S 1899 Introduced – Aviation Hydrogen

Last month, Sen Ossoff (D,GA) introduced S 1899, the Hydrogen Aviation Development Act. The bill would amend existing statutes to provide administrative support for the development hydrogen as an aviation fuel. No funding is authorized in the legislation. This is a companion bill to HR 3960.

Moving Forward

While Ossoff is not a member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration, Sen Warnock (D,GA), one of his two cosponsors, is a member. This means that there may be enough influence to see this bill considered in the House. I suspect that there would be some level of bipartisan support for the bill since it contains no funding authorization and is generally permissive rather than prescriptive.

As with most bills introduced in the Senate, there is little chance of this bill making it to the floor of the Senate, even though there would generally be more support for this ‘green energy’ initiative in the Democratic lead Senate, it is just not important enough to take up the time of the Senate during the regular order process. There is sufficient ‘anti-Green’ sentiment in the Senate to ensure that the bill could not be considered in their unanimous consent process.

Commentary

I have had a couple of folks on LinkedIn note my interest in the new hydrogen economy based upon a couple of my recent posts about hydrogen legislation. While I am intellectually interested in hydrogen as an energy source, I am not currently an advocate for the grand expansion of hydrogen as a fuel, too many sourcing and safety issues that need to be dealt with.

My current interest in these bills lies in the fact that if there is going to be even a moderate expansion of the use of hydrogen as a fuel, this is going to have an impact on the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program. That program requires any facility that has an inventory of 10,000-lbs of hydrogen to report that to CISA under the CFATS Top Screen process. CISA’s Office of Chemical Security would then determine if the facility was at high-risk of terrorist attack and thus subject to the physical and cybersecurity requirements of the program. The CFATS program currently covers about 3,400 facilities, but a significant expansion of the hydrogen fuel economy would increase that number greatly.

Gasoline stations are effectively exempted from the CFATS program because of their use of underground storage tanks. Unstated in that exemption is the fact that if DHS had attempted to bring those stations under the CFATS program when they crafted their regulations in 2007, it would have created such an uproar that the program that DHS might not have been able to move forward with the program. Just see what happened with the propane coverage, the minimum reporting requirement was raised from 10,000-lb to 60,000-lbs and propane in tanks smaller than 10,000-lbs were exempted from reporting requirements.

The growing hydrogen economy is not going to be able to get the same sort of reduced CFATS coverage because of the lack on industry clout. That clout will increase, but the newly built fueling infrastructure will have to comply with the CFATS security plan requirements, adding to their costs and causing customer access issues. These issues could kill the H2 fuel economy before it gets a chance to get off the ground.

 

For more details about the provisions of this bill, see my article about HR 3960 at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-3960-introduced - subscription required. The two bills have identical language.