Houston-area selected among 7 regions for $7B federal hydrogen hub investment

hi, hydrogen

The HyVelocity Hub, representing the Gulf Coast region, will receive $1.2 billion to strengthen and further build out the region's hydrogen production. Photo via Getty Images

A Houston-area project got the green light as one of the seven regions to receive a part of the $7 billion in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to advance domestic hydrogen production.

President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm named the seven regions to receive funding in a White House statement today. The Gulf Coast's project, HyVelocity Hydrogen Hub, will receive up to $1.2 billion — the most any hub will receive, per the release.

“As I’ve stated repeatedly over the past years, we are uniquely positioned to lead a transformational clean hydrogen hub that will deliver economic growth and good jobs, including in historically underserved communities," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says in a news release. "HyVelocity will also help scale up national and world clean hydrogen economies, resulting in significant decarbonization gains. I’d also like to thank all the partners who came together to create HyVelocity Hub in a true spirit of public-private collaboration.”

Backed by industry partners AES Corporation, Air Liquide, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Mitsubishi Power Americas, Ørsted, and Sempra Infrastructure, the HyVelocity Hydrogen Hub will connect more than 1,000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, 48 hydrogen production facilities, and dozens of hydrogen end-use applications across Texas and Southwest Louisiana. The hub is planning for large-scale hydrogen production through both natural gas with carbon capture and renewables-powered electrolysis.

The project is spearheaded by GTI Energy and other organizing participants, including the University of Texas at Austin, The Center for Houston’s Future, Houston Advanced Research Center, and around 90 other supporting partners from academia, industry, government, and beyond.

“Prioritizing strong community engagement and demonstrating an innovation ecosystem, the HyVelocity Hub will improve local air quality and create equitable access to clean, reliable, affordable energy for communities across the Gulf Coast region,” says Paula A. Gant, president and CEO of GTI Energy, in a news release.

According to the White House's announcement, the hub will create 45,000 direct jobs — 35,000 in construction jobs and 10,000 permanent jobs. The other selected hubs — and the impact they are expected to have, include:

  • Tied with HyVelocity in terms of funding amount, the California Hydrogen Hub — Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems (ARCHES) — will also receive up to $1.2 billion to create 220,000 direct jobs—130,000 in construction jobs and 90,000 permanent jobs. The project is expected to target decarbonizing public transportation, heavy duty trucking, and port operations.
  • The Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen (MachH2), spanning Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, will receive up to $1 billion. This region's efforts will be directed at optimizing hydrogen use in steel and glass production, power generation, refining, heavy-duty transportation, and sustainable aviation fuel. It's expected to create 13,600 direct jobs—12,100 in construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.
  • Receiving up to $1 billion and targeting Washington, Oregon, and Montana, the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub — named PNW H2— will produce clean hydrogen from renewable sources and will create over 10,000 direct jobs—8,050 in construction jobs and 350 permanent jobs.
  • The Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2), which will be located in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, will tap into existing infrastructure to use low-cost natural gas to produce low-cost clean hydrogen and permanently and safely store the associated carbon emissions. The project, which will receive up to $925 million, will create 21,000 direct jobs—including more than 18,000 in construction and more than 3,000 permanent jobs.
  • Spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, the Heartland Hydrogen Hub will receive up to $925 million and create around 3,880 direct jobs–3,067 in construction jobs and 703 permanent jobs — to decarbonize the agricultural sector’s production of fertilizer, decrease the regional cost of clean hydrogen, and advance hydrogen use in electric generation and for cold climate space heating.
  • Lastly, the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (MACH2), which will include Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, hopes to repurposing historic oil infrastructure to develop renewable hydrogen production facilities from renewable and nuclear electricity. The hub, which will receive up to $750 million, anticipates creating 20,800 direct jobs—14,400 in construction jobs and 6,400 permanent jobs.

These seven clean hydrogen hubs are expected to catalyze more than $40 billion in private investment, per the White house, and bring the total public and private investment in hydrogen hubs to nearly $50 billion. Collectively, they aim to produce more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually — which reaches nearly one third of the 2030 U.S. clean hydrogen production goal. Additionally, the hubs will eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from end uses each year. That's roughly equivalent to annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars.

“Unlocking the full potential of hydrogen—a versatile fuel that can be made from almost any energy resource in virtually every part of the country—is crucial to achieving President Biden’s goal of American industry powered by American clean energy, ensuring less volatility and more affordable clean energy options for American families and businesses,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in the release. “With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris Administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition while creating high quality jobs and delivering healthier communities in every pocket of the nation.”

HyVelocity has been a vision amongst Houston energy leaders for over a year, announcing its bid for regional hydrogen hub funding last November. Another Houston-based clean energy project was recently named a semi-finalist for National Science Foundation funding.

“We are excited to get to work making HyVelocity come to life,” Brett Perlman, president and CEO of Center for Houston’s Future, says in the release. “We look forward to spurring economic growth and development, creating jobs, and reducing emissions in ways that will benefit local communities and the Gulf Coast region as a whole. HyVelocity will be a model for creating a clean hydrogen ecosystem in an inclusive and equitable manner.”

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

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UH breakthrough moves superconductivity closer to real-world use

Energy Breakthrough

University of Houston researchers have set a new benchmark in the field of superconductivity.

Researchers from the UH physics department and the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH) have broken the transition temperature record for superconductivity at ambient pressure. The accomplishment could lead to more efficient ways to generate, transmit and store energy, which researchers believe could improve power grids, medical technologies and energy systems by enabling electricity to flow without resistance, according to a release from UH.

To break the record, UH researchers achieved a transition temperature 151 Kelvin, which is the highest ever recorded at ambient pressure since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911.

The transition temperature represents the point just before a material becomes superconducting, where electricity can flow through it without resistance. Scientists have been working for decades to push transition temperature closer to room temperature, which would make superconducting technologies more practical and affordable.

Currently, most superconductors must be cooled to extremely low temperatures, making them more expensive and difficult to operate.

UH physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng published the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month. It was funded by Intellectual Ventures and the state of Texas via TcSUH and other foundations. Chu, founding director and chief scientist at TcSUH, previously made the breakthrough discovery that the material YBCO reaches superconductivity at minus 93 K in 1987. This helped begin a global competition to develop high-temperature superconductors.

“Transmitting electricity in the grid loses about 8% of the electricity,” Chu, who’s also a professor of physics at UH and the paper’s senior author, said in a news release. “If we conserve that energy, that’s billions of dollars of savings and it also saves us lots of effort and reduces environmental impacts.”

Chu and his team used a technique known as pressure quenching, which has been adapted from techniques used to create diamonds. With pressure quenching, researchers first apply intense pressure to the material to enhance its superconducting properties and raise its transition temperature.

Next, researchers are targeting ambient-pressure, room-temperature superconductivity of around 300 K. In a companion PNAS paper, Chu and Deng point to pressure quenching as a promising approach to help bridge the gap between current results and that goal.

“Room-temperature superconductivity has been seen as a ‘holy grail’ by scientists for over a century,” Rohit Prasankumar, director of superconductivity research at Intellectual Ventures, said in the release. “The UH team’s result shows that this goal is closer than ever before. However, the distance between the new record set in this study and room temperature is still about 140 C. Closing this gap will require concerted, intentional efforts by the broader scientific community, including materials scientists, chemists, and engineers, as well as physicists.”

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice University to lead AI conferences in Paris this spring and summer

where to be

Houston’s own Rice University will host a series of conferences on artificial intelligence in Paris, France, starting this month. The series will tackle the impact and possibilities of AI in fields like econometrics and online privacy security.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming the global economy and raising profound questions about how technology intersects with society,” Caroline Levander, Rice’s vice president for global strategy, said in a news release. “By convening scholars from multiple disciplines and countries in Paris, Rice is helping shape the international conversation about how AI should be developed, governed and used.”

The four conferences in Paris aim for a multi-disciplinary approach that tackles aspects of AI from diverging angles. The conferences come as part of Rice’s increased partnership with French researchers at the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres. The two institutions have formed a binary star system of academic sharing and support.

“Paris has quickly become one of the most important global hubs for artificial intelligence research, entrepreneurship and policy,” Levander said. “For Rice, having a presence in the city allows our scholars to engage directly with that ecosystem while building collaborations that connect Europe and the United States around the future of AI.”

The conferences will be held at the Rice Global Paris Center. Topics scheduled are:

Emerging Topics in Operations Management: Platforms, Blockchains and AI

April 27-29

This conference will focus on how companies like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and DoorDash can use blockchain ledgers to deliver goods and services more transparently. It will also look at tokenized incentives, presumably forms of cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens in the app space.

Econometrics and AI

May 5-7

This conference will explore how AI can be used in various economic statistical models and practices.

Human Flourishing in the Age of AI

June 3-5

This conference will be a collaboration between engineers and philosophers about the ethics and impact of AI on the lives of its users.

On the Crossroads of AI and Society: Incentives, Privacy and Fairness

July 15-16

This conference will consider how to stakeholders can ensure AI’s actions most benefit people, particularly in the fields of healthcare education, energy and public policy.

Houston claims 19% of Texas’ new live-work-play growth

by the numbers

In Texas, Houston is a big player in the live-work-play real estate movement.

A new 21-city analysis from coworking marketplace CoworkingCafe shows the Houston area added five live-work-play projects—mixed-use developments with residential, office and recreational components—over the past decade.

From 2016 to 2025, Houston accounted for 19 percent of Texas’ new live-work-play inventory, the analysis shows. Among the new local developments were Arrive Upper Kirby, St. Andrie, and The Laura:

  • Arrive Upper Kirby, which was sold in 2021 for $182 million, offers more than 61,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space adjacent to apartments and offices. The 13-story, 265,000-square-foot project was completed in 2017.
  • St. Andrie, a 32-acre, mixed-use community, was completed in 2019. The apartment-anchored development includes an H-E-B grocery store and 37,000 square feet of office space.
  • The Laura, spanning 110,000 square feet, was completed in 2023. Among the apartment complex’s amenities is a coworking space.

According to Northspyre, a software provider for real estate developers, live-work-play projects enable people to meet their needs, such as housing, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities, in a single place.

A total of 542 live-work-play developments opened between 2016 and 2025 in the 21 cities, with another 69 in the pipeline for 2026, CoworkingCafe says. Among major markets, New York City made up the largest share (119) of new live-work-play developments from 2016 to 2025.

The Houston area’s five projects were built in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025, CoworkingCafe data indicates, with another project scheduled for completion next year. The Greater Houston Partnership recently highlighted four mixed-use projects taking shape in the region, but only one of them is scheduled to be finished in 2027. It can take two to five years or more to complete a mixed-use development.

Of the five Houston developments finished in the past decade, 56 percent of the space went toward multifamily units, 29 percent toward offices, and 16 percent toward retail, CoworkingCafe says.

As noted by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, economic development in the 21st century “is about cultivating quality live-work-play environments that attract, retain, and grow a diverse and skilled population. Employers and businesses are increasingly choosing to make long-term investments in places that connect and engage people to strengthen economic competitiveness and promote innovation.”

With eight completed projects, Austin led construction of live-work-play developments in Texas from 2016 to 2025, according to CoworkingCafe. Dallas, which welcomed five live-work-play developments during that period, tied with Houston. San Antonio data wasn’t available.

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