Jennifer Granholm Photo: Evan Vucci / AP / TASS

On her first day as US Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm called her department a “solution generator” in the Joe Biden administration. The Department of Energy will lead the way to reduce net carbon dioxide emissions in the United States to zero by 2050, “developing and deploying technologies that will create a clean energy revolution,” she said.

This week, Granholm put her plans into motion by announcing the Hydrogen Shot program, the first in a series of initiatives aimed at achieving breakthroughs in clean energy technologies over the next decade. As part of this program, the ministry wants to reduce the cost of producing so-called green hydrogen, which is obtained by electrolysis of water using energy from renewable sources, by 80% to $1 per kilogram over 10 years. At this cost, green hydrogen will be cheaper to produce than from natural gas.

“ To continue to develop a range of promising technologies, we must invest in research and development. Pure hydrogen is a radical game changer. »

Jennifer Granholm

US Secretary of Energy

The Department can help achieve U.S. climate goals by incentivizing and funding innovation and helping commercialize new technologies. Some, however, believe it is too risky a strategy that may not achieve progress in the fight against climate change for many years, or even fail. In May, environmental activists including Greta Thunberg criticized US special envoy for climate change John Kerry for what they saw as being overly optimistic about the role new technologies could play in the fight against global warming.

Analysts generally agree that the construction of renewable power plants and the electrification of large areas of the economy (especially transport) will help significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near term, while the issue of industrial decarbonization, which is much more difficult to achieve, remains largely open. Reducing more than half of the emissions that would need to be eliminated to create a zero-carbon economy would require technologies that are still largely in their infancy.

In the short term, such technologies, including green hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and renewable fuels, will do little to combat harmful emissions, but they will be critical in the long term. “I think it's very important to have hydrogen on the climate agenda,” says Paul Bledsoe, a strategy adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former climate adviser in the Bill Clinton administration.

Under Granholm, the Energy Department hopes to replicate the success of the Obama administration's Breakthrough Solar program, which helped lower the cost of grid-scale solar power from 2010 to 2017. by 75% to $0.06/kWh. “Twenty years ago we could not even imagine that solar energy could be so cheap. The option [with pure hydrogen] must be implemented, it is too important,” says Bledsøe.

The ministry hopes that a radical reduction in the cost of green hydrogen in the next decade will ensure a fivefold increase in demand for it. Its commercial production is already growing. In recent months, the commissioning of capacity to produce green hydrogen through electrolysis has increased sharply. According to Wood Mackenzie , until 2019, total global capacity in this area was only 200 MW. This has since grown to 6.3 GW, with 1.3 GW of capacity coming online in the first quarter of this year.

The past year and a half has seen a "sea change" that will see green hydrogen become a key element of the energy transition, says Ben Gallagher, lead hydrogen and emerging technologies analyst at Wood Mackenzie . The consultancy estimates that green hydrogen will become competitive with fossil fuels sometime between 2028 and 2033.

Translated by Mikhail Overchenko

US Department of Energy invests in green hydrogen technologies