• As jurisdictions around the world (e.g., Germany, Japan, Denmark, Canada, Los Angeles) have gotten serious about identifying a pathway to achieve economy-wide decarbonization, they’ve all reached a common conclusion: clean and green hydrogen will play a critical role to decarbonizing hard-to-electrify applications.
• In recognition of green hydrogen’s essential role in the clean energy toolkit, the United States federal government has allocated unprecedented funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to advance clean hydrogen and infrastructure.
• This market momentum has led to commercial project announcements, proposed policies supporting clean and green hydrogen project and infrastructure development, questions and feedback on the community impacts, and more – so hydrogen is in the news now more than ever!

Hydrogen is already a globally traded commodity, with 94 million tonnes safely produced and used each year around the world.

While the vast majority (99%) of hydrogen used today is produced from fossil fuels, from a safety perspective, a molecule of green hydrogen is indistinguishable from any other type of hydrogen gas. The best practices, such as engineering standards to ensure safety, already exist for fossil-derived hydrogen and are applicable to the emerging green hydrogen market.

While, like all fuels, hydrogen should be treated with care, the U.S. Department of Energy considers that “a number of hydrogen’s properties make it safer to handle and use than the fuels commonly used today,” such as gasoline, natural gas, and diesel (footnote: According to the USDOE website)

Today, wind and solar are the cheapest sources of renewable electricity and are being widely deployed to decarbonize our power sector. However, we also need resources that power the grid when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing to ensure grid reliability and resiliency. Today, this need for on-demand power is primarily met by burning fossil fuels such as natural gas.

Carbon free green hydrogen can capture excess wind and solar and store it for weeks, months and even seasons to be used when needed, replacing the need for fossil fuels to ensure reliability. It can also be utilized in place of diesel backup generators to ensure reliability during grid outages.

Green hydrogen can deliver on-demand, zero-carbon electricity through a fuel cell, gas turbine, or linear generator. The only emission resulting from the use of hydrogen in fuel cells – which can be used to displace diesel in many hard-to-electrify sectors such as heavy-duty trucking, port operations equipment with long duty-cycles, and aviation – is water vapor. Combustion of GH2 similarly does not produce any carbon emissions, SOx, or particulate matter as it is a carbon-free fuel. However, while renewable hydrogen is a greenhouse gas-free resource, high flame temperatures from combusting hydrogen in a gas turbine or linear generator in the presence of air will produce nitrogen oxides (NOx). According to the US EPA, high concentrations of NOx can irritate the human respiratory system, so it is critical to ensure NOx emissions are controlled.

NOx control technologies such as selective catalytic reducers have been in used to control NOx emissions from combusting natural gas for many decades and can be effectively employed for controlling NOx emissions from combusting hydrogen as well. Additionally, , new combustion technologies are being commercialized that are designed to reduce flame temperature and minimize NOx formation. The U.S. DOE estimates that with these advanced turbines, power plants will be able to achieve or improve upon current NOx emissions standards.

The GHC supports and encourages retiring power plants that are no longer needed. Only power plants which demonstrate a critical need for reliability and resiliency should remain online, and any new or repowered resources must meet local and state air quality standards for power generation facilities to be permitted.

Water for electrolytic hydrogen (the process of separating a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen) should be responsibly sourced. The United States has significant wastewater resources which can be utilized for green hydrogen production. According to the EPA, 32 billion gallons of municipal wastewater are produced each day in the United States but less than 10 percent of that is intentionally reused. This is being done in Mendota, California, where Plug Power is developing a wastewater treatment plant and a green hydrogen plant that will use treated sewage. Excess water from this treatment plant (over 1 million gallons of water) can be utilized by the city and community. Learn more about this project. In this case, the need to develop green hydrogen production helped the City of Mendota accelerate needed infrastructure improvements to its wastewater treatment facilities.

The Green Hydrogen Coalition studied various water supply scenarios for green hydrogen production in Los Angeles and discovered that water needs could be fully met by utilizing wastewater resources, while having little impact (approximately $0.10/kilogram of GH2) to the delivered cost of green hydrogen.

Hydrogen is already utilized to support our day-to-day lives, even if we don’t personally see or handle it. For example, hydrogen serves an essential role in making semiconductors, which are a core component of many products utilized in everyday life, such as smartphones, TVs, washing machines, and refrigerators.

If you live in California or Ohio, you may have already ridden on a hydrogen fuel cell bus through your local transit agency! Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can also be purchased today by consumers from a variety of car manufacturers as a zero-carbon means of personal of transportation, as infrastructure for fueling is getting deployed around the nation.