Calling this a green move is somewhat misleading. I think the author pretty much read the marketing copy on Bloom’s website, which doesn’t present the full picture.
tl;dr: This is a great step towards building infrastructure which can bridge the gap between fossil and renewable fuels, but as the technology stands this currently cannot be a renewably-fuelled system. This is important but the article buries the lede as to why: it helps to smooth our transition to renewable hydrogen when it becomes available.
Bloom bills their cells as “low or no CO”, which is kind of true. I’m going to focus on the effects on CO2 emissions here, but Bloom also talks about reducing water consumption and particulate emissions, which are very valid benefits. The article states that the data center will be powered by natural gas, with the hope of transitioning to hydrogen in the future, so let’s talk briefly about how fuel cells interact with natural gas.
Solid oxide fuel cells perform internal steam reformation of natural gas (DOE source), where if air is used as the oxygen source, methane and water are converted to H2 and carbon monoxide (DOE source). Yes, that does decrease the amount of CO2 produced, but CO is an objectively worse byproduct. The only realistic thing they can turn it into is CO2 via a water-gas shift reaction (which is standard for methane reformation), so a fuel cell still produces one CO2 per methane oxidized. These do decrease CO2 emissions, but only because they also slightly reduce the amount of methane which must be consumed to generate a certain amount of electrical energy, not due to a fundamental difference in how they process carbon.
Now, moving to hydrogen is a great goal, and that flexibility in fuel is the real progress story here. However, if they’re talking about moving to hydrogen in the near future, the only technique currently capable of generating H2 on an industrial scale is the same steam-reformation process which is happening in the fuel cells when they operate on natural gas. Unfortunately, we simply do not have any renewable methods for making hydrogen currently (98% of all hydrogen produced in the world is via coal gasification or steam-reformation of methane).
A small caveat to this is that if the data center was able to source biogas from a fermentor, this would help in at least closing our carbon cycle, i.e. only recycling carbon which is already in the carbon cycle.
Don’t get me wrong, building this datacenter with fuel cells is a worthwhile thing to do, but not for the reasons that this article (or the Bloom website) suggests. It does not substantially reduce CO2 emissions, even if it is run on hydrogen. However, the important thing that it does do is reduce the barrier for switching to green hydrogen when it becomes available, which is super important! The biggest issue when renewable hydrogen becomes practical will be the infrastructural expense of transitioning to an entirely new fuel source, and we’re currently not prepared for that transition–this is a step in the right direction.
Thanks for coming to my TED rant! Hope this is helpful or interesting to y’all.