Hydrogen Bomb
A political battle over billions in taxpayer money, fought by an army of confused politicians.
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” – Hellen Keller
Republican Congresswoman Carol Miller has a quintessentially American political biography. As the owner of a bison farm in Huntington, West Virginia, Miller first became active in state politics, gaining election to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 2006. During her 12 years of service at the state level, Miller rose to the position of majority whip. In 2018, she ran for Congress, decisively winning West Virginia’s 3rd district seat on a pledge to “cut the bull” in Washington. She currently sits on the powerful Committee on Ways and Means.
Separately, The Hill is one of the leading politically focused news organizations in the US. Founded in 1994 to cover the inner workings of Congress and the intersection of politics and business, The Hill is known for its non-partisan style, a rare distinction in today’s hyper-politicized media environment. With more than 100 journalists and tens of millions of monthly readers, The Hill is considered an essential resource for those in the Beltway. In 2021, the company was sold to Nexstar Media for $130 million.
When someone of Miller’s stature takes to the editorial page of The Hill to address the topic of energy, we pay close attention. Imagine our dismay when we read this last week (emphasis added throughout):
“Hydrogen is often described as the future of clean and affordable energy. There are multiple ways it can be developed, but the most effective way is through a process called carbon capture utilization and storage. This process takes coal and natural gas emissions and converts them into hydrogen. At the beginning of 2022, hydrogen was supplied almost entirely from fossil fuels. More than 70 percent was generated from natural gas and 27 percent generated from coal. In the last year, my home state of West Virginia’s coal and natural gas production rose 5.7 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Using natural gas and coal emissions to create hydrogen energy is the perfect example of a comprehensive energy solution.”
We are not sure which version of ChatGPT was used to create this gibberish, but Miller’s language model needs a new training set. There is so much wrong with what she wrote that it is difficult to know where to begin—we are stunned that The Hill would publish it.
Hydrogen is typically made by reforming natural gas or by using an electrolyzer to split water, not by “a process called carbon capture utilization and storage.” When people refer to “natural gas and coal emissions,” they almost universally understand this to mean carbon dioxide (CO2). There is no “H” in CO2, of course, which makes Miller’s prose indistinguishable from alchemy.
After having read the entire opinion piece a half-dozen times, our best guess is that Miller must have been referring to the prospect of turning coal bed methane into hydrogen via steam reforming, burning the hydrogen thus produced as a fuel source, executing a water-gas shift reaction to convert the byproduct carbon monoxide into CO2, capturing the resulting CO2 emissions for storage, and having the federal government pay handsomely to have all this done. But honestly, who knows?
Whatever Miller was advocating for, the issue that provoked her to take to the pages of The Hill is a high-stakes one: an upcoming and highly anticipated rule-making announcement by the US Department of Treasury that will decide who qualifies for some of the most lucrative (and scientifically dubious) tax credits codified into law by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The race is on to pilfer scores of billions from the US taxpayer in the name of chasing green energy unicorns, and there is a full-blown administrative brawl underway between the various factions trying to get theirs while the getting is good. It is a story of cronyism, a failure to learn from Europe’s energy madness, and a familiar scheme guaranteed to incinerate heaps of the public’s money. Let’s head to the swamp and expose some of the disturbing details.