Just before the Department of Energy starts allocating billions of dollars from Biden’s infrastructure bill for carbon capture and hydrogen hub funding, the Great Plains Institute – a nonpartisan energy research organization, releases a new publication called “An Atlas of Carbon and Hydrogen Hubs for US Decarbonization”.
The research paper was released on February 1st and identifies 14 potential carbon capture and hydrogen hubs from eight regions of the US evaluated against a set of criteria. The criteria also roughly correspond to how the Energy Department is expected to judge hub funding applications.
Some of the ingredients that these potential hubs possess are a high concentration of industrial emitters with significant emissions, high quantities of fossil fuels use, the presence of facilities qualifying for 45Q tax credit, large saline and geologic formations for CO2 storage.
Additionally, the 14 carbon capture hub locations are evaluated for their existing commodity distribution infrastructure, such as highways, railroads and waterways, and for their fossil fuel distribution infrastructure for hydrogen blending.
The publication also identifies 542 facilities that are candidates for carbon capture retrofits over the next 10 to 15 years. These hubs “can achieve beneficial economies of scale, thus enabling investment breakeven for industrial capture retrofit and maximizing the amount of carbon capture achieved,” according to Dane McFarlane, director of research at the Great Plains Institute.
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The locations are as follows: Houston, northern Utah, the Louisiana coast, the Permian Basin, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, the Rocky Mountain region, the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, Southern California, the Bakken region in Montana, the Michigan-Ohio border and Western Pennsylvania.
Carbon Capture And Hydrogen Hubs Funding
Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provide $8 billion for hydrogen hubs, which will support the creation of at least four regional hydrogen hubs. The president signed the bill on November 15th, which gives the Department of Energy 180 days to issue a request for proposals. That would initiate an application process through which regional groups would compete for part of the $8 billion.
The infrastructure bill also provides $12.1 billion to support new carbon management technologies, including the construction of regional CO2 transportation and storage infrastructure networks. With help from low-interest loans and cost-share grants, the funding will aim to support the development of large-scale commercial geologic storage sites across the country.
