Prolific Renewables Are Key to Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub Plans -- RBN Energy -- November 30, 2022

RBN Energy: prolific renewables are key to Pacific Northwest hydrogen hub plans. Archived. Hydrogen is tracked here.

Today, we turn our attention to a pair of hydrogen-hub proposals in the Pacific Northwest, both of which focus on the region’s potential for producing clean hydrogen via electrolyzers powered by renewables — especially electricity from large hydroelectric plants in Washington state and Oregon, but also from new wind farms and solar facilities that would be purpose-built to power clean-hydrogen production. Washington is far and away the U.S.’s leading producer of hydropower, generating more than 70 million megawatt-hours (MWh) from its rivers and dams in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Oregon was #2 in hydropower, with just over 28 million MWh last year (edging out #3 New York, home of Niagara Falls). And yes, despite Seattle and Portland’s reputation for long streaks of cloudy, rainy weather, many other parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho are typically dry and sunny — windy too — offering a lot of potential for solar and wind power.

As we said earlier, there are two separate but overlapping hub proposals in the Pacific Northwest. One is advanced by the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association (PNWH₂), a public-private partnership led by the state governments in Washington and Oregon that also includes representatives from industry, universities and colleges, labor unions and Native American tribal interests, among others. The other proposal is being advanced by Obsidian Renewables, a Lake Oswego, OR-based solar developer that has been working with a range of port-agency, labor and tribal representatives on what it calls the Obsidian Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub — we’ll refer to it as the Obsidian plan. (Obsidian, by the way, is a dark natural glass formed by the cooling of molten lava — Oregon has lots of the stuff.)

Obsidian Renewables took the unusual step of making its hydrogen-hub concept paper public — few, if any, others have — and, given that the proposal is quite specific, we’ll begin with a description of it, then follow that up with a more general look at PNWH₂’s plan.