President Biden announced on Friday the selection of seven regional clean energy hydrogen hubs that will collectively receive $7 billion from Infrastructure Reduction Act (IRA) funds. In his speech at the Tioga Marine Terminal in Philadelphia, the president underscored the private investments stimulated by public projects like these hydrogen hubs, which the president said will yield more than $40 billion in private investment on top of tens of thousands of jobs.
“Federal investments attract private sector investments. A lot of it,” Biden said. “It creates jobs and industries, like clean energy, and demonstrates we’re all in this together. And that’s what this is all about today.”
Over the course of his presidency, Biden has prioritized ambitious industrial policy like the IRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, marking a sea change in the federal government’s approach to industrial policy.
Biden said:
“One of the things that I worried about was that there used to be an argument that you can’t have industrial policy dictated by the government. Well, guess what? I found that when the government invests in the needs of the American people, invests in America and the American people, guess what? The private sector jumps on real quick.
“In fact, I’ve asked CEOs this question repeatedly: When the United States invests considerable resources in new industry, does it encourage or discourage businesses to get in? And the answer is clear. It encourages them to get in.”
The president met this past week with the chief executives of Target, IBM and other leading companies in construction, manufacturing, finance, and clean energy to discuss their perspectives on the U.S. economy and the impact of public investment in industry. Data shows that the business community is indeed seizing the opportunity to double down on public investment.
Since Biden assumed office, private companies have invested $516 billion in American manufacturing, according to the White House. And, in June, the Treasury Department announced that real manufacturing construction spending had doubled.
Just the Mid-Atlantic Hydrogen Hub that Biden announced Friday will create 20,800 direct jobs, with 6,400 of those being permanent, according to the White House. The other hubs will generate similar job gains.
In addition to economic benefits, the hydrogen hubs will bring play a key role in reducing emissions in industries that are challenging to decarbonize and bring America closer to achieving President Biden’s goal of cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution by 50-52% from 2005 levels by 2030.
Together, the seven new hydrogen hubs will create more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually and eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emission from end uses each year. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined emissions of more than 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars.