Electrolyzers Produce a Fraction of U.S. Hydrogen, But Capacity Ready to Spike

It took many decades to build out the U.S.’s natural gas production, processing and transportation infrastructure, and just as long to develop demand for natgas — the many millions of residential, commercial, industrial and power-generation customers that now depend on U.S. gas, both domestically and, more recently, internationally as well. Now, with action on both climate change and energy security top of mind, there’s a big push to add clean hydrogen to the energy mix as quickly as possible, as evidenced by the Department of Energy’s plan to invest up to $8 billion in the development of four or more “hydrogen hubs.” This time, we won’t have decades to build out the clean hydrogen supply, demand and infrastructure that will be needed to make a real difference — and that’s precisely the point being made by the folks in and around Houston, who assert that the region has just what it takes to get a consequential hydrogen hub up and running. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our look at the federal government’s push to advance clean hydrogen and the Houston-led effort to make the western Gulf Coast a center of hydrogen-related activity.

It’s been heard in many a pub: “Liquor may not be the answer, but it’s worth a shot.” You could make the same argument for hydrogen. While many question whether it will ever make economic sense to use hydrogen as a supplement to — or replacement for — natural gas on a large scale, others insist that hydrogen has a great future as a climate-friendly fuel, assuming it receives sufficient developmental support from government and ESG-minded industry. As it turns out, an early test of hydrogen’s potential is coming from the liquor industry itself, or more specifically, the maker of a renowned single-malt scotch on the Isle of Islay, off Scotland’s western coast. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the distiller’s hydrogen production and combustion project and the broader plan by members of the Scotch Whisky Association and Scotland itself to achieve net-zero carbon emissions within a generation, largely through the expanded use of hydrogen.

Based on the response we received to our first-ever hydrogen blog last fall, it’s fair to say we didn’t waste this space on a fringe subject. To be honest, the level of interest in hydrogen far exceeded our expectations, and suggested that we might have even been a little bit late to the party — but fashionably so, if you ask us. In the weeks since then, we’ve spent a fair amount of time distilling the tremendous amount of news flow and reading material that was either sent our way or popped up in the daily news feeds. You could go a lot of different directions with hydrogen and it’s still very easy, in our view, to get lost in the forest of green energy technology. So, as we are wont to do, we have stuck to our simple approach of tackling this fuel just like we do with hydrocarbons, and we are first turning our attention upstream. Today, we continue our series on hydrogen with a look at the top production methods for the fuel.