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.
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