_There is a part of Southeast Texas adjoining the Gulf of Mexico where round, white fuel-storage tanks the size of McMansions sit in rows as long as airport runways; webs of steel piping twist around their foundations connecting to towers venting dark plumes into the air; and narrow skyscrapers tower above the horizon, piercing the clouds with orange- and yellow-flamed tips.

These beacons of industry are part of the infrastructure that earned the city of Houston the reputation as the “energy capital of the world.” Four miles east of downtown lies the innermost terminal of the Houston Ship Channel. The channel is a center for oil refining, the chemical process of converting the crude oil that is drilled out of the ground in Texas and around the world into useable fuel. About fourteen percent of all oil refined in the United States comes from the Houston area, with more than a quarter of U.S. oil refining taking place on the Texas Gulf Coast. Chemical plants, plastics production, and other heavy industries have also staked out real estate from Houston’s Buffalo Bayou to Galveston Bay.

“All you see is stainless steel for miles and miles,” said Shiv Srivastava, who works as policy director at Fenceline Watch, a nonprofit advocating for communities that live along the channel.

The strip of water has been artificially deepened and widened over the years to allow larger vessels access to the nation’s fourth-most-populous city, the heart of a metropolitan area with over seven million residents. The nation’s largest oil and gas companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Valero, have all staked out real estate on the channel, which connects their supply chain to global markets from its beginnings in the state’s famous oilfields.

But in recent years, many of the companies along the shipping channel have been under increasing pressure to adapt. Amid a global push to stave off the effects of climate change by lowering carbon emissions that are a result of burning oil and gas, the industry has looked for alternative fuels. One possibility has gained the backing of major oil companies, local leaders, and the federal government: hydrogen.

As atomic number 1 on the periodic table, hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant element in the universe. Its use as a fuel dates back centuries. The first car powered by an internal combustion engine, developed by Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz in 1807, used hydrogen. The gas, consisting of two hydrogen molecules bonded together as H2, is also highly combustible. But, it rarely exists in nature as H2 gas, and must be separated from bonds with other elements such as carbon and oxygen before it can be burned as fuel. Crucially, burning H2 does not generate the carbon emissions that are heating the planet.

For decades, climate scientists have warned that unchecked burning of oil and gas will destabilize the world’s climate, resulting in more extreme weather events like heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, as well as sea-level rise and increasing threats to natural ecosystems across the globe. Reducing emissions from the energy sector must be accomplished as quickly as possible, experts say, but that could come with significant job losses if an economic transition plan is not in place.

At the end of 2024, approximately 317,000 people in Texas worked in the oil and gas industry, according to a report from the Texas Energy Workforce & Technology Council. Looking specifically at Houston, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that oil and gas was the fastest-growing sector, adding about 6,700 jobs in the previous calendar year in an industry dependent on extracting fuels forged within the earth over millions of years.

Proponents see hydrogen as an opportunity to safeguard Houston’s dominance as the energy capital while offering legacy oil and gas companies the chance to utilize existing resources and infrastructure for producing a cleaner fuel. The new hydrogen economy promises tens of thousands of jobs and the chance to nearly eliminate pollution. But many aren’t buying the hydrogen hype. The push for hydrogen has been riddled with objections from labor organizations wanting guarantees for working conditions, environmental groups questioning the industry’s benefits, and communities along the shipping channel worried about safety.

“A lot of these communities existed before the facilities,” Srivastava said. Fenceline Watch views hydrogen as a “false solution.” Rather than solving climate pollution, it threatens to create new problems in an area already bearing the brunt of industry.

“The reason we have focused on hydrogen is because it’s a key strategy in addressing climate change and in decarbonization,” said Brett Perlman, managing director of the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofit dedicated to researching long-term economic opportunities for the region. “We’re going to electrify everything we can with renewable energy, and then everything we can’t electrify, we’re going to convert to hydrogen, because hydrogen has so many different properties.”

Perlman is a third-generation Houstonian from a family whose business is real estate. Perlman chose a different path, studying economics and public policy. However, as his career has narrowed in on energy policy, his mission still revolves around the Houston area’s most important parcels of land, like the real estate of the shipping channel, and ensuring that it maintains its value for generations to come.

In college, Perlman had the opportunity to work with two prominent congressmen from Houston, one Democrat and one Republican. Seeing the political process up close from both sides of the aisle left an impression on Perlman, who decided he wanted to spend his career analyzing complex issues to figure out how to make things better for his hometown.

Improving outcomes in the energy sector became his chief focus, having seen numerous boom and bust cycles in oil and gas. He got a degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and worked for six years at the consulting firm McKinsey. Eventually, Perlman served as a commissioner on Texas’s Public Utility Commission at the time when the state was redesigning its electric market. His colleagues would call him “Dr. Data” for the no-nonsense analytical approach he took to the role.

He was part of designing a deregulated electricity market where any company generating power could easily connect to the grid and sell it, agreeing on bids with buyers. This helped the proliferation of renewable energy like wind and solar that could sell power to the market at low prices. He went on to serve on the boards of energy companies before coming to the Center for Houston’s Future in 2017.

“I saw that the energy world was changing pretty rapidly,” he said, adding that “energy is not just about the oil industry anymore.” However, he added that it doesn’t mean oil and gas will be going away. Energy demand is growing across the country and in Texas, where the maximum load on the state’s power grid is expected to nearly double by 2030, and many state lawmakers want to build new gas power plants to shore up the electricity supply.

At the Center for Houston’s Future, Perlman’s research centered on asking how Houston would fit into the energy transition. That led him to hydrogen, and from there, the center facilitated business connections, convening experts, consultants, and industry leaders to understand how to best pursue a hydrogen economy. That work eventually culminated in a grant application to take advantage of federal funds.

The goal, Perlman said, is to make Houston “the low-carbon energy capital, not just the oil and gas capital of the world.”

HOUSTON’S HIGH HOPES FOR HYDROGEN

_Often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife” of energy, hydrogen has been deployed for everything from buses and heavy-duty vehicles to maritime fuel, and has shown an ability to fuel power plants, aviation, heating, and industrial processes. Houston is already home to about one thousand miles of hydrogen pipelines, which companies including Chevron and ExxonMobil utilize to produce ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizers. Hydrogen has also been used in the oil-refining process to remove sulfur from the finished product.

Under the Biden administration, hydrogen began to gain momentum as part of a series of sweeping climate and energy policies that sought to wean the United States off of fossil fuels. Federal funds were invested in the rapid development of low-carbon alternatives including wind and solar (and batteries to capture that energy), electric vehicles, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower, and a multi-billion-dollar investment in hydrogen.

In 2022, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations announced a $7 billion effort to build hydrogen hubs across the country. In response, a coalition of energy companies, universities, and nonprofit organizations applied for these grants, and in October 2023, the DOE announced that up to $1.2 billion in grant funding would flow to the project centered on Houston and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, known as the HyVelocity Hub.

The HyVelocity Hub promises to create 45,000 jobs as part of a new hydrogen supply chain, with the support of partners including the Center for Houston’s Future, the University of Texas at Austin, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and global renewable energy company Ørsted, among others.

HyVelocity expects to turn the region into the largest hydrogen hub in the nation. DOE documents highlight that the combined hydrogen output could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by seven million tons per year, roughly equivalent to taking 1.5 million cars off the road.

Even without federal investments, the Texas Gulf Coast has become a center for hydrogen startups and projects. A partnership at the George Bush International Airport in Houston with airplane manufacturer Airbus is aiming to develop hydrogen-powered flight by 2035. The state environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, is offering grants for trucking companies to transition their fleets to hydrogen-powered vehicles. Belgian company John Cockerill is opening a gigafactory in Baytown, Texas, to manufacture electrolyzers, a crucial technology for producing hydrogen from water.

In June, Houston will host Hydrogen Technology Expo North America, one of the largest trade conferences in the world for the growing hydrogen industry.

With billions in investments on the line, HyVelocity, along with longtime hydrogen producers and a nascent ecosystem of startups, is betting that hydrogen will become the green fuel of the future. However, with many unresolved links on the supply chain and competition from electrification and other fuels, the industry’s high hopes could crash and burn like the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATE

_Amid the flurry of development, Paige Powell has remained one of hydrogen’s skeptics.

She knew from a young age that part of her life’s mission would be taking care of the natural world around her. “I was from cancer alley but moved to the petro metro,” she said in an interview, describing how she moved from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Houston when she was a kid.

The caring relationship she has with the environment started when her dad would take her sailing out in the Gulf and camping in the rich pine forests of Louisiana and East Texas or the rugged mountains and canyons of Big Bend National Park. It was there that she remembers going to pick a flower until her father stopped her.

“He was like, ‘No, don’t pick that. If everybody picked every flower they liked, there’d be no flowers for us to enjoy,’” she said. “That was kind of my first lesson in conservation. From then on, I became an environmental advocate.”

In elementary school, she started the Save the Earth Club. In between the portable buildings at her school in Houston, Powell recalls uniting some of her friends by exploring a stream through campus and making flower crowns and friendship bracelets.

“We really wanted denim jackets with, like, SAVE THE EARTH club on the back, you know, very eighties, like bedazzled,” Powell said.

It was not until Powell had a daughter of her own that the desire to protect the environment developed into a career path at a grown-up version of the Save the Earth Club: the local nonprofit Air Alliance Houston.

At three years old, her daughter would stand up on the family’s couch and gaze out the window as school buses full of kids arrived at the elementary school down the street. She desperately wanted to be part of that, so Powell found her a preschool, and with the newfound free time while her daughter was busy learning and meeting other kids, Powell found a part-time job as an administrative assistant for the air alliance.

After starting with Air Alliance Houston, Powell has now spent the past decade working for environmental nonprofits in Texas. She also holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Houston and has been a fellow at the Rice University Center for Environmental Studies.

“Finding that entry point was amazing for me, and I never looked back,” Powell said.

HOW HYDROGEN IS PRODUCED

_The core of Powell’s skepticism revolves around how hydrogen fuel is produced.

Currently, most of the hydrogen produced in the U.S. is what’s called gray hydrogen. This method uses methane gas, CH4, which in Texas is extracted from deep under the ground in the Permian Basin of West Texas and the Eagle Ford oil and gas field south of San Antonio. It is pumped through pipelines across the state to the Houston area. There, in a chemical process known as steam methane reforming, the methane reacts with H2O to form hydrogen, H2, and carbon dioxide, CO2, which is emitted into the air. CO2 emissions are a main contributor to climate change.

In order to lower the climate emissions of gray hydrogen, that carbon dioxide needs to be captured and stored. Companies along the Gulf Coast are currently proposing a variety of new projects for carbon capture and storage, sometimes called CCS or CCUS. The CO2 is captured and pumped in new pipelines that transport it to sites where it can be utilized in other industrial processes or pumped into wells and stored underground. The end product is named blue hydrogen—that is, hydrogen derived from natural gas with added carbon capture at the end of the process to reduce the climate-warming emissions.

Lastly, there’s green hydrogen. It is produced with renewable energy that powers the chemical process of electrolysis, in which water’s atomic structure H2O is split into hydrogen and oxygen. This avoids the need for methane gas as a feedstock or carbon capture, but it does require large amounts of electricity and water.

Few exact details of the HyVelocity Hub have been announced, but a document from the Biden-era Department of Energy laid out seven specific projects. The companies AES, Ørsted, and MHI are each planning green hydrogen production facilities. One will be in Harris County, where Houston is located, and another will be farther south in Duval County. The third location is not yet known, but documents say it will be located on the Texas Gulf Coast.

The largest project in terms of hydrogen production is led by Chevron. The company plans to rely on carbon capture to produce 700 metric tons per day of blue hydrogen—more than fifty percent of the total hydrogen production capacity of the hub, according to an analysis of the DOE document. The production facility will be on the Gulf Coast in Texas or Louisiana, but an exact location has not been announced.

For Powell, one of the biggest problems with hydrogen as an energy source is inefficiency in its supply chain, which is called the energy penalty. “I consider the climate crisis to be an energy crisis and a water crisis. All of these things are inextricably linked,” she said.

A recent article published in the science journal Nature Energy, “The Green Hydrogen Ambition and Implementation Gap,” argued that about 350 additional gigawatts of clean electricity will be needed by 2030 in order to power all of the green hydrogen projects announced worldwide by the end of 2023. For context, it would take roughly 175 Hoover Dams to produce 350 gigawatts, which is also more electricity than the combined maximum output of wind and solar in the U.S. in 2024.

With such large amounts of renewable energy required to produce significant amounts of green hydrogen, Powell said that it would be better for the climate to use those clean electrons to power homes and businesses through the grid.

“You don’t use the most expensive and the least efficient tool first,” she said.

Since electrolysis requires a lot of water, she questions whether that makes sense in a state all too familiar with drought.

Blue hydrogen has a different set of problems, according to Powell and other analysts. Those problems start farther upstream in the gas extraction process. During drilling and transportation operations, the methane gas can easily leak into the atmosphere. When burned, methane produces carbon dioxide, but when emitted directly to the atmosphere without being burned, methane is a more potent greenhouse gas that over a twenty-year period could heat the atmosphere about eighty times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide.

An analysis released in November 2024 from S&P Global found that ninety-six billion cubic feet of methane emissions leaked from operations in the Permian Basin in 2023. That was a twenty-six-percent drop from 2022, showing that the industry is making some progress on methane. However, that amount of methane leakage still represents a significant amount of planet-warming pollution.

Another problem Powell points out is that carbon capture and storage, which is required to turn gray hydrogen blue, is a novel technology that hasn’t been successfully implemented at the scale proposed. And building new CO2 pipelines presents another safety risk from leaks, she said. Inhaling highly concentrated levels of CO2 can cause suffocation, and some also fear that CCS offers the oil and gas industry a pathway to continue expansive drilling.

With so many potential risks, Powell ultimately doesn’t trust Texas to get it right, in part because of the overly relaxed regulations that help attract business to the state in the first place. The Texas Railroad Commission is the agency charged with regulating the oil and gas industry in Texas, and the agency’s responsibilities also include new infrastructure for carbon capture and hydrogen.

The nonprofit Commission Shift, where Powell previously worked, found in a 2021 report that state commissioners have significant financial interests in the industries they are charged with overseeing.

“They are a reluctant regulator, and essentially, they are in the pocket of oil and gas,” Powell said.

With her distrust in the regulators, her biggest concern overall is safety. And that concern is shared by workers and the groups representing their interests.

THE LABOR ORGANIZER

_As a civil rights lawyer in the 1980s, Rick Levy was involved in cases surrounding desegregation, state governments, and large corporations. But he wasn’t fully satisfied with the impact he was having.

He had been a member of a union representing legal and social justice workers, and through that he got involved with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) doing education and legislative work starting in 1991.

“It became clear that what really was going to change things was not lawsuits, but organizing and people getting engaged,” Levy said. “The only group that was really positioned to do that is the labor movement.”

Over time, Levy also began to get increasingly concerned with climate change, as he saw its effects around him. “You can’t live in Houston,” Levy said, “and not be concerned about flooding and hurricanes.” But investments in solutions to climate change, namely the new clean energy jobs, are often at odds with his duties to the labor movement.

In an interview, Levy described with equal parts passion and sarcasm how the energy transition presents a problem for workers in the oil and gas industry: “These are folks who have put their whole career into trained, highly technical work, make a good salary, have benefits, can send their kids to college, have health care. And then you tell them, ‘Well, go be a solar installer, and you can make maybe ten bucks an hour, with no benefits and no union protection.’ Who is going to say, ‘Oh, that sounds like a great idea.’”

Working his way through the ranks, Levy is now the president of the AFL-CIO in Texas, where he applies that commitment to the labor movement and the climate, coupled with his pointed sense of humor, to figuring out how workers can benefit from the energy transition. In hydrogen, Levy sees tremendous opportunity, but seizing that requires cooperation from the HyVelocity partners.

With a huge sum of taxpayer dollars going to the HyVelocity Hub, Levy said that he has tried to negotiate an overarching project labor agreement that would apply to all of the hub’s activities, but HyVelocity LLC hasn’t come to the table. The agreement would cover wages and benefits, as well as safety protocols.

“It’s been pretty much radio silence,” Levy said. “Our goal is to be in lockstep with the companies fully engaged in trying to make the rollout as successful as possible.”

Levy is hopeful that the HyVelocity partners will negotiate, and in the best-case scenario, hydrogen can offer workers a central role in the clean energy transition. “What we don’t want to do is have people see the South as their cheap labor alternative to doing work in other places.”

THE FENCE-LINE NEIGHBOR

_In addition to being known as the energy capital, Houston has also long been recognized as one of America’s most diverse cities. Houston attracts people from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, and by the start of 2020, one in four Houstonians were born outside the United States, according to the Greater Houston Partnership.

When Shiv Srivastava’s father Brij came to the United States from India in the 1960s, he chose the University of Houston because it was the most affordable four-year college he could find. As was, and in many ways still is, the custom for college graduates in the Houston area, Brij set his sights on a career in the oil and gas industry.

But as the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, Brij began to experience some ethical qualms with working in the oil and gas industry. According to his son, who remembers conversations they had, Brij didn’t like how oil was fueling geopolitical tensions, and he worried about the long-term ramifications for the environment.

Eventually, Brij began working for the city, and Shiv’s mother became a public school teacher in Houston’s Third Ward. They lived in the Northwest Houston neighborhood of Acre Homes, a historically Black area that had undergone redlining, a discriminatory loaning practice in the twentieth century that contributed to de facto segregation in American cities.

“My entire existence was kind of shaped by the struggles that [my parents] went through,” Srivastava said.

Those life experiences motivated Srivastava to study political science and go on to be a congressional staffer and work in opposition research and on electoral campaigns. In 2020, when a new local advocacy group was forming in Houston, Srivastava was among their first hires and still works as the policy director for Fenceline Watch.

“Our main goal is fighting multi-generational toxic harm faced by the communities on the Houston Ship Channel and the Gulf Coast caused by oil, gas, and petrochemicals,” he said.

In addition to sharing many concerns voiced by Powell and other skeptics, Srivastava said the HyVelocity project is being pursued without the backing of local communities along the shipping channel.

The group has been offering feedback to the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations since the hub selection process began, and later to the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), which is the organization leading community engagement for the HyVelocity Hub.

“Our goal is to create genuine two-way engagement that builds trust, includes diverse perspectives, addresses concerns, and delivers tangible benefits to all communities connected to HyVelocity,” Margaret Cook, HARC’s Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability, said in a press release at the end of 2024.

But from Srivastava’s point of view, the community engagement from DOE has been “deficient” and the details from HyVelocity partners themselves “incredibly opaque.” So far, Srivastava hasn’t seen any specific community benefit agreements, which are legal agreements that can be enforced by a court. Those agreements could include clear and transparent safety protocols as well as guaranteed investments in neighborhoods. Instead, he said HARC is talking about community benefits plans, which he described as “informal” agreements that cannot be legally enforced. And still, Fenceline Watch hasn’t seen any drafts of proposed community benefits plans either.

Srivastava doubts that any community benefits plan would be satisfactory to ensure minimum safety protections or provide any tangible benefits for the frontline communities living along the shipping channel, in part because the company executives also have to sign off on any plan.

With the actions of the new Trump administration, there is now even more uncertainty around the community benefits process.

According to a spokesperson for the HyVelocity Hub, “Executive Orders issued by the White House in late January effectively implemented a stop work order on community benefits activities.” Those orders included ending any programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, which had been one of the principles DOE officials highlighted in a December webinar about the process for community benefits commitments. Another order issued a freeze on federal funds for energy and climate change projects approved by Congress under the Biden administration through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

While the hub was awarded $22 million in November 2024, the remainder of the maximum $1.2 billion award was to be handed over to HyVelocity project over many years as the project hit new milestones from planning to construction and operation.

Even in light of the federal funding uncertainty, the HyVelocity Hub expressed confidence that the project would ultimately move ahead, saying in a statement that it is working with the new administration to “ensure that America leads the world on a critical 21st century energy solution—hydrogen.”

In addition to the backing of major oil and gas partners, the HyVelocity Hub also has the support of Texas’s Republican governor Greg Abbott.

DUELING VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

_Regardless of the future of HyVelocity, Perlman of the Center for Houston’s Future is confident that hydrogen will play a major role in the region’s future one way or another.

“We’re at the very beginning of this innovation cycle,” Perlman said. “As technology starts to evolve, we’re going to see more and more uses for hydrogen, and more and more applications and more and more ways of producing it.”

He also expressed that in time, the production process would become more energy efficient and safer. As more industries such as trucking, maritime shipping, and chemical production convert to hydrogen, he thinks neighborhoods near the shipping channel will also see lower levels of air pollution.

Perlman also sees the economic advantages over the horizon that he says will benefit everyone living in the Houston area through greater opportunities, whether they work in the industry or not.

The AFL-CIO’s Levy is on board with the idea of hydrogen, but in his view, the future prosperity of the Gulf Coast will be determined by whether the workers are at the center of fighting climate change. And the HyVelocity Hub is a crucial first test. “If we don’t get it right,” he said, “we’re setting ourselves up for failure, not just on this project, but on numerous projects to come.”

On the other hand, Powell, with her experience at environmental nonprofits, doesn’t believe hydrogen production at the scale proposed is worth it. Instead, she sees opportunities to fight climate change and create jobs centered on green infrastructure, envisioning “mangroves on the coast and oyster reefs to clean up the water quality. I see pocket prairies everywhere and really leaning into nature-based solutions to mitigate flooding and air pollution.”

Fenceline Watch’s Srivastava goes a step further, imagining the region without the industrial city of steel along the shipping channel. “What we want to see is a restoration for our communities,” he said. With investments in renewable energy, rather than oil and gas or hydrogen, Srivastava thinks the future will not require the petrochemical infrastructure that has overtaken the shipping channel. He instead envisions giving the space back to nature and providing people with safer, cleaner neighborhoods where they would have the freedom “not be actively harmed by our environment, [and] have a quality of life that isn’t impacted in the name of profit.”

These competing visions for the future of the Houston Ship Channel cannot all flow in the same direction. The regional economy depends on oil and gas infrastructure, but the channel itself is under threat from climate change. Hydrogen brings with it the promise of transitioning the economy away from planet-warming industries.

However, the promise of cleaner energy and continued prosperity comes packaged with many of the same risks, power dynamics, and potentially disparate impacts as the petrochemical economy it seeks to augment or replace.

No matter how the hydrogen is produced, as the burgeoning hydrogen industry sets a course to transform the Gulf Coast, the future will depend on who benefits from production—and who gets left behind.

This story appears in the Summer 2025 print edition as “Atomic No. 1.” Order the Y’all Street Issue here.