The hydrogen storage challenges are substantial .....

From an Explainer Article by Quinn Glabicki, Public Source, 8/8/22

Nature’s simplest element is at the center of a new energy strategy that has won the support of much of the Pittsburgh region’s leadership, while drawing scorn from sustainability advocates who say it would actually entrench the carbon economy.

As proponents tout the potential of so-called blue hydrogen to shepherd our region to a sustainable future, climate scientists and financial analysts question the viability — technologically, economically and ideologically — of developing a hydrogen hub reliant on natural gas and carbon capture in Western Pennsylvania.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last November contained $8 billion appropriated for four “clean hydrogen hubs” nationwide. In May, Gov. Tom Wolf announced that his administration would pursue the federal funds for Pennsylvania, and the state’s bipartisan congressional delegation threw its weight behind the effort in June. Even before that, a group of local industrial titans including Shell, EQT and U.S. Steel issued a joint press release pledging support for the idea.

With the process still firmly in the beginning stages, questions remain about how a hydrogen hub would be implemented, who gets a say in that process and whether it advances climate goals.

PublicSource spoke with climate scientists, financial analysts, critics and industry stakeholders in an effort to better understand the status and viability of the proposed hydrogen hub. Here are some of the questions and emerging answers.

What does hydrogen have to do with energy? When hydrogen burns, it produces heat and the only byproduct is water. The most abundant element in the universe, however, is itself not a source of energy.

“Hydrogen is another form of energy storage, like batteries,” said Neil Donahue, a climate scientist and professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University [CMU]. “Batteries are not a form of energy, nor is hydrogen.” The question, says Donahue: Where does the energy needed to produce hydrogen come from?

Renewables, fossil fuels and nuclear power are all potential energy sources for hydrogen production. Each occupies a corresponding space on a figurative color wheel often used in discussions of hydrogen power.

>> Green hydrogen is made using renewables like solar and wind energy through electrolysis to isolate the element.

>> Blue hydrogen is produced using natural gas, and the carbon emissions are captured and stored underground using carbon capture, utilization and sequestration technology.

>> When hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels but the carbon is released into the atmosphere, it’s known as gray hydrogen.

>> Nuclear power can also be used to create hydrogen in a process known as pink hydrogen.

>> Regardless of the energy input, the hydrogen produced is identical.

Experts say that hydrogen, when produced cleanly, has significant potential to reduce global carbon emissions, particularly among heavy industries like steel and concrete manufacturing, in large-scale transportation like trucking and aviation, and as a vehicle for energy storage in fuel cells. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s [IPCC] climate mitigation report released earlier this year listed hydrogen as a viable pathway to net-zero carbon emissions.

What is a hydrogen hub?

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law describes a regional clean hydrogen hub as “a network of clean hydrogen producers, potential clean hydrogen consumers and connective infrastructure located in close proximity.” The bill dictates that two of the four envisioned hubs are destined for areas “with the greatest natural gas resources.”

Because of abundant natural gas resources and infrastructure in Western Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio and West Virginia, a hydrogen hub in this region would in all likelihood be blue — that is, it would source the energy needed to produce hydrogen from natural gas, at least to start.

….. see this extensive Article from the ‘Public Source’ …

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Public Power Officials Play Key Roles With Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association

Douglas County PUD General Manager Gary Ivory and Tacoma Power Director Jackie Flowers are playing key roles with the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association (PNWH2), serving as the association’s secretary and treasurer, respectively.

PNWH2 recently completed its formation with election of Washington Commerce Director Lisa Brown as chair and Oregon Department of Energy Director Janine Benner as vice chair of the board.

The group is a non-profit, public-private partnership leading a regional effort to land a share of the U.S. Department of Energy’s $8 billion investment in a nationwide network of clean hydrogen hubs under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Formed at the direction of the Washington State Legislature, PNWH2 is currently preparing a final call for projects for consideration in its proposal to DOE.

A final request for information for individual project proposals is opening in early September. The RFI will be posted on Washington’s Electronic Business Solutions (WEBS) portal. More Information is available on the PNWH2 website and by emailing info@pnwh2.com.

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Build Back Better Lives Again, Now With Green Hydrogen

President Biden’s signature Build Back Better bill fell into the dustbin of history last summer, but apparently the US Department of Commerce did not get the memo. The agency has just put up $50 million for a green hydrogen hub in the New Orleans region under a new program called the Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC). That’s going to be a tough row to hoe, considering the grip of fossil fuel stakeholders on the Pelican State. However, Build Back Better is all about transformation, right?

Follow The Money To Green Hydrogen ~ In an interesting twist, South Louisiana’s BBBRC grant dovetails with the U.S. Energy Department’s $8 billion plan to create a network of regional “Clean Hydrogen Hubs” throughout the US. The plan is funded through last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The new grant could give H2theFuture a leg up on the sustainable H2 competition. They’ll need all they help they can get. Also competing for a share of the $8 billion pot is a powerful alliance of six northeast coastal states that are primed and ready to tap into their offshore wind resources. That group initially launched with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Maine and Rhode Island have also hopped on board.

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Didado Electric to Partner with Newpoint Gas on Advanced Hydrogen Generation and Carbon Sequestration Project in Ohio

Didado Electric announced today that it has signed a teaming agreement with Newpoint Gas to serve as a design assist and installation partner and provide electrical and grid services work on the redevelopment of the former U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) into an advanced hydrogen generation, decarbonization and combustion clean energy manufacturing facility near Piketon, Ohio.

The centerpiece of the h2Trillium Energy and Manufacturing (h2TEAM) Complex, the $1.5 billion project will be an integrated energy system – closed loop manufacturing facility powered by clean hydrogen, with carbon sequestration. At peak, in the construction phase, it will provide approximately 2,900 jobs and, when finished, will produce clean silicon, ammonia, and power.

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Governor Hochul Announces $16.6 Million in Awards for Five Long Duration Energy Storage Projects To Help Harness Renewable Energy and Provide Stored Energy to New York’s Electric Grid

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced $16.6 million in awards for five long duration energy storage projects that will help harness renewable energy and provide stored energy to New York’s electric grid. Governor Hochul also announced an additional $17 million in competitive funding available for projects that advance development and demonstration of scalable innovative long duration energy storage technologies, including hydrogen. The projects will support the current Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goal to install 3,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030 while facilitating further development to 6,000 megawatts.

Governor Hochul made today’s announcement at the 2022 Advanced Energy Conference in New York City. These awards and new funding are being made available through the Renewable Optimization and Energy Storage Innovation Program administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The awards and funding will advance renewable energy integration and reduce harmful emissions from reliance on fossil fuels. The $16.6 million in awards will support the following projects:

>>> Borrego Solar Systems, Inc. – $2.7 million – To develop, design and construct two stand-alone energy storage systems and perform field demonstrations of a six-hour zinc hybrid cathode energy storage system in New York City to help demonstrate that zinc hybrid technology is economically competitive with lithium-ion.

>>> JC Solutions, LLC dba RCAM Technologies – $1.2 million – To develop a 3D concrete printed marine pumped hydroelectric storage system that integrates directly with offshore wind development in support of grid resiliency and reduced reliance on fossil fuel plants to meet periods of peak electric demand.

>>> Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station, LLC- $12.5 million – To demonstrate nuclear-hydrogen fueled peak power generation paired with a long duration hydrogen energy storage unit to help reduce emissions from the New York Independent System Operator electric grid.

>>> Power to Hydrogen – $100,000 – To develop a Reversible Fuel Cell System for Hydrogen Production and Energy Storage called the Clean Energy Bridge and to help facilitate the system’s readiness for demonstration and commercial adoption.

>>> ROCCERA, LLC – $100,000 – To evaluate and demonstrate a novel commercially viable Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cell prototype for clean hydrogen production together with a corresponding scalable, more efficient manufacturing process.

Cost & efficiency of energy storage systems are under study

From an Article by Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker, April 18, 2022

The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns.

The dark doldrums make it difficult for an electrical grid to rely totally on renewable energy. Power companies need to plan not just for individual storms or windless nights but for Dunkelflaute that stretch for days or longer. Last year, Europe experienced a weeks-long “wind drought,” and in 2006 Hawaii endured six weeks of consecutive rainy days. On a smaller scale, factories, data centers, and remote communities that want to go all-renewable need to fill the gaps. Germany is decommissioning its nuclear power plants and working hard to embrace renewables, but, because of the problem of “intermittency” in its renewable power supply, it remains dependent on fossil fuels—including imported Russian gas.

The obvious solution is batteries. The most widespread variety is called lithium-ion, or Li-ion, after the chemical process that makes it work. Such batteries power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles; they are relatively inexpensive to make and getting cheaper. But typical models exhaust their stored energy after only three or four hours of maximum output, and—as every iPhone owner knows—their capacity dwindles, little by little, with each recharge. It is expensive to collect enough batteries to cover longer discharges. And batteries can catch fire—sites in South Korea have ignited dozens of times in the past few years.

Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist who directs the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (access), at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, told me that one of the biggest problems with Li-ion batteries is their supply chain. The batteries depend on lithium and cobalt. In 2020, some seventy per cent of the world’s cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Unless we have diversity, we’re going to be in trouble,” Srinivasan said. Any disruption to the supply chain can strongly affect prices and availability. Moreover, a lot of water and energy are required for mining the metals, which can cause environmental damage, and some cobalt-mining operations involve child labor. Experts doubt that Li-ion prices will drop more than thirty per cent below their current levels without significant technological advancements—a drop that is still too small, according to the Department of Energy. We need to expand our capacity; by one estimate, we’ll require at least a hundred times more storage by 2040 if we want to shift largely to renewables and avoid climate catastrophe. We may somehow find clean and reliable ways to mine, distribute, and recycle the ingredients for Li-ion batteries. And yet that seems unlikely. Although we usually think about renewable energy in terms of its sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels, that’s only half the picture. Ideally, we’d pair renewable energy with renewable storage.

We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a remarkable but unsung technology called pumped-storage hydropower. Among other things, “pumped hydro” is used to smooth out spikes in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power again. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down.

The facilities can be awe-inspiring: the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, in Virginia, consists of two sprawling lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; at times of high demand, thirteen million gallons of water can flow every minute through the system, which supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. Some countries are expanding their use of pumped hydro, but the construction of new facilities in the United States peaked decades ago. The right geography is hard to find, permits are difficult to obtain, and construction is slow and expensive. The hunt is on for new approaches to energy storage.

Quidnet, a Houston-based startup, is one of many companies exploring the possibilities. Last month, I sat in an F-150 King Ranch pickup with Scott Wright, its vice-president of operations, and Jason Craig, its C.O.O., as we drove to one of its test sites, on a farm west of San Antonio. Fields and billboards whizzed by as Craig explained, from the back seat, that Quidnet had patented a new kind of pumped hydro. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company’s system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet’s technology is like a green riff on fracking. In that technique, fluid is injected underground, where it builds up pressure that fractures rocks, releasing natural gas. Quidnet uses some of the same equipment and expertise, but with a different goal: the water is meant to be sandwiched between layers of rock, forming underground reservoirs that can be released on demand.

As we drove, I asked about the blackouts Texas experienced in February of 2021, when a winter storm shut down gas plants for several days and left millions without power. More than two hundred people died. The crisis had many causes, including the fact that Texas is the only state whose power grid isn’t connected to grids in other states. “We were pulling buckets of water out of the neighbor’s pool to get toilets to flush,” Wright said. “It definitely screams for some way to store power to lessen the burden on the grid in times like that.”

The artificial underground reservoirs created by companies like Quidnet are known to engineers as “lenses,” because of their shape. (“I say whoopee cushion and people don’t like it,” Craig said.) Initially, Quidnet encountered skepticism about its ability to form lenses of the right size and shape. By the time I visited, however, it had successfully completed multiple pumping cycles in Texas, Ohio, and Alberta. The company has received thirty-eight million dollars in private and government funding, including contributions from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established by Bill Gates.

Quidnet has benefitted from an energy-storage gold rush. In 2018, the Department of Energy awarded thirty million dollars in funding to ten groups, including Quidnet, through a program called Duration Addition to electricitY Storage, or days. Before leaving office, President Donald Trump signed into law the Energy Act of 2020, which included the bipartisan Better Energy Storage Technology (best) Act, authorizing a billion dollars to be spent over five years on the “research, development, and demonstration” of new energy-storage technology. Many states are now setting storage-capacity targets, and in 2018 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Order 841, which integrates stored energy into the wholesale electricity market. “There’s been a recognition that this is a technology whose time has come,” Jason Burwen, of the American Clean Power Association, told me. But a vast distance separates an engineer’s whiteboard from reality. Many renewable-storage technologies receiving funding will turn out to be too impractical, expensive, or inefficient for widespread adoption.

As we approached the farm, Craig mused on the raw physicality of many companies’ approaches. The basic principles are ones you might recall from high-school physics. If you put effort into lifting an object, it stores potential energy; if you then let that object fall, its potential energy becomes kinetic energy, which is capable of powering a generator and creating electricity. The same holds for many physical actions. In addition to lifting weights, energy-storage companies are compressing air or water, or making objects spin, or heating them up. If you use clean energy to do the initial work and find a green way to store and release it, you’ve created an ecologically responsible battery alternative.

“I’m kind of surprised and encouraged that the solutions to the long-duration-energy-storage problem could be the caveman stuff,” Craig said. Batteries depend on “pretty sophisticated electrochemistry that quickly gets outside of what I understand. And yet the solutions may be picking up heavy stuff with cranes, picking up the earth with a hydraulic jack. I think there’s some fellas in Nevada that are putting rocks in a train and rolling it uphill, then they come back down. Like, Fred Flintstone would be comfortable with most of this stuff. It could be the way.”

We pulled into the farm’s long drive. A kettle of vultures circled overhead. “You know what that means?” Craig asked. I already had one in mind. Was I about to see part of the future of green energy, or a curious and short-lived experiment in rural Texas?

Today’s Li-ion batteries are low-density by comparison, and renewable-storage systems also struggle to achieve density, convenience, and scale. The basic technology behind compressed-air energy storage goes back decades, and can involve pumping air into underground caverns, natural or artificial, then letting it out again. The first underground compressed-air facility was completed in 1978, in Germany; such systems can store and release vast amounts of energy. But, like pumped hydro, compressed-air facilities require the right geography and are expensive to build. They are also inefficient—typically, only half the energy put into pressurizing the gas can be retrieved.

Engineers are trying to improve density and efficiency. A Toronto-based company called Hydrostor has received more than three hundred million dollars in funding and is developing projects in California, Australia, and other places, to be brought online in the next five years. It stores compressed air in tanks, and holds on to the heat released during the air-compression process, which it then reapplies to the air during expansion, supercharging its ability to drive a turbine and generate electricity. A British company, Highview Power, is taking a more extreme tack, cooling air to more than three hundred degrees below zero, at which point it becomes a liquid. Liquid air is dense, and when Highview warms it, it gasifies rapidly, spinning turbine blades. Colin Roy, Highview’s executive chairman, told me that, when the company opens its tanks, air “explodes out with violent force.” It has built a prototype liquid-air system and is developing commercial plants in England and Spain.

Quidnet, too, is producing a refinement of pressure-based technology. At the company’s test site, we were greeted by Jacob and Sadie Schweers, the farm’s owners. About a year earlier, Quidnet had dispatched a drilling rig—a seventy-foot mast attached to a truck—to their property. Now a blue wellhead stood about ten feet tall, near a pump house the size of a shipping container, several yellow tanks, and a bunch of hoses. Water could be pumped from the tanks into the well, where it would be stored under pressure; then it could be released back to the tanks. Last month, Quidnet announced a pilot program to provide stored-energy technology to a utility in San Antonio.

We stepped inside the pump house to admire the pistons, the flywheel, and something called a pulsation dampener. A yellow five-hundred-horsepower diesel engine sat quietly in the back, ready to run the pump. “I love big machines and loud things and the smell of oil,” Wright said. In a commercial version of the system, an electric motor, ideally powered by clean energy, would pump the water, and act as a generator when the water returned.

As we walked back outside, into the hot sun, Wright gestured toward ten separate PVC pipes sticking out of the ground. They indicated the subterranean presence of tiltmeters, instruments for assessing the size and character of the lens by tracking the displacement of the rock; they can even sense the tidal tugging of the moon. We stood and chatted, and Craig said that the tanks would eventually be replaced by an attractive pond. Sadie Schweers told us that she likes to picture the whole farm running on solar panels and a Quidnet well.

Driving back in Wright’s truck, I thought about how things might look if Quidnet’s wells make headway. Today’s pumped-hydro plants form picturesque lakes on the Earth’s surface, but approaches like Quidnet’s would create reservoirs of pressurized energy beneath it. The company envisions terrain dotted with wellheads about half a mile apart, and a pond for every four. Wind turbines might rise skyward. The Earth itself would be a kind of giant battery.

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READER BEWARE ~ The descriptions above may be misleading as to the minimal environmental impacts of in-ground storage facilities. It is known that substantial disruptions to the Earth occur with hydro pumped storage projects. The Bath County project in Virginia is an extreme disturbance in the mountains, some say unsightly. Further, the proposed projects at Canaan Valley in Tucker County, WV, have been extremely unpopular in a highly scenic area, extending back to the 1960’s or earlier. DGN

President Biden explains the clean energy plans

From an Article by Lisa Friedman, New York Times, May 22, 2021

WASHINGTON — The linchpin of President Biden’s climate plan faces a perilous path through the Congress, as scientists say nations must move now to aggressively reduce the pollution that is heating the planet and the United States is trying to reassert a leadership role in that global effort.

The central tool of Mr. Biden’s plan, known as a clean electricity standard, would require power companies to gradually ratchet up the amount of electricity they generate from wind, solar and other sources until they’re no longer emitting carbon dioxide.

On paper, it seems a no-brainer. Some version of it has been approved by 29 states from Washington to Virginia. The idea is popular among Democratic and Republican voters. And experts say it is one of the most effective ways to cut the pollution from burning oil, gas and coal that is driving climate change.

But in trying to push a nationwide standard through a bitterly divided Congress, Democrats are considering a politically risky move: attaching it to a fast-track maneuver known as budget reconciliation, which allows some bills to pass with a simple majority. That would require the support of all 50 Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the state second only to Wyoming in coal production.

Mr. Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, has been noncommittal when it comes to a clean electricity standard. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill say forcing utilities to turn away from coal, oil and gas will mean higher electric bills. The fossil fuel industry says it will harm reliability of the power grid. Even supporters of the idea are at odds over how to design a national standard. And some Democrats question whether it’s aggressive enough.

Much is at stake. Without meaningful climate legislation this year, Mr. Biden will be left with executive action, some of it sure to be challenged in court, to meet his ambitious goals to pivot the country away from fossil fuels and prove to the world the United States is serious about global warming.

This year is “the last best chance for the world to get on a legitimate track,” said former Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s global climate envoy, during a recent interview in Rome, where he was meeting with European counterparts. A clean electricity standard is the best way at the moment to “make up for lost time” under former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Kerry said.

The last time Congress tried to enact major climate change legislation was 2009 when it failed to pass a complex market-based system to cut emissions. Democrats were trounced in the following midterm elections and lost the House, in part because of Republican claims that they were intent on driving up electricity costs.

But the political landscape has shifted. Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal and natural gas. Americans also are witnessing the real-time consequences of climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and stronger hurricanes battering their communities. Democrats are more unified around tackling climate change than a decade ago, and Mr. Biden won the White House based in part on a promise to enact the most aggressive climate agenda in history.

Perhaps most significantly, some major utilities are for the first time rallying around the idea of a clean electricity standard. In recent weeks, 13 publicly owned utilities announced support for an aggressive measure that would eliminate 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions from the sector by 2030. The American Public Power Association, which represents about 2,000 other public utilities, hasn’t taken a stand. But the Edison Electric Institute, which represents privately owned utilities and whose former president opposed a renewable energy standard in 2007, said it now supports a “well-designed” policy.

“That is different than it has ever been before,” said Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who has been pushing for a national clean energy standard for more than a decade and is drafting a new version. Edison Electric Institute has opted to support a clean electricity standard, in part because its members so quickly met an objective set by the Obama administration to cut power plant emissions, said Emily Fisher, general counsel for the group. That goal, of cutting the sector’s emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels, was accomplished by 2020 — a decade ahead of schedule.

“I often wish that I could get in a time machine and talk to myself in 2010,” Ms. Fisher said. “I think I would have told her to be more excited about the future. Sometimes in those early conversations it seemed like the future was going to be really hard to accomplish. We don’t feel that way anymore.”

Republican leaders, however, shrugged off signs of growing industry support and indicated they intend to fight Mr. Biden’s plan. “We all want to make energy as clean as we can as fast as we can, and do it in ways that don’t raise costs for American families,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, adding that he is focused on energy prices and jobs in energy industries for his constituents. “But what the president is proposing is raising energy costs significantly.”

Studies on the effects that clean electricity standards have had on consumer prices are mixed. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory evaluated several programs and concluded that they raised electricity bills by an average of 2 percent in 2017. But more recent research from the University of Chicago of various clean electricity standards in 29 states and the District of Columbia found that, seven years after imposing a standard, prices rose by about 11 percent. That study was also criticized by many energy experts who argued costs may increased because of other policies approved at the same time as a clean electricity standard.

After he returned the United States to the 2015 Paris climate accord, President Biden committed to cut carbon emissions roughly in half by 2030 and also eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. The White House has called for a clean electricity standard as part of its $2.3 trillion infrastructure package. It has preferred that approach over a tax on carbon emissions, a method that many economists say would be the most efficient way reduce emissions but is unpopular among many Republicans and some progressive Democrats.

Negotiations between the White House and Republican congressional leaders over the infrastructure package are continuing. Meanwhile, Democrats are debating the best strategy to pass a clean electricity standard, several House and Senate aides said.
The administration has offered few details about such a standard, other than it should include nuclear energy and should also incorporate technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions, which could allow some fossil fuel plants to continue operating. Energy experts said both nuclear energy and carbon capture will be required to reduce emissions. They also will be critical to gaining Republican support, if there is any to be had.

One of the most consequential questions to be decided by lawmakers is whether to characterize natural gas as a “clean energy,” something the gas industry wants. When burned, natural gas produces half the carbon dioxide of coal. But it releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide (though it has shorter staying power in the atmosphere). Much of that gas has been extracted through the controversial method known as fracking. Progressives have indicated they will fight any measure that includes anything other than renewable energy like wind, solar and geothermal power.

“You can’t have a truly clean energy system that includes fracked gas,” said Mitchell Jones, policy director at Food and Water Watch, one of more than 600 environmental group that signed a May 12 letter to House and Senate leaders. The group rejected gas “with or without carbon capture sequestration” and what it called other “false solutions” like nuclear.

Other supporters of climate legislation like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, said they worry the administration’s plan is too narrowly focused on the power sector. While electricity generation was responsible for 25 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted by the United States in 2019, the transportation sector produced about 29 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Manufacturing and industry produced another 23 percent. Commercial and residential buildings were responsible for 13 percent, and agriculture contributed 10 percent, the agency said.

Mr. Whitehouse wants a package of solutions, including a tax on carbon emissions. But he said Democrats understand they have a short window during which to act and it is closing fast. “The danger to us, primarily, is that we get into our traditional Democratic circular firing squad and quarrel with each other rather than taking on the common enemy of carbon emissions and a very malign fossil fuel industry apparatus,” Mr. Whitehouse said. “This is a really important moment and perhaps our last chance.”

While some Republicans have supported clean electricity standards in the past, environmental activists said they don’t believe Democrats can win over 10 GOP senators, the number needed to break a filibuster. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah in a recent interview said he is “looking at” a clean electricity standard but believes a tax on carbon pollution is a better approach. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was willing to “review” a federal standard but also made no commitment. Without Republican help, Democrats would have to try to pass a clean electricity standard through budget reconciliation. That approach requires only a simple Senate majority, but the legislation must be crafted in a way that changes federal spending or revenue. And they would have to win over Mr. Manchin, who has expressed concern both about using the reconciliation process as well as a clean energy standard.

Scott Segal, a senior partner at Bracewell LLP, which represents utilities and other energy industry clients, said Democrats could undermine their efforts on climate change by pushing legislation through without bipartisan support. “If they try to jam a clean electricity standard through on reconciliation, I think they would likely lose a strong handful of moderate Democrats, and they’d have no chance to pick up moderate Republicans,” he said.

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FACT SHEET: President Biden Sets 2030 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Target Aimed at Creating Good-Paying Union Jobs and Securing U.S. Leadership on Clean Energy Technologies, The White House, April 22, 2021