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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 we know 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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A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination will hit clean energy and oil majors alike, including Exxon and Chevron.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination obtained by Heatmap reveals an additional 338 awards for clean energy projects that the agency intends to cancel. Combined with the 321 grants the agency said it was terminating last week, the total value is nearly $24 billion.
While last week’s announcement mostly targeted companies and institutions located in Democratic states, the new list appears to be indiscriminate. Conrad Schneider, the senior U.S. director at Clean Air Task Force, told me in a statement that the move “will have far-reaching consequences — with virtually no region unscathed.”
“The federal government plays an essential role in addressing gaps that stall the commercialization of energy breakthroughs by providing grants and loans to accelerate innovative projects,” he said. “By abruptly canceling funding for several hundred energy projects, the U.S. risks ceding American energy leadership and signals that U.S. innovation is not a priority.”
Some of the most significant new terminations on the list include:
While two of the seven hydrogen hubs — those in California and the Pacific Northwest — were on last week’s cancellations list, all seven have their status listed as “terminate” on this new list. That includes hubs that planned to make hydrogen from natural gas based in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Midwest.
Those awards came out of $8 billion allocated by Congress in the IIJA in 2021 to develop hubs where companies and states would work together to produce and test the use of cleaner hydrogen fuel in new industries. The move would hit oil majors in addition to green energy companies. Exxon and Chevron were partners on the Hyvelocity hydrogen hub on the Gulf Coast.
“If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told me. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses."
The Inflation Reduction Act’s Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants, which were meant to support the conversion of shuttered or at-risk auto plants to be able to manufacture electric vehicles and their supply chains, would be fully obliterated based on the new list. All 13 grants that were awarded under the program are there, including $80 million for Blue Bird’s new electric school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, $500 million for General Motors’ Grant River Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, and $285 million for Mercedes-Benz’s next-generation electric van plant in Ladson, South Carolina.
Some of the other projects slated for termination raise questions about other projects from the same grant program that are not on the list. For example, a $45 million grant for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to deploy microgrids in seven communities shows up as terminated, along with several other awards made as part of the IIJA’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas program. Grants for indigenous tribes in Alaska, Wisconsin, and throughout the Southwest from that program appear to be preserved, however.
A $9.8 million grant to Sparkz to build a first-of-its-kind battery-grade iron phosphate plant in West Virginia also makes an appearance. The award was made as part of a nearly $430 million funding round from the IIJA to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing in 15 former coal communities. Similar awards made to Anthro Energy in Louisville, Kentucky, Infinitum in Rockdale, Texas, Mainspring Energy in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and a company called MetOx International developing an advanced superconductor manufacturing facility in the Southeast appear to be safe.
When asked about the new list, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that he couldn’t attest to its validity. He added that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,” referring to the earlier 321 cancellations.
A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by 2021 infrastructure law.
Trump’s Department of Energy is planning to terminate awards for the two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap has learned.
An internal agency project list shared with Heatmap names nearly $24 billion worth of grants with their status designated as “terminated,” including the Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub as well as Project Cypress, a joint venture between DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks.
Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.”
“Demand for removals is increasing significantly, with momentum set to build as governments set their long-term targets,” he said. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
Heirloom’s head of global policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said that the company was not aware of any decision from the DOE and continued “to productively engage with the administration in a project review.” He added that Heirloom remains “incredibly proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Louisiana energy majors, workforce groups, non-profits, state leaders, the governor and economic development organizations who have strongly advocated for this project.”
Much of the rest of the list overlaps with the project terminations the agency announced last week as part of a spate of retributive actions against Democrats during the government shutdown. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” White House Budget Director Russ Vought wrote on social media ahead of the announcement.
DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that the department was “unable to verify” the new list of canceled grants, and that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced.”
“As [Secretary of Energy Chris Wright] made clear last week, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration,” Dietderich said.
Direct air capture is a nascent technology that sucks carbon, as the name suggests, directly from the air, and is one of several carbon removal solutions with potential to slow global warming in the near term, and even reverse it in the long run. The $3.5 billion DAC Hubs program, created by Congress in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, promised to “establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer put it.
After a competitive application process, the Biden administration selected two projects that would receive up to $600 million each to build DAC projects capable of removing more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year and storing it permanently underground. Occidental, which first partnered with and later acquired a Canadian DAC startup called Carbon Engineering, would build its hub in South Texas, near Corpus Christi. Two other leading DAC startups, the California-based Heirloom Carbon and Swiss company Climeworks, would work together to build a hub in Louisiana. After the selections were announced, both projects received an initial $50 million award for their next phase of development, which was set to be matched by private investment.
"These hubs were selected through a rigorous and competitive process designed to identify projects capable of advancing U.S. leadership in carbon removal and industrial decarbonization,” Jennifer Wilcox, the former principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, told me in an email. “The burden should be on DOE to clearly demonstrate why that process is being overturned.”
All three companies already have demonstration plants that are either operating or under construction. Climeworks began operating the world’s first commercial DAC plant in Iceland in 2021, designed to capture about 4,000 tons per year, and has since scaled up to a larger plant more than eight times that size. Heirloom opened the first DAC plant in the U.S. in November 2023, in Tracy, California, capable of capturing 1,000 tons per year. Occidental’s first DAC project, Stratos, in West Texas, will be the largest of the bunch, designed to capture 500,000 tons per year. It is set to be completed in the next few months.
Removing carbon from the air with one of these facilities is currently extremely expensive and energy-intensive. Today, companies pre-sell carbon credits to airlines and tech companies to raise money for the projects, but will likely require government support to continue to innovate and bring the cost down. While both Climeworks and Heirloom announced the sale of credits that would support their DAC hub projects, it’s not clear whether those credits were meant to be fulfilled by the projects themselves.
The DOE grants would have helped prove the viability of the technology at a scale that will make a measurable difference for the climate, while also demonstrating a potential off-ramp for oil companies and the economies they support. Both projects said they expected to create more than 2,000 local jobs in construction, operations, and maintenance.
“The United States, up to this point, was the direct air capture leader and the place where top innovators in the field were choosing to build facilities as well as manufacture the actual components of the units themselves,” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “The cancellation of these grants to high-quality projects ensures that these American jobs will be shipped overseas and cede our broader economic advantage.”
That’s already happening. On the same day last week that the DOE announced it was terminating an award for CarbonCapture Inc., another California-based DAC company, the startup said it would move its first commercial pilot from Arizona to Alberta, Canada. Gebald, of Climeworks, said the company has “a pipeline of other DAC projects around the world,” including opportunities in Canada, the U.K., and Saudi Arabia.
Cavanaugh also pointed out there was a disconnect between the terminations, Congress’ recent actions, and even actions under the first Trump administration. Trump’s DOE revised the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture in 2018 to allow direct air capture projects to qualify. In July, the reconciliation bill preserved that credit and strengthened it. “These were bipartisan-supported projects, and it goes expressly against congressional intent.”
As the DAC hubs program was congressionally mandated and the awards were under contract, the companies may have legal recourse to fight the terminations. The press release from the DOE announcing last week’s terminations said that award recipients had 30 days to appeal the decision. “That process must be meaningful and transparent,” Wilcox said. “If DOE is invoking financial-viability criteria, companies and communities deserve to see the underlying metrics, thresholds, and justification — and to understand whether those criteria are being applied consistently across projects.”
While this isn’t a death knell for DAC in general, it will be a “massive setback for American climate and industrial policy”, Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me. “The need for carbon removal hasn’t changed. The science hasn’t changed. What’s changed is our political will, and we’ll feel the consequences for years to come.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to add comment from the Department of Energy and to correct the total value of canceled grants.
On Trump’s metal nationalization spree, Tesla’s big pitch, and fusion’s challenges
Current conditions: King tides are raising ocean levels near Charleston, South Carolina, as much as eight feet above low water averages • A blizzard on Mount Everest has trapped hundreds of hikers and killed at least one • A depression that could form into Tropical Storm Jerry is strengthening in the Atlantic as it barrels northward with an unclear path.
Solar and wind outpaced the growth of global electricity demand in the first half of 2025, vaulting renewables toward overtaking coal worldwide for the first time on record, according to analysis published Tuesday by the research outfit Ember. This year’s growth resulted in a small overall decline in both coal and gas-fired power generation, with India and China seeing the most notable reductions, despite the United States and Europe ratcheting up fossil fuel usage. “We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
Wind and solar installations matched 109% of new global demand for power in the first half of 2025.Ember
That growth is projected to continue. Later on Tuesday morning, the International Energy Agency released its own report forecasting that renewable capacity will double over the next five years. Solar is predicted to make up 80% of that growth. But, factoring in the Trump administration’s policies, the forecast roughly cut in half previous projections for U.S. growth. Domestic opposition to renewables runs beyond the White House, too. Exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro and published in July showed that a fifth of U.S. counties now restrict development of renewables.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing federal agencies to push forward with a controversial 211-mile mining road in Alaska designed to facilitate production of copper, zinc, gallium, and other critical minerals. The project, which the Biden administration halted last year over concerns for permafrost in the fast-warming region, has been at the center of a decadeslong legal battle. As part of the deal, the U.S. government will invest $35.6 million in Alaska’s Ambler Mining District, including taking a 10% stake in the main developer, Trilogy Metals, that includes warrants to buy an additional 7.5% of the company. The road itself will be jointly owned by the state, the federal government, and Alaska Native villages. “It’s a very, very big deal from the standpoint of minerals and energy,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
It’s just the latest stake the Trump administration has taken in a mineral company. In July, the Department of Defense became the largest shareholder of MP Materials, the company producing rare earths in the U.S. at its Mountain Pass mine in California. The move, The Economist noted at the time, marked the biggest American experiment in direct government ownership since the nationalization of the railroads in World War I. Last week, the Department of Energy renegotiated a loan to Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass project in Nevada to take a stake in what’s set to become the largest lithium mine in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in the next few years. The White House’s mineral shopping spree isn’t over. On Friday, Reuters reported that the administration is considering buying shares in Critical Metals, the company looking to develop rare earths production in Greenland. In response to the news, shares in the Nasdaq-traded miner surged 62% on Monday. Partial nationalization isn’t the only approach the administration is taking to challenging China’s grip over global mineral supplies. Last month, as I reported for Heatmap, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded money to Xerion, an Ohio startup devising a novel way to process cobalt and gallium.
Tesla looks poised to unveil a cheaper, stripped-down version of its Model Y as early as today. In one of two short videos posted to CEO Elon Musk’s X social media site, the electric automaker showed the midsize SUV’s signature lights beaming through the dark. The design matches what InsideEVs noted were likely images of the prototype spotted on a test drive in Texas. The second teaser video showed what appears to be a fast-spinning, Tesla-branded fan. “Your guess is as good as ours as to what will be revealed,” InsideEVs’ Andrei Nedelea wrote Monday. “Our money is on the Roadster or a new vacuum cleaner design to take on Dyson.”
The new products come amid an historic slump for Tesla. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, the company’s share of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to their lowest-ever level in August despite the surge in purchases as Americans rushed to use the federal tax credits before they expired thanks to Trump’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act law. Yet Musk has managed to steer the automaker’s financial fate through an attention-grabbing maneuver. Last month, the world’s richest man bought $1 billion in Tesla shares in a show of self confidence that managed to rebound the company’s stock price. But Andrew Moseman argued in Heatmap that “the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.”
On Monday, Trump warned that medium and heavy-duty trucks imported to the U.S. will face a 25% tariff starting on November 1. The president announced the trade levies in a post on Truth Social on the eve of a White House visit by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose country would feel the pinch of tariffs on imported trucks. As the Financial Times noted, Trump had threatened to impose 25% tariffs on some trucks in late September but “failed to implement them, raising questions about his commitment to the policy.”
Fusion startups make a lot of bold claims about how soon a technology long dismissed as the energy source of tomorrow will be able to produce commercial electrons. Though investors are betting that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion,” a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy shows that supply chain challenges threaten to hold back the nascent industry even if it can bring laboratory breakthroughs to market. Tritium, one of two main fusion fuels, has a half life of just 12.3 years, meaning it does not exist in significant quantities in nature. Today, tritium is primarily produced by 30 pressurized heavy water fission reactors globally, but only at a total of 4 kilograms per year. As a result, “tritium availability could throttle fusion development,” the report found. That’s not the only bottleneck. “The fusion industry will require specialized components that don’t yet have well-established supply chains, like superconducting cables and the aforementioned advanced materials, and shortages of these components would delay development and inflate costs.”
Scientists mapped the RNA — the molecules that carry out DNA’s instructions — of wheat and, for the first time, identified when certain genes are active. The discovery promises to accelerate plant breeders’ efforts to develop more resilient varieties of the world’s most widely cultivated crop that use less fertilizer, resist higher temperatures, and survive with less water as the climate changes. “We discovered how groups of genes work together as regulatory networks to control gene expression,” Rachel Rusholme-Pilcher, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Britain’s Earlham Institute, said in a statement. “Our research allowed us to look at how these network connections differ between wheat varieties, revealing new sources of genetic diversity that could be critical in boosting the resilience of wheat.”