PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration’s commitment to reshaping the nation’s economy by replacing oil and gas with renewable energy, including green hydrogen, was a dominant theme at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum last week.

The three-day, fast-paced conference held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh drew more than 6,000 participants from the U.S. and 31 countries and featured more than 60 energy-focused seminars, programs and discussion panels featuring global experts.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm used the conference to announce that the DOE had finally issued a request for proposal allowing industries and local governments to compete for $7 billion in federal matching grants to develop four to six “hydrogen hubs.”  

The hubs will be designed to concentrate clean hydrogen production for use by nearby industries — power plants, steel and cement makers, and fertilizer producers. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, approved by Congress last year, allocated $8 billion for hubs and an another $1.5 billion for associated services.

Industries in Houston are among the competitors for hub funding. (See Report Sees Houston at Center of Gulf Coast Hydrogen Hub.)

“We have been doing a lot of work and building that stakeholder coalition and putting together not only the hub piece of it, but all the other parts of the ecosystem that need to accompany that,” said Brett Perlman, CEO of the Center for Houston’s Future, in one of the discussion groups.

The day before Granholm’s announcement, the European Commission approved up to $5.2 billion in public funding to assist in the development of industrial-sized electrolyzers and pipelines. The 28 member nations of the E.U. will contribute to the fund.  

A theme that repeatedly emerged in most of the eight hydrogen-focused seminars was that the mass production of electrolyzers, which use electricity to produce hydrogen from water, must be ramped up as quickly as possible if nations are to have any chance of producing the prodigious amounts of green hydrogen that will be necessary to alter the pace of climate change.

The technology was repeatedly described as well understood. While megawatt-sized electrolyzers have never been built, engineers often describe the process of building very large electrolyzers as a “bolt-on” process, suggesting that ramping up in size will not be a problem.

Very few GCEAF participants voiced any doubt that hydrogen could replace conventional fossil fuels in most applications, given enough time. But time is the issue for advocates of clean energy, a mission Granholm crystalized in her pre-conference remarks in a single sentence: “It’s all about pushing, pushing, pushing to deploy, deploy, deploy clean energy solutions.”

John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, repeated the oft-quoted line that hydrogen is the Swiss Army knife of energy, meaning it can be substituted for many conventional fuels, assuming the technology to use it has been developed and manufactured — a goal that will require hundreds of billions of dollars in government and private investment.

That includes large gas turbines able to burn 100% hydrogen, an objective that Mitsubishi Power doesn’t think it can achieve in its larger turbines until 2045.

Working the Supply and Demand Sides

The dramatic reduction in carbon emissions that could be achieved by switching from fossil fuel to clean hydrogen — if only in the transportation sector — became clear during one panel discussion.

Natascha Viljoen, CEO of Anglo American Platinum, a mining company with operations in South Africa, made the connection between the electrification of heavy trucking and global carbon pollution.

The company pulled the enormous diesel engine from one of its three-story tall mining dump trucks that are built to haul 315 tons of ore and replaced it with a fuel cell system running on hydrogen produced by electrolyzers using electricity from a 140-MW solar farm.

The conversion of the giant truck from diesel to hydrogen is the equivalent of taking a half million cars off the road, she said.

“We use 40 of these trucks in our fleet,” she added in reference to the platinum mining division. “Across our broader company, we use 400 of these trucks.”

Kurt-Christoph von Knobelsdorff, CEO of NOW GmbH, a consulting company coordinating the German government’s efforts to replace natural gas with hydrogen, noted in one panel discussion that Germany is aiming to completely change its fossil energy system as quickly as possible.

“Hydrogen is so new, and it’s just a tiny bit of the world’s energy mix. If you really want to get it going, you need to work both on the supply and the demand side. It really is a chicken and egg,” he said.

“The idea is that you have to bring supply and demand together. You have to try to do it at scale so that investors can come in. And you have to create visibility over the long term, so that the financial packages can come together as well,” he said.

NOW GmbH has calculated that to produce affordable hydrogen, renewable power prices must be 2 to 2.5 cents/kWh.  “We are not very far from that,” he said. The Biden administration has targeted the price of hydrogen at $1/kg by 2030.

“But to do this on a massive scale, industry will have to ramp up the installed global capacity of wind and solar farms, which now represent less than 5% of the power generated globally,” von Knobelsdorff said.

Another theme running through several of the hydrogen seminars was that close international cooperative efforts could speed up development of both hydrogen production and the wind and solar installations needed to support it. Offshore wind was mentioned as a source of the enormous amounts of renewable power that will be necessary to run the still-to-be-mass-produced electrolyzers generating the megatonnage of hydrogen.

Germany and Japan are both developing plans to help companies build solar and wind farms dedicated to producing hydrogen in nations with more sun and wind, and then converting it to ammonia for shipping. Germany has already signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to import hydrogen produced by still-to-be-built wind farms on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Germany and Australia have issued a joint notice of intent to study the feasibility of creating a hydrogen supply chain.

Moving the hydrogen thousands of miles will require converting it to a “hydrogen carrier,” typically a liquid such as ammonia or ethanol. Ammonia is a chemical familiar to many industries, Shell USA president Gretchen Watkins said in another session.