Beyond the Bottom Line: Assessing Non-Economic Barriers to Hydrogen Adoption

To achieve a deep reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases, the global clean energy transition will require the wide adoption of sustainable and low-carbon energy sources. Hydrogen has emerged as a promising part of a portfolio of solutions, with the potential to offer a clean alternative for various sectors such as transportation, industry, and power generation. However, integrating hydrogen into the existing energy infrastructure presents challenges, including issues of cost competitiveness, achieving clean production with very low leakage, public understanding and acceptance, and ensuring a reliable supply chain. All of these challenges underscore the complexities involved in the deployment and adoption of a transformative technology within energy and infrastructure systems.

Currently dozens of pilot projects, designed to jumpstart the production and use of hydrogen and demonstrate its large-scale application in the energy mix, are being planned and developed across the United States. While achieving, or at least providing a pathway to, cost competitiveness is a key market-based objective for these projects, identifying and overcoming non-economic challenges will be at least as important to ensuring the successful development of a hydrogen market.

This dissertation contributes to the understanding of barriers and opportunities associated with the widespread use of hydrogen technologies in the United States today. It applies both qualitative and quantitative methods to (1) evaluate barriers identified across published national hydrogen roadmaps, as well as stakeholder views on non-economic barriers the hydrogen market is currently facing in the US; (2) gain a more nuanced understanding of the public perception of hydrogen and hydrogen hubs; and (3) provide a comparative lifecycle assessment of the envi?ronmental impacts that various regions of the US will face in establishing hydrogen production facilities. The results advance the understanding of current opportunities in the integration of hydrogen into the clean energy sector and provides actionable guidance to aid decision-makers and stakeholders in the development and implementation of the U.S. Hydrogen Roadmap.

Results and insights from this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Global barriers to hydrogen development, as identified in existing national hydrogen roadmaps, were shown to be infrastructure development, market development, and the need for research and development. Domestically, providing regulatory clarity and addressing decision makers’ lack of awareness were the two non-economic barriers that stakeholders identified as being the most impactful to hydrogen technology deployment today. Additionally, public perception of hydrogen resulted vi in surprisingly disparate views between industry and government employees – suggesting an opportunity for these groups to work together in addressing this barrier. To address public perception, private and public sectors should work together to develop balanced messages and address the public’s desire for additional information. Specifically, leak detection and safety considerations were top concerns for participants in the focus group participants in the Southwest Pennsylvania case study. Lastly, as regulatory policies are proposed and refined, incentives need to be carefully designed to ensure developers’ process designs and investments achieve the low?carbon goals of hydrogen technology. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, while no single variable can result in increasing a developer’s clean energy tax credit eligibility, the electricity grid mix provided the largest impact independently to emissions.