It was only a few days ago that President Biden issued an executive order invoking the Defense Manufacturing Act to provide great support for clean energy and lower carbon emissions in America. This contract gives priority to solar energy, heat pump production, building insulation, electricity grid components and hydrogen production. Here is the part of the order that focuses on hydrogen:
“Electrolyzers, fuel cells and platinum group (PGM) catalysts are vital for increasing domestic production and the use of pure hydrogen, a versatile energy carrier. Pure hydrogen produced by electrolysis is expected to make a significant contribution to achieving US decarbonization goals. President Biden’s actions to support domestic supply chains for cells, fuel cells and PGM catalysts will strengthen national and energy security by reducing US dependence on imported fossil fuels, especially in Russia (the world’s second-largest producer of PGM) and China. “Consumers will benefit from the price stability of pure hydrogen compared to fossil fuels, cost reductions as the hydrogen economy grows and resilient domestic supply chains.”
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks issued a statement after an executive order was announced, saying, “Reducing America’s dependence on gas and oil is critical to US national security.” Fossil fuel supply lines are particularly vulnerable in the conflict. The events announced today by President Biden will help strengthen our supply chains and ensure that the United States is a leader in producing the energy technologies that are essential to our future success. They will also help accelerate the Department of Defense’s move to clean energy technologies that can help strengthen military capabilities while creating good jobs for US workers.
Support for Biden’s latest executive order was generally positive among all CleanTechnica commonwealth. It achieves many of the goals of the government’s Build Back Better legislative package, which was torpedoed in the Senate by Despicable Joe Manchin. But now it turns out that what the Biden administration gives with one hand takes with the other.
Pure hydrogen, dirty hydrogen
The charm of hydrogen is understandable. When oil, coal or natural gas are burned to produce energy, they produce a lot of unpleasant emissions – carbon dioxide, fine particles and oxides of nitrogen and sulfur – which annoy people and contribute to global warming. When hydrogen is used as a fuel, its waste products are heat and water. No wonder people consider hydrogen to be a clean fuel.
But the little dirty secret of hydrogen is that it does not exist in nature. It is enclosed in compounds such as water and dizzying amounts of hydrocarbons. Although it is possible to separate water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen by passing a strong electric current in a device known as an electrolyser, this process takes lots of electricity and costs more than natural gas production today. Part of this week’s executive order aims to make pure hydrogen production more accessible.
Proponents of hydrogen say we can simply use the surplus electricity that comes from grid-based solar power plants in the middle of the day, and they are right. Much of this is wasted or “constrained,” as the industry likes to say. But maintaining a clean hydrogen industry would require a huge amount of new solar energy. Today, there is not enough solar energy to cover all our needs, so we have to choose between powering the cells or powering the cells. We can’t do both, at least not yet.
In some countries, which have enough hydropower, electrolysers are used to produce hydrogen that is truly “green”. But in the United States, the vast majority are produced by reforming so-called natural gas, which is not really so natural. It makes no sense to say “natural gas” than to say “natural coal” or “natural oil.” It is mostly methane and much of this methane escapes into the atmosphere at wellheads or in pipelines and compressor stations when it reaches customers. Even if it enters the hydrogen production plant, it must be divided into individual parts by means of high-pressure steam. One of the by-products of this process? Carbon dioxide, and it does not take into account the energy needed to create that high-temperature pressure steam.
So environmentalists are pleased and outraged to learn that the Department of Energy plans to make $ 8 billion available to create a series of hydrogen centers across the country to reduce hydrogen needed to reduce emissions in such critical industries as steelmaking. and cement. The Verge announces that the U.S. Department of Energy ‘s announcement of intent this week will initially provide funding for 6 to 10 nodes. One of them is to produce hydrogen using renewable energy. Another is to power hydrogen production by nuclear energy. The third is expected to show that it is possible to produce pure hydrogen from fossil fuels using technologies that capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions.
Here’s the kicker. The DOE says it will place at least two more H2Hubs in “gas-rich” regions, which could lead to more of them driving fossil fuels than renewable energy. In other words, the administration could potentially give a big, wet, sloppy $ 8 billion kiss, funded by the taxpayer, to the “gas” industry at a time when almost anyone who is not a fossil fuel lobbyist or a Republican senator knows that it is necessarily. on completely stop using fossil fuels.
Hydrogen production, which combines natural gas with carbon sequestration, does not produce truly clean fuel and could even lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions in certain scenarios. Carbon capture schemes to date do not work or are much more expensive than previously thought. Union of Concerned Scientists and RMI point out that $ 8 billion in clean hydrogen funding comes from last year’s infrastructure law between the two parties. The language in this law only takes into account the climatic impact of CO2 emissions at the hydrogen production site, but does not take into account the emissions that arise from methane leakage on the way to the production site.
He argues that a safer approach would be to examine all greenhouse gas emissions that come from the entire supply chain and hydrogen production process. As a sign that the DOE may keep this in mind when assessing funding applications, the NOI issued this week says the ministry “also intends to evaluate life-cycle emissions for each application and will prioritize applications that reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the whole life cycle of the project. “If this is in fact true, none from the natural gas reform centers will go through the assembly.
Methane is killing us
Somehow methane doesn’t get as much attention as carbon dioxide. It doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but it’s a much stronger greenhouse gas as long as it’s there, and the world releases billions of cubic feet of material into the air every year. To understand more clearly how much fossil industry the US government has from the government cojones, it is enough to realize that even the most aggressive climate initiatives are riddled with the search for fossil fuels.
Maybe the answer is to shrug and say, “It’s politics. You might have to give a little to get a little. ”That might be fine in general, but in a time of global emergency with 5 alarms (much of the United States will experience dangerously high temperatures this weekend and the entire Southwest is facing critical water shortages, the end of which is in sight). ), is there an excuse to spend taxpayer dollars to reward those who got us into this mess? Something to think about the next time you enter the polling station.
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