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Research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis calls blue hydrogen’s carbon math into question.
The largest hydrogen producer in the world, Air Products, stands to earn up to $440 million per year in clean energy tax credits once it opens its massive, $7 billion complex in Louisiana in 2028. But a recent report argues that while the hydrogen produced there will be highly profitable for Air Products, it’s a “lose-lose proposition” for the environment — and for taxpayers.
The research adds to the long-running debate around the climate benefits of “blue hydrogen,” which is produced via the separation of hydrogen molecules from carbon molecules in natural gas, with systems that capture the resulting carbon emissions and store them underground. Advocates of the technology say it’s a critical bridge to a renewables-powered hydrogen economy, as it allows for cleaner hydrogen production now by relying on existing infrastructure. Critics, however, say that blue hydrogen’s emissions benefits are minimal if any, and that a focus on this technology diverts money from more meaningful climate solutions.
The blue hydrogen produced at Air Products’ Louisiana facility will be eligible for the lucrative 45Q carbon sequestration tax credit, which was expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and provides up to $85 per metric ton of carbon that’s permanently locked away.
The March report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, however, argues that Air Products makes overly optimistic assumptions about both methane leakage rates and the effectiveness of carbon capture equipment, while underestimating the potency of methane in the short term. The company’s estimates are largely based on a Department of Energy life cycle analysis tool, which the report's authors also believe is flawed. The result, the authors write, is that the Louisiana plant would “cost billions of dollars in subsidies for essentially zero environmental benefit.”
With lawmakers in Congress considering which IRA tax credits to preserve and which ones to cut to make way for Trump’s spending priorities, now is a critical moment for climate-focused policymakers to have their priorities in order. It’s worth asking which provisions from Biden’s signature climate law are actually delivering a climate bang for their buck.
Air Products says that its Louisiana facility will sequester 5 million metric tons of CO2 annually over the 12 years that it’s eligible for the tax credit, which equates to $6.3 billion in total tax savings. To state the obvious, that’s a lot of taxpayer money for a project that a leading research group asserts will likely be a net negative for the environment.
“As you start expanding the envelope to take into account the full footprint and the full impact of this project and its product, there’s just not much of a benefit there, if any. It may be making things worse.” Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at IEEFA and one of the report’s authors, told me. These findings are not specific just to Air Products’ upcoming facility — they’re “broadly applicable to other blue hydrogen projects,” Juhn said. (My colleague Emily Pontecorvo, for instance, wrote about a similar finding regarding methane leakage from the Permian Basin.) At least four of the DOE’s seven hydrogen hubs rely on natural gas with carbon capture and storage to some degree. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking to cut funding for the hubs that primarily produce hydrogen via renewable energy.
The DOE’s life cycle analysis tool uses an industrial methane leakage rate of 0.9% and a carbon capture rate of 94.5% for the specific method the Air Products facility will use, called autothermal reforming. (Or at least that’s what the IEEFA report said — I couldn’t find evidence of this carbon capture number in the government’s model itself.)
When Juhn and her co-author David Schlissel adjusted the analysis of Air Products’ Louisiana project using more typical industrial methane leakage rates of 1% to 4% and carbon capture rates ranging from 60% to 94.5%, they found that only under the most optimistic scenario would the project yield any carbon reductions at all. Even then, avoided emissions would only be about 200,000 metric tons per year of CO2 equivalent, whereas at the high end of the report’s “realistic scenario,” the project could result in an additional 7.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent annually.
Courtesy of IEEFA
To calculate the net life cycle emissions of a hydrogen project, the authors had to take the estimated benefits of hydrogen production into account, a task complicated by the fact that Air Products hasn’t announced any offtakers, making it impossible to know what dirtier (or cleaner) options customers might turn to if they didn’t have access to blue hydrogen. So instead, IEEFA relied on the White House’s general estimate that the 3 million metric tons of blue and green hydrogen (i.e. hydrogen released from water molecules using carbon-free electricity) produced by the hydrogen hubs would displace 25 million metric tons of CO2. But because the White House didn’t release its formula for determining avoided emissions, take their numbers with a grain of salt.
All of Air Products’ calculations thus come with the usual caveat, which is that they’re measured against an unknowable counterfactual — essentially a best guess at what would happen if plans for the Air Products facility went poof. Would the end users opt for hydrogen alternatives or would they rely on a standard natural gas-powered hydrogen facility with no carbon capture? Is it possible that a green hydrogen plant using renewables-powered electrolysis would be built instead?
All weknow is that a portion of the hydrogen will be turned into ammonia and exported abroad, where Juhn told me it’s likely to be burned as fuel. Another portion will be injected into an existing 700-mile hydrogen pipeline on the Gulf Coast for use by existing customers in industries such as energy, transportation and chemicals.
While Air Products did not respond to my request for comment on the report, I was able to discuss the results with John Thompson, a director at the climate nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, which advocates for a wide array of climate-focused technologies, including hydrogen with carbon capture and storage. He took issue with the IEEFA study’s methodology, and told me that blue hydrogen projects have the potential to be a big win for the climate, so long as they’re replacing “gray” hydrogen projects — that is, those powered by natural gas with no carbon capture.
“When you do displace gray hydrogen, you get huge, huge benefits,” Thompson told me. Despite all the unknowns involved, he’s confident the Louisiana project will do just that, primarily due to the existing network of hydrogen pipelines at the site. “Those pipelines are there because they’re serving existing customers — refineries, ammonia plants, chemical manufacturing,” he said, meaning that “the likelihood that you’re displacing existing sources is pretty great.”
Thompson also took issue with the notion that a 95% capture rate is overly optimistic, telling me that there’s no technical barriers to achieving industrial capture rates in the 90s. “The 95% capture rate that they’re proposing to build towards is what is commercially guaranteed by many vendors,” Thompson said. “It hasn’t been widely used, not because it’s not commercially available, but because it’s costly, and there hasn’t been much demand for it until we got into climate considerations.”
To Thompson, the IEEFA report looked more like an “advocacy piece.” To IEEFA, the Louisiana project still appears to be a government subsidized money-making scheme. Notably, the Air Products facility probably will not qualify for the much debated 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit, the most generous subsidy of all in the IRA. That credit provides up to $3 per kilogram of clean hydrogen produced — a whopping $3,000 per metric ton — for projects with the lowest emissions intensity. It’s also tech-neutral, meaning that so long as blue hydrogen projects have life cycle emissions under 4 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen produced, they will be eligible for at least a $0.60 credit per kilogram of clean hydrogen.
Air Products said last May that it would not even attempt to claim this credit for the Louisiana facility, even as the company asserts that the complex will produce “near-zero carbon emissions.” A 2023 DOE report indicated few blue hydrogen projects will be eligible, period, given “the added [natural gas] and electricity needed to run the [carbon capture and storage] facility.”
So at least by the DOE’s own standards, the hydrogen produced by Air Products will not be “clean.” That’s not a precondition for the carbon sequestration tax credit, though, which doesn’t demand life cycle analysis, just proof that you’re putting a certain amount of CO2 in the ground. Juhn thinks that’s a big mistake. These analyses are “the only way that you can know whether or not investing in CCS projects makes sense, either in a climate sense or in a financial sense,” she told me.
But as fossil fuel interests including Occidental and ExxonMobil have advocated for preserving and even increasing the 45Q tax credit, Juhn doesn’t expect to see any changes to the rule that would mandate more stringent requirements.
“I do hear the fossil fuel industry saying, Oh, we need blue hydrogen first because we can get things moving. We can get this online and we can start creating this product to stimulate demand,” she told me, citing a common argument that blue hydrogen is a necessary stepping stone to creating a robust, economical green hydrogen economy. “But the problem is that these facilities, they’re not going to go away when green hydrogen projects come online, and these projects are being built with a 25-, 30-year lifespan.”
At the very least, what everyone can agree on is the need to address upstream methane leakage. “It’s not enough to do carbon capture, I can’t emphasize that enough,” Thompson told me, pointing out that methane emissions are “not a law of thermodynamics” but rather “a variable that we can control if we choose to.” Unfortunately, it looks like the Trump administration won’t be choosing to, as the president recently signed legislation scrapping a Biden-era rule that imposed fees on oil and gas producers who emit excess methane.
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It will take years, at least, to reconstitute the federal workforce — and that’s if it can be managed at all.
By anyone’s best guess, there are — or soon will be — 284,186 fewer federal employees and contractors than there were on January 19, 2025. While Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for International Development have had it the worst, the Trump administration’s ongoing reductions have spared few government agencies. Over 10% of the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including at critical weather stations and tsunami monitoring centers, have left or been pushed out. Layoffs, buyouts, and early retirements have reduced the Department of Energy’s workforce by another 13%.
The best-case scenario for the civil service at this point would be if the administration has an abrupt change of heart and pivots from the approach of government “efficiency” guru Elon Musk and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who has said he wants government bureaucrats to be “traumatically affected” by the funding cuts and staff reductions. Short of that unlikelihood, its membership will have to wait out the three-and-a-half remaining years of President Trump’s term in the hopes that his successor will have a kinder opinion of the federal workforce.
But even that wouldn’t mean a simple fix. In my effort to learn how long it would take the federal workforce to recover from just the four-plus months of Trump administration cuts so far, no one I spoke to seemed to believe a future president could reverse the damage in a single four-year term. “It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to restore the kind of institutional knowledge that’s being lost,” Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government workers, told me.
There are three main reasons why restaffing the government will be trickier than implementing a simple policy change. The first is that the government had already been strugglingto fill empty posts before Trump’s layoffs began. “For a considerable period of time, the biggest challenge for the federal government, in personnel terms, has been getting talented people into government quickly,” Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told me. “That was already a problem preceding the Trump administration, and they just made it a lot worse.”
Before Trump’s second term, an estimated 83% of “major federal departments and agencies” struggled with staff shortages, while 63% reported “gaps in the knowledge and skills of their employees,” according to research by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit supporting the civil service. Even President Joe Biden, who’d promised to restore a “hollowed out” federal workforce after Trump 1.0, struggled at the task, ultimately growing the number of permanent employees by just 0.9% by March 2023. (He eventually saw 6% growth over his entire term; a bright spot was hiring for roles necessary for carrying out the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.)
Still, as I’ve previously reported, many hard-to-fill roles in remote locations or that required specialized skills were empty when Trump came into office and ordered a hiring freeze.
The second challenge to rebuilding the federal workforce is that many employees who have left the government may not be able to — or may not want to — return to their previous roles. Staff who have taken early retirements will be permanently lost or have to return as rehired annuitants, which Simon of the American Federation of Government Employees noted has “a lot of disadvantages,” including, in some cases, earning less than the minimum wage. Other former employees, particularly in the sciences, may have been enticed abroad as part of the U.S. brain drain. Still others may have found enjoyable and fulfilling work at the state level, in nonprofits, or in the private sector, and have no interest in returning to government.
It certainly doesn’t help that the Trump administration has made the federal government a less competitive employer. Abigail Haddad, a data scientist for the Department of the Army and, until recently, the Department of Homeland Security’s AI Corps, wrote for Moynihan’s Substack,Can We Still Govern?, that she’d been hired for a fully remote job, only to be told “we would be fired if we did not immediately return to office 9 to 5, five days a week.” Rather than make a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip commute to “an office that was never mentioned when I took the job,” Haddad quit. “It was clear to me that the people making these decisions about my work conditions were not only unconcerned about my ability to be productive, but were actively hostile toward it,” she wrote.
The last obstacle to reversing the Trump administration’s cuts echoes Haddad’s experience — and is, in my view, the most worrisome of all. That is, the current landscape will almost certainly dissuade future generations from pursuing jobs in the government. “There will be some opportunities in states and nonprofits,” Simon noted. “But as far as an opportunity for public service in the federal government — they’ve made that an impossibility, at least for the next many years.”
Moynihan, the public policy professor, added that while it’s still early to predict what students will do, he’s heard worries in his classrooms about “what future job prospects look like, given the instability around the federal government.” But the crisis goes beyond just hiring concerns.
“There’s a whole generation of public servants who would say they were inspired to go into government because they heard John F. Kennedy say, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,’” he said. “There is a genuine value in elected leaders calling on people to serve and presenting that service in noble terms.” Most people don’t join the public sector for the paycheck, after all — it’s for the “opportunity to do meaningful work, and for job stability and security,” Moynihan went on. The Trump administration has gutted the promises of both.
So then, how long would it take to restaff the government? Simon told me that since it was an executive order that directed the cuts, they could be functionally undone by another executive order, though the rehiring process itself “could take years.” Moynihan used the metaphor of a muscle, rather than a switch that gets turned on and off, to answer the same question. “The Trump administration is cutting a lot of muscle right now, and so the next president will not be able to simply, on day one, bring that back,” he told me. “They’ll have to be able to persuade people that the workspace is no longer going to be toxic, is going to be more secure, and will allow them to do meaningful work — and they’re going to face a fairly skeptical audience, given everything that’s going on.”
But that’s if things hold as they are. They could still get worse.
As the administration continues its attack on the civil service, it seems all but sure to be cueing up an eventual Supreme Court case over the legality of reclassifying federal employees so that they can be easily fired if they’re perceived as not loyal enough to the president. And if the court rules that the president can do so, “any sort of law that Congress might put in the future that constrains those powers is unconstitutional,” Moynihan said. In that scenario, the government would no longer be able to provide “any sort of long-term credible commitments to potential employees that four years down the line or eight years down the line, any new president could just rip up their workplace” or lay them off for arbitrary reasons.
The answer to how long it would take to restaff the federal government after Trump, then, takes on an entirely different tenor — it may never be the same again.
Smothered, covered, and recharged.
Picture, if you will, the perfect electric vehicle charging stop. It sits right off a well-traveled highway. It has decent bathrooms, preferably ones that are open 24/7. It gives drivers and road-tripping families a simple way to occupy themselves during the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to refill the battery, the most obvious solution being a meal that can be consumed within that time window.
In other words, it is a Waffle House.
The beloved chain of budget restaurants spread across the American South said last week that it would begin to install DC fast chargers in 2026. Built by BP, the charging stalls will be able to deliver up to 400 kilowatts of electricity and will include plugs with both the Combined Charging System standard (the plug used by most non-Tesla EVs to date) and the North American Charging System standard (the formerly proprietary Tesla plug that is slowly becoming the standard for the industry at large). At last, Americans can get their hash browns smothered, covered, and recharged.
We won’t see every Waffle House in the country become an electron depot overnight. BP said it is planning installations at about 50 sites right now; Waffle House has around 2,000 locations in the United States. Yet the addition of charging — and not just charging, but high-speed charging — at the Waffle House is just what the American EV experience needs.
Where fast chargers are built has been driven by a few factors. Notably, there is necessity from the EV driver’s point of view and practicality for the charging company. Charging depots along major highways and interstates make electric road trips possible, but many prime pit stops between big cities are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it a challenge to provide amenities to resting drivers. In the empty California desert between L.A. and San Francisco, for example, Tesla built Superchargers at iconic steak restaurants and at existing travel plazas with your expected array of gas stations and fast food restaurants. I’ve also stopped numerous times at an impromptu, formerly unpaved site rushed together to accommodate holiday traffic; for months it featured nothing but plugs and portable bathrooms sitting in the dirt.
In cities and suburbs, it’s not uncommon to find charging stations at outlet malls and shopping centers. It makes sense: These places have lots of parking spaces, room for the necessary electrical infrastructure, and stores and restaurants to provide some level of amusement or distraction. If it so happens that you need to go to the REI or Sephora anyway, then so much the better. Mercedes-Benz is trying to class up this setup by putting its luxury charging sites at high-end malls and providing primo, covered parking spaces.
But the game changer is the Waffle House. Businesses have long realized the benefit of adding EV chargers, either as a serendipitous perk for customers who arrive in electric need, or as an enticement for EV owners to patronize their business rather than the competitor with no plugs. Mostly, though, those businesses install Level 2 “destination” chargers that are roughly equivalent to what drivers get in their garage if they pay for the upgrade: 240 volts, or enough to provide 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
That’s perfect for a hotel, where patrons who snag a charger can wake up the next morning with a full battery, just as they would at home. I made it across sparse Utah country this way. At a grocery store or a restaurant it’s less useful. It’s a pleasant bonus to add a few miles of juice during an errand. What would be better would be filling up the whole battery while you’re inside the Whole Foods.
The problem, however, is timing. Chargers are a shared resource. For optimal EV charging that works for everybody, drivers move their cars as soon as they’re done to open the stall for someone else, which is why many fast-charging operators ding drivers with idle fees if they stay plugged in. So not every activity is a perfect match. It’s pretty annoying to leave your half-filled cart inside Trader Joe’s to go move the car, or to rush through shopping so you finish by the time the battery does. I’ve been through plenty of situations where I couldn’t get back to my Model 3 right away, and so even though it was about to finish charging at 80%, I used the phone app to bump up the limit to 90% or higher to keep the session going.
You know what is a decent match? The Waffle House. You can probably finish your All-Star Special in time, and if you can’t, no problem. This isn’t fine dining; you can leave the table a moment to hop out to the parking lot and unplug the EV.
Putting chargers at the places Americans love to go anyway, whether road tripping or not, would be a wonderful little way to boost their desirability. My native Nebraska has Superchargers co-located with Runzas at towns along the interstate, a welcome trend that must expand. Let Wisconsinites fill the battery while crushing a frozen custard at Culver’s. Give us chargers at the Cracker Barrel so I can finally solve that unholy peg game. Continue the California trend of putting plugs at the In N Out. If the charging stop is someplace you want to go anyway, the minutes required melt away.
Current conditions: The first U.S. heat wave of the year begins today in the West, with a record high of 107 degrees Fahrenheit possible in Redding, California • India is experiencing its earliest monsoon in 16 years• Power was largely restored in southeast Texas by early Wednesday after destructive winds left nearly 200,000 without electricity.
The global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2-degree Celsius threshold within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization shared in a new report Wednesday morning. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a warming limit to under 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, although the WMO’s prediction will not immediately mean the goal has been broken, since that threshold is measured over at least two decades, the Financial Times reports. Still, WMO’s report represents “the first time that scientists’ computer models had flagged the more imminent possibility of a 2C year,” FT writes. Other concerning findings include:
You can find the full report here.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been in disarray since its acting administrator was fired in early May for defending the agency before Congress. His successor, David Richardson, began his tenure by threatening staff. According to an internal FEMA memo obtained by The Handbasket, however, the picture is worse than mere dysfunction: Stephanie Dobitsch, the associate administrator for policy and program analysis, wrote to Richardson last week warning him that the agency’s “critical functions” are at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.”
Of particular concern is the staffing at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, which The Handbasket notes contains the nuclear bunker “where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11,” and which, per Dobitsch, is now “at risk of not being fully mission capable.” FEMA’s primary disaster response office is also on the verge of being unable to “execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life-saving and life-sustaining program delivery,” the memo goes on. Hurricane season begins on Sunday, and wildfires are already burning in the West. You can read the full report at The Handbasket.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a religious liberty appeal by the San Carlos Apache Tribe to stop the mining company Rio Tinto from proceeding with its plan to build one of the largest copper mines in the world at Oak Flat in Arizona, which the Tribe considers sacred land. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said in a dissent that they would have granted the Tribe’s petition, with Gorsuch calling the court’s decision a “grave mistake” that could “reverberate for generations.” The Trump-appointed justice argued that “before allowing the government to destroy the Apaches’ sacred site, this Court should at least have troubled itself to hear their case.”
I traveled to Superior, Arizona, last year to learn more about Rio Tinto’s project, which analysts estimate could extract enough copper to meet a quarter of U.S. demand. “Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me of the project. But many skeptics say that beyond destroying a culturally and religiously significant site, there is not the smelting capacity in the U.S. for all of Rio Tinto’s raw copper, which the company would likely extract from Oak Flat and send to China for processing. According to court documents, Oak Flat could be transferred to Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Resolution Copper as soon as June 16. In a statement, Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — said, “While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over.”
MTA
New York won a court order on Tuesday temporarily preventing the Trump administration from withholding funding for state transportation projects if it doesn’t end congestion pricing, Gothamist reports. The toll, which went into effect in early January, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th street, and has been successful at reducing traffic and raising millions for subway upgrades. The Trump administration has argued, however, that the toll harms poor and working-class people by “unfairly” charging them to “go to work, see their families, or visit the city.”
The Federal Highway Administration warned New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it had until May 28 to end the program, or else face cuts to city and state highway funding. Judge Lewis J. Liman blocked the government from the retaliatory withholding with the court order on Tuesday, which extends through June 9, arguing the state would “suffer irreparable harm” without it. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, celebrated the move, calling it a “massive victory for New York commuters, vindicating our right as a state to make decisions regarding what’s best for our streets.”
European Union countries agreed on Tuesday to dramatically scale back the bloc’s carbon border tariff so that it will cover only 10% of the companies that currently qualify, Reuters reports. The scheme applies a fee on “imported goods that is equivalent to the carbon price already paid by EU-based companies under the bloc’s CO2 emissions policies,” with the intent of protecting Europe-based companies from being undercut by foreign producers in countries that have looser environmental regulations, Reuters writes. The EU justified the decision by noting that the approximately 18,000 companies to which the levy still applies account for more than 99% of the emissions from iron, steel, aluminum, and cement imports, and that loosening the restriction will benefit smaller businesses.
The famous “climate stripes” graphic — which visualizes the annual increases of global average temperature in red and blue bands — has been updated to include oceanic and atmospheric warming. “We’ve had [these] warming estimates for a long time, but having them all in one graphic is what we’ve managed to do here,” the project’s creator, Ed Hawkins, told Fast Company.