PORTLAND, Ore. — Late last year, the U.S. Department of Energy chose the Pacific Northwest to serve as a hub for the creation of hydrogen energy. It's part of a larger effort to explore more sources of clean energy, getting the U.S. away from fossil fuels.
A billion dollars of federal funding is going into these hydrogen plants at sites across Oregon and Washington, and in the end they're expected to create 10,000 new jobs. But not everyone is on board with the idea of these hydrogen hubs.
At present, power grids in the Northwest are being stretched almost to their breaking point. While the area has yet to see rolling blackouts, it has come close — and power consumption is only going up. At a summit in Seattle earlier this year, energy leaders had some jolting predictions about the near-future.
"The 2024 update to the northwest regional forecast projects demand could increase by 30% in the next 10 years," said Crystal Ball, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee. "That's an increase of 7,000 average megawatts ... enough electricity to power seven cities the size of the city we're in today, Seattle."
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Going green with gas
There were a few potential solutions highlighted at the summit, and one of them was green hydrogen. If you recall your high school chemistry class, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It's the first element on the periodic table, it makes up the majority of huge celestial objects like the sun, and it's two-thirds of every water molecule.
"Green hydrogen" is created through a process called electrolysis, separating the hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules. The hydrogen can then be used as a form of renewable energy.
There are three different grades of hydrogen energy, broken down into "colors." That's where the term green hydrogen comes from, and that's what will be created in the Northwest.
Earlier this month, the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association was awarded "phase one status" to start working on hydrogen plants in the region. They're receiving an initial $27.5 million to get started. For the time being, that's limited to the bureaucratic side of building something big — getting permits, drawing up plans and taking input from stakeholders.
Three of the planned Pacific Northwest locations are in Oregon: two in Boardman out in Morrow County and one in Baker County's Baker City. Another will be located in Montana, and four were planned for Washington state; including sites in Chehalis, Centralia, Ferndale and Richland. However, the company slated to run the Centralia site pulled out earlier this month over tax credit issues.
Each site will work on some aspect of production, storage and delivery of green hydrogen once they're up and running. That said, production is still a long way out.
The Story spoke to Oregon Department of Energy Director Janine Benner, who talked about the Boardman sites in particular.
"It is a pretty industrialized site and the project is on the grounds of a former coal plant — actually, Oregon's final coal plant that closed in 2020," Benner said. "And so PGE, the owner of that coal plant, working with Mitsubishi and Williams Pipeline, have created a project that will be a facility that will use clean electricity to generate hydrogen via an electrolyzer and then store and use that hydrogen to create clean electricity when wind and solar aren't available."
Other sites were chosen because they are close to I-84, and because the companies expected to run the plants gave the fastest timelines to get them up and running.
Efficiency, sustainability and 'Oh, the humanity'
But not everyone thinks building new hydrogen plants is a good idea; there are plenty of concerns. One of them is that producing hydrogen isn't all that efficient, according to Abbe Ramanan from the nonprofit Clean Energy Group.
"Electrolysis is very, very energy intensive, and it's also very inefficient," Ramanan said. "So, I mean, if you think about it, you're taking renewable energy that you could just be plugging directly to the grid and you're taking that energy and you're transforming it into a fuel, which then needs to be either run through a fuel cell or combusted to produce energy ... So you're kind of getting these multiple conversions, and because of those multiple conversions, the process is very inefficient — and most electrolyzers only have a round trip efficiency of 30-40%, which means you're losing 60-70% of the renewable energy that you're putting in."
Chris Green with the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association acknowledged that this is true; but the plan is mostly to use hydrogen for fuel, somewhat as a stand-in for fossil fuels.
"If the only thing hydrogen was being used for was to take electricity, run it through an electrolyzer, create hydrogen and then use that hydrogen to burn in the turbine to turn back into electricity, if that's the only thing it was used for, that would not ... the economics of that of the energy utilization wouldn't be very good. It's a round-trip loser.
"But that's the reason that's not what we're proposing. We have proposed for this energy to be used as a fuel in most cases, so heavy-duty transportation and buses and trucks and planes and boats and those kinds of things. That's in general where we think most of the offtake is going to come in the near-term.
"And we do think about using hydrogen, you know, when in those peak moments when we really need a little bit of extra electricity to keep the lights on ... the places we want to make sure that our grid is sustainable and doesn't, you know, endure brownouts or blackouts or those kind of the kinds of things in the future. So at peak moments where there's peak demand, but having that opportunity to use hydrogen to create some electricity is better than a natural gas turbine or using diesel backup generation of places."
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Then there's the issue of water. The electrolysis process breaks down water molecules to extract hydrogen, which requires a great deal of water.
"You need 9 tons of water to produce 1 ton of hydrogen," Ramanan said. "So, if you think about that in terms of the scale of hydrogen production that these hubs are suggesting, we're talking about a ton of water usage. When you run water through an electrolyzer and you break apart those molecules, you can't recycle any of that water because it has been broken down on a molecular level. So that 9 tons of water that you put in, you won't get any of that back — and that's 9 tons of purified water. Electrolyzers are very, very sensitive, so you can't just run wastewater through them."
The response to that concern from hydrogen advocates is that these sites won't use any more water than other energy projects like coal or nuclear, which each use about three Olympic-sized swimming pools of water per day. And in the end, they say, the energy needs to come from somewhere.
However, Ramanan said, efficiency and sustainability aren't the only concerns. The other is safety. In 2020, an explosion at a North Carolina hydrogen plant damaged 60 homes, leaving one of them uninhabitable. Luckily no one was hurt or killed, but opponents argue that hydrogen risks these kinds of incidents.
"Hydrogen is a very volatile molecule, and it's very small and leak-prone," Ramanan said. "So, then you run into several issues with transporting it through pipelines. First of all, you can't transport hydrogen through any sort of steel pipeline, because it will diffuse through the alloy. The steel alloy create a ton of cracks, and then you get explosions in those cracks. So you need to be very careful about the material that those pipelines are made out of.
"In addition, because the molecule is so small and it's very prone to leakage, and we don't currently have any equipment that's sensitive enough to capture those leaks before they get to an explosion-level event. And the reason we talk about explosions with hydrogen so often is hydrogen is a very explosive molecule — it burns four times as hot as natural gas."
Ramanan referenced the infamous Hindenburg disaster of 1937, when a hydrogen-filled airship exploded into flames over New Jersey as it attempted to land, causing dozens of deaths.
"That is part of the reason hydrogen explosions are so dangerous is because it burned so hot," Ramanan said. "It's much harder to put that out effectively. So, in addition to being concerned about the leaks just from the secondary greenhouse gas effect you get from hydrogen leaking to the atmosphere, we are also concerned about how well those leaks are being monitored for the sake of the community and whether, for example, local firefighters are being trained on how to fight hydrogen fires."
Officials with the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub said that safety is both, of course, a priority and a requirement of their federal funding. And they think the benefits outweigh any potential risks.
"It's very important for all the reasons of it — not just for hydrogen, (but) everybody keeps thinking about and keeps talking about the need to bring on more renewable generation assets throughout the region," said Green. "We're going to need these because of all the decarbonization policies we've already implemented. We want to charge all of our cars. We want to get rid of gasoline cars. We need data centers to store things and focus on cybersecurity issues that we have. So we're going to need a more clean electricity as a region. Even if you don't have hydrogen, hydrogen is a very small portion of the overall energy utilization portfolio, even as we project it out over the next 20 or 30 years."