As the demand for energy increases the need to find more sustainable avenues of generating power becomes paramount. The federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) is taking steps to shape the future of power generation, sustainable energy, and sustainable transportation.

The BIL is expected to provide more than $70 billion in funds over the next five years to support future energy infrastructure, which spans a variety of different subsects.

“The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has played a very important role over the last 50 years in doing basic research and development, and safeguarding our national nuclear stockpiles,” said Phil Jonat, WSP USA national leader for electrification. “But with the BIL, they're really being asked to increase their spending on deployment and open up the future for sustainable energy and transportation.”

Most of the U.S. electrical infrastructure is privately owned and operated for profit. The BIL funding will involve public sector entities such as state departments of environmental protection as well as public utility commissions, but money will also be available for private sector firms to pilot and deploy new technology. This funding will act as the catalyst that will push the market in directions that Congress views as important, such as domestic supply chains, cybersecurity and green hydrogen.

One of the areas of opportunity that Jonat noted specifically was in the electric grid.

“The electric grid is really being viewed by our legislators as the key to solving climate change,” Jonat said. “We can electrify almost everything. And as we electrify our lives, the electric grid will become cleaner and more resilient.”

This commitment is shown in the funding levels for 12 grid infrastructure programs, set at $33.1 billion – nearly half of the money earmarked for energy. “These really are historic levels of funding that have never been seen before,” he added. “As we go through a historic energy transition from a dirty energy economy towards a new, clean energy economy, we are we are going to see some disruptions.”

For example, moving away from gasoline powered cars to electric cars will increase demand on the raw materials that need to be mined for the batteries, such as nickel, much of which is imported from Russia. “We need alternatives, and luckily there are alternatives that are readily available.”

Lithium iron phosphate batteries, for example do not rely on nickel in a large scale. “There are innovative chemistries out there already that many WSP clients are utilizing in their batteries.”

To decarbonize the economy, there has been a growing emphasis on green hydrogen and how it could possibly impact the environment in the coming years.

“Hydrogen is a very useful molecule, so there is growing interest in concentrating some of the expertise in clean hydrogen hubs across the U.S. that might provide specific geographic benefits, particularly for the end users,” Jonat said. “With $8 billion in funds available, clean hydrogen is one of the largest individual buckets of energy funding in the BIL.”

Jonat added that the DOE’s Loan Programs Office is going to gain some traction in the coming years.

“This is a program that was successful during the Obama years in catalyzing the clean energy revolution, and they are open for business again,” he said. “One of its biggest success stories was that Tesla received a $500 million loan from the program to scale up its factories. That helped Tesla emerge as the largest, most important electric vehicle maker in this country.”

The Loan Programs Office, though not directly funded by the BIL, is actively vetting new technologies that apply, and they've already developed three conditional commitments/loan guarantees: green hydrogen and carbon black ($1 billion), critical materials for domestic electric vehicles ($100 million), and green hydrogen production and underground salt cavern hydrogen storage ($500 million).

“The first project has the potential to make hydrogen through groundbreaking processes,” he said. “The second one is an attempt to onshore crucial components for the domestic electric vehicle supply chain, which includes production of critical materials in Louisiana.”

The first fully developed loan guarantee is already supporting a WSP project – construction of the ACES Delta underground storage facility in Utah. When completed, it will be the world’s largest green hydrogen production and storage facility.

WSP was awarded the engineering, procurement and construction management contract for the underground storage portion and related surface facilities by the joint venture between Magnum Development and Mitsubishi Power. Phase I of the project consists of developing two large salt caverns capable of holding a total of 11,000 metric tons of hydrogen.

“I’m extremely proud of this project,” Jonat said. “This project is the first large scale seasonal energy storage for the electrical grid. WSP will be building extremely large salt caverns to store this hydrogen underground, and it can be used by a new peaking power plant on site.”

This will provide valuable storage for states like California that over-produce renewable energy in the spring but consume more than they can produce during the summer months.

“When there is overproduction of renewables and low demand on the California grid, the ACES caverns can store that additional generated energy in the form of hydrogen molecules, and then utilize that hydrogen to make power during times of higher grid stress, when it gets really hot and everybody is running their air conditioner,” Jonat said.

“One of the exciting aspects of the BIL that I see is going to be hydrogen hubs that are fully funded, added Scyller Borglum, WSP national underground storage market sector leader. “The federal government has placed a minimum of four hydrogen hubs in there.”

This new funding provides endless possibilities for underground storage projects, provided that it meets the necessary requirements that are needed to create the most efficient facilities.

“Typically, you want the salt cavern located within a salt dome, because those provide the greatest volume and the greatest security,” Borglum said. “Just to give you an example of the size potential, some of the natural gas caverns that we have developed are on the order of the size of the Empire State Building.”

Many of these caverns will emphasize transportation, including the possibility of incorporating salt cavern storage at or near airport hubs.

“What will be most beneficial is being able to have the airport and its aviation infrastructure be able to access this fuel source easily, through either a pipeline, tie in, or mobile transportation,” Borglum said.

There are examples of this taking place currently in the UK, where a pilot project is under way to demonstrate the feasibility of generating green hydrogen on site at an airport, storing it, and then using a mobile refueling truck to fuel planes.

“The aviation industry is far advanced when it comes to using hydrogen as a fuel source and the expectation is that planes can be commercially ready by 2035 for hydrogen fuel use,” Borglum said. “This is exciting engineering and there's a lot of opportunity here, but we need to be preparing for this future now.”

One advantage is that the DOE has left it wide open for the industry and local governments to define and describe how the hub will look and operate.

“This is an incentive for hard-working and creative problem-solving engineers to get involved and find that right geologic subsurface structure tied into an airport,” Borglum said.

(Note: These program details are updated through mid-July 2022.)

This is the fifth article in a six-part series offering a sector-by-sector review of what's been happening with BIL funding, and how to make the most of these opportunities. This series covers the BIL’s impact on:

• Part 1: Climate, Resilience & Sustainability (CRS) and Equity
• Part 2: Highways, Bridges and Electric Vehicles
• Part 3: Transit and Rail
• Part 4: Water
• Part 5: Energy
• Part 6: Aviation and Maritime Infrastructure

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