Water Footprint of Green Hydrogen in California

Executive Summary:
For my leadership project, I served as the lead author of the Luskin Center for Innovation’s report, “Exploring the Water Footprint of “Green” Hydrogen for Power Generation in California: Equity Implications, Pitfalls, and Open Questions”. This project was done under my Graduate Student Research Fellowship with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. This study examines the water demands associated with green hydrogen in California, particularly for hydrogen combustion in power generation. With support from Lauren Dunlap and Greg Pierce, we analyzed publicly available data, reviewed scientific literature, and estimated potential water use under various production and energy scenarios.
While green hydrogen is often promoted as a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, advocates and researchers have raised concerns about its significant water requirements—especially in drought-prone California. Motivated by these concerns, we investigated the technical and logistical demands of producing and using green hydrogen. Our findings show that electrolysis-based hydrogen production, as proposed in California, requires substantial volumes of ultrapure water. This could threaten water affordability and availability in already water-stressed communities. Despite increasing investment, limited public transparency on project locations, water sourcing, and purification costs hinders a full understanding of local impacts. Our projections suggest that by 2045, hydrogen production in California could consume up to 390,000 acre-feet of water annually. Although this is less than water use for natural gas production, the localized impacts could still exacerbate existing environmental injustices and threaten the human right to water.
For this project, I led the literature review and writing for most of the report. I consolidated recurring themes of stakeholder concerns and identified analytical factors in literature to support our estimation of the water footprint of the California Hydrogen Hub. I also critically assessed the limitations of publicly available information. Throughout this process, it became clear that green hydrogen—especially at the scale envisioned in California—is poorly understood and largely untested. For me, this work contributes important context to broader discussions around global energy security and climate goals.

Importance:
Since the announcement of the California Hydrogen Hub, which is meant to replace natural gas with hydrogen to support California’s climate goals, the process has been moving quickly with very little transparency and lack of address to community concerns on safety and impacts on drinking water supplies. This report provides context and answers to some of the concerns of environmental policy advocates, and contribute to the larger discussion of whether or not hydrogen is truly a climate solution for California. Fortunately for me, my advisory, Greg Pierce, gave me the autonomy to research any topic that I was interested in. As the former Research and policy Manager for Physicians for Social for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, the topic of hydrogen in California was still in its infancy and little information was available (in terms of the available literature or data). Therefore this topic wasn’t just one that I was interested in, but was one that I knew policy advocates were already working on and needed more information. With little academic literature on the topic, this gave us the opportunity to contribute to the discussion and perhaps move the needle in the way of supporting and protecting local water supplies.

Impact and Reach:
The project was published on UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation’s website and has been via social media channels. This project was meant to provide insights for policy makers, community advocates, and hydrogen project leads so they can make better informed decisions on the future of hydrogen in California. We can tell it was upsetting for the hydrogen industry as we have received a letter criticizing our work. I’m pretty proud of that. We have also received messages of thanks by water and environmental justice advocates thanking us for our report, and have expressed quoting our report in public comments in hydrogen policy spaces. Measuring the impact of our report is still yet to be determined, but knowing that our report is being reviewed is good news for us.

Collaborations:
I am a Luskin Center for Innovation Graduate Student Research Fellow, so this report done and completed through my fellowship obligations. Under the guidance of Greg Pierce, and support from Lauren Dunlap, I was able to take the time to really go down the rabbit hold on the topic and was able to help inform the projection models. Lauren, who did our modeling, and I collaborated consistently to ensure that our model was reflective of logistical and technical requirements for producing and using hydrogen in California. Furthermore, my relationships with environmental justice advocates were crucial as they were able to provide us with enough context to hit the ground running on what information we needed to seek out and what questions needed answering. We were also able to identify industry and public agency personnel whom we reached out to, however, due to the sensitive/secret nature of the California Hydrogen Hub, we were unable to incorporate their perspectives in our report.

Your Role Well Defined:
For this project, I led the literature review and writing for most of the report. I consolidated recurring themes of stakeholder concerns and identified analytical factors in literature to support our estimation of the water footprint of the California Hydrogen Hub. I also critically assessed the limitations of publicly available information. Together, I wrote most of the report with support from Lauren with her data analysis contributions, and Greg’s overall guidance on the flow and narrative framing.

Optional Next Steps:
This report provides crucial insight on the topic of hydrogen in California and its potential implications on water supply. As the Director of Policy and Research for Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, and public health and environmental justice advocate organization, I will likely continue to engage on hydrogen policy in California for the purposes of protecting California communities, and informing policy makers on hydrogen in California.