At an office park near the West Virginia University campus in Morgantown, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin stood in a line with other officials on a recent afternoon.
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In his hand: a pair of oversized scissors to cut a ribbon on the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2.
“Everybody say ‘ARCH2’!” said Manchin, an independent who is set to retire next year after 14 years in the Senate. “ARCH2!” responded the small invited crowd of elected officials and representatives of various government, university and corporate entities related to the project.
With the snip of the scissors, the ribbon was cut, and the crowd applauded.
The opening of the hydrogen hub comes a month after the Department of Energy announced an initial round of $30 million would go to planning the hub.
Manchin had been instrumental in steering federal dollars to his home state for the hydrogen hub through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The law gave the Department of Energy $7 billion to create hubs around the country that would produce and consume hydrogen, a key industrial product that is also on a shortlist of potential clean energy sources.
Manchin says he fought for and won a hub for the gas-rich area of Appalachia. The hub is a public-private consortium that was awarded up to $925 million from the federal government for projects in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
“It’s a transition we’re going into. We need horsepower,” he said. “One of the hubs had to be in Appalachia. It was just common knowledge. If you’ve got the amount of energy that we have available to us, why not be able to produce the energy?”
A zero-carbon source for heavy industry
When hydrogen is burned or used in a fuel cell it emits zero carbon dioxide – the main cause of global warming.
Scientists say this makes it a potential climate solution in hard-to-clean-up sectors, like heavy industry or long-haul trucking.
“It provides a carbon-free molecule for delivering energy in applications where electrification may be challenged,” said Dharik Mallapragada, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at New York University.
ARCH2 will produce blue hydrogen, a method by which hydrogen is extracted from natural gas, and the CO2 pollution created in the process is captured and buried in deep underground wells.
Companies haven’t built the pipelines, wells, and storage tanks needed to do this because it isn’t profitable.
That’s where the hydrogen hubs come in.
“The government is trying to incentivize deployment of that [infrastructure] through these hydrogen hubs,” Mallapragada said.
A public process slowed by a lack of detail
The hub currently includes nearly a dozen projects that will produce, store and use hydrogen, though few details have been made public.
At a recent community briefing, ARCH2’s program manager, Kurtis Hoffman of the consulting firm Battelle, said there’s a reason why even basic information, like where projects will be built, remains hard to come by.
“A lot of those locations aren’t nailed down. yet, exactly. They’re in general areas and, therefore, still need to go through all the proper processes,” Hoffman said.
ARCH2 officials say more information should be coming soon in the form of open house meetings throughout the project area.
However, environmental and community advocates say that ARCH2’s outreach is lacking. At the latest online public briefing, dozens of people submitted questions on environmental topics like the impacts of carbon dioxide pipelines and air and water pollution from fracking.
Most of these questions went unanswered.
I think they failed that test,” said Tom Torres, hydrogen coordinator with Ohio River Valley Institute. “I don’t think a lot of attendees left feeling reassured or empowered after this briefing.”
Among those who submitted questions at the briefing was Morgan King with the West Virginia Citizen Action Group.
King says she’s alarmed by how little information about the project has been divulged two years after a plan was announced to bring the hub to the region.
“That’s no surprise. That’s the history of Appalachia, of large companies from out of state or from big cities coming in proposing their projects that will only really benefit shareholders and folks out of state,” King said.
King is worried that something packaged as a climate solution will only leave problems for her region.
Manchin, for his part, brushed off those concerns. He pointed to rising electricity demand.
“The world has so much more demand for energy than it’s ever had,” he said. “You want less carbon; you want a cleaner environment, you better look at fuels that … can do the work that you need done in a carbon-reduced manner. It’s not perfect, but it’s on a way [to] a transition.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship.
