Texas has plenty of the ingredients needed to support a major buildout of hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS), including abundant natural gas, extensive energy infrastructure and access to international markets, but another essential input — water — could prove harder to secure, according to a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
The 2027 Texas State Water Plan projects that water demand will exceed supply by 16% in 2030, even if all recommended development projects are completed on schedule. But the plan does not account for significant new demand from recently announced hydrogen and CCS-dependent industrial projects. Commercial-scale production of blue hydrogen, green hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives such as ammonia and methanol requires billions of gallons of water. Direct air capture (DAC) using solvents is also water-intensive. Process and cooling water needs to be pure, so water would ideally come from an aquifer or other source that would put these proposed projects in direct competition with municipal, residential or agricultural uses.
Statewide, the planned hydrogen and CCS-dependent projects most likely to be completed could require an additional 57,000 acre-feet (18.6 billion gallons) of water per year, the report said. There are an additional 49,000 acre-feet (15.9 billion gallons) of water associated with projects that are in early phases of development or on hold with the possibility of resumption. If all 21 of those projects were built out to their proposed levels by 2040, there would be about 106,000 acre-feet (34.5 billion gallons) of demand that is not currently accounted for in the state’s 2027 water plan. Most of the clean energy projects in the development pipeline (see chart below) involve blue and green hydrogen, followed by DAC, green ammonia, blue methanol, blue ammonia and green methanol.
For more on the water needs of hydrogen-related projects and how they are impacted by the warmer Texas climate, see this week’s Hydrogen Billboard.
