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By
Tina Casey
October
17, 2023
Green Hydrogen Slugfest Brewing In
Texas
ExxonMobil placed another bet on
Texas shale gas last week, but green hydrogen stakeholders are gearing
up for a fight.
The dust has settled over the final selection of winning projects in
the new US Clean Hydrogen Hubs program, and now the real fight begins.
All eyes are on Texas, where green hydrogen stakeholders are already
jockeying for opportunities to push fossil-sourced hydrogen out of the
picture. That should make for some interesting goings-on, especially
now that the Japanese firm INPEX has thrown the sustainable H2
gauntlet down right in ExxonMobil’s own backyard.
Texas Leads On Renewable Energy, No, Really
Texas is best known as a global epicenter of oil, gas,
and petrochemicals production, but the early 2000s saw the state begin
a rapid diversification into wind, solar,
and energy
storage.
From a policy perspective that may seem somewhat odd,
considering recent attempts to obstruct renewable
energy investment by the Republican-led
state legislature and other high profile officials. However,
policymakers were singing a different about 10 years ago, when a new, renewables-friendly
transmission plan kicked into gear.
Helping matters along is the state’s unique status as a grid unto
itself. Other states can share transmission connections to help each
other smooth out bumps in local generation capacity and assist with
emergencies. In contrast, almost the entire state of Texas is isolated
into its own grid. The island effect has hard-wired the state’s grid
operator, ERCOT, into seeking new in-state opportunities to build more
resilience and reliability into the grid, and that means more wind,
solar, and energy storage.
Green Hydrogen Rising In Texas
With all this in mind, it’s no surprise that green
hydrogen has caught the eye of investors,
energy planners, and even some public officials in
Texas.
Green hydrogen primarily refers to hydrogen pushed from
water in an electrolysis system, which deploys a catalyst and an
electrical current generated by renewables (see lots more coverage here).
In terms of sustainability, that’s a sea change from the dominant
source of hydrogen today, which deploys a steam reformation process to
draw hydrogen from natural gas or coal.
About 95% of hydrogen production in the US comes from
natural gas, and ExxonMobil appears determined to keep it that way. On
October 11, just two days before the Energy Department announced its
selection of the
winning Clean Hydrogen Hubs projects,
ExxonMobil sent out word that it is doubling down on its shale gas
interests in the lucrative Permian Basin fields, in Texas.
As if to clap back, on October 12 — just one day before
the Energy Department announcement — INPEX Corporation put its seal of
approval on a press release that describes the latest development in a
major sustainable
H2 venture in Texas undertaken by the firm
Green Hydrogen International:
“INPEX CORPORATION (INPEX), Japan’s largest oil and gas exploration
and production company, and Green Hydrogen International (GHI),
the world leader in green hydrogen developments, have signed a Joint
Study Agreement to advance GHI’s flagship Hydrogen City production hub
in South Texas with the aim of producing green hydrogen and green
ammonia to meet growing Asian and global market demand.”
If you’re wondering why one leading oil and gas company can diversify
into renewable energy while another one can’t, that’s a good question.
Many other legacy fossil energy stakeholder have begun their renewable
energy journey over the past 10 years or so, but ExxonMobil has
continued to focus on natural gas and petrochemicals.
The only significant renewable energy project promoted
by ExxonMobil during this time is — or rather, was — an on-again,
off-again algae
biofuel R&D
program, which the company finally dropped
earlier this year, ostensibly forever.
(Green)
Hydrogen City, USA
As the home state of Hydrogen
City, Texas will be the host to a massive
energy storage project as well as a green hydrogen and ammonia plant.
While some of the green hydrogen will be available for
local markets, the main plan is to dedicate about 230,000 tons of
green hydrogen per year to produce 1 million tons of green ammonia per
year, destined for overseas markets that are eager to replace
fossil-sourced ammonia fertilizer and other products with a more
sustainable supply chain. (for those of you new to the topic, ammonia —
NH3 — consists of three hydrogen atoms
and one atom of nitrogen, which can be sourced from ambient air).
That’s just for starters. Plans are already in the works to expand the
facility as customer demand accelerates, apparently in the area of
rocket fuel among other uses. In the meantime, GHI expects to have the
first phase up and running by 2029, complete with a salt cavern
storage facility to ensure a steady supply of wind and solar power
from the South Texas region.
GHI expects the combination of low cost renewable energy and the use
of natural salt formations will enable it to build “one of the world’s
largest production and export hubs with the most cost-competitive
green hydrogen in the world.”
On its part, INPEX will contribute its experience in developing large
scale energy projects to shepherd Hydrogen City through construction.
The company also expects to convince its roster of liquid natural gas
clients that green ammonia is the wave of the future.
In the October 12 press release, INPEX President and CEO Takayuki Ueda
took note of his company’s pivot into renewables.
“This project perfectly aligns with our Vision@2022, as we strive to
reshape the energy landscape by producing green hydrogen and
accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral world.
INPEX’s dedication to a brighter, greener future remains steadfast,
and this endeavor in Texas marks a pivotal step in our vision for a
more sustainable tomorrow,” he said.
Meanwhile, Over In The Laboratory…
Fossil energy stakeholders like ExxonMobil can still leverage low-cost
natural gas to hold back the rising tide of green hydrogen, but not
for long.
The Texas-based organization HyVelocity is one of the
winning Hydrogen Hub proposals to include both gas and alternative
sources in its plan, and it looks like gas stakeholders are in for a
fight. The group of industry partners spearheading the HyVelocity
collaboration is a mixed bag of both fossil
energy and green H2 stakeholders. ExxonMobil
is in the mix, but so are Ørsted, Mitsubishi, and other legacy firms
pivoting into green hydrogen.
In addition, new and improved electrolyzers helping to drive down the
cost of electrolysis, while R&D work continues apace on even better,
more efficient systems.
As may be expected, Texas has emerged as a hotspot of
electrolyzer innovation. Last week, Texas
A&M University reported on a new study
undertaken by one of its research teams, led by chemical engineering
professor Dr. Abdoulaye Djire.
You can read all about it in the journal Cell.
For those of you on the go, Djire worked with graduate student David
Kumar Yesudoss and materials science and engineering professor Dr.
Miladin Radovic to deploy a new catalyst based on a class of
2D-layered materials called Mxenes.
Mxenes caught the CleanTechnica eye
back in 2013 as applied to EV batteries and we haven’t been following
along since then, so it seems that we missed a lot.
The A&M team was looking for a low-cost replacement for the expensive
platinum catalysts typically used in electrolysis systems.
“Using these inexpensive catalysts instead of platinum will
significantly reduce the cost of the resulting hydrogen technology,”
Djire explained.
“My work is centered around designing and evaluating materials to be
used as catalysts for sustainable chemical production,” Yesudoss
added. “We have been able to reduce the cost of catalysts that are
used in producing green hydrogen by half, which I think is really
significant.”
For the record, graduate student Ekenedilichukwu Uwadiunor and
undergraduate student Hoang Nguyen from the Artie McFerrin Department
of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M, along with graduate students
Vrushali Kotastane and Eugenie Pranda from the Department of Materials
Science and Engineering at Texas A&M, and Dr. Kingsley Obodo from HySa
Infrastructure at North-West University in South Africa, also
collaborated on the project.
Where’s Congress?
Of course, no story about green hydrogen would be complete without a
mention of Republican antics in the House of Representatives. The
Republican majority has been running around like a headless chicken in
search of a free lunch ever since October 4, when they fired their
Speaker.
Without a Speaker, the House can’t fulfill its normal
duties of government under the Constitution of the United States of
America, which means that Republicans in the House have all but
finished what
they started on January 6, when 139 of them
voted in support of an effort to prevent President-elect Joe Biden
from taking office.
Well, Joe Biden took office, only now his hands are
tied because the Republican House majority literally
refuses to function normally under his
administration. At least this time around a
bloodthirsty mob of white supremacists is
not involved, though it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.
Meanwhile, several Republican Senators have also joined
in the de facto insurrection against the Biden administration, led by
Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who has single-handedly slammed the lid
on hundreds
of military promotions. Republican Senators
Rand Paul (Kentucky), JD Vance (Ohio), and Ted Cruz (Texas) also
chipped in by shutting down key
State Department appointments.
If you have any thoughts about that, drop us a note in the comment
thread.
Image: Massive new green hydrogen facility planned
for Texas (image courtesy of GHI via
prnewswire.com).
Follow me @tinamcasey on Bluesky, Threads, Post, LinkedIn, and
Spoutible.
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509 995 1879 Cell, Pacific Time Zone.
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Spokane, WA 99212
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