OCED released summaries of each hub’s commitment to community benefits immediately after the hubs were selected last October. Since then, OCED has held more than 70 meetings with more than 900 individuals and groups participating, Cummins said. The office has also briefed about 4,000 individuals and groups, including community members, environmental justice organizations, labor and workforce organizations, first responders, local businesses, energy professionals, elected tribal leaders, and local, state, and federal government officials.
The feedback from those meetings has led OCED to add new requirements for the hubs. The projects now must create public data reporting portals to share information as it’s finalized. They must develop community advisory structures that allow groups to provide feedback on plans as they’re developed. And they must “jointly evaluate or pursue negotiated agreements” on labor, workforce, health and safety, and community benefits plans.
“We’re really focused on three-way communication” between OCED, hub participants, and affected communities and other groups “to make sure anything we’re hearing back from the community is adequately addressed,” Cummins said. “That will determine whether we move forward to the next phase of the process.”
Environmental and community groups worry these requirements may still not prevent hub participants from running roughshod over communities, however.
In particular, many fear that participants — including oil and gas giants such as bp America, Chevron, Enbridge, EQT, ExxonMobil, Sempra Energy, and TC Energy — will subject communities already burdened with fossil fuel pollution to further harms from hydrogen production.
Communities have “questions around the transparency for the selection and planning process, how to monitor and evaluate community benefits plans, and to ensure there are sustained community benefits after the duration of the grants,” said Cihang Yuan, a senior program officer at the environmental nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. Other concerns include “more local impacts, such as hydrogen leakage or chemical disasters,” she said. “It’s definitely important for these hubs to have a solid plan for safety of operations.”
The secretive approach that hubs have taken to sharing information with potentially affected communities has added to these concerns. In California, the ARCHES hub requires meeting participants to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from sharing information about the hub’s activities under threat of legal penalties.
“That’s something we can’t do,” said Theo Caretto, associate attorney at California-based environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), since it would bar community groups from sharing information with their constituents.
Those non-disclosure rules have remained in place at ARCHES and other hubs despite continual protests, forcing groups like CBE to wait for public information to dribble out. But one year in, “we’re having difficulty getting specifics on which projects are being funded,” Caretto said. “They’ve given out fact sheets and publications,” such as the map and chart below in a May report from ARCHES to DOE. “But those are still quite general and don’t give specifics about what each project is.”
The Ohio River Valley Institute has raised similar concerns about the ARCH2 project in Appalachia. In a May letter to DOE signed by 54 nonprofit and community groups, Tom Torres, the institute’s hydrogen campaign coordinator, said communities have had “no substantive opportunity to shape this proposal while negotiations continue behind closed doors.”
The saving grace, he wrote, is that “nothing so grievous has been done that cannot be undone. Money has yet to flow to these projects and ground has not been broken.”
Giving communities authority over how major energy infrastructure is planned and built would be a departure from how large industrial projects have historically been pursued.
“There is this dichotomy, this tension, between the project development deadlines and long-term robust engagement processes that will be needed to meet these community benefits plans obligations and gain community trust,” said Mona Dajani, global co-chair of energy, infrastructure and hydrogen at law firm Baker Botts and lead counsel for the HyVelocity hub in Texas.
DOE’s commitment to ensuring that hubs will meet the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative — its pledge to direct at least 40 percent of climate-related federal spending to communities “historically impacted by energy development and burdened with policies of exclusion and disinvestment,” as Dajani put it — heightens the importance of community involvement.
This will “add a lot of complexity to development processes. But they’re doing their best.
It’s definitely going to be challenging to be transparent when it’s not all finished,” Dajani said.
Will private-sector players commit to spending the money?
Amidst questions around community benefits and lifecycle carbon emissions, much of the hype that fueled oversized clean-hydrogen projections in the past few years has started to deflate. Major project announcements have been delayed or put in limbo, leading analysts to question whether ambitious government clean-hydrogen production targets can be reached in the coming decade.
This retrenchment is also a threat to U.S. hydrogen hubs, which must convince companies and their financial backers to commit to the tens of billions of dollars of investment needed to scale up clean hydrogen to compete against the fossil fuels it is meant to displace.
That challenge is already rearing its head at the Appalachian ARCH2 hub, a pet project of a lawmaker key to getting the hydrogen hub program passed as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — retiring Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Manchin praised the ARCH2 hub’s potential to revitalize the economy of his home state and the greater Appalachian region at an August event marking DOE’s approval of its first-phase grant. “I’m happy to know that I was able to play a part in this to be able to have a future for my children and grandchildren,” he said.
But, as is true for all of the hub projects at this point, it’s far from clear that ARCH2 will deliver on its promise of becoming a clean energy economic engine for the region.
In a report released this week, the Ohio River Valley Institute noted that several projects initially identified as part of the ARCH2 plan have since dropped out. Those include Canadian gas producer and pipeline owner TC Energy and industrial chemicals giant Chemours, which canceled plans to develop two green hydrogen production sites in West Virginia.
“The various hydrogen hubs and their individual projects are much more tenuous than many people imagine,” Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute and the author of the report, told Canary Media. “These projects are still heavily dependent on private markets to come up with the funds.”
In an attempt to fill the gap left by those departures, ARCH2 recently issued a call for companies to propose projects, which could receive up to $110 million if selected. “Originally you could argue that we had projects that were seeking federal funds,” O’Leary said. “Now, we have federal funds seeking projects.”
Cummins said that OCED has anticipated that hub participants may drop out or be added throughout the early stages. “That’s OK. We don’t want a company that for any reason doesn’t want to participate to be stuck in something they don’t see as economically viable.”
At the same time, OCED will vet new entrants on the same criteria applied to those that initially applied: “Are they technically feasible? Do we see a path to financial viability? What does their workforce plan look like? And finally, what do their community benefits look like?”
In an email to Canary Media, T.R. Massey, spokesperson for Battelle, the research organization managing the ARCH2 hub, echoed a key refrain about the projects: “The important context to remember is these new hydrogen hubs, including ARCH2, have just entered the first phase.”
