At the heart of Louisiana’s efforts to lessen its dependence on fossil fuels and attain energy independence is the Louisiana Clean Energy Complex. With a budget of $4.5 billion, the project represents a major green investment in the Gulf Coast by Air Products, an internationally networked industrial gas company.
The landmark initiative was first announced in October 2021 at a Baton Rouge event that brought together Governor John Bel Edwards and Seifi Ghasemi, the chairman and CEO of Air Products. It is located in Burnside in Ascension Parish and represents the largest permanent carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration project ever attempted. When completed, it will generate more than 750 million standard cubic feet of blue hydrogen daily, permanently capturing and sequestering 95% of all CO2 emitted through the manufacturing process.
Blue hydrogen refers to the hydrogen produced from natural gas when the associated CO2 generated is sequestered underground forever. With a stringent emissions mitigation system, the low-carbon hydrogen is not responsible for additional CO2 entering the earth’s atmosphere.
When burned, end-product hydrogen produces heat while leaving only H2O as a byproduct, making it an extremely clean energy source. The hydrogen market is expected to grow into a multitrillion-dollar one worldwide over the next decade, with countries like the United States and China vying for leadership.
One area of confusion for many is the difference between green and blue hydrogen. Green hydrogen comes into play when the energy used in powering electrolysis, an essential process in creating hydrogen, is derived from renewable sources like water, wind, and solar. By contrast, blue hydrogen involves a steam methane reforming process, in which hot steam acts as a catalyst when mixed with natural gas.
One major hurdle with blue hydrogen is ensuring that leaks during natural gas drilling, extraction, and transportation do not result in significant methane emissions. This is critically important because the International Energy Agency estimates that a single ton of methane has the equivalent effect on global warming as 28 to 36 tons of CO2.
Hydrogen, sometimes called the “Swiss Army knife” of energy, offers unparalleled versatility and is expected to have an outsized role in the multistage process of decarbonizing heavy industries such as commercial trucking, shipping, and airplane transportation. While hydrogen does not efficiently compete with the EV batteries on smaller vehicles, it does away with the need for massive batteries, energy-intensive to produce, on larger vehicles.
One of hydrogen’s most immediate uses is as a chemical industrial process component that helps clean up the steel industry. It also underlies the Haber-Bosch process, which creates ammonia for fertilizer using hydrogen and nitrogen. This process has revolutionized agricultural production, allowing it to keep pace with a rapidly increasing population over the past century.
The major hurdle preventing green and blue hydrogen’s adoption is cost. Simply delivering hydrogen from natural gas costs $1.50 per kilogram, which more than triples when clean hydrogen is the aim. Launched in June 2021, the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Shot program seeks to address that and bring clean hydrogen costs from the current $5 to around $1 per kilogram within a decade.
Large-scale projects such as the Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, which create economies of scale, are essential in accomplishing this and can access significant federal and state incentives while generating local economic growth. The complex requires the efforts of 2,000 construction workers to complete, with 170 permanent jobs, at an average salary of $93,000, created.
