The industrial gas firm Air Products and Chemicals is canceling its clean hydrogen project in Darrow, Louisiana. The Louisiana Clean Energy Complex would have produced 1,700 metric tons (t) of hydrogen per day via steam reformation of fossil methane followed by carbon capture and sequestration, an approach that yields what’s known as blue hydrogen.
The firm will write off $2.9 billion in losses. The decision ends an investment that was expected to total as much as $9 billion and include equipment to convert the hydrogen to ammonia.
The cancellation also kills the CO2 sequestration system the company was installing nearby under Lake Maurepas. Air Products says it is abandoning the permitting and regulatory process for the wells, which would have disposed of 5 million t of CO2 per year. The firm is also canceling a smaller low-carbon hydrogen project in Casa Grande, Arizona. ExxonMobil similarly paused a large blue hydrogen project in Baytown, Texas, in December.
“This wasn’t really surprising. We were just wondering when it would happen,” says Cansu Doganay, an analyst covering hydrogen at Lux Research. Air Products executives have been openly unenthusiastic about the project since Eduardo Menezes took over as CEO, a change spurred by activist investors who wanted the firm to move away from environmental sustainability.
The investment firm Jefferies praised the move in a report advising investors to buy Air Products stock. “These exits illustrate the company’s focus on growing the core gas business, improving productivity, and capitalizing on the secular increase in industrial gas demand from data centers and semiconductors,” Jefferies analysts write.
Customers that could use hydrogen as a fuel or chemical feedstock have been waiting to invest in their own facilities until ample supply comes on line. Suppliers like Air Products, meanwhile, say they can’t build production capacity until demand materializes. “There is no demand, especially in the US, for low-carbon hydrogen,” Doganay says. The Donald J. Trump administration has rescinded and restricted subsidies meant to overcome that chicken-and-egg problem, she says, “but even if the subsidies had stayed, I think it wouldn’t really change.”
The project seemingly caught a lifeline in December, when Air Products and the fertilizer maker Yara previewed a deal in which Yara would have bought the ammonia assets of the project and agreed to buy 80% of the low-carbon hydrogen produced at the site for 25 years. That deal is off, and Yara will instead sign a marketing and distribution agreement for low-carbon ammonia from Air Products’ remaining low-carbon hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia.
The site in Saudi Arabia, called NEOM, will make hydrogen by using renewable electricity to split water. That green hydrogen is a better fit for the market, Doganay says, because it meets the requirements for renewable fuel mandates in Europe. Like the erstwhile Louisiana site, NEOM will convert most of its hydrogen into ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer, chemical feedstock, or fuel. Ammonia is also easier to ship than molecular hydrogen, so in some cases, NEOM’s customers will convert the ammonia back into hydrogen and use it that way.
Japan also has renewable fuel mandates, Doganay says, but suppliers in India and China have already captured much of that demand. The major exception will be the Blue Point joint venture in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, between the ammonia producer CF Industries and the Japanese energy company JERA. The $3.7 billion project is expected to yield 3,800 t of blue ammonia per day when it opens in 2029, primarily for export to Japan.
Another bright spot for low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia is India, where the government has stepped in as a major buyer. In both India and Japan, public utilities are readying their fleets of coal-fired power plants to run on up to 20% ammonia. The two nations are co-funding a $3 billion clean ammonia initiative, according to reports from a meeting this week of their prime ministers.
But in the US, an unreliable policy environment will likely suppress clean hydrogen investment for quite some time, Doganay says. “For the US, it’s just failure of hydrogen in general,” she says. “If we consider hydrogen as a policy-driven molecule, the high-capital-cost low-carbon projects are simply too risky.”
