DOE resources for the Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit, created under the Inflation Reduction Act.
January 3, 2025
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The Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit creates a new 10-year incentive for clean hydrogen of up to $3.00/kilogram. For qualifying clean hydrogen, the credit provides a varying, four-tier incentive depending on the carbon intensity of the hydrogen production process. The credit value also depends on whether the project meets prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements. The credit measures emissions up to the point of production using the 45VH2-GREET model.
For more information about the 45VH2-GREET model, visit the DOE GREET website.
45V White Papers
Assessing Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated with Electricity Use for the Section 45V Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit
This paper considers the lifecycle GHG emissions impacts of electricity required for the process of producing hydrogen within a well-to-gate perspective. This well-to-gate lifecycle perspective is required by statute and focuses on production and not downstream emissions effects. Therefore, hydrogen’s potential to reduce emissions by displacing incumbent fuels in various end uses is outside the scope of both § 45V and of this paper. Greater deployment of technologies like electrolyzers could also drive down technology costs, increasing the long-term cost-effective potential of clean hydrogen and resulting in greater emissions reductions potential. Such considerations are also out of scope of this paper.
The paper finds that energy attribute certificates (EACs) are an established means for documenting and verifying the generation and purchase of electricity. EACs do not directly quantify emissions from specified sources or from induced generation when adding load to the grid. However, when EACs from low-GHG generators have attributes that meet three criteria (incremental generation, geographic matching, and temporal matching, as defined further in the body of the paper), they can serve as a reasonable proxy for calculating induced grid emissions. If hydrogen producers acquire and retire EACs whose attributes meet these criteria, it would be reasonable to treat induced grid emissions as zero and for hydrogen producers to deem their GHG emissions from electricity to be the lifecycle GHG emissions associated with the specific generators from which the EACs were purchased and retired. Use of such EACs is therefore an appropriate approach as part of assessing and documenting qualification for particular tiers of the § 45V production tax credit.
A Generic Counterfactual Greenhouse Gas Emission Factor for Life-Cycle Assessment of Manure-Derived Biogas and Renewable Natural Gas
This paper focuses on estimating counterfactual emissions for biogas and renewable natural gas (RNG) from manure generated from farms and dairies in the U.S. This paper finds that a generic manure counterfactual GHG emissions value is a simple, technically sound, and transparent option for incorporating avoided emissions credits in LCA in a manner that reduces the challenges involved in tracking the specific type(s) of manure loaded into each digester and each facility’s past and expected future manure management practices in the absence of monetary incentives.
It specifically establishes a generic average manure GHG counterfactual emissions value that is agnostic with respect to manure management method and to animal type and can be applied broadly to biogas and RNG production when prior and future manure management practices are varied or uncertain.