Gimme Three Steps - Clean Hydrogen Rules Focus on 'Three Pillars,' Strict Approach to Hourly Matching

RBN Energy Blogcast

The long-delayed rules around the federal government’s Hydrogen Production Tax Credit (PTC), also known as 45V, have been the subject of heated debate (and lobbying) since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August 2022. While some industry groups argued for looser guidelines around the PTC that would allow the low-carbon hydrogen industry to grow quickly, others called for a stricter set of rules from the start, arguing that an approach that was too lax would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at how those newly published rules rely on the so-called “three pillars” of clean hydrogen, how they prioritize production of green hydrogen at the expense of its blue and pink varieties, and explain the rules around temporal matching and why it might be hard to hit the administration’s 2028 target date for implementation.