Illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios
🌎 Sens. Chris Coons and John Cornyn have reintroduced a suite of bills to support hydrogen financing and demonstration projects.
Why it matters: Hydrogen could be crucial to decarbonizing tough sectors like heavy industry and long-haul transportation, and it’s drawn significant bipartisan attention on the Hill in recent years.
Details: The “Hydrogen Infrastructure Initiative” rolls together four separate pieces of legislation.
- They would create hydrogen demonstration programs for ports, trucks and carbon-intensive industries like steel and cement.
- One of the bills — the Hydrogen Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act — would establish a pilot grant and loan program for hydrogen projects.
What they’re saying: "I am hopeful that they'll get a markup in two of the key committees to which they've been referred," Coons told Axios in the Senate basement Monday night.
- “Hydrogen is a versatile energy source, but we lack the infrastructure to reap its benefits for a wide range of industries,” Cornyn said in a statement.
Quick take: It’s clear that an ideologically diverse set of lawmakers are interested in boosting hydrogen.
Yes, but: Hydrogen’s climate impact depends on how it’s made.
- Currently, it’s largely produced using fossil fuels.
- Climate hawks want to advance cleaner methods of production that either use electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen or capture the carbon released in production.
- That low-carbon fuel could help the world replace fossil fuels in applications—such as container ships and tractor-trailer trucks—where electrification is challenging.
Of note: Congress has already pumped big money into hydrogen.
- The infrastructure law funded an $8 billion hydrogen hub program to build out a domestic industry.
- Lawmakers are jockeying to get their regions and states some of that money. A bipartisan group from the Southeast penned a letter last week lobbying DOE for a slice.
- The IRA also included a new tax credit for clean hydrogen and a huge boost in the federal incentives for carbon capture.
Go deeper: Environmentalists and the energy industry are fighting over the implementation of that new tax credit—and how it deals with hydrogen’s carbon footprint. CNBC has more.
