In Green Hydrogen, Experts See an Exit Ramp From Fossil Fuels

This is part two of a two-part series on ways that coal infrastructure is being repurposed to meet the needs of renewable energy. Read part one here.

For four decades, the Oklaunion Power Plant has been a fixture on the landscape near rural Vernon, Texas, a town of about 11,000 in the vicinity of the Texas-Oklahoma state line. The plant burned coal to produce energy until it was officially decommissioned in September 2020.  

Carl Freeing and his family have owned farmland near the facility going back decades. Back when the former coal plant was active, he recalls how the sky would change colors some afternoons as a hazy yellow smog slowly leaked from the facility. Back then, Freeing could see which way the wind was blowing just by looking at it. “You’d have this yellow streak that would go up, and go in whatever direction,” Freeing says of the former power plant’s pollution. 

After its closing, the Oklaunion Power Plant sat like a ghost on the flat North Texas landscape. Then, in 2022, it looked as if the facility might spring back to life: The international gas and chemical company Air Products and the Virginia-based utilities provider AES announced a partnership to redevelop the defunct energy facility into a $4 billion “green hydrogen” producer. Rather than pump harmful chemicals into the air, the fuel source would be created through electrolysis of water using only renewable energy sources, like solar or wind. 

The companies claimed the project would prevent a lifetime of five billion gallons of diesel and resulting carbon emissions that trap heat within the atmosphere, and which accelerate climate change’s greenhouse effect. The project’s spokespeople estimated that the plant would be operational by 2027 and that it would create nearly 2,000 temporary jobs during its construction. Following an announcement of the companies’ plans to revitalize the former coal plant, Texas Governor Greg Abbott described the facility as the nation’s largest. 

The facility has become an example of how oil-rich states like Texas — which leads the nation in annual wind power production and is behind only California in annual solar power production — are buying into the renewable energy boom. Much of this investment was spurred by former President Joe Biden’s administration and his legislative goals, such as the roughly $500 billion that Congress set aside through its approval of the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.  

This eagerness to invest in renewable energy has come at a time when climate change has driven average global temperatures to roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius (and steadily climbing) above pre-industrial levels. To stave off the worst of the ongoing climate crisis’s effects, domestically and abroad, renewable sources like green hydrogen bear promise, scientists say. And that promise is already being fulfilled in nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden, all of whom are global leaders in green hydrogen production facilities that are in final planning or financing phases, according to a hydrogen projects data tracker published by the International Energy Agency last year. 

Meanwhile, in the U.S., some 67 green hydrogen projects are planned through at least 2029, according to an energy transition paper published by the workforce solutions company Airswift. 

The alternative fuel has always had promise, says Dr. Alan Lloyd, a renewable energy researcher at the University of Texas. It’s not a future pipe dream, he adds. But rather, now, “it’s happening.”

Rebranding ‘clean’ hydrogen 

In some ways, the element hydrogen is everything. It’s the universe’s lightest, most abundant chemical. It’s part of the foundation of life on Earth, from water to plants, to primates, to us. Alongside the element carbon, hydrogen even helped form the fossil fuels the global energy economy has relied upon for more than century through their extraction and, later, refinement. 

As a fuel, hydrogen production has historically been a polluting process. That remains the case today: The International Renewable Energy Agency’s 2018 hydrogen and renewable energy report found that about 95 percent of global hydrogen was described as “gray hydrogen.” That means its production relies on the use of fossil fuels, such as polluting chemicals like natural gas and methane. 

But the process of producing hydrogen varies, resulting in different classifications. There’s “blue” hydrogen, which also uses natural gas in its production process. Like green hydrogen, it, too, is described as a clean energy source, but only if the greenhouse gas emissions created during its production are then captured and stored underneath bodies of water, such as an ocean or lake (in fact, near Louisiana’s Lake Maurepas, a separate Air Products project will attempt to store an estimated 95 percent of a facility’s emissions doing just that). 

By contrast, green hydrogen is drawn from water using renewable electricity. It’s cited as the cleanest means of producing hydrogen as an energy source, minus its transportation process by a private sector that still relies on diesel-powered vehicles to move it once produced.  

The Biden administration’s Department of Energy made a habit of referring to both green and blue hydrogens as “clean” hydrogen fuels early on. The federal agency first described the hydrogens as clean in its announcement of the U.S.’s first hydrogen and decarbonization strategy. 

It’s a rebrand, experts say. 

It also forces the public to “think about the carbon intensity of hydrogen production,” says Genevieve Saur, a hydrogen and fuel cell researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. More importantly, Saur adds, the “clean” description provides leverage for the U.S. to “maximize its decarbonization potential.”

Experts see green hydrogen as a practical alternative for some sectors, like those dependent on aviation fuels. 

“The agricultural sector, steel, cement, a lot of these industries cannot necessarily be decarbonized electrically,” Dr. Saur says of the federal government’s intentions in the hydrogen production buildout. 

Perhaps more importantly, green hydrogen has potential to aid in the U.S.’s carbon reduction efforts. The Biden administration aimed its efforts at drawing down carbon emissions in the energy and transportation sectors, which produce the majority of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. In December 2024, Biden announced the U.S.’s new climate target of drawing down net greenhouse gas emissions 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels in the next decade — a goal that would keep the U.S. on track to meet net-zero emissions by at least 2050. 

“Hydrogen has another role to play in reducing pollution,” Lloyd points out, noting that renewable fuel sources like green hydrogen can help the U.S. meet those same goals. That includes through converting heavy-duty vehicles to hybrids using hydrogen and electric batteries, particularly in disadvantaged communities that are, on average, most likely to suffer from transportation’s pollution. With such changes, “You will see immediate benefits,” he says, because unlike the burning of gasoline and diesel in today’s heavy-industry vehicles, batteries and fuel cells will not burn emissions from a tailpipe. 

Ongoing challenges

Even if energy markets and researchers are quick to point to green hydrogen’s industrial potential, it remains expensive and difficult to produce. 

A 2020 International Renewable Energy Agency report focused on green hydrogen production found that the renewable energy source is roughly three times more expensive to produce than gray hydrogen. Additionally, about one-third of the energy produced through electrolysis is lost during the production process. And with the nation’s renewable energy grid still in its adolescence, there just aren’t many sources from which to pull the energy required for its production. 

In other words, the market is there. But even if renewable energy is on the rise in states like Texas  — which installed more solar capacity in 2023 than any other state in the U.S. — the capacity to produce truly cleaner fuel sources like green hydrogen is still lacking. 

That might change soon, energy sector forecasts suggest. 

Two reports from the business intelligence firm IDTechEx provide hope. For example, one report estimated that the green hydrogen market will grow up to about four times larger than the dirtier, but currently cheaper, blue hydrogen market over roughly the next decade. And by 2033, researchers also note, the global green hydrogen market’s annual value is expected to balloon to roughly $120 billion, while in 2022, it was valued at roughly $4 billion. Meanwhile, the global blue hydrogen market is expected to grow from about $18 billion in 2023 to $34 billion in 2033. 

Importantly, experts say, green hydrogen can help build an exit ramp away from fossil fuels. It can also provide a cleaner fuel source for developing nations as they continue to build wealth. 

Clean hydrogen production has already begun playing a role in reducing emissions in the U.S. 

In 2021, California became the nation’s first state to go all-in on the use of clean hydrogen as a zero-emission vehicle fuel source as part of the state’s larger greenhouse gas reductions. California law requires that 100 percent of new passenger vehicles sold within the state will be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. 

The integration of hydrogen energy into the U.S. market is new, but it’s already established in Asia and Europe. China currently leads the world in green hydrogen project planning. And last year, the European Union announced a hydrogen and decarbonization strategy that will increase green hydrogen production and capacity to keep pace with the E.U.’s own 2050 net-zero target. Sweden, Germany, Spain and Austria currently lead Europe in green hydrogen projects in planning, while Germany is currently Europe’s leader in operational green hydrogen capacity, according to the IEA’s hydrogen project database, which was last updated in 2024. 

But even amidst these big economic bets on the clean hydrogen market, experts like Dr. Saur are quick to admit that “there’s still a good bit of research and development to help the industry ramp up production of [green hydrogen electrolyzers]” — the device used during production that splits hydrogen and oxygen water molecules — “as well as making them more efficient and reliable.”

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The next challenge, Dr. Saur adds, will be making clean hydrogen accessible to the public. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that going forward clean hydrogen will act as a fix-all for climate change. “I don’t think it’s a silver bullet,” Dr. Lloyd says. Rather, green hydrogen is part of “a menu of options.”

“History tells us that we shouldn’t just bank on one technology,” he adds.  

Now, for the U.S., that menu of options hinges on the administration of President Donald Trump — historically, a vocal oil and gas industry proponent. 

The continued construction of green hydrogen and virtually all renewable energy sources in the U.S. were thrown into question with President Trump’s reelection. Throughout his reelection campaign, he promised to halt funding of the Biden administration’s landmark climate and infrastructure bills. 

Back in Vernon, Texas, the future is uncertain: Air Products and AES announced in September last year that the green hydrogen facility intended for the community had been put on hold. Air Products and AES spokespeople did not respond to interview requests. 

Freeing, the farmer living near the proposed green hydrogen plant, says he would be glad to see industry come back to the town. He admits Vernon has been hurting since the coal plant’s closure, and green hydrogen could provide a lifeline.