(upbeat music) - Constellation Energy, which owns the LaSalle Clean Energy Center in northern LaSalle County plans on building the world's largest nuclear-powered, clean hydrogen facility.

Our Phil Luciano explains more about the process.

- [Phil] 65 miles northeast of Peoria, the LaSalle County generating station stretches outside the town of Marseilles.

There near the Illinois River, two nuclear reactors have produced electricity since the early 1980s.

The station powers more than two million homes.

The plant is owned by the Constellation Energy Corporation based in Baltimore.

And now Constellation wants to expand the plant to build a clean hydrogen facility.

The project would cost $900 million and employ thousands of workers.

It would be part of the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen or MachH2.

It consists of 70 public and private entities in Illinois, Indiana, and other Midwestern states.

The US Department of Energy has awarded MachH2 $1 billion to foster the production of clean hydrogen.

But what is clean hydrogen and what can it do?

The biggest use is likely in fuel cells.

Inside a fuel cell, a membrane allows positive hydrogen particles to pass through to oxygen, which is supplied by ambient air.

Negative hydrogen particles are sent on a detour, creating a flow of electrons and creating electricity that can power a motor.

All those particles then reunite and form water, the lone emission from this process and a clean one at that.

The idea of fuel cells isn't new.

They were first proposed in the 1800s and hydrogen fuel cells currently power green cars.

But right now, those cells can't power bigger motors.

However, researchers and investors are working to create hydrogen fuel cells that could power long-haul trucks, ocean-going ships, manufacturing plants, even airplanes.

A fuel cell starts, as it will in LaSalle County, with hydrogen electrolysis.

This involves splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

An electrical current is passed through the water.

Oxygen gravitates to the positive end or anode.

Hydrogen moves to the negative end or cathode.

From the cathode, hydrogen is then pumped into tanks.

It later can be infused into fuel cells.

The Constellation plant in LaSalle County, the electricity in the process will come from the nuclear-generated power on site.

- The Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen or MachH2 is a multi-state coalition of energy providers, utilities, and universities.

Their Chief Integration Officer Neil Banwart joins us now to talk about what this means for producing clean energy.

Neil, thanks for joining us from Indianapolis.

We appreciate it.

- Great, I'm pleased to be here, thank you for the opportunity.

- Well, before we go into specifics about hydrogen production and its use, tell us how this is different from the energy that the nuclear facility is already producing.

- No, appreciate that.

So, the LaSalle facility, of course, is producing nuclear power that goes onto the grid that powers our houses, powers facilities in the area.

And so, what we're going to do with MachH2 is we are going to utilize the existing nuclear facility and actually utilize some of the power to power an electrolyzer.

An electrolyzer is essentially the machine that separates hydrogen from oxygen and water.

And so, you take water as the input, you need to power that to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen.

So, the end result is you have clean hydrogen that can be used in a variety of use cases.

And so, I'm sure we'll get into the use cases, but that's essentially what we're going to do at LaSalle and actually do this in other parts of our Midwest hydrogen hub.

- Okay, so, let's talk about hydrogen.

You know, we have all kinds of different ways we can produce energy and forms of energy.

Why hydrogen?

Why is that something that your alliance is interested in?

- Absolutely.

So, maybe taking a step back, the Department of Energy, through the bipartisan infrastructure bill, received up to $8 billion to establish these hydrogen hubs.

And I think the United States Department of Energy recognizes the value or the importance of hydrogen as an energy carrier.

You know, what makes hydrogen unique or different is the low carbon intensity.

So, if we think about, and I'm sure again, we'll get into the different use cases, but if we think about using hydrogen, say in a fuel cell truck, we are using clean hydrogen and the results are very low to zero emissions.

So, think of hydrogen as a way to realize zero emissions for a heavy-duty truck application.

So, different than the traditional diesel combustion type of engine, we can employ that fuel cell technology.

Again, that's just one of the many applications that we see for hydrogen.

- So, we talk about clean energy and that's what a lot of people in the government are going towards right now, there's clean energy, but then there's ways, correct me if I'm wrong, to produce clean energy that's not clean.

So, with the hydrogen is the process clean to produce clean hydrogen?

- Yeah, so, thanks.

So, there's different ways or different methods to produce hydrogen in the United States today.

The majority of the hydrogen produced in the United States today is a process that uses natural gas and that results in hydrogen that is that is quote unquote, "gray hydrogen."

That hydrogen is not necessarily clean because it does result in some emissions in that process.

So, what we're doing with our clean hydrogen hub is instead of producing quote unquote, "gray hydrogen," we're producing cleaner forms of hydrogen.

And there's actually a couple of different production methods in our hydrogen hub.

Again, we talked about the LaSalle facility producing hydrogen via electrolysis, and the electrolyzer needs to be powered.

If you power the electrolyzer with nuclear power, it's considered pink hydrogen, which is a form of clean hydrogen.

There's another way, if you power the electrolyzer, again, the machine, with renewable power such as wind or solar, it would be considered a green hydrogen.

And then thirdly, you can perform that same natural gas process, but if you actually capture that carbon, sequester that carbon and push it down, that's considered blue hydrogen.

And those are forms of clean hydrogen as opposed to the gray hydrogen that is prevalent in the United States today.

- And when this hydrogen is produced, how and where is it stored?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

So, some of the hydrogen can be stored on site.

Some of our producers do envision doing some onsite storage.

You can generally either compress the hydrogen or you can actually liquefy the hydrogen.

If we harken back to our high school chemistry days, hydrogen can be liquified.

But in order to liquefy the hydrogen, you have to bring the temperature of the molecules down extremely low.

You can liquefy, but it does require special handling to be able to preserve those low temperatures.

So, some of that hydrogen that we will be producing will be stored on site.

Some will be compressed and transported.

There's different ways, different methods to transport hydrogen, again, could be in the compressed form, or it could be in the liquid form.

Hydrogen can be transported via a tube trailer behind a Class 8 truck.

It could be liquified and put in a different type of tube trailer.

It can also be transported, of course, via a pipeline.

So, there's different ways that you store the hydrogen and different ways that you move the molecule.

It really depends on the end use.

- Well, since you mentioned pipeline, you know, here in central Illinois, we've done a lotta stories lately about different companies wanting to build CO2 pipelines to get that CO2 down further south and sequester it underground.

A lot of people are against that.

They're worried about the safety of pipelines.

What about the way you might transport hydrogen from this facility?

Any safety concerns there?

- Yeah, so, I mean, I would absolutely say that safety is the most important thing with respect to our hydrogen hub.

And so, with respect to the production of the hydrogen molecules, how we're generating the molecules, how we're transporting the molecules, how we're storing the molecules, we'll have safety experts at every step of the process.

And again, this is a regulated industry.

Some of the hydrogen, as I mentioned, will be transported via dedicated hydrogen pipelines.

Hydrogen pipelines are not a new phenomenon.

There's actually an extensive network of hydrogen pipelines primarily in the south, sort of in the Texas region.

But if one of the methods is to transport via pipeline, we envision more of a dedicated hydrogen pipeline type of situation.

- Well, you do have a lot of support from the government, that's for sure.

I know Governor Pritzker and our US senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth are on board on this.

Do you see this as, for lack of a better term, the wave of the future?

- I do, I do.

So, hydrogen is not the be all end all.

It's not necessarily the right energy carrier for every application, but the end uses are multiple.

You know, earlier I mentioned heavy-duty trucking and there's reasons why it's difficult to electrify or battery power long-haul, heavy-duty trucks, and that of course, would have to do with the size and the weight and the charge time of a battery for a heavy-duty, Class 8 truck.

And so, we think hydrogen is a great end use for heavy-duty trucking.

But there's also heavy industry, such as steel.

There's a significant amount of steel that's currently being produced, for instance, in northwest Indiana.

Steel is a process that is also hard to electrify, you need a lot of heat.

And so, we think hydrogen is a great solution for those heavy industries.

Concrete, glass, again, other heavy industries that we think introducing hydrogen into would be very appropriate.

And really, as you said, the wave of the future.

The last thing I'll mention is with respect to transportation.

You know, I touched on the heavy-duty trucking, but there's also testing being done for fuel cells for actually ships.

And so maritime vessels around the Great Lakes could run, instead of the traditional diesel engines, could run on hydrogen fuel cell.

And then, two other ones to mention, one would be rail.

So, instead of the traditional diesel locomotive, you could actually have a hydrogen fuel cell.

And there is precedence for this, there are hydrogen fuel cell trains actually running in Europe, and we'd certainly like to bring that technology to the US.

And then the last one, Mark, I'll mention is the aviation industry.

And we're certainly probably a ways away from actually having hydrogen airplanes, but it is feasible, we do see a path.

So, again, a variety of end uses and we think this is one of the reasons that the DoE is putting some money behind this hydrogen hub effort.

- As we come up towards the end of the year, where do you stand now on the funding process and when might we see this go into action?

- Yep, no, great.

So, on October 13th, the Department of Energy announced that there were seven hubs that were invited to go into negotiations.

And so, while MachH2 is fortunate enough to be one of those seven hubs, we haven't received any funding yet, right.

And so, we're in discussions, in the negotiations just now with the Department of Energy.

These are complicated grants.

Right?

There's a sizable amount of funding, there's multiple projects at stake here.

And so, we anticipate the negotiation process, Mark, could take three to six months.

So, that would take us certainly into 2024.

A lot of this is greenfield type of sites.

And so, there's of course, permitting, and things that we'll need to go through.

I think we'll start to see some projects maybe 2025, into 2026, 2027.

The projects essentially need to be completed within a 12-year timeframe.

So, this is not a short-lived project, but really excited that we're in the process.

- Just to kind of wrap this up, when you do get the money and this is complete, and you start pumping out hydrogen, what's this gonna mean for the average Illinoisan?

- Yeah, so, what I think you'll see is that you'll start to see a fueling station or fueling stations that have hydrogen as an option.

Again, this is gonna take a long period of time, but I think you'll start to see perhaps larger truck stops along the interstate highways where they have the traditional diesel and maybe they have high-speed charging for passenger cars, but then maybe you have hydrogen as an option.

Again, this will take several years, but I think that's one tangible example that an average citizen could notice over the next decade or so.

- And I'm sure the folks in LaSalle County who get a lot of tax money from the existing nuclear plant, they'll be getting a lot more.

- Yeah, we're anticipating, Mark, that in aggregate across the three-state region that this hub monies will unlock almost 13,600 construction jobs.

So, a significant number of jobs.

Some of those jobs will then turn into permanent jobs.

So, we're really excited about the job increase, additional revenues coming as a result of this hydrogen hub project.

- All right, Neil Banwart with the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen, MachH2, which is a great name, Neil.

Great name.

- Thank you.

- Well, we will keep up with you on this and keep us abreast of what happens with that funding and we appreciate your time today.

- Appreciate the time, thank you.

Take care.

- Take care.

Joining us now is Gina Czubachowski, the executive director of North Central Illinois Economic Development Corporation, which serves LaSalle, Putnam, and Bureau counties.

Thanks for joining us Gina.

- Thank you for having me.

- So, we are telling people about the changes coming to the nuclear power plants.

They're big, a lot of money going into it.

What does that mean for the surrounding area?

- We're excited that this is gonna create some additional jobs, good-paying jobs for our region.

So, we expect our residents to have the opportunity to upscale to the higher positions that will become available.

They'll have more disposable income to spend in many of our small communities.

Invest in a home if they have not already, or upgrade their home currently, and spend money out in the community, especially our small businesses who thrive on local economy during the week or weekends.

- Now, right now the power plant has about 800 union jobs.

It's the third biggest employer in your area.

It may move on up the charts there.

What does it mean not only to have more jobs available for people in our area, but maybe people coming from outside of our area?

- Right, it'll draw more people to the region and we're always looking to grow our population, especially the skilled workforce.

We do encourage people to look ahead, it'll take up the rental properties and even home purchase have been tight, but many of our communities are looking at building additional suburbs or additional communities or subdivisions in our communities.

So, we see progress happening in our communities that more homes are being developed.

We see some of our businesses remodeling because people are spending their incomes.

And we'd like to, rather than losing population year after year, see influx, increase, so, it shows good things for additional manufacturers to come to our area.

- Yeah, you touched on it a little bit.

I was gonna ask, since this transition, it's not gonna happen overnight.

Could take a few years to get the whole thing done.

Communities and businesses, I guess, we could see more gas stations pop up, more convenience stores, on a smaller scale, on a larger scale, like you said, new communities coming.

That's gotta be pretty exciting for the area.

- Yeah, it's very exciting.

I know we've been really good about our downtowns are predominantly filled with businesses, small businesses have been thriving in our downtowns and I think it'll be valuable for them to see additional income and additional people coming to their businesses and spending money rather than going online or out of town.

- And when it comes to taxes, according to Constellation, they pay about $22 million in taxes annually.

That additional tax income that's gonna be coming in from this new facility, can you think of anything that you personally would like to see the counties, or specifically LaSalle County use that money for?

- I would always, for the government tax funds, I would say anything with our law enforcement.

I know it's been challenging and I mean, we've kept our crime rates low, but we're not far from Chicago, so, the investment into keeping our policemen paid well and keeping them employed locally so our crime rates do stay lower in our communities would be valuable.

And then of course, our schools, continuing to increase the technology capabilities, so different programs can be offered in our rural schools so they can compete with the suburb schools when it comes to education standards.

- And you're gonna be drawing a lot of folks, I mean, heck, people will drive a distance for a good job.

You never know, you may be getting people down here from Peoria, Bloomington, Normal, that are interested in working up in your neck of the woods.

What kind of things does that three county area, Putnam, LaSalle, and Bureau, what kind of things is that going to offer for families who may be relocating?

- I think it'll offer our region, I mean, you don't have to just live in Lasalle or Bureau County to work for this prospective project.

Grundy County's right on the edge of where this project is.

And so, I think not only our three counties, but Grundy and some of the, even Peoria County, DeKalb County will value, and even their universities for training.

- And when you first heard about this deal that we believe is gonna be happening, I assume there was a lot of buzz throughout your communities wondering, "Wow, how could we capitalize on this?"

- Oh yeah, the people always when there's a project that comes into the region, you know, it's great to see their community members being employed and can we make sure other residents are coming to our communities and even, what services are they gonna need to continue to expand?

- Well, it seems to be good news for LaSalle County especially, but also Putnam, Bureau, and the surrounding counties.

Again, when we tell people that there are gonna be jobs available, and I think a good portion of those would be union jobs, how do you get people ready to apply for these jobs?

Do you have any advice there?

- I would say watching the website, under the Constellation website of seeing what the process is because they do additional screening through there.

So, it may take four months for them to go through the hiring process, so, be patient.

But it's a great area to live.

We have low crime and we have a great access to Illinois Valley Community College for additional training.

So, any employees that may be, or prospect employees that may be looking to upskill or gain some additional skills, I would value the community college training programs that are available.

- All right, exciting times.

Gina, thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

And best of luck with the future.

- Yes, thank you for having me - Joined now by Phil Luciano.

Thank you for explaining the scientific aspects of this because my brain was about to explode.

- Took me a while to weed through it, but two things about it.

One, I found nothing about people protesting this 'cause it's clean energy.

Two, this is crazy good, A billion dollars with a B.

You don't hear about those type of projects too often in this area.

And that just is gonna be so crazy in terms of what it's gonna do for that area, like you're all talking about.

- Well, and the good thing is they don't have to start from scratch.

The nuclear facility's already there, they just have to add onto it.

So, we will see this in our lifetimes.

- And a few years ago, it's been a few, but I had the opportunity to go to the school district, the high school district that is supported by the property taxes from the nuclear power plant there.

And then I visited the school district next door.

And the difference is night and day because the property taxes for a nuclear power plant are huge and they well support the schools.

The other areas, not so much.

In fact, that school is now gone.

So, it's gonna do great things for that entire area.

And one of the things that you were talking about in terms of the ripple effect, you know there's the Amazon Fulfillment Center that opened not too long ago in North Pekin, and I hear from the folks who live around there that they're like, "Man, when I go to the Casey's, when I go to the gas station, when I go to this, the lines are longer."

And they're really not complaining 'cause they live there and they're like, "Look at all this business.

Look at all these people who are coming here now to spend their money."

We need to buy a gas station by LaSalle County.

- I'll tell you what.

Well, and when she talked about them already planning more subdivisions to house people, that reminded me of when Rivian came to Normal.

We live not too far away from there.

You can't find a house or an apartment anywhere close.

So, they're getting a headstart on all the influx of new employees they could potentially have.

- I know plenty of folks who live right here, right around Peoria, they go to Rivian and it's no big deal, like you were saying.

And to get up there up 39 or whatever you take, they'll go up there for these jobs.

And I think they're gonna be really good jobs.

- Absolutely.

Well, we will continue to follow this story as it unfolds.

But unfolding right now in about a minute is "You Gotta See This."

- Stick around.

- We're gonna have some good stuff for you.

As always, Phil and Julie Sanders, they'll put a smile on your face.

- Oh yeah.

- Whether you like it or not.

- All right, thanks very much for joining us.

Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at WTVP.

And of course, you can watch us anytime at WTVP.org.

Have a great night.

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