On December 23, 2021, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) announced that it would guarantee a loan of up to $1.04 billion to Monolith Nebraska LLC to scale up the production of hydrogen at its Olive Creek facility in Hallam, Nebraska.[1] According to the LPO, the expansion will create approximately 1,000 jobs during construction and 75 “high-paying, highly skilled, clean energy jobs” for facility operations. The LPO said that the company must meet certain conditions before a final loan is issued, though it did not specify what these conditions will be. The announcement is the office’s first conditional commitment to be offered to a non-nuclear project since 2016. According to the DOE, it is likely to be the first of many such awards in 2022.

The Monolith Olive Creek project is the first-ever commercial-scale project to use methane pyrolysis technology, which produces carbon black and hydrogen from natural gas. Monolith aims to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during carbon black and hydrogen production by up to 80% compared to traditional methods. Carbon black is a type of soot that is widely used to reinforce and improve the performance of tires and other rubber products. It is also used in the production of plastics, dyes, and inks. Tire producers like Michelin and Goodyear are pledging to cut their own emissions footprints by sourcing their carbon black from Monolith.[2] The hydrogen produced at the Olive Creek facility will be used for cleanly made ammonia fertilizer and sold to agricultural buyers.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/open-business-lpo-issues-new-conditional-commitment-loan-guarantee

[2] https://monolith-corp.com/news/monolith-receives-conditional-approval-for-a-one-billion-dollar-us-department-of-energy-loan