As an anti-natural gas movement grows across the U.S., Louisiana and Texas are considered key players in a potential Gulf Coast hydrogen production hub.
According to a report from S&P Global Platts, the two states, which underpin the petrochemicals industry, together represented more than one-third of U.S. industrial gas consumption in 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
But since the Gulf Coast is a major contributor to U.S. industrial sector emissions, it is also an ideal location to scale up decarbonization as well as carbon capture and storage infrastructure, Julio Friedmann, a former U.S. Department of Energy principal deputy assistant secretary, tells S&P Platts.
That’s because it has plentiful storage potential and is home to much of the current U.S. hydrogen supply and infrastructure, where hydrogen is chiefly consumed in the refining and chemicals sectors.
That could include building a pipeline network to transport carbon captured from so-called blue hydrogen, produced from natural gas, Friedmann told S&P Global Market Intelligence in an October 2020 interview. Friedmann, now a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, contends that blue hydrogen is critical to building a hydrogen economy.
