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The Energy Department has finalized a $504 million loan guarantee to a low-carbon hydrogen project, marking the agency’s first completion of a new award in eight years, according to POLITICO Pro’s ENERGYWIRE (subscription).

What’s happening: “The Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES) project, as it’s known, bundles together renewable-powered production of hydrogen with the creation of what DOE called ‘the largest clean hydrogen storage facility in the world’—an underground salt cavern in Delta, Utah.”

• The stored hydrogen would be sold for transportation and heavy industry use and would also be used at the Intermountain Power Project, a Utah power plant that will “blend a rising proportion of hydrogen into gas turbines, until the fuel powers 100 percent of the system in 2045.”
• DOE’s Loan Programs Office first gave a conditional award to the project in April.

“All of the above” approach: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) applauded the move, calling it part of an “all of the above” energy approach.

• “On the federal level, decarbonizing hydrogen production and scaling up its use has gotten bipartisan support. Last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, for instance, laid out $8 billion for creating large-scale demonstrations,” according to ENERGYWIRE. 

Growing popularity: The U.S. is seeing increasing numbers of hydrogen-powered energy-generation projects.

• “Over 8 gigawatts worth of planned hydrogen-fired power generation projects were announced last year in the U.S., according to a factbook from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Half of the projects are aiming for 100 percent hydrogen by 2045, like the ACES site.”