View the proceedings from the 2023 Hydrogen Program Annual Merit Review.
Eric Miller, U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Welcome back. Take your seats. We're going to get started for the rest of the plenary session. I'm Eric Miller, chief scientist at the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, and I'll be hosting and moderating the next few sessions. We are very fortunate this afternoon to have to continue the theme. We have a star-studded cast of thought leaders from across the DOE. You'll be meeting them as the afternoon rolls on. But we've got a lot of interesting things to delve into what's really going on in DOE, and how everyone in the different offices are so excited about where we are and where we need to go.
The first set of panels, we will be focusing on, as you see on the slide, everything, all of the above, all hands on deck. We're looking at everything, spanning the hydrogen shot, all the way through the clean hydrogen hubs. Our panel will be looking specifically at their different offices and their roles in this journey from the hydrogen shot to the hydrogen hubs. Let's keep going and let me talk about this slide. And let me get a show of hands, how many people have said these words in the past two years?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Eric Miller: OK, so that's good. OK, now, how many people have said these words 10 years ago? 10 years ago? Five years ago. I think Sunita's got her mic on. [LAUGHS] You should careful. You should be listening. [CHUCKLES] We'll give her a second. OK, so two years is good. How about 20 years ago? Anybody say—OK, see, there's a few hands out there.
Those of us who have been in this field for 10, 20, 30, we went up to 50, right, this morning? Those of us who have been doing this for a while have uttered these words quite often through some good times, but some not so good times as well. But this is kind of our mantra that we kept ourselves going.
And so I will say that—I will say that today, you heard this morning that the administration, their commitment to the clean energy transition as well as to energy justice and environmental justice, honestly, the stars are aligned. I mean, if there's any time that there's a golden age for hydrogen, it is now. So I can honestly say with joy in my heart that really is exciting times for hydrogen. And I think the next time we ask, I think we're going to have a better response on that one as well. So let's continue.
Sunita showed this slide as well. I won't go into it before we actually kick off our panel. I just want to highlight that those of us in the Department of Energy, you see on the right-hand side our structure. It really just highlights. I mean, there's a lot of internal language in there. But basically, it shows that every office in the Department is working together in this important mission all the way up to the deputy secretary's remarks, who's really on top of this and really excited about how we're working well together. We'll talk a little bit more about that as you go through the panel.
And on the left-hand side, again, this is just a reminder that the National Hydrogen strategy and roadmap document did get released today. Please, I encourage everyone to download it and take a look at it to see how all of these things fit together into a really intricate puzzle that we're working on. So with that, I'm going to introduce our first set of panelists that will start at the hydrogen shot as we move toward the hydrogen hubs.
First, we have Devinn Lambert, who is Deputy Director of Crosscuts and Energy Earthshots under the Office of the Undersecretary of Science and Innovation. Thank you. Welcome, Devinn. We have John Vetrano, program manager of the Office of Basic Energy Science in the Office of Science. Welcome, John. We have Katie Randolph, operations supervisor in the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office, and EERE here. More about that as well.
Mark Achiewicz, director of the Office of Carbon Management Technologies at the DOE Office of Fossil, Energy and Carbon Management. All right, and last but not least, we've got Alison Hahn, director of the Office of Nuclear Energy Deployment in the Department's Office of Nuclear Energy. All right, so we're going to kick things off. Let me see. I think I have one sort of other intro slide.
This is, again, something you've seen before. Sunita just showed this recently. But I'm just going to kick it off by saying this is not done in a silo. This is not done in a linear fashion, what we're showing here. This is that virtuous cycle where everything that's happening at the fundamental research and development stages has to be serving, has to be informing the next set of technology developments. And everything that's happening in the demonstration and deployments has to inform the priority research areas. So this virtuous cycle is critical for us to meet the goals in the time frame that we have at our disposal.
So with that, you've seen the Hydrogen Energy Earthshot was the very first shot. It's really important that this administration focuses on the Earthshots to address our climate challenge with hydrogen being the first one. We're really excited about it. But really excited to have Devinn here to talk more about the Earthshot in general. OK, Devinn, take it away.
Devinn Lambert, Energy Earthshots: It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My responsibility for this panel is to summarize the last set of plenaries in about five minutes. So I'm going to hit all those key points. I was part of the team along with John Vetrano that established the Energy Earthshot Initiative. So I want to go to its foundings to share with the group.
President Biden very clearly has prioritized climate for his administration. In the first 100 days of his administration, he organized the Leaders' Summit on Climate to reengage the United States in the climate discussion on that international venue. At that Leaders' Summit on Climate, he highlighted that we were going to have a whole of government approach. Again, one of these points that you've heard from folks today.
And he elevated the Department of Energy, as Secretary Granholm likes to say, as the solutions department to identify how we were going to achieve the ambitious targets we needed to set to get net zero. Secretary Granholm said that we were going to focus on some of the hardest to decarbonize sectors, picking out how we can get on paths to reducing the cost of technologies that are going to be critical to getting to net zero and critical to the jobs and the economy that we have to establish.
She called for an all hands on deck approach. That all hands on deck effort is the Energy Earthshot Initiative. It calls for integrated program development across our department. We currently have seven Energy Earthshots. The Hydrogen Earthshot was the first out of the batch. From the plenaries you heard this morning, there's no doubt why that is. It's a critical enabling technology for decarbonizing the full economy.
One thing I love about Hydrogen Shot presentations is that you always see that glow picture. And I wanted to share why that's significant. That's from the Leaders' Summit on Climate itself. Whenever that's put up, it gives me the sense of hope. That by coming together, by raising ambition, we can go after what we thought was once impossible. And so that's what these Energy Earthshots are. You can go to the next slide for me. Thank you.
You heard that by greater coordination, we can achieve our goals. The Energy Earthshot Initiative is modeled off of the SunShot Initiative, which set the goal to reduce the cost of solar energy technology to $1 per kilowatt hour within a decade. We achieved that goal in record, time three years ahead of expected. And still today, we continue to reduce the cost of solar energy technology.
What the Energy Earthshot does, it's a performance target. It's not a single funding opportunity. It's not something owned by any singular office. It's a performance target. And what it does is it causes each of our offices at the Department to look at their assets and how they can align their resources, how they can conduct strategic planning, and how they can engage their stakeholders along this target.
As you've seen, and as we've called for many times already today, we'll release funding opportunities. We'll get comments on draft documents to stimulate the next set of innovation, the next set of plans. But these things are living documents. And so from those information we gain, it will feed back to the Department of Energy, and we will refine our strategies, not just at individual office levels, but across the Department as well, sharing this key information.
So the last slide that I'll have is, well, what does this look like in action? Thank you, Eric. This is just another look of what has happened since June 2021 to March of this past year. Each of our offices, Office of Science with many subcomponents underneath it, our Applied Energy offices like Hydrogen Fuel Cells and FECM and NE, and our infrastructure based offices like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, all taking action in this space in part through the lens of the Energy Earthshot to move the space forward.
And so this is something that we'll continue to do. We're in year two. Eight years to go on achieving this hydrogen shot target. But what we know is through this continued coordination, we can advance and achieve more together. Thank you.
Eric Miller: Thank you, Devinn. Let's continue this journey with the foundational science that's really relevant to all the hydrogen technologies that we've been developing over the years. I'll turn it over to John.
John Vetrano, Office of Basic Energy Science: Thank you, Eric. And I'm really happy to participate in this meeting. So I'm John Vetrano from the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, which is part of the Office of Science. And as you can probably surmise from the name of that, we support the fundamental research across the Department of Energy, including work that really underpins technologies, such as hydrogen, nuclear, and carbon capture, and energy storage, and these various aspects.
So as the Office of Science, we have a budget, our FY23 budget was about 8 billion. And Basic Energy Sciences is part of that is about $2.5 billion for FY23. And for that, so actually, we haven't figured out the FY23 number for hydrogen yet. But in FY22, Basic Energy Science has supported about $40 million worth of underpinning research related to hydrogen.
So that just gives you order of magnitude. Next slide. So Office of Science, we support hydrogen in research dollars. But also Office of Science develop, builds and runs a number of facilities. And these have also been used for hydrogen research, both from a basic science standpoint, as well as from other offices such as HFTO and consortia.
And these, in particular, the three offices, the OSCAR, Advanced Scientific Computing and Research, BER, which is Biological and Environmental Research, and BES, Basic Energy Sciences. We run the computers and the supercomputers that OSCAR runs. BER has, in particular, the facility at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. And at BES, we have synchrotrons and synthesis facilities, neutrons, which are really handy for hydrogen and variety, and these are useful facilities.
So I just want to mention that these are great ways to get research done and to make connections. Next one. So for our research, when we want to put together—we're going to be doing research in areas. One of the things that we need to do is figure out the research priorities.
And so with the help of offices of HFTO and FECM and NE, we put together in 2021 a round table foundational science for carbon neutral technologies. And out of that, that's a community. So then we invite people from across the community to really understand, get an understanding of what the technological barriers are, and then think what are the fundamental science concepts that will allow us to overcome those barriers.
And so here's the four priority research opportunities. I'm not going to read through them, but they probably are no surprise to people to think about where the key science areas are. And that roundtable, as well of all of ours, we have a series of research reports. They are available online.
So we have in the—so like I say, we're currently supporting just over $40 million a year for hydrogen-related research. And we've been funding $1,000,000 for decades. So that's sort from our color core research areas. And then we had these energy frontier research centers. So those all moved up this year. We have a new thing to go with the Earthshots. We'll go to the next slide.
And so this year, actually, I'll start with the bullet instead of the headline. This year, in 2023, these photos are closed, but we had $100 million across the Office of Science for the Energy Earthshots Initiative. And this is going to be—it's across off to science, and we had six actually at the time, six of the Earthshots. We had two complementary programs.
One is Energy Earthshot research centers, which are led by labs. And we have the scientific foundations for Energy Earthshots, which are more university-based. But these are all groups of people, multi-investigator abroad, to attack the fundamental science that goes in that are barriers for these Energy Earthshots.
So I'll just say real quick that some of our projects are just starting. So we only have two projects here today. We have posters tomorrow night from the University of Maryland and PNNL. And then we also have a Basic Energy Sciences poster that will be in the main poster session. Thank you, Eric.
Eric Miller: Thank you, John. All right, let's move on to EERE and Katie. EERE typically bridges between some of the foundational science moving into the applied research and development that you'd want to see a piece of what's going on in EERE regarding hydrogen technology.
Katie Randolph, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Yes, yeah, thank you, Eric. And thanks for taking a word from your earlier side. I'm very excited to be here. And excited that EERE is really working towards our administration goals, climate goals, achievement net zero GHG emissions economy by 2050. And in order to do this right, we really need to do it in a way that's going to benefit all Americans in fair and just and equitable manner.
So if you go to the next slide, I can kind of tell you what EERE is doing in terms of clean hydrogen to meet these ambitious goals. So the best way to look at this is through the scale vision, where we're really looking at everything from production to storage delivery, conversion, and end use technologies. But our emphasis in EERE is on integrating with renewables.
And as you know, HFTO, as Sunita said, we kind of lead the coordination across all of the DOE offices. But we also coordinate and collaborate closely with the tech offices within EERE doing things like wind hybrid systems, solar fuels production, biofuels and products, offshore energy harvesting, geological hydrogen, and activities like manufacturing and industrial decarbonization.
All these activities are really going to help move us from today's clean renewable hydrogen cost of about $4 to $6 per kilogram of hydrogen depending on the scenario to our 2026 build target of $2 per kilogram, and ultimately reaching that hydrogen shot target of $1 per kilogram of clean hydrogen. And as you've heard throughout today, the big thing to help us get us there is going to be collaboration and coordination. And also finding new ways to invest our funds in R&D that will help bring these clean energy technologies to market as soon as possible.
So if you go to the next slide, showing an example of a very successful approach that EERE, along with HFTO, have implemented over the last several years. The consortia approach, where we're looking to leverage and give streamlined access to the incredible world class capabilities and expertise we have at our national labs to really accelerate the R&D. And this example here, very relevant to the panel here.
Water splitting technologies for hydrogen production starting with hydrogen, where we're looking at our earlier stage technologies, like Stitch and PEC, as well as the less mature electrolyzer technologies like AEM or alkaline exchange membranes and proton conducting SOFCs focused on materials discovery and development and fostering this cross-cutting collaboration and theory-guided approach to move the R&D.
H2New, on the other hand, is focused on the more mature electrolyzer technologies like PEM, and SOFCs, and [INAUDIBLE] electrolyzers. And looking to address performance and durability barriers through things like components development and integration, as well as collaborating closely with industry on BOP, system validations, first-of-a-kind demos. And we're also working with Anton [INAUDIBLE] to enable high volume manufacturing, which is really going to be key to meeting that Hydrogen Shot goal.
So if you go to the next slide, just some other exciting work being done across the EERE shown here. The first is a project that SETO or Solar Energy Technology Office is funding with Sandia National Lab, where they're using concentrated solar power to drive these liquid metal redox cycles to split water. And the interesting thing they're doing here is promoting it with electrochemistry to help efficiencies and bring down the temperature of the reduction step of the cycle.
The second image here is for a great collaboration with the Wind Energy Technology Office and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Office for offshore wind, where we're looking at opportunities for hydrogen to offer a more effective way to move the energy that's generated in these offshore remote locations back onshore that might be more effective and efficient than transferring the electrons directly. So there's a lot of ways to combine the technologies of production and wind.
And so we started some analysis looking at which combinations are really going to offer the most promise for a given scenario. And finally, this last project you're seeing here is with the Water Power Technology Office, and they're looking at ways to use hydrogen for improved grid reliability. So Idaho Falls may experience severe weather that can cause grid reliability issues. So they're looking at ways to integrate hydrogen electrolyzers with hydropower and grid for not only grid reliability, but also energy storage.
And you can see all of these exciting projects and more at the inter-agency track on Wednesday. We're really looking at taking projects from the lab, R&D phase to graduating up to that first of a kind demonstration. And I also, before I hand it back to you, want to plug our energy justice posters on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Because in order to really be successful in meeting these climate goals, we have to do it in a fair and just way. So there's posters you can see on Tuesday and Wednesday night that will cover things like the community benefits plans you've been hearing about that will now require as well as environmental and energy justice program and policy.
Eric Miller: All right, thanks, Katie. All right. Let's turn to Mark, in the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, has been working in the hydrogen field for quite a long time, had a lot of experience [INAUDIBLE] the infrastructure that we need to be adapting for clean hydrogen.
Mark Achiewicz, Office of Carbon Management Technologies: Oh, thank you. I'll step back here.
Eric Miller: So Mark, tell us a little bit about what's going on at FECM today.
Mark Achiewicz: Yeah, thanks, Eric. And it's great to be here. The one thing that I really enjoy about the job that I'm in—Eric doing things like that. But no, but seriously, you hear a lot about the cross collaboration, and I will say, in the carbon management space, it actually cuts across a lot of sectors—hydrogen, industrial.
So we're really engaged with a lot of our colleagues over on the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office. So it's just great to see the collaboration. But taking a step back and looking at where we are at FECM, and we've just recently—well, about a year and a half ago or so, we relaunched our—or we launched our new strategic vision document. And it's really focusing and driving in on achieving those net zero greenhouse gas reductions, but really hitting on three key pillars.
One is justice labor and engagement. You've heard that, and you'll continue to hear it throughout the week. But it's really critical when we're thinking about carbon management as well and hydrogen. And we're thinking about infrastructure buildout and development, really making sure that are we communicating the information that we're developing? Do people understand what this means? Are they going to have the benefits? What are the community needs? So really driving home and really making that a key focal point of the work that we're doing.
The other part of our strategic vision was looking at technologies that help lead to sustainable energy resources. And what does that mean? We hear the word sustainable a lot. It's really looking at natural gas supply chains, mitigating methane emissions, reducing the fugitive emissions that you might see from the methane supply chain, especially when you're thinking about infrastructure development and natural gas and going to scale for hydrogen.
And then finally, the carbon management approaches towards deep decarbonization. And we're looking at—so what does carbon management means? We break it down into two areas. One is point source capture, looking at ways to prevent emissions of CO2, and then carbon dioxide removal as well, looking at ways to, OK, if there's CO2 in the atmosphere, there's hard to decarbonize sectors, such as aviation. How can we help decarbonize those by looking at carbon dioxide removal technologies as well?
Next slide. So just to hit a couple of the key highlights that we have and looking at pre-commercial hydrogen generation, and we have a number of feed studies or pre-feed studies for advanced carbon capture and storage systems for both steam methane reforming and then autothermal reforming technologies as well. And steam methane reforming commercial, and process emissions, they already separate hydrogen from CO2.
What we're looking at is because of the endothermic reaction, is really looking at the technologies that we've developed in our portfolio. Can we further decarbonize and look at the heat generation sources within those facilities? Can we deploy some of our advanced technologies as well? So really going for the additional CO2 removal.
So we have our two projects. One is with Linde using an advanced capture technology from a company called Svante, which is rotating beds of solid sorbent materials. And then also with Philips 66 and looking at hydrogen capture—or captured CO2 from their hydrogen production facilities at their refinery. And then also finally an advanced project for autothermal reforming with Tallgrass and a number of partners as well.
So really trying to drive down those CO2 emissions for some of those nearer term options. Next slide. And then finally, we hear a lot about the production side, but thinking about the storage. And Sunita mentioned this a little bit earlier today, the Shasta project. And this is a collaboration amongst a number of the National Energy Technology Laboratories to really focus on driving down and understanding the risk associated with geologic storage of hydrogen.
Today, typically looking at geologic storage of hydrogen in salt caverns, what we're trying to look at are, are there other options, other formation types leveraging some of the expertise and experience that we have within our office historically on subsurface geology and really trying to leverage that skill and capability to really bring this to scale.
So trying to identify what are some of those other opportunities that we have for geologic storage, trying to understand what are some of the key technological hurdles, where the costs and various challenges, and really helping to develop the technology and the science and data to help inform some of the decision making processes as we go forward. So thanks.
Eric Miller: All right. Thanks, Mark. All right, now let's turn to Alison. I know that you heard from Sunita this morning as well, there's some exciting new demonstration projects out there that are really leveraging the opportunities for integrating electrolysis with nuclear power generation. But Alison, tell us a little bit more about that.
Alison Hahn, Office of Nuclear Energy Deployment: Yes, thank you. And thank you for having us here today. So I wanted to start off with this slide because I think it does a really good job of showing how nuclear is truly captured within an integrated energy system. And I want to just start with the basics on the left. You kind of see three plants on the left there in blue. And one looks like a tractor trailer. And that's our microreactors.
They are factory fabricated. They are transported to site, fully transportable, minimal onsite construction required to get them into operation. So it's really good for remote communities and non-traditional energy applications. And you have small modular reactors, which also use factory fabrication for the main components and systems. And then those are taken to the site, assembled.
The cool thing about SMRs, Small Modular Reactors, there's more than one SMR here, is that you can add modules as energy demand increases. So that's a unique feature there. And then lastly, large plants. Much like we have nuclear plants today, at that same capacity level. So you can see the variety of options that's truly being developed within the nuclear industry to meet the needs of the customers and make sure that there is something available depending on the market that you're interested in.
So then moving to the right of the slide, there are a number of aspects where nuclear fits into this integrated energy system. And first, you have that thermal energy storage, which provides that variable response that nuclear can utilize in addition to its clean firm capacity that it has right now as more variable renewable resources come on the grid to help ensure that the grid maintains its reliability.
Second, you have integrated industrial chemical plants to provide that clean chemical energy to industrial and transportation sectors. And hydrogen really is that first critical step to meeting those goals. And then lastly, we have—there is a lot of thermal heat coming out of nuclear plants. And so how can we utilize that for new industries, district heating for one is the most clear. But those other industries as well, refining, and minerals, and pulp and paper, and things like that as well.
And then lastly, another thing, those large existing plants that we have right now, they're usually set off away from industrial parks. Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory body, recently ruled in favor of New Scale's methodology to site the emergency planning zone at the site boundary of the plant, which is in comparison to the 10 mile radius that plants currently have.
And so really with the small modular reactors and microreactors that are coming out and being deployed, first of a kind, hopefully [INAUDIBLE] soon, you can put those closer towards the industrial parks to the end user of those products. Next slide please. Thank you. So Eric had mentioned 50 years, 20 years, 10 years.
This slide, I think, does a really good job of showing the progress that has already been made and the progress that we're making within this Earthshot now, and really being able to meet that—the 111 target. A lot of plants now operate at $30—a lot of nuclear plants operate less—at $30 per megawatt hour or less. And so you can see that blue arrow coming down there. And then through the HFTO program, they're continuing to reduce the electrolysis manufacturer—or the capital for the hydrogen plant as well, bringing that down a little bit further.
So you get to that interim $2 per kilogram goal pretty quickly. To reach this energy Earthshot, we just need a couple more things. And so first, the cost of nuclear power needs to continue to decrease about $20ish per megawatt hour. And we're working on that. And then secondly, high temperature steam electrolysis technology advancements are needed. And that's where our close coordination with HFTO really comes into play, following along in that area as well.
For nuclear, Office of Nuclear Energy specifically, though, we're looking a lot at thermal systems, R&D, the full scope reactor simulators, PRA, engineering, and the architecture and engineering work and regulatory, reducing those regulatory risks and really educating the regulatory body on what it is that's feasible. Next slide, please.
So we have awarded a number of hydrogen production demonstration projects through Office of Nuclear Energy and in direct coordination with HFTO, sometimes through HFTO as well. And so you can see three of those here. Two are at Nine-Mile Point and Energy Harbor's Davis-Besse plant looking at low temperature electrolysis. And I think that was mentioned earlier today.
And then you've got the Excel Energy's Prairie Island plant looking at high temperature thermal electrolysis. And really these are just the first step that we're trying to demonstrate this technology. And I think a really good example of that, and really recently, is Nine-Mile Point, I think you all heard that they started producing hydrogen in March.
But not that long ago, a New York State grant for an additional $12.5 million to help demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology at Nine-Mile Point is building on top of the $5.8 million award that was utilized. So you can really see things start to happen with just as—I'll say small, it's relative. But it's not the $8 billion for hubs. But a smaller award is being built upon by other groups, in this case, state agencies, but also in private industry as well. And that's really what we're looking for here to continue on.
And then I'll end that we just closed on our last cycle of our five-year nuclear industry funding opportunity announcement. And we selected two more additional awardees for that one. That's General Electric Global Research and Westinghouse Electric Company for clean hydrogen production and then to demonstrate nuclear energy applications beyond electricity as well. So we're really excited to get those started as well.
Eric Miller: Thanks, Alison. All right, so this brings us to our first question that we'll pose to our panelists. We did float the idea of doing on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are—you heard this morning. The panelists declined that because basically they said obviously it's 10. So that would be kind of a redundant question.
But let's go through one at a time. We've heard some of this, especially Alison, on your recent slides, specific technical areas that we need to focus on to achieve $2 and $1. And this maybe if we can go down, Devinn, we'll just go around once. And we'll highlight the priorities.
Devinn Lambert: Sounds great. I think the challenge that I would highlight from the Undersecretary's Office is the challenge to rising to the occasion. We have historic investments in [INAUDIBLE] and IRA. We have this call for all hands. You can see what this panel has done in part by excellent coordination, the leaders on stage for quite some time.
Also a call for capacity on partnering at state and regional levels as well. And just want to say thank you to everyone that's here today in person and online. The advice I always give to anyone is interested in learning about the department is attend an annual merit review or peer review to know the players on the ground. So thank you all.
Eric Miller: Thanks, Devinn. John?
John Vetrano: Yeah, from the perspective of the Office of Science, I think really looking at our roundtable that we held two years ago, that was done again in conjunction with the other offices at DOE. But it really looked at the fundamental science priorities, which I showed you. But things that are no surprise, like better catalysis, catalyst operation, and improved degradation. So what are the fundamental science aspects of degradation, for example, that we can attack to really improve that and achieve those goals?
Eric Miller: Thanks, John. Katie?
Katie Randolph: Yes, so from the perspective of EERE, and we're talking about electrolysis with renewable energy, we really need low-cost renewable electricity. So that's going to be very key. And you'll see a lot of that in the presentations you see this week. But we also need to get to manufacturing at scale is going to be huge. And along the way, continuing to make the improvements in durability and lifetime of electrolyzers.
Eric Miller: Thanks, Katie. Mark?
Mark Achiewicz: Yeah, so I'm going to hit maybe on a couple points from our perspective. One, I think, is the methane mitigation and looking at the lifecycle emissions, especially when you're looking at tax credits such as 45B and being able to take advantage of those credits. The other part is for carbon management. It's driving down the cost of capture. I think that's really one of the key things that we're really focused on.
The other parts, switching back over to the hydrogen side and some other elements within our R&D program, looking at novel ways to take advantage of opportunity feedstocks, whether that's biomass, waste plastics, or other materials, and other ways that we can convert those into products—or hydrogen as well. And kind of coupled with that, and I think a common challenge across all of the offices, is really looking at that infrastructure and that demand build out.
One of the other key areas that we have within our portfolio is looking at hydrogen turbines and developing that technology as well. So I think a lot of key critical areas. But as you said, opportunities going forward.
Eric Miller: Thanks, Mark. Last but not least, Alison, you covered this quite well already. But final thoughts?
Alison Hahn: Yeah, I'll just expand a little bit more. And I'll break it down. My office looks at both the existing clean and advanced reactors. So I'll kind of break it into two. For the existing fleet, they are already on operation. We have the opportunity to demonstrate these technologies that we've showed on the screen.
But we do need to reduce these operating costs. And we're looking at a lot of plant modernization, automation, machine learning with the operator still in the loop, and demonstrating that capability to all parties involved, the utilities, the vendors, and the regulatory agency to really be able to reduce the costs there. And then on the advanced reactor side, we currently have three advanced reactor demonstrations in play.
Two are being managed by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. And ones being managed through the Office of Nuclear Energy. But that's really getting those first of a kind plans out there and expanding on those lessons learned for those nth of a kind plants to be able to meet the targets that we need to be able to get.
In addition to that, we're looking at a lot of supporting technology, so construction technologies. What else can we do in that regard to build these plants cheaper? We're using modularization instead of stick building. But what else can be done? What other technologies can we support in that regard to build these things faster?
Eric Miller: Awesome. Thank you all. Please join me in thanking our panelists. We're going to send new panelists up here. But thank you so much. All right, I'd like to invite our next set of panelists up. We're going to be looking more at the tech to market commercial liftoff aspect that's going on in the DOE right now.
[INAUDIBLE], support contractor in tech to market at ARPA-E, welcome to the stage. Hannah Murdoch, Senior Advisor in Market Analysis at the Office of Technology Transitions, ODT; Dinesh Mehta, Deputy Director of Loans Organizations and the Loan Program Office; as well as Crystal Farmer, Program Manager in the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Welcome to the stage.
All right, so we're going to continue this journey from R&D all the way through tech transitions. We'll start with ARPA-E, whose mission is about technology transitions through technology.
Vivien Lecoustre, ARPA-E: Thank you very much, Eric. And I'd like to introduce myself. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. I am within Hamilton. I'm a support contractor to ARPA-E, where I act as a technical and technical market advisor. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was created more than 14 years ago via the America Competes Act. Received its first appropriation in 2009. And as of today, the agency has funded more than 1,400 different projects over 69 different programs. Current funding for this year is $470 million.
Mission of the ARPA-E, as you ask, was really to fund early stage—we're talking about [INAUDIBLE] 2 high risk, high reward energy technologies that can benefit the nation via reduction of importation, energy importation, energy emission, improving efficiency of energy systems while at the same time, improving the resilience of energy infrastructure and the way we manage radioactive waste.
All of this is to promote and get better, resilient energy infrastructure for this century, affordable, sustainable energy for promoting US economic development and maintaining the American leadership in science and technology. Next slide, please.
So the agency doesn't have really any roadmap informs projects, and programs, and a wide variety of technologies. But they all have in common that they look to identify and find transformative research in—that could lead to disruptive technology in the way that we generate, store, distribute, and use energy.
ARPA-E works with a lot of different actors, universities, national labs, small and large businesses, to really look at novel approaches and have them to build the risks and prove that their technology, these approaches which are too early stage and therefore too risky for private sector investment. With the hope that after a couple of years, private sector will be interested by those technology and will help them to further mature toward a proper commercialization.
It's important, actually, to not only focus on the technical side, that's what performers are paid for. But we've had them from day one to think about how they're going to commercialize this technology. This is not going to happen overnight. And we've asked them to do their homework by proposing, developing a commercialization plan to make some comprehensive market study developing a comprehensive IP strategy, whether you license, or whether you keep the—or whether you decide actually to sell it as a spin off or as part of your product offering.
And also to develop a cost model and to develop a technoeconomic analysis showing that the technology you are developing and you're spending a lot of hard time developing has, indeed, value—will provide value to the end user or the potential customer. Next slide, please.
I'd like to say a few words about the SCALEUP program, which the agency launched back in 2019, which helped to further commercialize existing technologies that were developed or put to practice during an ARPA-E project or program. We had two edition of SCALEUP, one in 2019, where 10 teams were selected for overall $70 million of federal funding. And this doesn't include the cost share.
We asked actually for substantial amount of cost share. It's less risky, more actually we want them to have more skin in the game. The last edition in 2021, so eight teams selected for an overall budget of $100 million of federal funding. We may or may not have one soon. So stay tuned if you're interested. Subscribe to the ARPA-E newsletter to get informed about the latest program of that. So next slide, please.
I don't have—I don't have a lot of time. But ARPA-E does has some activities around the production of hydrogen or the use of hydrogen. So just wanted to highlight a couple of programs and cohort. This is an existing methane pyrolysis cohort of eight projects, $21 million of federal funding that was started four years ago. The overall idea here is to produce, in a cost-competitive way, hydrogen by not only focusing on the production of hydrogen via novel method, but also about the byproducts of pyrolysis.
Capture the carbon and see what you can do with it. Maybe you can sell it. And that overall, you can actually produce hydrogen at lower cost. So next slide for another example of a program that doesn't target production of hydrogen, but now the use of hydrogen in transportation, namely aviation.
Three years ago, the agency launched a couple of programs toward the decarbonization of aviation via the use of carbon liquid neutral fuel. REEACH is one of such program that aims to develop high efficiency, we're talking about 70% fuel to electricity conversion at high power density. It's aviation, so weight is a killer. Looking at novel fuel cell, hybridized or not, also novel Brayton cycle that are capable of promoting future carbon neutral aviation. And we do have some very good success, not only on a fuel cell, but also on the Brayton cycle side.
And finally, that's going to be my last slide, I just want to give a sneak peek at the novel efforts within the agency. So we had a workshop two months ago on geologic hydrogen. See there are some opportunities here down on the ground to produce or maybe extract hydrogen. This is an effort led by a program director Doug Wicks. I'm not going to say much more about it. But if you are interested, please feel free to contact him Thank you so much.
Eric Miller: Thank you. I appreciate it. Now, we're going to turn it over to Hannah, who has spent quite a lot of energy in the past few months on hydrogen liftoff. Why don't you tell us about that? Because that's we're really excited that got published as the very first commercial liftoff publication.
Hannah Murdoch, Market Analysis at the Office of Technology Transitions Senior Advisor: Awesome, yeah, that sounds great. Hi, everyone. My name is Hannah Murdoch. I'm a contractor and senior advisor in the Office of Technology Transitions. And OTT's mission is really to expand the commercial impact of research investments across the department and to drive private sector uptake of clean energy technologies.
So our goal is to really make sure that these baton passes from research and development to demonstration through deployment are very clean baton passes and really to steward commercialization across the entire department. So Eric, if you'll flip to the next slide, we'll talk about how we do that. Great.
So I wanted to pick a couple of efforts here that I think really highlight both the breadth and depth of the OTT portfolio. The first are commercial liftoff reports. We call these the pathways to commercial liftoff, or the liftoff reports for short. If you go ahead and go to liftoff.energy.gov, you can download a copy for yourself.
This is really a whole of DOE effort. So we tried to take the best and latest from national labs and the thinking across the entire department. We've had more than 30 writers and reviewers, many of you are in this room. And we're so grateful for your time. And these reports are really trying to highlight and demystify what is a really fast-moving sector and help understand what will it take to get private sector uptake of clean hydrogen.
So we're trying to answer questions like how are federal dollars buying down risk to crowd in private capital? And what's the investment gap today through 2030 or to 2035 in hydrogen production in midstream infrastructure and then in the dozen plus sectors that can accept clean hydrogen for end use?
The second thing I wanted to highlight is our Technology Commercialization Fund. The Technology Commercialization Fund promotes the commercialization of promising clean energy technologies through both base annual appropriations, as well as those funding opportunities provided by the bipartisan infrastructure law. For the base annual appropriations, the TCF is more than a $30 million opportunity that supports commercialization of technologies emerging from the national labs.
And then the Bill TCF program promotes the commercialization by enabling faster replication and scaling of demonstration projects. I also wanted to highlight our lab partnering service. This is really the front door for anyone who sits outside the national labs to partner, discover, connect with the entire DOE R&D portfolio. And it will enable faster discovery and expertise between investors and innovators.
And then finally, OTT it is one of the champions of adoption readiness levels across the department. This is a framework that says technology is key, but sometimes, technology is not enough. So if you take all the other things that you need for market adoption, think about supply chains, workforce, availability of private capital. How can we move technologies from that bottom left quadrant that you see there up in terms of technology readiness and then to the right in terms of market readiness to adopt the technology? So if you go to the next slide.
This is just a double click on the liftoff reports themselves. Again, we hope you'll download a copy for yourself at liftoff.energy.gov. We've really been thrilled by the response from journalism, from the private sector. And so you'll see a wide variety of publications that have covered their launch, everything from those focused on the policy side of things to publications, like Climate Tech DC, which is really for series A, series B, early stage companies. Go to the next one.
Awesome, so clean hydrogen does not exist in a vacuum. And so the liftoff reports are actually families of reports. And so for example, if you're interested in reformation based production pathways, I'd encourage you to also check out the carbon management report, which takes a look at infrastructure via CCUS across the country.
And we also have many more coming down the pipeline. So there's a whole family of reports on industrial decarbonization that should be out at the end of the summer, ones focused on grid and many more. We really view these as living, breathing documents. And so you'll see at every report has a place where you can actually give us feedback. Please tell us what we got right. Please tell us even more so what we got wrong. This is a really fast-moving sector. And we want to reflect the best and latest as quickly as we can.
And then finally, last slide from us, a very, very busy one. So don't worry, we won't read through this. But on the left hand side, you have various production methodologies for clean hydrogen. In the middle bucket there, you see the midstream infrastructure. And we're playing back what we've heard from industry here.
So what would it take if we get to best-in-class deployments in 2030 in terms of hydrogen distribution and storage? And then finally, you can choose your own adventure along those different paths and compare it to that end use willingness to pay. So we know that hydrogen needs to stand alone when tax credits expire and be a self-sustaining commercial market across more than a dozen sectors. And so the report is really focused on how do we get there and how do public and private sector interact to be successful?
Eric Miller: All right. Thanks, Hannah. All right, Dinesh, I hear there's some exciting opportunities in the Loan Programs Office. Why don't you tell us about those?
Dinesh Mehta, Loan Programs Office Deputy Director: Sure, thank you. My name is Dinesh Mehta. I'm the Deputy Director for the loan program for the Origination Division of Loan Programs Office, where we underwrite loans. I think the central issue is the challenge the United States has in facing its climate goals is a deployment challenge, not an invention challenge.
Significant capital exists for decarbonization technologies. And you've seen all the efforts that are happening here and will continue to happen through BIL and IRA. But these projects will still lack access to adequate debt capital. That's where the LPO, or Loan Programs Office, comes in. We fill the commercial—we fill this gap of commercial deployment serving as a bridge to bankability and for innovating high impact technologies and provide folks out there with access to loans and loan guarantees when banks won't or cannot until the technology has been proven out a lot further down the road.
So what are the pillars in there? The first is the first deployment. So we sort of take first-of-a-kind risk in many of these. So you get up to that higher TRL technologies, as you said, you get out to the commercial markets, they won't take that risk. We certainly will because we have the backup of the labs and all the folks in here. And so we understand those technologies a little bit better than some other commercial lenders would.
So the first commercial is to address the sort of scale up challenges. The second thing is the construction challenges. This is to look at the engineering challenges, and mitigating the construction risks. And then the scale up from there, establish demand. So we go through that.
And finally, we also address sort of the commercial debt education. To make sure they understand that process. And they can see one or two of these come through. They can see it successfully moving along. And therefore, they tend to—they tend to understand and accept those things. This happened in the past.
We've done that with solar back in 2010 and '11. We were doing very small—industry was doing very small solar, 20 or 30 megawatts. We were starting 250 to 300 megawatt solars and 550, 750 megawatt wind, which no one else was doing. Now, the banks have come in and do that. We don't play in that space anymore because the commercial sector has taken that over. So that's kind of what we've done in the past. And we plan to do that in the future. Next slide.
So what do we offer? So we offer really three main things, access to patient capital. So we're there. And we're there for a long time. And we also make sure that we're there through the end. We're not—we're there through the lifetime. We're not going to try and syndicate and sell off the loans. We're going to be there because we want to see success.
We have flexible financing. Well, we're not a one size fits all. We are a one-stop—or we can be a one-stop shop. But one size fits all is like if you don't fit this, go somewhere else. We actually work with our applicants and able to tailor our loans to suit their requirements. So it could be—we could do the whole thing in one shot. We could do some co-lending we could do a bunch of different things. So we're very flexible in that way.
And we're a committed—we're a committed partner. And what that means is we engage early in the system. And we provide them with advice on financial, environmental, and a variety of other things that they would need early on to be successful in that process. Next slide.
So this is really kind of under the Innovative Clean Energy, the 1703 ICE program. And you can go through the eligibility and loan features. I'm not going to go through them, but other than to say it's innovative technologies that reduce carbon or sequester greenhouse gases. They have to be in the US. And we really like our money to be paid back.
So unlike grant programs, we are really a loan program. And we are looking for a reasonable prospect of repayment. I've gone through some of the things on the other side, where we can do a variety of different setups. We can do corporate finance. We could do a project finance, or a mixture of the two. And we are fairly competitively priced with other commercial rates.
That's the end of my pitch book. Let me get to an actual case. So advanced clean energy storage is in Delta, Utah. It's a storage facility. And Mitsubishi Powers and others were putting this together. So let me tell you a little story about how that came together. The need really was, if you look the second box over, was they really had a lot of renewable energy that was being curtailed and lost.
And so that was one of the issues. The other thing is EPA, who was sort of providing power to LAWT, also wanted to change out their coal plant—yes, their coal plant, their gas-fired plants, or a mixture of two—so it's really carbon, hydrogen, and natural gas, with the intent to move it completely into natural gas—to hydrogen at the end of the lifetime.
And LAWT also was not able to meet its needs in those off-peak seasons because they had to rely on carbon-based peakers. So I think it was a good combination for the two of them. There was a confluence of needs. And so in the bottom left hand corner, you can see a schematic of this, where we take renewable energy, use electrolyzers, alkaline electrolyzers and convert to hydrogen. And then hydrogen can then be pulled out in those periods when you need electricity.
There's also a picture at the bottom of the size of the salt caverns, just to kind of give you an idea what they look like. And you can see the size of the Empire State Building in there to kind of give you what these things look like. So they're pretty big. So the solution is really sort of long-term duration, which is seasonal for these guys. And that's kind of what we put together.
It's the, I think, the bellwether because it's one of the largest storage facility, I think, uses 40 alkaline electrolyzers. And it is under construction. But it should be finished within a year. Anybody wants to know more about that, we're going to be—there's going to be—Mike from Mitsubishi is going to be providing a full, in-depth analysis or presentation on that tomorrow afternoon.
So I won't go into that. But one thing I do want to end with is the bottom right hand corner. So you could see all that stuff in the circle, that's really what we financed. So taking renewable energy. And what we've financed is the conversion from electricity to hydrogen, the electrolyzers and storing it. And then putting it back out into the generator.
What you see in the red box is what I think ACES Delta wants to do in the future, which includes transportation and industrial applications. So they truly want to make this a hub. And with that, I'm going to use that as a presentation to get to Crystal, who's going to talk to you all about hubs.
Eric Miller: As promised, we were going to get to the hubs. And we're there. So take us home, Crystal.
Crystal Farmer, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm Crystal. And I work for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. We do a lot of different work in OCED. But I'm obviously going to focus on the hydrogen hubs. Next slide.
So the regional clean energy hydrogen hubs are going to be $7 billion of the $8 billion that's funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This $7 billion will be used to fund about 6 to 10 hubs across America. And these hubs will be a network of producers, consumers, and local infrastructure to help accelerate the use of hydrogen for clean energy.
We'll be focusing on helping sectors that have high decarbonization. And we'll be focusing, obviously, on the sectors that are a little bit tougher to decarbonize, such as the heavy duty transportation sectors.
So as it states in the liftoff report, this is a high level glimpse. Obviously, there's a ton more detail in the liftoff report. But in near terms, with the help of the production tax credit, they'll be focusing on sectors such as industrial and chemicals. Parallel, the hydrogen hub programs will be starting, which I'll talk about a little bit more on the next slide.
And in about the 2027 frame, there'll be more focus on bigger growth in consumers, and producers, and infrastructure, along with always having a focus on making sure this is an equitable transition into the hydrogen area. All of this will help support that 2035 goal that we have of 100% clean electricity, and hopefully also support the 2050 goal of the net zero emissions. Next slide.
So what was laid out in the FOA for the hydrogen hubs is that this will be no more than a 12-year effort, hopefully a little bit less. And it will be done in four phases. Phase one, talking about project planning. Phase two, development, permitting, financing. Phase three will be the construction and integration. And finally, getting to phase four, which will be the production and the sustainment of these hydrogen hubs.
We are, as mentioned earlier, in exciting times. The applications are in. And we are reviewing the applications right now. Hopefully at the end of the year, we'll be able to go into negotiations with the organizations. And by the beginning of next year, we will be able to kick off phase one with the hydrogen hubs.
Eric Miller: All right, thanks, Crystal. This brings us to our pondering question that I'll give everyone a half a minute to answer. No, but I think as you've already answered this mostly. We really want to know from your perspectives, you're coming from different perspectives in terms of technology transfer, commercial liftoff. Maybe give us just a sentence or two about what we really need—what are the key priorities to really make this successful to meet the timeline that we just heard from Crystal? Let me start with Crystal. Let's go backwards on that one.
Crystal Farmer: Sure. I couldn't decide on one. So I'll say the three are making sure there's any uses out there for the hydrogen, also ensuring that the cost is at a level for commercialization, and also ensuring that we're keeping our eye on that equitable transition to hydrogen for all the communities involved in the hydrogen production.
Eric Miller: Thanks, Crystal. That's wonderful. Dinesh.
Dinesh Mehta: Yeah, so—repeat your question?
Eric Miller: Yeah, just give us—what is the most important thing for a commercial liftoff.
Dinesh Mehta: So yeah, so I think technology readiness. If you are ready and ready to get to the commercial, that's where we come. We're the catalyst to make sure that if you're able to do that, we want to be supportive in all facets. So at that point, we are as I said, very patient capital. We'll work with you very early. And we really want to see successful. So even beyond construction and operation, we want to make sure that you're successful down the road. So we will kind of work with you throughout the life of the loan.
Eric Miller: Awesome, thank you. Hannah, what's your thoughts?
Hannah Murdoch: Yeah, well, we think all the time about how do you get to that self-sustaining commercial market. And so I think from the production point of view, as Ali Zaidi said earlier in his remarks, we've seen more than 12 megatons of production announced. We need to make sure that we don't take our foot off the accelerator there.
And so when we ask these production projects, what will it take to reach final investment decision? I think the two things that we hear, one is long-term bankable offtake contracts. You need those creditworthy offtake contracts to secure debt financing and get these projects over the line. And the second piece is really that scaled midstream infrastructure. So how are we going to not only produce hydrogen at low cost, but distribute and store it in a way that you can have self-sustaining markets when the subsidies expire?
Eric Miller: All right, [INAUDIBLE].
Mark Achiewicz: To conclude, I would say, especially from an early stage, it's not enough to just focusing on the technical aspect. I know this room actually has probably some of the best scientists of the world. And I'm pretty sure somebody here would be able to figure out any kind of technical problem that would be thrown out. But when you develop a new technology, it's important also to think about how you're going to commercialize it even from day one. You want to ask yourself, what does the technology brings in terms of value to a potential customer? Is it appropriate for the intended use, now, 5, 10 years from now. And especially also when you start small at a lab, you need to start to think big.
In order to solve the problem, you need to solve it at scale. And you need to understand. And you need to ask yourself, what will it take to deploy this technology at scale? So it's a critical aspect of any project you have to tackle. And I think it's important to start from day one.
Eric Miller: All right, thank you. Well, this concludes our journey from the hydrogen shots to the hydrogen hubs. Let's thank these panelists and all panelists for participating.