White House Strips Funding Promised to Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub

White House Strips Funding Promised to Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub

Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association - serving WA, ID, MT, & OR -- loses around $1 billion in federal funding, potentially curtailing billions in private sector clean energy investments & 10k+ jobs throughout region

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association (PNWH2) is one of the projects targeted by the Trump Administration's short-sighted, partisan funding cuts the White House Office of Management and Budget announced last night. The PNWH2 supports clean energy efforts in Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. Its cancellation will eliminate more than 10,000 jobs across the region, mainly in rural areas.

"The Trump Administration's politically motivated decision to strip funds from the pioneering Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub is unprecedented and corrupt. Our region was awarded this Hub following an intensive national competition because we showed we had the pioneering researchers, clean energy resources, and over $5 billion in committed local investment that it would take to show that clean hydrogen can work. I will be fighting to restore these funds," said U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), senior member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

The Trump Administration cut funding from the following Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub partner projects located in Washington state:

• Alare Renewables (Whatcom County): $102,797,603
• Atlas Agro (Benton County): $157,342,270
• Northwest Seaport Alliance (King/Pierce Counties): $11,800,670
• Lewis County Transit (Lewis County): $36,385,400

The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, a collective of projects aimed at green hydrogen ecosystem spurring billions of dollars of infrastructure investment to provide alternatives to fossil fuels, has been years development and won a highly competitive national competition to receive the roughly $1 billion federal funding award. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) choose the Pacific Northwest Hub to demonstrate how clean hydrogen generated from hydropower could be utilized by a range of industries and transportation sectors.

In October 2023, the DOE designated PNWH2 as one of seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) across the nation, focused on harnessing the Pacific Northwest's abundant and clean hydropower supplies to produce hydrogen through hydrolysis.

In July 2024, DOE announced that PNWH2 received Phase 1 award status and would receive an initial amount of up to $27.5 million to fund initial planning, permitting, and analysis activities to ensure that the overall Hub concept is technologically and financially viable, with input from relevant local stakeholders. Besides the $1 billion in federal cost-sharing, the Hub expected to be matched by over $5 billion in local investments.

Sen. Cantwell worked to include the H2Hubs program and other key hydrogen investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) during consideration in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where she served as a senior member, in July 2021, and push for its successful passage through the Senate. Together with the clean hydrogen incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), these investments represent a historical investment that will help spur hydrogen to be an important piece of the decarbonizing puzzle needed to reach our climate goals.

In March 2024, Sen. Cantwell co-led a bipartisan delegation of Washington and Oregon lawmakers voicing their support for PNWH2 in a letter to the DOE.

"Supported by the region's vast federal and non-federal hydropower resources, the PNWH2 will not only demonstrate our region's ability to produce, process, deliver, store, and use clean hydrogen, we believe it will serve as a national model of how an integrated clean hydrogen network can facilitate the creation of an affordable and self-sustaining clean hydrogen economy," the lawmakers wrote.

In July 2024, Sen. Cantwell led her colleagues in a letter to U.S. Department of the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urging the agency to ease its criteria for hydrogen power development projects that qualify for the Section 45V Credit, which was established by the IRA and reimburses hydrogen power projects by up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced.

"The 45V credit offers the United States an irreplaceable opportunity to boost our economic and international competitiveness. At this critical juncture for the expansion of domestic clean hydrogen production, it is important that Treasury apply a workable tax treatment of new projects to spur investment, attract customers, and promote new clean energy jobs," the senators wrote. The letter also stated, "Getting it right means capitalizing on this opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster and enhance our energy security, while strengthening our economy, creating thousands of jobs, and combating the climate crisis."

The H2Hubs program was established by the BIL. It designates up to $7 billion in competitive grants to establish between six and 10 regional clean hydrogen hubs across the United States. These networks of hydrogen producers, consumers, and local connective infrastructure will help accelerate the use of hydrogen as clean energy and work toward achieving the goal of a 100 percent clean electrical grid by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association is a collective of government, tribal, labor, energy, research, nonprofit, and private sector stakeholders aimed at creating a hydrogen center in the Pacific Northwest region. This public-private partnership includes leaders from the Washington State Department of Commerce, the Oregon Department of Energy, Amazon, Washington State University, and others.