California lawmakers continue to side with environmental advocates in a push to exclude dairy methane from the production of hydrogen fuel. State agencies, independent budget analysts and multiple research studies have found digesters are the most cost-effective solution to reducing short-lived climate pollutants, creating a pathway for rapidly cutting overall greenhouse gas emissions in the fight against climate change.
Lawmakers have adhered to environmental justice arguments that incentivizing digesters creates more local air pollution for socially disadvantaged communities and leads to industry consolidation, claims recently debunked by the California Air Resources Board. That reasoning led policy committees in the Legislature to significantly water down a bill that initially aimed to boost hydrogen production to meet California’s clean energy goals and tap into federal funding.
After several rounds of amendments, Senate Bill 1420 was signed into law last week as a measure to streamline environmental permitting for certain hydrogen projects.
An earlier version had attempted to define clean hydrogen in line with the state’s own standards. That contrasted with the U.S. Treasury Department’s proposal to prohibit methane from hydrogen production in its tax credits, a set of rules known as the three pillars. The debate over digesters consumed the conversation on the legislation.
“SB 1420 is a roadmap for heavily polluting hydrogen production to be greenwashed as clean,” said Sasan Saadat, a policy advocate at Earthjustice testifying against SB 1420 in a committee hearing. “It would greenlight the process of taking gray hydrogen made from fossil fuel — and that's made in California's refinery communities — and merely pairing it with unbundled biogas credits from out-of-state factory farms or landfills.”
Sen. Anna Caballero, D-MercedEarthjustice and other advocacy groups have urged policymakers to instead embrace the more expensive electrolytic hydrogen option, produced strictly from solar or wind power. Several lawmakers echoed the comments.
“When it comes to the greenwashing side of this, we have to be careful,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, D-Glendale. “I do have concerns still around using, for instance, livestock refuse. I get that we have a lot of it and we want to use it for good things. But do we end up perpetuating things that have a huge environmental footprint, like giant dairies, like more grazing of cattle?”
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Friedman called dairy farms “a terrible use of land” and argued they have “huge climate impacts.” She pushed for the bill to acknowledge that and to set guardrails prohibiting methane captured at dairies or landfills.
The first committee to hear AB 1420 had acting on those concerns, amending the bill to add a definition of hydrogen that prohibited the use of fossil fuels as feedstock. A subsequent committee removed the definition and then another sought to add the clause back in.
Teresa Cooke, executive director of the California Hydrogen Coalition, put those calls to rest. She described the definition as a “backdoor requirement for the three pillars.” Throughout the hearings, Senator Anna Caballero, D-Merced, stressed her bill instead supports the Newsom administration’s position on hydrogen and its push for a federal exemption from the three pillars.
Caballero repeatedly defended AB 1420 against the environmental arguments. She also accused staff in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee of incorporating inaccuracies and misstatements in their analysis of the bill.
“Let me just make it very clear that fossil fuels are excluded,” said Caballero, asserting that digester methane is not a fossil fuel. “I don't know why people keep talking about it.”
She argued dairy farms “get a really bad rap” and passed around a fact sheet to educate her colleagues on the issue.
“If you believe dairy farms have gotten bigger because of methane and dairy digesters, you've been sold a bill of goods,” she said. “They have gotten bigger because we have put so many regulations on them that the small farmers have gone out of business.”
Cooke lashed back at critics as well.
“It's worth noting that we do not add all of these additionalities when we talk about permitting of solar and wind,” she said, noting later that the Legislature has put less scrutiny on streamlining permits for sports stadiums.
Despite the significant amendments to SB 1420, Caballero has held steadfast to the cause, describing her pursuit — to plant the seeds for hydrogen production in the San Joaquin Valley — as an ongoing passion project. She has worried about the race to build largescale solar development on farmland fallowed under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
“It will absolutely devastate communities of color. It will run the small businesses out of their towns,” she said. “When we start replacing agricultural communities with industrial-sized solar to their exclusion, there's no work.”
Caballero, reflecting on the battles over SB 1420 as “not my first rodeo,” vowed to return next session with a new bill to “have this conversation all over again.”
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