New Tax Break for Clean Energy Draws Scrutiny

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/politics/climate-natural-gas-hydrogen-new-mexico.html

By Eric Lipton, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Blackstone, the New York-based asset manager with nearly $1 trillion of investor funds, is moving rapidly into the clean-energy revolution, driven in part by federal tax incentives .... But one of its larger projects — through a subsidiary called Tallgrass Energy — is drawing protests from environmentalists who argue that Blackstone’s effort in New Mexico will not do enough to combat climate change.... Tallgrass intends to spend $600 million to rebuild a defunct coal-burning power plant in northwest New Mexico into one that uses natural gas converted into hydrogen to create electricity that will be sent to households and businesses in four states in the region. The project would be eligible for a generous tax break — generating about $30 million a year in federal subsidies for its electricity generation — because the climate-change-causing carbon generated by the plant would be collected and then buried deep underground, in a process called sequestration. ...the Inflation Reduction Act... increased the carbon capture subsidy by 70 percent, to $85 per ton of carbon that is captured and buried. The New Mexico project is expected to sequester about 380,000 tons of carbon annually.... ...In place of coal, Tallgrass would take natural gas drilled from the New Mexico area and convert that gas into hydrogen through a process called methane reforming, which relies on high-pressure steam to separate hydrogen from the gas. ...The problem with the plan, according to other energy analysts and environmental engineers, is that the process is extremely inefficient: Using natural gas to create hydrogen is very energy intensive. ...Making matters worse, said Bruce Robertson, an energy industry analyst who conducted a study of carbon capture projects worldwide, most of them have failed to live up to promised carbon removal targets, meaning they have not achieved the intended environmental benefits.…

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