Collaborating to Advance the Hydrogen Economy

By Kristine Wiley and Zane McDonald

The energy industry’s excitement about the promises of hydrogen is becoming more and more evident. This abundant element can be used as a powerful decarbonization tool for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as aviation, manufacturing, and trucking. Hydrogen can also leverage the existing energy systems, infrastructure, and workforce that brings fossil fuels to every corner of the globe.

As a map for the next decade of U.S. industrial policy, the Inflation Reduction Act has dialed the excitement around hydrogen up to 11. The historic legislation provides tax credits — similar to what ignited the renewable energy industry — to help scale new energy technologies and decrease long-term costs.

But transitioning to an energy industry that embraces hydrogen isn’t simply a cost challenge and isn’t as easy as swapping fuels. For hydrogen to be a genuine climate game changer, we must quantify and address some key challenges.

And at GTI Energy, we are doing our part to ensure we get hydrogen right.

Measuring Hydrogen’s Carbon Intensity

Hydrogen today is often described using colors (e.g., green hydrogen is made from renewable energy, blue hydrogen is produced mainly from natural gas). These colors are helpful to understand how hydrogen is made and provide a very basic comparability of climate impact, but it fails to provide a defendable, scientific, data-focused understanding of hydrogen’s impact on the climate.

Of greatest importance is ensuring that all energy solutions deliver significant climate benefits. When it comes to hydrogen, the inability to effectively measure the carbon intensity of a molecule of hydrogen diminishes its credibility and role in decarbonization strategies.

This is why we need trustworthy, transparent, and standardized carbon intensity accounting tools for various production methods and for the infrastructure that will contain and transport the fuel. To meet this need, GTI Energy launched the Open Hydrogen Initiative (OHI) which brings together stakeholders from across the energy sector to develop a credible methodology for carbon emissions accounting down to the facility level that will allow users to make universal comparisons across the hydrogen production ecosystem.

An Opportunity for Collaboration

As billions of dollars are flowing into global hydrogen projects, it is more important than ever that companies, investors, and climate advocates agree on an empirical method for understanding hydrogen’s true climate impact.

At a “Future of Hydrogen Markets” workshop in February, a collaborative event led by our OHI team and Stanford University’s Hydrogen Initiative, hydrogen experts with varied perspectives seemed to unanimously agree on one objective: We need to act with an unmistakable sense of urgency to mitigate the impacts of climate change, but we need to resolve the ambiguity around the carbon intensity of one of our most abundant and versatile energy molecules.

It’s critical that we develop standardized measurement and accounting tools that provide a clearer picture of which production methods provide the greatest climate benefits.

Helping Hydrogen Hubs Hit Their Potential

It’s likely most Americans don’t know much about regional clean hydrogen hubs, but, they will. Dozens of organizations are already competing for billions of dollars for these hubs which are designed to build and strengthen hydrogen networks and the broader hydrogen ecosystem in communities across the country needing access to safe, affordable, clean energy supplies, and equitable distribution of economic benefits.

GTI Energy is already involved with several proposed hydrogen hubs across the United States — the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen (MachH2), the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2), and we’re taking a leading role in the Gulf Coast HyVelocity Hub, bringing together investors, state officials, and community leaders across state lines to create a roadmap for a long-term industrial transition.

Looking Ahead

GTI Energy is excited and optimistic about the way the public and private sectors are each working to unlock the potential of a hydrogen economy. We now have clear incentives, technology innovation, and emerging collaborations across stakeholders to make scaling the hydrogen economy more feasible.

Now that the world is ready to leverage the benefits of hydrogen for cleaner, safer environments and economies, it’s critical that we ask the hard questions and identify the challenges we must overcome for this new energy resource to reach its greatest potential.

For hydrogen to effectively help us to meet climate goals, our enthusiasm, collaboration, and shared mission must persist.