliance. “Hydrogen is produced from both sides.”
The alliance backed three bills related to hydrogen incentives and regulation in the Republican-heavy Texas legislature this year, during a session marked by fierce battles over curbs on solar and wind. All three passed nearly unanimously.
Hydrogen is one of the most common elements on earth, but it nearly always appears in compounds such as water or methane. Separating it out into pure form takes a lot of energy.
One method involves splitting the element from water molecules using electricity—ideally powered by a green source such as wind or solar. That method generates low emissions, but the technology to do it in large volumes is still developing.
Most hydrogen now is made by applying intense heat to the methane in natural gas. That procedure emits a lot of carbon dioxide, but companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron are proposing to clean it up by capturing the carbon and burying it deep underground.
Those companies and others are planning hydrogen-production projects in Texas and Louisiana, which already have pipelines and facilities for hydrogen and natural gas.
“People in Texas see this as a way to continue Texas’s role as an energy leader,” says Brett Perlman, CEO of the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofit that helped develop the proposal for the Houston-based hydrogen program. “That’s why I think you see that support from a number of different elected officials.”
Not everyone sees the participation of oil and gas companies in building a hydrogen industry as a good thing.
If hydrogen is made from natural gas, that gives fossil fuel producers another excuse to keep pumping, many critics say. Others warn that capturing and burying carbon dioxide to get rid of the emissions associated with hydrogen production is expensive and might not prove as effective or safe as advertised.
“If you’re not using total renewables [in the production of hydrogen], then you’re doing less than” what’s needed, said Robert Bullard, an urban-planning and environmental-policy professor at Texas Southern University, during a lecture on carbon capture in Houston.
Bullard is watching the government’s hydrogen-grant plans closely. The Biden administration has pledged that some of the benefits from the investments will go to disadvantaged communities, and Bullard is on a White House advisory council to help ensure such goals are met. But he said that projects in which the gas is made from fossil fuels are “not even on the table for us.”
“There are still some pretty intense politics around hydrogen and hydrogen production right now if you unpeel the onion a little bit,” says Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Still, the newness of hydrogen as an energy source means that it tends to be less politicized than more-mature technologies such as solar and wind, he says.
And both Republicans and Democrats like that no country has yet seized the lead in hydrogen, in contrast with clean technologies such as solar or batteries, which China dominates. That means the U.S. has a good chance to move ahead of others, says Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a Republican-leaning advocacy group for energy and environmental policy.
“You have much more bipartisanship and ability to get things done when you’re in that space…where the U.S. is strongest,” she says.
Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com
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Phred Dvorak writes about the energy transition and climate for The Wall Street Journal in Houston. Phred has spent most of her career as a foreign correspondent, primarily in Asia. Before coming to Houston, she was a roving reporter based in Tokyo, writing about SoftBank, Indian solar farms and the rescue of a trapped Thai soccer team from a cave. EnergiesNet.com does not necessarily share these views.
Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the November 6, 2023, print edition as ‘Oil Country Goes All In On Hydrogen’. All comments posted and published on EnergiesNet or Petroleumworld, do not reflect either for or against the opinion expressed in the comment as an endorsement of EnergiesNet or Petroleumworld.
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energiesNet.com 11 08 2023
