A bill overwhelmingly passed by the state legislature during the most recent special session doesn’t appear to be as threatening to Intermountain Power Project’s transition plans as might have first appeared.
During a recent virtual conference sponsored by industry trade group Green Hydrogen Coalition, the chief engineer and general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Martin Adams, made clear his agency is moving full bore toward a green energy future.
IPP and the salt domes beneath it are critical elements of that future, he said.
Adams was a keynote speaker at the coalition’s third annual fall get-together Nov. 30 to Dec. 1. During his virtual presentation, the LADWP chief engineer delivered an impassioned case in an address titled “Leveraging Green Hydrogen for an Affordable and Reliable Energy Transition: IPP Renewed and HyDeal LA.”
SB2002, the bill Utah lawmakers recently passed stripping Intermountain Power Agency of many of the legal perks it accumulated over at least two decades, wasn’t even mentioned.
Instead Adams referenced the motion picture “Field of Dreams” and the phrase “if you build it, they will come,” to spell out a blueprint for future clean energy production and distribution.
“In this case we are building it. We are building the Intermountain Power Project in Delta, Utah.”
He also noted that current planning calls for multiple hydrogen generation power stations in El Segundo, Calif., and three other locations within the Los Angeles basin.
“These are all near-future things. Within the next decade all of these plants will need to be addressed. There is going to be a tremendous transformation of our power supply here at the same time keeping the lights on and converting to that clean fuel,” Adams assured his audience. “The future is now. It’s up to us to make it happen.”
Adams laid out a vision where hydrogen is not just used as a fuel for IPP’s power plant, but is created using renewable resources already in place and stored in bulk within the salt domes underneath IPP. The vision includes building a massive network of hydrogen pipelines, making the fuel increasingly accessible to end-users, thereby reducing the costs of production and transmission of energy over time. He said LADWP sees IPP as a ready-made asset, in place, with all the water, land and transmission resources necessary to become the first hub in a new Western green energy system, a commercialization plan named HyDeal North America.
Adams likened the vision and its requirement for buy-in from stakeholders, big business and government in particular, as akin to the development of the nationwide rail network or the interstate highway system, both of which transformed how the country operated but could never be accomplished without massive investment.
“Together, we need to commercialize this, drive the price down, do the same thing with hydrogen that happened with solar panels, but do it much quicker. Bring this to scale,” he said.
Adams said he believes LADWP is on track to accomplish the first phase of such progress by 2030 or 2035.
“I hope you understand Los Angeles is serious about this,” he told his audience. “We plan to be a leader in this space. We have projects going on now that in the next few years we will be burning green hydrogen. And hopefully that will set the pace for the rest of the power industry.”
Eventually, the infrastructure laid down first in Southern California and Central Utah will be expanded into other states and regions, potentially forever changing the energy economy of the U.S. and possibly the globe.
The vision is one already embraced by federal policymakers.
The Biden Administration’s recently passed infrastructure legislation, for instance, carves out $8 billion to support green hydrogen projects. A Department of Energy loan program also provides critical financing options for new hydrogen infrastructure development. The DOE already touts a program called “Hydrogen Shot,” short for a moonshot race to develop a green hydrogen energy economy within the next decade. This includes enough investment to reduce the cost of a single kilogram of green hydrogen to $1 within 10 years—a figure many in the finance sector consider low enough to compete with current energy prices.
Adams said an application has already been submitted for federal financing to aid in IPP’s transition.
“We really need substantial investment to help defray the costs,” he said, adding that LADWP’s ability to bond such large power projects depends on government assistance, particularly early credits for the 4 million ratepayers who will be footing the bills at first during IPP’s transition.
Adams said a federal hydrogen production tax credit is predicted by 2024 and will be “hugely important” as well. IPP’s transition to natural gas and green hydrogen power generation is scheduled to commence sometime in 2025.
Realization of the vision is not without challenges.
Adams said after transmission, storage and movement of green hydrogen pose the biggest obstacles.
Hydrogen can be stored inside pipelines or as ammonia in larger containers. But shipping the fuel will most likely require pipelines, as trucking hydrogen makes little sense, he said.
“How you move it and how you store it. I don’t believe it does a whole lot of good to truck hydrogen in the form of ammonia or anything to a location if you are going to burn fossil fuel to get it there,” he said. “The infrastructure to move and store the hydrogen will be key.”
Southern California already hosts about 60 miles of hydrogen pipeline—though it currently moves gray hydrogen, or that produced using fossil fuels. Adams said perhaps that small network can be expanded first.
“If you look on how we can expand on that network, how we can tie other users together, and find hubs of green hydrogen use so that we can get more economy of scale. Then we can build that network out. One of the challenges in the LA basin will be storage and how we store hydrogen,” Adams said.
Janice Lin, founder and director of the Green Hydrogen Coalition, said Adams’ vision and confidence were inspiring.
“Marty is the kind of person that when you spend any amount of time with him, you leave the meeting feeling pumped up and totally inspired about what is possible,” she said.
Adams was joined by several other keynote speakers at the GHC conference, including David Turk, deputy secretary at the DOE and Sunita Satyapal, director of the DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office. Other participants included multiple state energy office directors, technology and energy companies, and environmental concerns among others.
