Speaking Sustainability

Congress is considering a suite of proposals to facilitate the build out of infrastructure necessary to transport, store and deliver hydrogen in a legislative package introduced on March 2, 2023 referred to as the Hydrogen Infrastructure Initiative. The Hydrogen Infrastructure Initiative includes four separate pieces of legislation: (i) the Hydrogen for Ports Act (S.647), (ii) the Hydrogen for Industry Act (S.646), (iii) the Hydrogen for Trucks Act (S.648) and (iv) the Hydrogen Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (HIFIA) (S.649). This post focuses on HIFIA because infrastructure is considered to be one of the most significant barriers to the widespread deployment of clean hydrogen. Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are the initiative’s original co-sponsors.

Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) on December 13, 2022, explaining how DOE will allocate more than $1.2 billion of federal funding to support the development of four Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs (“DAC Hubs”). The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA) requires DOE launch a program to accelerate DAC Hub development. This FOA is the first of two anticipated announcements explaining how DOE will allocate $3.5 billion appropriated by the IIJA through fiscal year 2026 for this purpose. Click here for full post.

On February 18, 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC or the “Commission”) issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking “new information and additional stakeholder perspectives” on potential revisions to its policy statement on the certification of natural gas facilities.¹ The NOI invites comments on new and revised questions that “modify or add to” a 2018 notice of inquiry on the same topic (the “2018 NOI”), citing new developments such as President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad (EO). The EO, among other things, directed agencies to embed environmental justice considerations into their missions and ensure that federal permitting decisions “consider the effects of greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions and climate change.” To that end, the NOI poses new questions on FERC’s consideration of potential adverse human health or environmental effects of its certificate process and decisions on minority and low-income populations, or “environmental justice communities.” Other notable new or revised questions concern FERC’s evaluation of a proposed project’s upstream and downstream GHG emissions and FERC’s potential use of the “Social Cost of Carbon,” a metric we discuss in more detail here.