NM Gov. Grisham's "Blue Hydrogen" Proposal Gets A Thoroughly Sour Response From Allies

[hatrack]

In mid-November, after months of hinting about an upcoming bill, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration sent a draft Hydrogen Hub Act out to stakeholders for their input. First reactions are not positive. “Let’s be crystal clear,” says Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, “this bill isn’t a climate or clean energy bill. It’s a fossil fuels bill.”

The 27-page act is designed to make New Mexico a national hydrogen production hub, and 22 of those pages detail tax incentives and tax breaks to promote building production and distribution facilities and other major infrastructure. The rest details how carbon emissions for hydrogen production need to decrease over time and how fresh water cannot be used to make hydrogen if companies are to get the tax breaks. While not directly stated, those physical requirements indicate the act is clearly aimed at producing and distributing so-called blue hydrogen, which is developed from natural gas. That fuel is already resoundingly unpopular with the state’s environmental contingent, as natural gas leaks from both oil and gas wells are a major source of greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions.

EDIT

Hydrogen’s environmental and public health problems come from its production. A color-coded system describes the different processes and hints at the associated environmental and climate threats. Green hydrogen is created from water and renewable energy, but is energy intensive and expensive to make. Blue hydrogen is created from fossil fuels — usually natural gas — and the carbon waste is sequestered. It is also energy intensive but less expensive. Gray hydrogen is made the same way, but the carbon is vented to the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. This is currently the cheapest and most common production method in the country. Another complication with hydrogen is that it takes more energy to split it away from either water or natural gas than it provides when later converted to energy. And the main drawback comes from needing a lot of natural gas for both the feedstock and the heating fuel when making blue hydrogen, so overall, even small methane leaks from the gas supply chain can quickly outweigh hydrogen’s benefits.

So a hydrogen blending power plant ends up using natural gas in three ways: as the main fuel, as the feedstock for hydrogen, and as the fuel that powers the hydrogen conversion process. “We see that hydrogen whatever — blue, green, gray — in northwestern New Mexico, it’s a value-added good derived from fracked natural gas source material,” says Mario Atencio, a Navajo and a legislative district assistant with the Navajo Nation Council. “It’s a non-starter,” he adds.

EDIT

https://capitalandmain.com/new-mexicos-draft-plan-for-hydrogen-a-nonstarter-for-environmentalists

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. There are two types of hydrogen production;

Green and black. "Gray and blue" are lies. Any H2 production that creates GHG, directly or indirectly, is black.