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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Heath care organizations made up 20 percent of the top 100 employers on Forbes' list. Photo via houstonmethodist.org

Prestigious Houston hospital system named No. 1 large employer in Texas and No. 2 in U.S. by Forbes

where to work

Attention to all those seeking a career in the medical industry: this top city hospital is one of the best places to work for. Houston Methodist was named the best large employer in Texas, and second best employer in America, according to Forbes’ latest report.

Health care organizations are the shining stars in this year’s report; they represented 20 percent of the top 100 employers. Houston Methodist made some major improvements within the span of a year after being ranked No. 37 in Forbes' 2022 report. In another win for health care, Dallas’ University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center was placed at No. 19.

To determine their rankings, Forbes partnered with consumer data and statistics firm Statista to survey 45,000 employees at companies with a staff of 5,000 or more. The full list categorized 500 of America’s large employers that earned the most recommendations.

Other Houston-area companies on the list after Houston Methodist include:

  • No. 210 – Shell
  • No. 289 – Schlumberger, based in Sugar Land
  • No. 341 – BP
  • No. 383 – Sysco
  • No. 421 – Waste Management
  • No. 479 – Air Liquide

Elsewhere in Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth area had the most employers on Forbes’ list, with 14 companies making an appearance after UT Southwestern Medical Center’s No. 19 ranking.

Dallas-Fort Worth area companies on Forbes’ list include:

  • No. 70 – Southwest Airlines
  • No. 83 – Topgolf
  • No. 164 – McKesson, based in Irving
  • No. 188 – Toyota North America, based in Plano
  • No. 250 – Jacobs Engineering
  • No. 268 – Texas Instruments
  • No. 339 – ExxonMobil, based in Irving
  • No. 369 – CBRE Group
  • No. 376 – American Airlines Group, based in Fort Worth
  • No. 400 – Aimbridge Hospitality, based in Plano
  • No. 403 – NTT Data, based in Plano
  • No. 410 – Republic National Distributing Company, based in Grand Prairie
  • No. 430 – AT&T
  • No. 497 – Crossmark, based in Plano

San Antonio had a top 10 contender on Forbes’ report for best employers: none other than Texas’ signature grocery store H-E-B. Other San Antonio companies that were ranked include United Services Automobile Association (USAA) at No. 42 and Whataburger at No. 493.

In Austin, five employers earned spots in Forbes' rankings:

  • No. 77 – Dell Technologies, based in Round Rock
  • No. 96 – Keller Williams Realty
  • No. 121 – University of Texas at Austin
  • No. 306 – Whole Foods Market
  • No. 454 – McLane Company, based in Temple

The full rankings and its methodology can be found at forbes.com.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

The Center for Houston's Future is a part of a collaboration that has established a hub for hydrogen innovation. Image via Getty Images

Houston organization leads collaboration to advance Gulf Coast clean hydrogen projects

H-town

A handful of organizations have joined forces to create a new hub for the advancement of clean hydrogen projects in Texas, Southwest Louisiana, and the surrounding Gulf Coast region.

The HyVelocity Hub announced last week that it is applying for U.S. Department of Energy Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub funding. GTI Energy, The Center for Houston’s Future, The University of Texas at Austin, Air Liquide, and Chevron are among the founding members of the HyVelocity Hub.

“The name ‘HyVelocity’ conveys the idea that we have a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the creation of a clean hydrogen market at the pace needed to meet aggressive decarbonization goals for communities in our nation and around the globe,” says Paula A. Gant, president and CEO of Illinois GTI Energy, in a news release. “We need hydrogen deployment at scale, and this hub will lay the foundation with complete end-to-end demonstrations of an integrated network, match supply and demand regionally or locally, and leverage existing infrastructure to deliver resilient, reliable, and sustainable clean energy.”

The Gulf Coast is already a leader in hydrogen production, per the release, and the region is home to a diverse array of energy resources, including hydrogen production facilities and pipelines, a large base of industrial energy consumers, and a skilled, technical workforce.

“We are pleased to be partnering with our colleagues at GTI Energy in creating HyVelocity Hub as the implementation platform for the shared vision of a Texas-sized global clean hydrogen ecosystem created by our collaborative stakeholder process," says Brett Perlman, CEO of The Center for Houston’s Future in the release. “The realization of this vision will be achieved faster with clean hydrogen hub funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

Earlier this year, the Center for Houston's Future released a report that outlined what it will take for Houston to establish itself as a hub for hydrogen innovation as well as the impact this industry can have on Houston's economy. The HyVelocity Hub will engage environmental and social justice organizations in the Gulf Coast region to grow the local economy and create jobs in disadvantaged communities, according to the release.

“Accelerating clean energy technologies is vital to addressing global climate challenges as well as local air quality, and Port Houston is excited to participate in advancing these efforts with the HyVelocity Hub,” says Rich Byrnes, chief infrastructure officer of Port Houston, in the release. “The Hub will benefit trucking and maritime sectors, and our communities tremendously with cleaner transportation, lower emissions, new jobs, and both social and environmental equity."

Business and government leaders in the Houston area hope the region can become a hub for CCS activity. Photo via Getty Images

3 businesses join Houston initiative for carbon capture and storage

seeing green

Three big businesses — Air Liquide, BASF, and Shell — have added their firepower to the effort to promote large-scale carbon capture and storage for the Houston area’s industrial ecosystem.

These companies join 11 others that in 2021 threw their support behind the initiative. Participants are evaluating how to use safe carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at Houston-area facilities that provide energy, power generation, and advanced manufacturing for plastics, motor fuels, and packaging.

Other companies backing the CCS project are Calpine, Chevron, Dow, ExxonMobil, INEOS, Linde, LyondellBasell, Marathon Petroleum, NRG Energy, Phillips 66, and Valero.

Business and government leaders in the Houston area hope the region can become a hub for CCS activity.

“Large-scale carbon capture and storage in the Houston region will be a cornerstone for the world’s energy transition, and these companies’ efforts are crucial toward advancing CCS development to achieve broad scale commercial impact,” Charles McConnell, director of University of Houston’s Center for Carbon Management in Energy, says in a news release.

McConnell and others say CCS could help Houston and the rest of the U.S. net-zero goals while generating new jobs and protecting current jobs.

CCS involves capturing carbon dioxide from industrial activities that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and then injecting it into deep underground geologic formations for secure and permanent storage. Carbon dioxide from industrial users in the Houston area could be stored in nearby onshore and offshore storage sites.

An analysis of U.S Department of Energy estimates shows the storage capacity along the Gulf Coast is large enough to store about 500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to more than 130 years’ worth of industrial and power generation emissions in the United States, based on 2018 data.

“Carbon capture and storage is not a single technology, but rather a series of technologies and scientific breakthroughs that work in concert to achieve a profound outcome, one that will play a significant role in the future of energy and our planet,” says Gretchen Watkins, U.S. president of Shell. “In that spirit, it’s fitting this consortium combines CCS blueprints and ambitions to crystalize Houston’s reputation as the energy capital of the world while contributing to local and U.S. plans to help achieve net-zero emissions.”

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Houston scientists develop breakthrough AI-driven process to design, decode genetic circuits

biotech breakthrough

Researchers at Rice University have developed an innovative process that uses artificial intelligence to better understand complex genetic circuits.

A study, published in the journal Nature, shows how the new technique, known as “Combining Long- and Short-range Sequencing to Investigate Genetic Complexity,” or CLASSIC, can generate and test millions of DNA designs at the same time, which, according to Rice.

The work was led by Rice’s Caleb Bashor, deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute and member of the Ken Kennedy Institute. Bashor has been working with Kshitij Rai and Ronan O’Connell, co-first authors on the study, on the CLASSIC for over four years, according to a news release.

“Our work is the first demonstration that you can use AI for designing these circuits,” Bashor said in the release.

Genetic circuits program cells to perform specific functions. Finding the circuit that matches a desired function or performance "can be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Bashor explained. This work looked to find a solution to this long-standing challenge in synthetic biology.

First, the team developed a library of proof-of-concept genetic circuits. It then pooled the circuits and inserted them into human cells. Next, they used long-read and short-read DNA sequencing to create "a master map" that linked each circuit to how it performed.

The data was then used to train AI and machine learning models to analyze circuits and make accurate predictions for how untested circuits might perform.

“We end up with measurements for a lot of the possible designs but not all of them, and that is where building the (machine learning) model comes in,” O’Connell explained in the release. “We use the data to train a model that can understand this landscape and predict things we were not able to generate data on.”

Ultimately, the researchers believe the circuit characterization and AI-driven understanding can speed up synthetic biology, lead to faster development of biotechnology and potentially support more cell-based therapy breakthroughs by shedding new light on how gene circuits behave, according to Rice.

“We think AI/ML-driven design is the future of synthetic biology,” Bashor added in the release. “As we collect more data using CLASSIC, we can train more complex models to make predictions for how to design even more sophisticated and useful cellular biotechnology.”

The team at Rice also worked with Pankaj Mehta’s group in the department of physics at Boston University and Todd Treangen’s group in Rice’s computer science department. Research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, the Robert J. Kleberg Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, the American Heart Association, National Library of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute and the Rice Institute of Synthetic Biology.

James Collins, a biomedical engineer at MIT who helped establish synthetic biology as a field, added that CLASSIC is a new, defining milestone.

“Twenty-five years ago, those early circuits showed that we could program living cells, but they were built one at a time, each requiring months of tuning,” said Collins, who was one of the inventors of the toggle switch. “Bashor and colleagues have now delivered a transformative leap: CLASSIC brings high-throughput engineering to gene circuit design, allowing exploration of combinatorial spaces that were previously out of reach. Their platform doesn’t just accelerate the design-build-test-learn cycle; it redefines its scale, marking a new era of data-driven synthetic biology.”

Axiom Space wins NASA contract for fifth private mission, lands $350M in financing

ready for takeoff

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include information about Axiom's recent funding.

Axiom Space, a Houston-based space infrastructure company that’s developing the first commercial space station, has forged a deal with NASA to carry out the fifth civilian-staffed mission to the International Space Station.

Axiom Mission 5 is scheduled to launch in January 2027, at the earliest, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew of non-government astronauts is expected to spend up to 14 days docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Various science and research activities will take place during the mission.

The crew for the upcoming mission hasn’t been announced. Previous Axiom missions were commanded by retired NASA astronauts Michael López-Alegría, the company’s chief astronaut, and Peggy Whitson, the company’s vice president of human spaceflight.

“All four previous [Axiom] missions have expanded the global community of space explorers, diversifying scientific investigations in microgravity, and providing significant insight that is benefiting the development of our next-generation space station, Axiom Station,” Jonathan Cirtain, president and CEO of Axiom, said in a news release.

As part of Axiom’s new contract with NASA, Voyager Technologies will provide payload services for Axiom’s fifth mission. Voyager, a defense, national security, and space technology company, recently announced a four-year, $24.5 million contract with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to provide mission management services for the ISS.

Axiom also announced today, Feb. 12, that it has secured $350 million in a financing round led by Type One Ventures and Qatar Investment Authority.

The company shared in a news release that the funding will support the continued development of its commercial space station, known as Axiom Station, and the production of its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) under its NASA spacesuit contract.

NASA awarded Axiom a contract in January 2020 to create Axiom Station. The project is currently underway.

"Axiom Space isn’t just building hardware, it’s building the backbone of humanity’s next era in orbit," Tarek Waked, Founding General Partner at Type One Ventures, said in a news release. "Their rare combination of execution, government trust, and global partnerships positions them as the clear successor-architect for life after the ISS. This is how the United States continues to lead in space.”

Houston edtech company closes oversubscribed $3M seed round

fresh funding

Houston-based edtech company TrueLeap Inc. closed an oversubscribed seed round last month.

The $3.3 million round was led by Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, a venture capital firm based in Houston. Gamper Ventures, another Houston firm, also participated with additional strategic partners.

TrueLeap reports that the funding will support the large-scale rollout of its "edge AI, integrated learning systems and last-mile broadband across underserved communities."

“The last mile is where most digital transformation efforts break down,” Sandip Bordoloi, CEO and president of TrueLeap, said in a news release. “TrueLeap was built to operate where bandwidth is limited, power is unreliable, and institutions need real systems—not pilots. This round allows us to scale infrastructure that actually works on the ground.”

True Leap works to address the digital divide in education through its AI-powered education, workforce systems and digital services that are designed for underserved and low-connectivity communities.

The company has created infrastructure in Africa, India and rural America. Just this week, it announced an agreement with the City of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo to deploy a digital twin platform for its public education system that will allow provincial leaders to manage enrollment, staffing, infrastructure and performance with live data.

“What sets TrueLeap apart is their infrastructure mindset,” Joe Swinbank, General Partner at Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, added in the news release. “They are building the physical and digital rails that allow entire ecosystems to function. The convergence of edge compute, connectivity, and services makes this a compelling global infrastructure opportunity.”

TrueLeap was founded by Bordoloi and Sunny Zhang and developed out of Born Global Ventures, a Houston venture studio focused on advancing immigrant-founded technology. It closed an oversubscribed pre-seed in 2024.

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