A tiny California town is set to be home to a controversial hydrogen experiment—and not everyone is happy about it

A small California town populated by Latino farmworkers where the average resident makes around $12,000 a year could be a testing ground for a controversial solution to lower greenhouse gas emissions after several wealthier and far whiter communities rejected similar proposals. 



The experiment to reduce climate emissions by blending natural gas with hydrogen is taking shape in Orange Cove, a community of fewer than 10,000 residents southeast of Fresno. Natural gas utility Southern California Gas Co. will analyze the project’s results, along with other gas utilities, whose operations were the largest source of climate-heating emissions in California other than gas- and diesel-fueled cars in 2022, according to the California Air Resources Board.



By 2026, Orange Cove residents could be using gas with a small amount of hydrogen mixed in to power their stoves, space and water heaters, and other appliances.



In an application sent to the California Public Utilities Commission on March 1, SoCalGas and three other utilities said Orange Cove “will inform the feasibility of developing a hydrogen injection standard” for their gas distribution systems. Similar and smaller blends of hydrogen and natural gas are planned for University of California campuses in San Diego and Irvine and the town of Truckee, north of Lake Tahoe.



If it is approved, SoCalGas plans to increase gas rates through 2028 for all its California customers by 56 cents per month this year and 20 cents next year to recover its forecast costs.



The  risks  of injecting hydrogen into gas lines include an increase of lung-damaging nitrogen oxide pollution inside homes. Hydrogen also leaks easily into the atmosphere—and is more explosive than natural gas when exposed to the air. 



SoCalGas said in regulatory filings that it will monitor for leaks quarterly and shut down equipment if leaks are detected. It plans to produce its hydrogen with solar power. 



Orange Cove would be among the world’s largest hydrogen blending sites. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, a utility uses recycled wastewater and crude oil to make synthetic natural gas and hydrogen, servicing around 30,000 customers.



Experts said the low levels of hydrogen proposed in Orange Cove, ranging from 1% to 5% of the total volume of fuel in the pipeline, probably won’t make it much more dangerous than the natural gas now used. The main concern, critics said, is allowing a group of utilities to use a small, economically distressed town for an experiment they contend will do little to lower climate-altering emissions. 



Any emissions cuts from blending hydrogen with natural gas pale in comparison to the benefits “if we stop burning gas completely,” said Adam Cooper, a climate activist and PhD candidate in atmospheric chemistry at U.C. San Diego. “We don’t think it’s a real solution.”



SoCalGas said its long-term blended hydrogen plans will reduce the state’s emissions by an amount equal to taking 1.52 million cars off the road for a year. The utility said in a  blog post  that the Orange Cove project and similar projects will “demonstrate that blending clean hydrogen into the natural gas system is a safe and effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”



“Disengagement”



The company hosted a community engagement meeting in Orange Cove last fall and sent information by mail to residents. But six residents who spoke with Capital & Main during a recent visit said they were unaware of the project.



Along pitted roads where yellow-green grass grows in cracked asphalt, Maria Cano sat under a blue plastic canopy selling lamps and clothing at a yard sale. She thought the hydrogen blending plan sounded like a “good idea” but wanted to better understand the risks. 



In the past two years, suburban residents in Colorado  and  Oregon rejected hydrogen blending efforts. But residents in Orange Cove have historically not been encouraged to participate in civic decisions, said Genoveva Islas, founder and executive director of the Fresno-based health advocacy group Cultiva la Salud. 



“That disengagement creates a breeding ground where things like this happen, where people don’t know there is a hydrogen blending plant planned for the community,” Islas said. Most in the town are employed as farmworkers but see little of the nearly $1 billion generated by the state’s orange industry. A citrus packing house, which sells citrus to Sunkist Growers, also employs many of the town’s residents and has operated here for nearly a century. The median income is below the federal poverty line.



SoCalGas plans to install solar panels on a 10-acre plot of city land to produce electricity for an electrolyzer, which separates the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of water. Other equipment at the site would include a battery, storage tanks, and a blending skid to receive gas from a new pipeline.



Daniel T. Parra, Orange Cove’s city manager, said he contacted SoCalGas when he saw the utility’s planned hydrogen project “wasn’t going well” at U.C. Irvine, where the company originally wanted to use blended hydrogen and natural gas in buildings, including dormitories. Students spoke against the proposal at local climate protests and scrawled their opposition on school grounds in chalk. The plans were scrapped, and SoCalGas now intends to use a hydrogen blend only at a recreational building.  



“I convinced [SoCalGas] to come out here,” said Parra, who is also the mayor of nearby Fowler, where he lives. 



Parra said he believed Orange Cove would benefit from revenues for leasing land to SoCalGas. The town may also be able to keep the infrastructure when the pilot program winds down in 2028. Parra wants the solar panels and other equipment to power a new groundwater well on the site in the future.



Such discussions are largely happening without the input of residents, said Evelyn Morales, an Orange Cove resident and project coordinator at Cultiva la Salud. Residents have “low health literacy,” meaning awareness of how their surroundings affect their personal health, she said.



“It is extremely upsetting to know that our disadvantageness is being acknowledged and kind of exploited,” Morales said.  



Parra disagreed. “Nobody is taking advantage of the folks here, and I wouldn’t let that happen.” In fact, Parra said, “I came here to help them.”



“Marginal Climate Benefits”



California’s blueprint to eliminate climate emissions includes injecting hydrogen into gas lines, ultimately  reducing  utility emissions by 7%. That is a relatively low number compared to the expensive and fraught effort of making and transporting hydrogen. 



It’s  hard to produce  without increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And to hit climate targets for home heating, a lot of hydrogen will have to be made because it takes three times as much to generate the equivalent amount of energy as natural gas. 



Pipelines built to move gas can’t be easily repurposed for hydrogen. The high pressure necessary for consumer use would dissolve the steel, said Mariano A. Kappes, a researcher for Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commision who has studied   the issue. It costs about $2 million to lay 1 mile of new pipeline, he said. 



For these reasons, hydrogen for space heating is “at best a risky strategy and at worst a dead end locking in new fossil fuel infrastructure,” according to a  meta-analysis  of 54 independent studies in the scientific journal Cell Reports Sustainability.



In a  paper  sponsored by the think tank Energy Innovation, researchers said that more effective options to lower gas utility emissions include repairing leaks and improving insulation inside homes. Heat pumps, which use electricity to regulate indoor temperatures by moving air outside, use renewable power far more efficiently than gas-hydrogen heaters, it said.



Blending hydrogen into gas lines has “marginal climate benefits while introducing high risks at the same time,” said Bethany Kwoka, a scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, a scientific research institute, who worked on a  report  examining California’s hydrogen policies. 



“Pre-Lobbying”



The California Public Utilities Commission called hydrogen blending an “important decarbonization strategy for California,” a statement it used after more than a decade of advocacy by the gas industry. 



In their application to the PUC, the gas utilities cited a 2022 study by U.C. Riverside faculty advocating a “real world demonstration of hydrogen blending.” The study itself cited two statutory reasons why researchers investigated blended hydrogen. 



The first is a PUC directive stemming from a gas industry-backed 2012 law promoting gas from biological sources, such as dairy manure. The second is a law from 2018 that set grid targets for using green hydrogen produced by renewable energy such as solar and wind. That law was also supported by gas utilities, hydrogen business groups and the Advanced Power and Energy Program at U.C. Irvine. 



In 2021, the U.C. Irvine program awarded a $50,000 contract to Pacific Gas & Electric to “develop a simple and low-cost hydrogen injection and blending design concept.” The study was overseen by Jeff Reed, a former director of business strategy and advanced technology at SoCalGas. The utilities have also given money to the university: SoCalGas has awarded $5.13 million, and PG&E has given $336,956 since 2017.



Cooper, the climate activist who opposed the blending projects at Southern California universities, called the monetary awards “pre-lobbying,” in which fossil fuel companies “funnel money to academic institutions to steer the direction of energy research.” 



If blending hydrogen and natural gas goes forward, residents should be granted “leverage,” said Cultiva la Salud’s Islas, including reparations for damaged appliances, scholarships for students, and access to healthcare.



SoCalGas acknowledged that bills could rise and said it would adjust them if necessary. It said it will survey damage to appliances at the request of residents.



Farmworkers are among those most harmed by climate change, according to a state  report . Constant droughts threaten their livelihoods; intense storms put their safety at risk, and the punishing heat of the San Joaquin Valley where they work the fields is at record levels—and on track to rise another 5 degrees Fahrenheit on average by midcentury. 



Orange Cove could be at the forefront of tackling climate change, according to hydrogen supporters. But so far, residents’ role is largely passive and at the mercy of larger forces.



 —By Aaron Cantú, Capital & Main







This piece was originally published by Capital & Main , which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.