TotalEnergies and a Belgian energy start-up plan to build a $2bn plant in the US to produce synthetic natural gas, underscoring how President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is drawing clean energy infrastructure investment away from Europe and towards the United States.
The plant, which will probably be in Texas, will use wind and solar power to make hydrogen that will be combined with carbon dioxide to create synthetic methane — which has essentially the same chemical structure as natural gas.
Marco Alverà, chief executive of Tree Energy Solutions, which is focused on the production of green hydrogen, said the incentives provided by the IRA had accelerated the project by several years.