In Green Hydrogen, Experts See an Exit Ramp From Fossil Fuels

For four decades, the Oklaunion Power Plant has been a fixture on the landscape near rural Vernon, Texas, a town of about 11,000 in the vicinity of the Texas-Oklahoma state line. The plant burned coal to produce energy until it was officially decommissioned in September 2020.

Carl Freeing and his family have owned farmland near the facility going back decades. Back when the former coal plant was active, he recalls how the sky would change colors some afternoons as a hazy yellow smog slowly leaked from the facility. Back then, Freeing could see which way the wind was blowing just by looking at it. “You’d have this yellow streak that would go up, and go in whatever direction,” Freeing says of the former power plant’s pollution.

After its closing, the Oklaunion Power Plant sat like a ghost on the flat North Texas landscape. Then, in 2022, it looked as if the facility might spring back to life: The international gas and chemical company Air Products and the Virginia-based utilities provider AES announced a partnership to redevelop the defunct energy facility into a $4 billion “green hydrogen” producer. Rather than pump harmful chemicals into the air, the fuel source would be created through electrolysis of water using only renewable energy sources, like solar or wind.

The Oklaunion Power Plant generated power from 1986 to 2020. Credit: Roy Luck / Flickr
The companies claimed the project would prevent a lifetime of five billion gallons of diesel and resulting carbon emissions that trap heat within the atmosphere, and which accelerate climate change’s greenhouse effect. The project’s spokespeople estimated that the plant would be operational by 2027 and that it would create nearly 2,000 temporary jobs during its construction. Following an announcement of the companies’ plans to revitalize the former coal plant, Texas Governor Greg Abbott described the facility as the nation’s largest.

The facility has become an example of how oil-rich states like Texas — which leads the nation in annual wind power production and is behind only California in annual solar power production — are buying into the renewable energy boom. Much of this investment was spurred by former President Joe Biden’s administration and his legislative goals, such as the roughly $500 billion that Congress set aside through its approval of the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

This eagerness to invest in renewable energy has come at a time when climate change has driven average global temperatures to roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius (and steadily climbing) above pre-industrial levels. To stave off the worst of the ongoing climate crisis’s effects, domestically and abroad, renewable sources like green hydrogen bear promise, scientists say. And that promise is already being fulfilled in nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden, all of whom are global leaders in green hydrogen production facilities that are in final planning or financing phases, according to a hydrogen projects data tracker published by the International Energy Agency last year.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., some 67 green hydrogen projects are planned through at least 2029, according to an energy transition paper published by the workforce solutions company Airswift.

The alternative fuel has always had promise, says Dr. Alan Lloyd, a renewable energy researcher at the University of Texas. It’s not a future pipe dream, he adds. But rather, now, “it’s happening.”

Rebranding ‘clean’ hydrogen

In some ways, the element hydrogen is everything. It’s the universe’s lightest, most abundant chemical. It’s part of the foundation of life on Earth, from water to plants, to primates, to us. Alongside the element carbon, hydrogen even helped form the fossil fuels the global energy economy has relied upon for more than century through their extraction and, later, refinement.

As a fuel, hydrogen production has historically been a polluting process. That remains the case today: The International Renewable Energy Agency’s 2018 hydrogen and renewable energy report found that about 95 percent of global hydrogen was described as “gray hydrogen.” That means its production relies on the use of fossil fuels, such as polluting chemicals like natural gas and methane.

OP and further reading
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/clean-promise-green-hydrogen/