US DOE seeks to recognize hydrogen's potential in integration 'road map'

The U.S. Energy Department's vision for hydrogen as a decarbonization tool is far-reaching.

"A lot of technologies are being considered altogether in creating a new infrastructure and a new economy, more or less," said Jordan Kislear, environmental, systems and economic analysis engineer at the DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

The challenge, Kislear said, is visualizing how those technologies can be integrated into an already-complex energy system.

On May 12, DOE officials presented one such "road map" during a webinar hosted by the United States Energy Association. The hydrogen market module design report, released in April, is the DOE's first step in modeling a hydrogen infrastructure economy.

The report analyzed how hydrogen infrastructure is represented in the U.S. Energy Information Administration's national energy modeling system, or NEMS, a complex framework used to project energy production, demand, imports and prices. The authors found that NEMS focused only on using hydrogen in the transportation sector and for refining.

"However, the role of hydrogen may be far broader than just in transportation," the report said, so the Energy Information Administration should add other hydrogen pathways to NEMS to "better characterize the role of hydrogen within a deeply decarbonized energy system."

"There are many things that have to be upgraded because decarbonization is not something that is generally modeled under existing policies or regulations in the standard NEMS code," Fossil Energy and Carbon Management systems, economic and environmental analysis director Jose Benitez said during the webinar.

At stake is $9.5 billion in bipartisan infrastructure law funding for the rollout of low-carbon hydrogen. The DOE spending package includes $8 billion for four or more regional clean hydrogen hubs, $1 billion to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen production and $500 million for manufacturing and recycling initiatives.

Other policies may be in the pipeline.

"One of the big ones that's been discussed is a hydrogen production tax credit," Kislear said, which would be awarded based on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. "And that puts a very unique challenge on there because you've really got to look at the entire lifecycle of the fuel that's being produced."

Hydrogen is being proposed as an energy carrier, "which means it touches many parts of the model," Kislear said. In other words, hydrogen must be converted from a primary energy source, such as renewables, fossil fuels or nuclear power, and then distributed, either through a network of pipelines, as some in the natural gas industry have proposed, or as a liquid fuel. Ultimately, that energy is consumed in industrial processes, to power vehicles or to heat buildings.

The carbon footprint of that process is also highly variable. Hydrogen is referred to as "green," "blue or "gray," depending on the carbon intensity of its production, with the cleanest produced by electrolysis using renewable electricity. However, zero-emissions hydrogen is still scarce. About 95% of hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas, according to the DOE.

The purpose of incorporating hydrogen into NEMS, according to the design report, "will be to understand how hydrogen may be used in the energy economy and allow analysts to assess various policies to incentivize low-carbon pathways over the status quo."

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