'US clean hydrogen industry being held back by lack of interest from Big Oil': senior government official
Not a single US refinery has signed up to buy clean H2, with 'slightly fanciful' offtake deals instead being struck with European companies, says Jigar Shah
“I do not see any major traditional players involved in hydrogen, none whatsoever, none of the big oil majors,” Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy, told the Hydrogen Americas Summit in Washington DC earlier this week.
“Until you see the really large incumbents say, ‘We are actually going to bet the company on this conversion’, you are not going to see the level of growth to be able to see it as a gigatonne-scale climate reduction.”
Shah, the founder of US solar manufacturer and developer SunEdison, told the conference that US hydrogen developers seem to be signing offtake deals with European companies, rather than local firms — something he described as “slightly fanciful”.
“There are a lot of people getting European offtake agreements with almost nothing happening in the US,” he said.
In January, Shah authorised a $1.04bn loan guarantee from the Department of Energy to enable US turquoise hydrogen producer Monolith to massively expand its commercial facilities in Nebraska.
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