Development of scalable hydrogen has a critical liability – infrastructure. Despite growing interest and federal incentives, achieving large-scale, centralized production of hydrogen is simply infeasible in the short term. But while infrastructure constrains the growth of a hydrogen sector, it forces proponents to look around and reevaluate our assets. In the end, it is infrastructure that will jumpstart national hydrogen demand.
Hydrogen is a dynamic energy and chemical resource with application to multiple critical industries. In spite of all the promise, there are a number of constraints, each involving infrastructure. These can be evaluated through two dimensions: the location the hydrogen is produced and the color designation.
Hydrogen Hubs – the Central Solution
Central production of hydrogen, no matter its color, has the key issue of storage and transportation. If hydrogen is generated in one location, where resources may be concentrated to make that production most efficient, the end product still has to be held somewhere and moved to its end user. This can be solved with storage solutions to hold the hydrogen and with pipelines or trucks to transport to consumers.
Hydrogen (H2) is a very small molecule and makes it prone to leaks, corrosion, and embrittlement of the containers holding or transporting it. That requires either new pipelines – taking nearly a decade for permitting approvals and final construction – or retrofitting existing natural gas lines, which entails its own considerable costs and regulatory hurdles. If moved by truck, the vehicle emissions for transportation undermine the carbon-free nature of the hydrogen itself. Trucks also move on public roadways where dynamic conditions including driver behavior, infrastructure deficiencies, and weather can lead to considerable safety risks.
These hurdles can be overcome, both with private investment and public incentives, including regulatory reforms. However, they cannot be overcome quickly. At best, these issues lead to a 10-year runway before the right infrastructure elements are in place to effectively store and transport centrally produced hydrogen.
The Hydrogen Rainbow
When it comes to color designation, there are both upfront and back-end challenges that affect each production method. The main hydrogen colors in popular discussion are “green hydrogen” and “blue hydrogen.” These come to the forefront due to their low carbon intensity.
Green hydrogen is so labeled because it is a carbon free hydrogen production technique that utilizes electricity to separate the hydrogen (H) from water molecules (H20). On top of this, it utilizes renewable power sources to ensure even the electricity is low carbon. This requirement presents a key infrastructure issue – where to get the power. Renewables provide a low portion of total utility-scale power in the United States.
To produce hydrogen on a wide scale, new renewable capacity will be needed. That means new wind farms, new solar arrays, and new hydropower, geothermal, and other power sources. These are infrastructure components in themselves, but the issue compounds when recognizing the new transmission and distribution infrastructure needed to connect these energy projects to the electrical grid. Such transmission lines have their own 10-year timeline from proposal and approval to being energized. Once all these are in place, the hydrogen still needs to be transported.
Blue hydrogen is generated by splitting the hydrogen (H) off of methane molecules in natural gas (CH4), which results in carbon emissions. Capturing this source emission is what makes this “blue” rather than “gray” hydrogen. That capturing technology requires up-front investment in technology, equipment, and facility upgrades. These can be expensive, but do not ultimately take a long time to acquire and implement. Where infrastructure truly constrains blue hydrogen is downstream of production. Like other challenges, hydrogen has to be stored and transported, but with blue hydrogen another dimension includes carbon management.
The carbon – usually carbon dioxide gas – has to be stored and transported away from the hydrogen production facility. Like the hydrogen, this can be accomplished with pipelines – presenting another decade-long challenge.
Once again, these infrastructure challenges are not insurmountable. They can be eased with permitting reform, good project identification, and investment. But these are short-term structural barriers to a fast scaling of hydrogen. They cause hydrogen proponents to reflect on ways to move faster in the face of such rigid, short-term constraints. The key is to leverage existing infrastructure to maneuver around these barriers and flexibly produce and scale up hydrogen immediately, which will jumpstart demand and lead to circular effects such as investments in green and blue hydrogen infrastructure.
Thinking Inside the Box
The key infrastructure in place today is the natural gas network, comprising over three million miles of pipelines. Rather than retrofitting this infrastructure, it can be used for its intended purpose to move natural gas to end users – avoiding new hydrogen production and storage solutions. This sets up a distributed production scheme rather than a centralized one – to serve as a complement not indefinite alternative to hydrogen hubs.
On site at facilities using natural gas, methane can be broken into its respective elemental components of carbon (C) and hydrogen (2H2) but without carbon dioxide emission in need of traditional source emission capture technology. To do this, one technique is methane pyrolysis. This solution is often labeled turquoise hydrogen and leads to a solid carbon byproduct, which may be carbon black, graphite, or another grade of carbon depending on technique.
The solid carbon does not require new pipelines and can be more easily and safely handled than carbon dioxide. Moreover, the resulting carbon can be directly utilized in industrial processes, manufacturing applications, and physical infrastructure improvements – whereas carbon dioxide is costly to move and often stored geologically without adding value. With policy incentives like 45Q or the recently proposed Carbon Dioxide Removal Investment Act, policymakers should consider innovative solutions that achieve multiple outcomes at once and broaden the policy scope to encompass processes that can remove solid carbon rather than focus too rigidly on carbon dioxide.
Lack of proper supporting infrastructure means we cannot immediately (nor likely within the next 10 years) see a robust and full-scale hydrogen production sector, whether green or blue, and especially so if produced centrally. Making the most of existing infrastructure – namely the natural gas network – unlocks the potential for distributed hydrogen production that avoids storage and transportation challenges and simplifies carbon management into a circular economic asset. While this solution has its own challenges and limitations, it is an eminently feasible one with short-term applicability that can jumpstart hydrogen demand and provide flexible hydrogen solutions to commercial and industrial natural gas users.
To achieve a true hydrogen economy, where hydrogen is leveraged in transportation, energy, chemical and industrial sectors, and more, a great level of investment will be called for. Before that investment is attractive to the private sector, demand must be demonstrated. Public policy and permitting reforms are integral to unlocking that demand and enabling the needed build outs. Performance-oriented policy incentives rather than rigid prescriptive rules and finite lists of project types will speed up the development of even more solutions. In the end, innovative technology and leveraging existing infrastructure can help bring many of the needed elements into place today to realize and jumpstart hydrogen demand.
Read our latest report, The Hydrogen Highway.
Written by Benjamin Dierker, Executive Director
The Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (Aii) is an independent, national research and educational organization. An innovative think tank, Aii explores the intersection of economics, law, and public policy in the areas of climate, damage prevention, energy, infrastructure, innovation, technology, and transportation.