MORGANTOWN — West Virginia University is leading the way on research on technologies that can help bridge the state to a cleaner environment while still using natural gas produced in the state.

Researchers at WVU’S Energy Institute presented their latest work to reporters Monday for WVU Academic Media Day on the Evansdale campus in Morgantown.

The institute is finding ways to use West Virginia’s fossil fuel industry – particularly natural gas – to provide new sources of energy, new resources, and reverse the effects of climate change.

“We’ve been vocal in establishing the importance and impact that decarbonization has to regional industries,” said Sam Taylor, assistant director for the WVU Energy Institute. “We recognize that many regional industry partners have set internal CO2 mitigation targets independent of any external regulation. Because of that commercial pull, there’s great interest in developing novel and scalable technical solutions for carbon utilization.”

One of the ways researchers believe will be a realistic form of decarbonization is developing hydrogen for energy production and manufacturing processes. Hydrogen can be used for a number of industries, including steel and metals production. It can also be used for long-term storage of energy with hydrogen fuel cells. The byproduct of hydrogen production is water with no carbon emissions.

Taylor said West Virginia is ripe for a blue hydrogen project, which would manufacture hydrogen using the state’s abundant supplies of natural gas. Instead of greenhouse emissions from the process being emitted into the atmosphere, emissions would be collected through carbon capture and sequestration.

“Hydrogen has become a potentially significant tool in the future energy portfolio in our region,” Taylor said. “There’s significant efforts underway in the development of a blue hydrogen hub with a focus on utilizing existing resources in West Virginia, coupled with carbon capture and storage.”

West Virginia is in the running for a regional hydrogen hub demonstration project. Most of the state’s federal and state elected leaders submitted an application to the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year to land one of the regional hubs.

The federal project is funded with $9.5 billion from the hard infrastructure bill, including $8 billion for the Regional Hydrogen Hub program. Each hub is required to demonstrate the production of clean hydrogen and demonstrate the use of clean hydrogen. Lawmakers were able to insert specific language that requires at least one hub to be placed in the Appalachian region.

Shikha Sharma, a professor of geology with WVU’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, said that as renewable sources of energy – such as wind and solar – continue to make up more of the nation’s sources of energy between now and 2050, natural gas will still play an enormous role in both providing energy when wind and solar struggle, as well as help decarbonize the atmosphere.

“We are trying to lower our carbon footprint,” Sharma said. “We are trying to lower the environmental impacts of energy produced, and also whichever energy source we try to develop needs to be economically viable so we can afford it. This kind of path moved us from utilizing conventional energy sources – like oil and gas, and coal – to unconventional energy resources like shale gas, which in a way can be considered as a step towards sustainable energy because it produces energy more efficiently.”

Sharma said her work group can demonstrate that natural gas extraction – using hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling into the Utica and Marcellus shale formations in northern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania – can be done with minimal environmental impact.

“Natural gas will also serve as a bridge to overcome technology gaps required for decarbonization in the energy sector,” Sharma said. “Natural gas can be a key player in our energy transition, but we have to make sure that we produce natural gas sustainably in an environmentally responsible manner.”

The natural gas extracted can be used in the blue hydrogen manufacturing process. The greenhouse gas emissions from the blue hydrogen manufacturing process can be trapped underground in former natural gas deposits. There is also an opportunity to extract rare earth elements used in manufacturing electronics from shale gas sites.

Xingbo Liu, the associate dean for research and Statler Chair Professor for WVU’s Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, said the technologies for hydrogen production and carbon capture and sequestration are nothing new. But with billions in federal funding for clean energy initiatives and leaps in research, these technologies are closer to being economically viable.

“Technology is much more advanced than before and that’s a very typical pattern for the development of technology development,” Liu said. “The reason this time it’s become real is the technology is much more advanced. Both hardware, computers, and the software become more and more useful.”