As the Treasury Department holds public hearings this week on the 45V hydrogen tax credit and industry lines up to weaken environmental safeguards, we wanted to share with you new research from Friends of the Earth US about Big Oil’s and the nuclear industry’s efforts to co-opt hydrogen and attack any chance of guardrails in the new tax credit.
While the “three pillars” for electrolysis have been scrutinized (i.e., additionality, geography/regionality, and temporality/time-matching), there are also a number of under the radar concessions that could be traded away by the Biden Administration. This report provides a roadmap of these dangerous concessions and their climate and justice implications.
Some key findings include:
- Outlining the loopholes that Big Oil, major utilities, and nuclear giants are lobbying for to weaken the Biden Administration’s modest steps towards a “three pillars” approach to hydrogen.
- Fossil fuel companies are joining forces with factory farms and landfills to demand that dirty fossil hydrogen be allowed to claim the highest tier of the credit.
- Prominent Blue State governors, including Jay Inslee (WA), JB Pritzker (IL), Tina Kotek (OR), and Gavin Newson (CA), are using their credentials as climate leaders to propose drastically undercutting the integrity of the hydrogen tax credit.
- Big Oil is attempting to “lock-in” the Department of Energy’s low-ball estimate for methane leakage. This would allow dirty energy projects to claim a full decade of subsidies even if the agency later updates its modeling to reflect the latest science.
- Opaque methane gas “certifiers” like Project Canary are siding with Big Oil to further weaken the Biden Administration’s already flawed approach to emissions modeling.
The report can be found here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any reflections or questions on this!
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