Trump List of Saved Projects Spares $5 Billion Hydrogen Hubs

BioChemicals/Renewable Chemicals Business News/Analysis Energy (DOE)Federal Agency/Executive Branch Funding/Financing/Investing Opinions Policy

April 20, 2026

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by Ari Natter (Bloomberg/MSN) The Trump administration plans to preserve billions of dollars in funding for hydrogen ventures and other projects previously earmarked for termination. An Energy Department list that includes proposals backed by oil companies, utilities and others was provided to House Appropriations Committee members Wednesday and details roughly 2,000 funding awards the agency plans to “retain or modify.”

Included on the 39-page list seen by Bloomberg is almost $5 billion previously awarded by the Biden administration for five so-called hydrogen hubs — broad networks of producers and consumers in Texas, Appalachia, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest — and backed by companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Exelon Corp.

The hydrogen projects, which include ventures involving Chevron Corp., EQT Corp. and Bloom Energy Corp., were included last year in a list of roughly $12 billion in energy projects that the Trump administration was considering cancelling. The Biden administration awarded $7 billion for the ventures, meant to jump start production of the clean-burning fuel in the US in 2023.

Also revived were a pair of direct-air capture projects that had been selected by the Biden administration to split $1.2 billion: one from Occidental Petroleum Corp. and another from Climeworks AG and Heirloom Carbon Technologies Inc. Those developments are intended to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air.

...

The department initiated a case-by-case review of some $15 billion in grants awarded by the previous administration in May and has since announced plans to cancel billions of projects, including $7.6 billion in Democrat-led states.

The majority of those cuts are moving forward including plans to slash billions in funding for a pair of West coast hydrogen hubs.

“Energy prices are rising,” Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, said at the appropriations hearing Wednesday. “This is the moment to invest in American innovation not throttle it.” READ MORE

Related articles

Trump Administration Preserves Federal Funding For US DAC And Hydrogen Hubs (Carbon Herald)
DOE revives 18 canceled Biden-era projects -- The 18 projects the department re-instated represent more than $660 million in investment (Politico Pro Greenwire)
Scoop: DOE sends a list of ‘retained’ projects to Congress (Latitude Media)
DOE to issue Biden-era project awards after high-level review (E&E News)

Excerpt from Carbon Herald: The reportedly 39-page-long list of preserved awards contains five major US hydrogen hubs, including ventures linked to Chevron Corp., EQT Corp., and Bloom Energy Corp., as well as the two largest DAC hubs in the United States—Project Cypress in Louisiana, a joint initiative between Heirloom, Climeworks, and Battelle; and the South Texas DAC hub in Kleberg County, Texas, developed by Occidental’s 1PointFive, with technology by Carbon Engineering.

Under the Biden administration, the two large-scale DAC hubs were selected to split a federal award of $1.2 billion. The wave of DOE awards cancellations in the fall of 2025 left the fate of this funding uncertain, raising concerns that it too might be slashed.

...

Carbon Removal Alliance Executive Director Giana Amador said that some of the DAC projects included in the list of preserved initiatives were notified in recent days of the development.

In a publication, she highlighted that “this outcome was far from guaranteed,” adding, “This is a step in the right direction, but what’s important now is that these projects get built. That means steel in the ground, agreements honored, and clarity so our companies can do what they do best: build.”

...

While the DOE has confirmed the list of preserved awards, it has not provided any additional information on how the funding awards might be modified going forward. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro Greenwire: The Department of Energy is reinstating 18 awards that were previously canceled by the Trump administration, according to a new analysis.

The findings from a bipartisan DOE alumni group provide new details on a list of more than $23 billion in "retained" and "modified" Biden-era awards sent to Congress this week. DOE has said it is advancing most grants that were under review, but the list includes at least 247 awards that were already being closed out.

The list also suggests an ongoing pattern of favoring grants in red states versus blue states with some programs, according to the network, a group launched last year.

"It is also unclear what types of ‘modifications’ may be proposed by DOE for grantees to keep existing grants," said the analysis, which was co-authored by Tarak Shah, former DOE chief of staff during the Biden administration.

DOE told Congress it reviewed 2,271 projects overall and retained 86 percent of them. In October, DOE canceled roughly $7.5 billion in projects, largely in blue states. A federal judge later ruled that DOE acted illegally in terminating projects mainly in states won by former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election. READ MORE

Excerpt from Latitude Media: A small number of awards — less than 1% of the list — appear to have previously received official termination notices from DOE. Those 18 projects appeared in October on the department’s official cancellation list of around 320 awards, which primarily targeted companies based in Democrat-led states. Most stemmed from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, though a handful were funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Apparently reinstated awards include 13 previously-cancelled projects under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Program, which DOE recently rebranded as the SPARK program, and reopened for another round of funding.

Most projects on the list sent to Congress today had not received any termination notice from DOE, nor had they appeared on any of the lists of “threatened” projects that circulated last year. Some projects on the list have already been completed and are in the midst of closing out their awards.

More notable is what’s not on the list. The vast majority of the projects that lost their funding last year have not been reinstated. Most are still in limbo, waiting for DOE to process and respond to their informal disputes.

Several of DOE’s largest projects awarded to Democrat-led states remain terminated, including the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub and the Arches Hydrogen Hub in California. The five remaining Hubs, located in Delaware, Ohio, North Dakota, Maryland, and the Gulf Coast, are tagged for retention or modification. Both the Delaware and Maryland Hubs had been recommended for termination last spring, alongside the Pacific Northwest and California Hubs.

Uncertainty continues

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about this new list. For example, it’s not clear which projects are being “modified,” and what those modifications might entail. Meanwhile, though DOE reinstated several projects after losing a federal lawsuit led by the City of St. Paul, most of those are not on the list sent to Congress. (Those seven projects did receive official notices of reinstatement this spring.)

The list itself comes after 15 months of delay and disruption for most DOE grantees, which has created deep uncertainty among private sector and academic partners alike around the federal government’s future role in U.S. energy innovation.

It’s also unclear whether the stalled or canceled projects on this new list will be able to move forward as planned. Widespread layoffs and departures of career staff across the agency have left questions about whether offices have the bandwidth to manage remaining projects. The year-long pause on funding has already had serious ramifications for many projects, with some awardees choosing to abandon their grants altogether, make layoffs, and even file for bankruptcy.

The cancellations themselves are part of a broader pattern of slowed and abandoned energy innovation funding at DOE, according to an analysis by the agency’s Alumni Network. That includes a significant drop in the number of new funding opportunities made available to applicants in the last year — the administration opened just eight in 2025 compared to the prior average of 50 — as well as in new obligations. The agency also appears to have abandoned a number of open funding opportunities, without selecting awardees or identifying applicants that the program was being shuttered. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News: The list also includes funding for some priorities that President Donald Trump has railed against, including hundreds of millions of dollars for automakers like General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automotive to convert at-risk auto plants in Michigan into EV manufacturing hubs. The compendium also includes air capture and carbon capture and storage projects. READ MORE