Impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act on the Economics of Clean Hydrogen and Synthetic Liquid Fuels.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States provides unprecedented incentives for deploying low-carbon hydrogen and liquid fuels, among other low-greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions technologies. To better understand the prospective competitiveness of low-carbon or negative-carbon hydrogen and liquid fuels under the IRA in the early 2030s, we examined the impacts of the IRA provisions on the costs of producing hydrogen and synthetic liquid fuel made from natural gas, electricity, short-cycle biomass (agricultural residues), and corn-derived ethanol. We determined that, with IRA credits (45V or 45Q) but excluding the incentives provided by other national or state policies, hydrogen produced by electrolysis using carbon-free electricity (green H) and by natural gas reforming with carbon capture and storage (CCS) (blue H) is cost-competitive with the carbon-intensive benchmark gray H, which is produced by steam methane reforming.

The state of macro-energy systems research: Common critiques, current progress, and research priorities.

The growing field of macro-energy systems (MES) brings together the interdisciplinary community of researchers studying the equitable and low-carbon future of humanity's energy systems. As MES matures as a community of scholars, a coherent consensus about the key challenges and future directions of the field can be lacking. This paper is a response to this need.