To The United States Department of Energy & President Biden:

We, the undersigned, petition the Department of Energy and President Biden to stop the hydrogen hub planning, funding, and buildout.

Hydrogen is not a climate solution. In fact, according to numerous scientific studies, it will make the climate crisis worse. It is one of the false climate solutions being promoted by the fossil fuel dirty energy industry so it can keep doing business as usual. The investment of billions of taxpayer dollars and the creation of more tax subsidies for polluters are diverting resources away from the proven, scalable, available renewable energy solutions that must be deployed to address the climate crisis. STOP developing hydrogen hubs. Go back to the drawing board and pick real clean energy solutions instead.

BACKGROUND:

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act have allocated billions of taxpayer dollars and created tax credits to support the creation of a hydrogen economy. They plan to use the public funds to create a hydrogen energy industry by establishing regional “Hubs”, or constellations of business ventures dedicated to hydrogen production, transportation, storage, and consumption. In October 2023, President Biden announced the seven Hubs selected to receive a combined $7 billion.

Today, more than 95% of hydrogen is produced from methane gas using a process called steam methane reforming. Any use of methane is dirty because methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas, 86 times more potent at trapping heat over a 20-year lifetime, than CO2. Because hydrogen can be produced by various methods from different feedstocks, scientists have begun assigning colors to differentiate its many forms. Using methane, usually fracked gas, is referred to as gray hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is gray hydrogen with carbon capture and storage (CCS) added to the process. Pink hydrogen is made from nuclear energy, green made from renewable energy, and orange made from biogas or so-called renewable natural gas (“RNG”).

However, there is no such thing as clean hydrogen. No matter the color of the rainbow it has been assigned, hydrogen has profound impacts on health and the environment and exacerbates climate change. Blue hydrogen, for instance, relies on unproven and dangerous Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology to address the CO2 emissions and it releases powerful methane emissions that come from creating the feedstock and powering the CCS process. Adding CCS to hydrogen creation requires the use of even more methane to power the CCS system and results in more GHG emissions than not using it. But even green hydrogen, considered to be the cleanest of the clean, is anything but.

●       Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, which makes it prone to leaking, contributing to global warming, and can embrittle steel, making its transport and storage very dangerous.

●       Hydrogen is a highly flammable and potentially explosive gas.

●       Hydrogen’s toxic Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) emissions when combusted can be six times higher than methane’s. NOx is also a greenhouse gas with a GWP of 30 (30 times more potent at capturing heat than CO2 over a 10 year period) and has debilitating human health harms.

●               Hydrogen itself is an “indirect” greenhouse gas with a Global Warming Potential, or GWP, that’s roughly 100 times that of CO2 over a ten-year period. All hydrogen forms have an indirect global warming effect by extending the lifetime of methane and other greenhouse gasses.

Still other problems fail to make hydrogen a solution to the climate crisis or environmentally friendly. Producing hydrogen is extremely costly and energy-intensive. A key issue for hydrogen is its cost, which the DOE’s “Hydrogen Shot” program aims to reduce from $5/kg in 2021 to $1/kg by about 2031. Thus, hydrogen’s costs need to be reduced by 80% to make it widely effective. Producing green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive, consumes huge volumes of water, and its renewable energy feedstock is still relatively scarce. Using renewable energy to make hydrogen is wasteful and inefficient. It actually takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it provides as useful energy. What’s more, most of the “clean” production and use is unproven and only tested at an experimental scale. It’s far more efficient to use renewable energy to electrify directly.

Hydrogen is just one of the false climate solutions the fossil fuel and chemical industries have been promoting so it can continue to do business as usual. Oil and gas companies want the infrastructure such as pipelines and compressors that would be built for the Hubs and plan to cash in on new markets for fracked gas since most of the hydrogen hubs would use it to produce hydrogen, enabling and intensifying the fracking industry’s devastating environmental and human health harms.

The resources going into creating a hydrogen economy should be going to pay for deployment of real, available, and scalable renewable energy solutions. Hydrogen is a misdirection of funds that is robbing us of time we don’t have to take real steps to address the climate crisis. We MUST reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030 to address the atmospheric warming that is driving the climate crisis, according to scientists and the Biden Administration’s own stated climate goals. Investing in a $7B “hydrogen shot” will actually undermine achieving that.

There are very few applications for hydrogen outside of existing industrial uses such as producing ammonia. Generally, given present and near-term foreseeable technologies, the use of batteries is preferable for light-duty vehicles. The same holds true for heavier vehicles with short ranges, like transit buses and delivery vehicles, and for peaking power production. Direct use of electricity from sources such as wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies is always more efficient than using them to make hydrogen.

Unfortunately, the public, and the communities that would be directly impacted by the adverse impacts of polluting emissions, many already heavily burdened by environmental injustices, have been kept in the dark about the components of the Hubs, where these facilities will be located, or what the impacts could be - the public process has been abysmal and anything but transparent. And the truth is that once a hydrogen project is proposed, a community will not have the right to refuse to be a “host”. That is totally unacceptable and unjust.

Let’s join our voices together to say our communities must be able to determine our future, we won’t accept being run over by project builders. Let’s tell the Department of Energy that our new economy must be built on truly clean, renewable and efficient energy solutions and that hydrogen has no place in it.