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HARRISBURG — The federal government and private developers are collecting public feedback on two major hydrogen production networks that will be partly located in Pennsylvania as part of a multibillion-dollar Biden administration effort to cut carbon pollution and fight climate change.
But affected communities and environmental advocates feel left out of the planning for these massive projects and worry that promises of clean energy and good jobs gloss over serious health risks.
Zulene Mayfield sees history repeating. She heads Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, a group formed over two decades ago to oppose waste disposal facilities linked to high levels of air pollution and illnesses including cancer.
“Historically, Black and brown communities have suffered under all of these ‘good’ new proposals,” Mayfield told Spotlight PA.
As part of the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub, also called MACH2, pipelines, hydrogen production plants, and hydrogen storage facilities are planned in and around Chester, though details on environmental and health impacts aren’t yet available.
Mayfield feels the proposal offers little benefit to the predominantly Black Delaware County city, in which a third of people live under the poverty line. “It’s certainly not for our residents,” she said of the planned facility.
Hydrogen is a clean-burning fuel central to a federal effort to make industries that produce large amounts of carbon emissions, like cementmaking and steelmaking, greener. But generating hydrogen can also release climate-warming gasses, depending on how it’s produced.
Last fall, the Biden administration announced plans to invest $1.6 billion into building two hydrogen hubs partially located in Pennsylvania. Hubs are sprawling networks of infrastructure used to produce, store, and transport hydrogen and its byproducts.
The federal Department of Energy, which oversees the effort, began holding information sessions in October 2023. It has hosted three public meetings on MACH2, and developers are slated to host two sessions over the next month.
Mayfield said the meetings so far haven’t convinced her that community concerns will be taken seriously. She pointed to a March session that MACH2 developers hosted at the Steamfitters Local 420 union hall in Philadelphia. It was attended by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, union members, and fossil fuel executives.
Mayfield found the location and time to be exclusionary. “This meeting was not accessible via public transportation, we had to rent a bus, (it) was held at 8 o’clock on Monday morning,” she said.
The developers have since reached out to Mayfield, who told Spotlight PA she is apprehensive but eager to learn more about the project.
Other people who live around planned hub projects also say they’re still waiting for detailed proposals from developers.
Marcia Dinkins, who heads the anti-pollution Black Appalachian Coalition, has followed the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2, since it was announced last fall.
The Department of Energy has kept in touch with her, she said, but hasn’t shared details about the hub itself. Dinkins said what she learned at DOE meetings was “very vague.”
“As a community, we don’t know anything and that’s one of the biggest concerns,” she said.
Wanted: More info
The Biden administration has greenlit both MACH2, which will be located in Delaware and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania; and ARCH2, which will be located in Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
Three of ARCH2’s 15 projects are slated to be in Pennsylvania.
Two of the projects, targeted for Fayette County, will be related, according to a DOE presentation. One will use natural gas “to produce low-carbon aviation fuel.” Then, “excess hydrogen” from that project would be liquified in the other facility for use in the trucking industry. EQT and Air Liquide, an industrial gas supplier, head those projects.
Completing the hydrogen hubs is expected to take around a decade, and the DOE has broken the process into several phases.
At the moment, developers are hashing out community benefits plans, which are agreements that outline how they plan to accommodate and contribute to affected locales.
Developers have wide latitude to decide what details they make public. They were not required to publish their initial applications to DOE, which included project timelines, data on projected environmental and health impacts, and estimated costs.
They also had to submit community benefits plans. The department said it would publish a summary of the plans after choosing developers, but so far it has not done so.
Residents and other stakeholders say they want more information about the exact locations of hub facilities, and expected emissions and habitat disruptions.
During public hearings and listening sessions hosted by the DOE, and in interviews with Spotlight PA, developers said they have good reasons to be tight-lipped.
“You see a lot of people promising things that never came to fruition,” said Shawn Bennett, a representative of ARCH2, at an October DOE hearing. “And for people who have lived there and continue to live there, the last thing you want to do is give them too much hope for something that may not happen.”
Health concerns
Most of the community and environmental advocates who spoke with Spotlight PA fear that by the time they have enough detail to understand the scope of the projects, it will be too late for the hubs to incorporate community feedback or make substantive changes.
Underlying that fear is an even deeper one about the health, safety, and environmental effects of the hubs.
The southwestern and north-central areas of Pennsylvania that are expected to host ARCH2 facilities are on the Marcellus Shale. Over the past two decades, the region has been at the center of Pennsylvania’s hydraulic fracturing boom.
Fracking, as the practice is more commonly known, is the process of injecting water into the ground to create cracks in the Earth’s surface to extract oil and gas.
Living near fracking pads or oil fields can cause headaches and nausea. It has also been linked to increased rates of cancer and asthma in children, birth defects, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
Those risks are top of mind for residents in the vicinity of the two ARCH2 facilities, which are expected to produce hydrogen using natural gas.
Veronica Coptis is one of them. She lives in Carmichael, about a 30-minute drive from La Belle, a Fayette County community that an early DOE announcement identified as a primary ARCH2 project site. Coptis, a community organizer and advisor at environmental advocacy group Taproot Earth, first learned about the project through her job.
Coptis worries about the future of air and water quality in her neighborhood. Materials from the DOE indicate one project will use carbon capture, while another nearby site won’t.
According to an air monitor on her property, the area already has hazardous levels of pollution.
“I have two kids that are under the age of 10 and (am) really concerned about any health impacts that could happen from an increase,” Coptis said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s public or private money, it matters that there’s a facility that impacts my health and property value.”
In western Pennsylvania, at least one ARCH2 project — likely located in Clinton County — will include subsurface carbon dioxide storage.
Under this system, carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen produced with natural gas are captured and then stored underground. There are just over a dozen carbon injection wells in the country, but none in Pennsylvania.
Environmental advocates want to know who will monitor these wells given that the carbon will be underground for centuries.
“Once you get it into the injection well, the question is if it’s going to stay there,” said Rob Altenburg, senior director for energy and climate at PennFuture, a statewide environmental advocacy organization. “At some point, the people doing the storage no longer are responsible.”
Advocates also note the hubs’ pipelines will be connected to relatively new and untested industries.
Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, said that makes it hard to know what questions residents need to ask to guarantee their safety.
“We don’t know enough about the technology to be able to say that it is safe,” Steele said. “But what we do know about some of the components that we’ve seen in use in the field, it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that communities around this infrastructure will be at increased health risk.”
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