CHARLESTON — After more than two years of anticipation, President Joe Biden announced Friday that parts of West Virginia, southeast Ohio and Pennsylvania will play host to a regional hydrogen hub including a location in the Northern Panhandle.
The Appalachian Hydrogen Hub was one of seven regional hydrogen hubs announced Friday by Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm at an infrastructure event in Philadelphia.
“Advancing clean hydrogen is essential to achieving the President’s vision of a strong clean energy economy that strengthens energy security, bolsters domestic manufacturing, creates healthier communities, and delivers new jobs and economic opportunities across the nation,” the White House said in a statement Friday.
Senior Biden administration officials provided a background briefing Thursday in anticipation of Biden’s announcement.
The Appalachian Hydrogen Hub will not be a single location. Instead, the hub will consist of linked assets, or production nodes, connected between West Virginia, Southeast Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania spread across hundreds of miles.
Announced nodes include West Virginia locations in Belle, Follansbee, North Point Pleasant, Washington in Wood County and Fairmont; Ohio locations are in Ashtabula, Canton and Hopedale; and Pennsylvania locations are in Labelle and West Keating Township.
Officials said the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub will be one of the largest of the seven proposed hubs, using natural gas to produce hydrogen in a process called blue hydrogen. The project represents a more than $925 million investment.
“Obviously, that region is part of the industrial heartland of the United States, so it will provide hydrogen to industry,” said one administration official. “It is also a transportation crossroads for the U.S., so it also has that element to it.”
According to administration officials, the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub will create 18,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent jobs.
The hub will partner with the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2, which includes more than 40 partnering companies in the natural gas, energy and manufacturing sectors, West Virginia University and Marshall University, local transit authorities and the federal National Energy Technology Laboratory.
ARCH2, which announced its partnership last year, would take advantage of the state’s access to natural gas supplies and existing infrastructure to manufacture blue hydrogen and store the carbon emissions underground. At least one hydrogen project, Houston-based Fidelis New Energy’s Mountaineer GigaSystem LLC, has been announced for North Point Pleasant.
Hydrogen is a fuel that can be used to decarbonize manufacturing processes, such as steel and metals production, and heavy transportation. Hydrogen also can be used as a long-term fuel cell to store energy for future use.
The byproduct of hydrogen is water.
One way to manufacture hydrogen is through the blue hydrogen process using the state’s abundant supplies of natural gas. Instead of greenhouse emissions from the process being emitted into the atmosphere, emissions would be collected through carbon capture and sequestration.
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, negotiated in 2021 by U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., included $9.5 billion in funding for hydrogen research. The West Virginia Hydrogen Hub Working Group made up of state and federal elected leaders applied to the Department of Energy last year to land a regional hydrogen hub.
Manchin and Capito inserted specific language in the infrastructure investment and Jobs Act requiring a hub in Appalachia. The cost for the seven announced regional hydrogen hubs is more than $7 billion and could draw down as much as $43 billion in private investment.
The $737 billion Inflation Reduction Act, passed last summer after negotiations between Democratic leaders and Manchin, also included several tax credits to incentivize the production and commercial use of hydrogen. These include the 45V hydrogen tax credit that provides up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced for projects that begin prior to 2033.
Each hub will have access to different feedstocks for hydrogen and different end uses serving the specific needs of the geographic regions the hubs will be located in. Officials are hopeful that if a hydrogen economy can be built, the regional hubs can be connected together and create a national hydrogen system.
Other regional hydrogen hubs include the California Hydrogen Hub, the Gulf State Hydrogen Hub serving southeast Texas and eastern Louisiana, the Heartland Hydrogen Hub serving Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota, the Mid-Atlantic Hydrogen Hub serving parts of eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, the Midwest Hydrogen Hub serving Illinois, Indiana and Michigan and the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub serving Washington State, Oregon and parts of Montana.
Officials say switching commercial transportation and heavy industry to hydrogen could annually prevent 25 million tons of carbon from being put into the atmosphere, or the equivalent of 5.5 million vehicles. Switching to hydrogen could reduce overall carbon emissions by between 10% and 20% from heavy industry and transportation.
Officials believe the regional hydrogen hubs will help meet Biden’s 2021 goal of cutting greenhouse emissions in the U.S. between 50% and 52% of 2005 levels by 2030, a carbon-neutral electric grid by 2035 and zero-emissions by 2050.