Lower carbon emissions; 6,000 new jobs; improved public health; a bigger voice for underserved communities; some $250 million in federal funds, and a lot more in private investment.
Those, according to its supporters, are among the benefits that Delaware can look forward to under a new “hydrogen hub” that also includes southeast Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.
The three regions are forming a network where hydrogen will be produced, consumed, stored and distributed in a new attempt to wean the region off planet-warming fossil fuels, and substitute an alternative that can run applications like trucks, buses and heavy industry while adding little or nothing to greenhouse gas emissions.
But some environmentalists say hydrogen is not the clean fuel claimed by its backers, and that the billions of dollars now being spent on converting some parts of the economy to hydrogen would be more effectively if used to build up truly clean energy sources like wind and solar.
The Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (MACH2) was unveiled by its local backers and the federal government last week along with six other regional programs around the country. Together, they will share $7 billion in federal funding awarded by the Biden Administration in its latest effort to curb climate emissions while boosting the economy.
The project was selected in preference to several other entrants in the Mid-Atlantic area because it will produce and use only “green” hydrogen – that generated with electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar – and “pink” hydrogen – made with electricity from nuclear fuels, in this case from the Salem plant across the Delaware Bay in South Jersey.
“We were chosen because we were the cleanest in the country,” said Collin O’Mara, chairman of MACH2, and a former Secretary of Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. The project as a whole won $750 million in federal funds, about a third of which will go to Delaware.
O’Mara said the U.S. Department of Energy chose MACH2 also because it showed an ability to reduce air pollution in some environmental justice communities that have some of the highest asthma rates in the country, and because the project had stronger labor union participation than any hub plan. Other stakeholder groups include environmental and business groups, academics, and government officials from all three states.
Since it will be producing only “green” and “pink” hydrogen, the Mid-Atlantic hub can avoid attacks by environmentalists who criticize some other hubs which plan to produce “blue” hydrogen that’s generated by burning natural gas – whose carbon emissions will then be captured before becoming greenhouse gases. Continuing to use natural gas, even if it is used to make hydrogen, means more emissions and more methane leaks even if the resulting carbon is captured and injected underground rather than pumped into the atmosphere, critics say.
But like the other hubs, the Mid-Atlantic network will create the fuel by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in a process called electrolysis. It will then promote its use by trucks, buses, and some heavy industries that are seen as being hard to decarbonize.
Supporters like O’Mara hope the cost of hydrogen as a fuel for heavy transportation and some industries will eventually become competitive with diesel as a result of the federal money and an expected four times as much in private investment. More incentives are expected in the form of federal tax breaks later this year, he said.
Public transit agencies like DART in Delaware and SEPTA in Philadelphia are high on the list of potential hydrogen users for their buses, and may inspire private companies to follow, O’Mara said.
“If we are able to show that the economics work for DART and SEPTA, then making the case to Amazon and Wal-Mart and others that have big distribution places becomes easier,” he said.
By contrast, school buses are more suitable for electrification because their batteries can be recharged when students are in school, unlike public transit buses that are in constant use, O’Mara said.
Gov. John Carney welcomed the hub as an important part of the energy transition away from fossil fuels, and as a way of creating jobs in a clean-energy economy.
“This is all about the source of electricity to split the water into hydrogen,” Carney told Delaware Public Media in an interview at a Philadelphia marine terminal where President Joe Biden announced the hub program on Oct. 13. “It’s really about getting the electricity from clean non-carbon-based sources.”
Carney cited plans by Delaware City Refinery to install electrolyzers on undeveloped land as offering an example to the rest of industry on what can be done to generate hydrogen, even by a prominent user of fossil fuels with a history of environmental violations.
“Knowing that’s going to be happening at the refinery will send a signal to the rest of the population about ‘this is what we have to do,’” Carney said. PBF, the refinery’s owner, declined to comment. Other partners include Chesapeake Utilities, Chemours, Bloom Energy, DART and the DuPont Experimental Station.
Still, electrifying the economy is a major project, especially when it comes to persuading people to drive electric cars, Carney said.
“That’s a big political challenge,” he said. “But when they see other things happening like this, then I think it gets easier for people to imagine the future. Right now, they just see the impediments. This kind of project puts something out there to enable people to see the future.”
The Carney administration is facing strong public pushback to its plans to require an increasing proportion of new cars to be emissions-free, starting in model year 2027 and ending with all new cars sold in 2035. The policy, based on a California rule, was opposed by more than 90 percent of about 4,800 people who commented on the rule when it was published earlier this year, according to State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn
Meanwhile, plans by New Castle County to rezone refinery land where the electrolyzers would be built has already run into a hiccup because it’s being proposed without consulting the local community – a process that will precede setting up tanks, pipes and electrolyzers that will produce and distribute the hydrogen, said O’Mara.
“We have asked them to withdraw and hold that until the community engagement takes place,” he said, referring to the county. “I think they just got ahead of themselves.”
Much of 2024 will be taken up trying to get communities across the state to “buy-in” to the hydrogen hub, O’Mara said. He predicted there would be widespread acceptance of the idea, especially when people understand the public-health benefits of lower carbon emissions.
Across the region, the hub aims to produce 300 tons of hydrogen a day when its plan is fully implemented. That would reduce carbon emissions by about 1 million tons, or some 10 percent of the total, and is the equivalent of taking a quarter-million cars off the road, O’Mara said. The project will produce 77 percent of its hydrogen from renewable sources of electricity and 21 percent from nuclear power. The remaining 2 percent will come from methane captured from a Philadelphia wastewater plant.
But the environmental group Delaware Riverkeeper Network said MACH2’s projection that 98 percent of its electricity will come from renewables or nuclear power is called into question by an abstract on the project saying that it would create blue hydrogen in its early stages while green hydrogen-generating facilities were built up.
Tracy Carluccio, DRN’s deputy director, said the hub group has not defined how long it would be producing blue hydrogen, leaving it open to using fracked natural for “an indeterminate period of time.”
Hydrogen itself is not the clean-energy source that its backers claim, Carluccio said. She argued that hydrogen is 100 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
“It has a huge environmental footprint no matter what the energy source and simply has no place in large-scale energy systems. Our government is wasting precious time chasing hydrogen and should instead be investing directly in truly clean, renewable energy sources..."Tracy Carluccio, Deputy Director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network
“It has a huge environmental footprint no matter what the energy source and simply has no place in large-scale energy systems,” she said. “Our government is wasting precious time chasing hydrogen and should instead be investing directly in truly clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar that will help us limit and eventually eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the atmosphere.”
Discussions about setting up the hub began after the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law by President Biden in November 2021, promising major federal funding for the hubs across the country, O’Mara said.
“I approached people in labor to say that this is an opportunity to involve them if we do it the right way from the beginning,” he said.
Despite the promise of lower emissions, that won’t necessarily be fulfilled if hydrogen is used for powering homes or fueling cars – both of which can be easily electrified, said Dustyn Thompson, director of the Delaware Sierra Club.
Thompson said the environmental group “cautiously” welcomes the hydrogen hub but only if it ensures that the fuel does not leak during production, distribution, or consumption. Using it in homes or cars would increase the chances of it leaking, at which point it would combine with methane in the atmosphere and create a greenhouse gas that is even more potent than methane or carbon dioxide, he said.
“You could have the warming potential of methane with the lifecycle of carbon,” he said. “The easiest way to prevent that is to do everything you can to prevent leaks.”
For O’Mara, the hub’s performance will be measured by air emissions, jobs created – especially in EJ communities – public-health metrics linked to air quality, and whether hydrogen costs less for heavy transportation or industry than fossil fuels.
“With federal support, hydrogen in this market should be cheaper than diesel or fuel oil within a couple of years,” he said. “Once we get to that point, the market takes off.”
