What will it cost to build the entire U.S. hydrogen infrastructure? The answer is $405 billion.
(Note: To learn more about hydrogen fuel cell cars and their potential to solve the oil crisis, please read the series of articles titled “Twelve Hydrogen Facts” which is part of the Hydrogen Manhattan Project.)
How much will it cost to build the entire U.S. hydrogen infrastructure? This question gets asked a lot. Is it $10 billion? $100 billion? Or could it be as high as $1 trillion as I used to think? This post will try to answer this question.
The two parts that will make up the hydrogen infrastructure are the retail hydrogen fueling stations and the hydrogen pipelines. The assumption is going to be that the hydrogen will come from clean sources of energy (e.g. wind power from the Great Plains region or solar power from the Mojave Desert), so the number of miles of hydrogen pipelines will reflect this.
Currently, there are around 170,000 gasoline fueling stations in the U.S. Right now, hydrogen fueling stations cost about $2 million to build. However, this will obviously go down a lot over time. I’m going to assume that the hydrogen fueling stations will eventually cost $1 million to build. Therefore, the average cost of all of the 170,000 hydrogen fueling stations will be $1.5 million.
This will equal a cost of $255 billion for all of the hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S.
Polymer hydrogen pipelines are estimated to cost $500,000 per mile. Regarding the number of miles of hydrogen pipelines that will be needed, the closest comparison that can be made is with the current natural gas pipeline infrastructure. Although there are about 2.2 million miles of natural gas pipelines, only 300,000 miles are long-distance transmission pipelines.
Trucks will be the most practical way to distribute hydrogen locally to fueling stations. Therefore, I’m going to estimate that 300,000 miles of hydrogen pipelines will be needed. This will equal a cost of $150 billion.
Therefore, the total cost of both the hydrogen fueling stations and the hydrogen pipelines will equal $405 billion.
Some people could obviously argue that the cost will be higher and others could argue that it will be lower. However, this figure provides a really good general idea of what the total cost would be.
Although $405 billion is obviously a lot of money, it is about $100 billion less than has been spent so far on the Iraq War.
Furthermore, as discussed in Hydrogen Fact #7 and Hydrogen Fact #8, the entire hydrogen infrastructure could be built without any subsidies (although, for all practical purposes, the federal government will almost certainly need to get involved in building the initial hydrogen fueling stations).
Consumers would simply pay for the hydrogen infrastructure through their purchases of hydrogen fuel. The loans on the hydrogen fueling stations and hydrogen pipelines would be paid back over 20 years by including the infrastructure cost as part of the cost of each kilogram of hydrogen sold.
