By ANYA LITVAK, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
After more than a year of speculation, the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub finally lifted the cloak and named names.
The mammoth consortium that has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for up to $925 million in funding to establish a hub for methane-derived hydrogen production and use, includes 15 projects and more than a dozen companies.
Shawn Bennett, energy and resilience division manager at Battelle, and a former DOE assistant secretary, said he’s never been involved in anything this big. What some have derided as a lack of transparency has been a mad-dash, super-competitive process that’s still not over, he said. Negotiations with DOE are slated to last the next few months until the award is secured.
Still, “the cloak of competition has been removed,” said Melanie White, director of strategic engagement with Allegheny Science and Technology who is leading community engagement efforts for the hub.
Ms. White and Mr. Bennett unveiled the projects at a DOE-run public webinar.
The map they presented on Tuesday was different from the one Mr. Bennett showed during a presentation at an oil and gas industry conference, Shale Insight, last month. Most notably, it included the names of the companies and which projects they were developing. It also slimmed down its Pennsylvania inventory.
The map shows two dots in the Keystone State: one, in Fayette County, is EQT’s planned natural gas-derived hydrogen facility that would turn some of it into aviation fuel and sell the rest to Air Liquide, a French chemical company that plans to turn hydrogen into ground transportation fuel. The other is KeyState Zero’s project in Clinton County. This expanding effort has been in the works for years. It aims to marry onsite gas drilling with hydrogen, ammonia, and urea production and carbon sequestration.
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