The US Hydrogen Demand Action Plan
The U.S. Hydrogen Demand Action Plan finds that the United States maintains significant resources, both natural and manmade, across many regions of the country to rapidly drive hydrogen market formation. Hydrogen offers the energy system unique versatility, flexibility, and scalability to rapidly decarbonize existing infrastructure and transition to new clean energy pathways at scale. This is important as the timetable for developing and deploying new business models, technologies, and policies for reaching economywide net zero emissions by midcentury requires an immediate nationwide commitment.
This study focuses on how to implement recent federal policy most effectively, while capitalizing on the growing private investment into new clean hydrogen production projects. There will be a cost gap between the supply side incentives of the IRA and the conditions needed to accelerate demand in most commercial use cases, critical for market formation. This gap is mostly due to the lack of federal R&D in clean hydrogen—and therefore slow progress in advanced stage demonstration and deployment— during previous decades. This study recommends additional policy and regulatory actions to accelerate hydrogen’s use across a range of regions and sectors, especially by leveraging regional hydrogen hubs as growth engines. Additional policy measures that target hydrogen-ready applications in difficult to decarbonize sectors can effectively use hydrogen’s unique attributes, while reinvesting in America’s workforce, and rapidly driving U.S. market formation.
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