Summary Of The Project

Title: “Hydrogen Education for a Decarbonized Global Economy”
Applicant: Electric Power Research Institute, Inc. (EPRI)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Eladio Knipping
Co-Investigator: Dr. Krystal York
Major Participants: GTI Energy, Oregon State University, University of Delaware, University of Houston, Embedded Assessments, and Cavendish Energy.

Objectives of the Project:

The Hydrogen Education for a Decarbonized Global Economy (H2EDGE ) initiative will advance emerging hydrogen workforce by developing newly trained personnel, and enabling the existing workforce to migrate into the hydrogen field by way of enhanced industry coordination and workforce readiness initiatives, made possible by training, education, and recruitment of qualified people.

Description of the Project:

Clean hydrogen technology is rapidly developing as an option to help decarbonize our energy system, potentially leading to vast new employment opportunities across a wide variety of industries with a range of skills and earnings potential. Many of these jobs do not currently exist and do not have occupational titles defined in official classifications. In addition, many of these roles would require different education and skills than current jobs. As a result, training requirements must be assessed so that this rapidly growing part of the economy has a sufficient supply of qualified, educated, trained workers. Educating a hydrogen industry workforce in new practices, equipment, and standards is essential for enabling hydrogen’s potential role in decarbonization.

GTI Energy and Partner Universities have created the H2EDGE initiative to develop and train a workforce for the emerging hydrogen technology industry and its end-use applications. The content provided will address workforce development skills in the four key technical pillars that form the basis for the hydrogen industry: 1) production, 2) delivery, 3) storage, and 4) end-use with safety as a foundation woven through each pillar. The project team will develop each technical pillar from training needs throughout the pipeline of the workforce. The approach will be multi-pronged across several categories; longevity of career, diversity in delivery mechanism and regional and national availability. The training resources developed for the project include both university curricula and professional training materials.

EPRI will use a variety of past, present, and developing activities for training tomorrow’s energy workforce on safe and economic hydrogen technology production, transportation, storage and usage assets. Beginning in 2013, EPRI set out to develop and build a workforce development program and infrastructure to support the growth for development of the next generation of electric power engineers. The effort was focused on integrating renewable energy technology into the grid of the future which led to the creation of the Center for Grid Engineering Education (GridEd). It has become a sustaining training & education (T&E) infrastructure. In 2017 EPRI’s Board of Directors invested in an operating infrastructure to sustain the T&E initiatives across EPRI in support of the industry thorough a system known as EPRI University (EPRI|U). Further, in early 2020, EPRI in partnership with the GTI Energy launched a $100M+ commitment to advance and facilitate technologies to enable deep decarbonization beyond 2030 called the Low-Carbon Resources Initiative (LCRI). EPRI has added three Partner Universities to its H2EDGE team to have a full spectrum of participants: Oregon State University, University of Delaware and University of Houston.

In addition, H2EDGE will build a university network which is led by the Partner Universities and then expanded with Affiliate universities. Affiliate Universities are industry sponsored to build a long-term sustainable relationship. As a part of the university network, H2EDGE has added a special category of Affiliate universities that focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). For information about the Affiliate University program, please contact Eladio Knipping (eknipping@epri.com) and Krystal York (kyork@epri.com).

The addition of Federal funding will accelerate the process of training a hydrogen technology workforce by producing training materials which is challenging to secure through private investment. Further, DOE’s involvement will stimulate national awareness of the potential impact that hydrogen may play in a decarbonized economy.