PITTSBURGH (TNS) — A group of Western Pennsylvania companies and global power players have formed an alliance to pursue making this region a hub for carbon capture and storage and hydrogen production.
The companies involved are U.S. Steel, EQT Corp., Shell Polymers, Mitsubishi Power, Norway-based Equinor, GE Gas Power, and Marathon Petroleum Corp.
Some have been meeting since early 2021, organized by IN-2-Market Inc., a nonprofit that is facilitating the initiative.
They represent large industrial producers and users of energy, as well as companies involved in making power generation and processing equipment, some who are already involved in hydrogen or carbon capture projects.
Mitsubishi Power, for example, is developing a project in Utah where hydrogen produced through electrolysis will be stored in a salt cavern and, when needed, used to produce electricity.
U.S. Steel has already been working with Equinor on a feasibility study EQT has previously said it might be interested in turning its natural gas into hydrogen and testing some of its deep wells as potential injection sites for CO2.
Shell, which plans to start up commercial operations at its petrochemical complex in Beaver County this year, said it is working on capturing carbon dioxide from that plant.
”We do intend to decarbonize our own operations and we’re in the very early stages of developing a plan to capture CO2 at site,” spokeswoman Virginia Sanchez said. “We also see opportunity for us to support our customers and partners in to meet their carbon emissions goals, whether by supplying our carbon capture technology, collaborating to permanently store CO2 underground, or providing hydrogen energy in the future.”
Although the alliance’s announcement did not include specific plans for the future, it is likely the group will pursue a number of federal funding opportunities that were included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed last year.
Among them is $8 billion to fund regional hydrogen hubs, and billions more for carbon capture, storage and utilization projects. Solicitations are due to the Department of Energy by May 15, 2022.
The marrying of the two technologies, where hydrogen would be produced from natural gas with the resulting CO2 emissions captured and sequestered, has been floated as a good fit for regions with natural gas resources, heavy industrial facilities that cannot be easily electrified, and geological formations that could serve as permanent storage fields for CO2.
There is already a sizable tax credit available to companies that can capture and store carbon — $50 per ton of CO2 put into permanent geological storage.
The Great Plains Institute, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that published its Atlas of Carbon and Hydrogen Hubs this month, estimated of the 152 major industrial facilities in Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and northern West Virginia, 20 have emissions that would qualify for the federal tax credit if they captured and stored their carbon.
They include coal and gas power plants, cement and steel facilities and refineries.
”The existing landscape of industrial production, commodity transport infrastructure, and geologic carbon storage capacity make Western Pennsylvania a natural launching point for investment in carbon capture and low-carbon hydrogen deployment,” the report, which identified 13 other areas in the U.S. as potential hubs, concluded.
A hydrogen production credit was part of the Build Back Better plan, which is either dead or still being negotiated, depending on which politician is asked.
