Port Houston secures $3M from EPA program to fund green initiatives, clean tech

money moves

The grant, funded by the federal Inflation Reduction Act, will help promote cleaner air, reduced emissions, and green jobs. Photo via Getty Images

Port Houston’s PORT SHIFT program is receiving nearly $3 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Ports Program.

The grant, funded by the federal Inflation Reduction Act, will help promote cleaner air, reduced emissions, and green jobs.

“With its ambitious PORT SHIFT program, Houston is taking a bold step toward a cleaner, more sustainable future, and I’m proud to have helped make this possible by voting for the Inflation Reduction Act,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia says in a news release.

“PORT SHIFT is about more than moving cargo — it’s about building a port that’s prepared for the future and a community that’s healthier and stronger,” Garcia adds. “With investments in zero-emission trucks, cleaner cargo handling, workforce training, and community engagement, Port Houston is setting the standard for what ports across America can accomplish.”

Joaquin Martinez, a member of the Houston City Council, says one of the benefits of the grant will be ensuring power readiness for all seven wharves at the Bayport Container Terminal.

The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $3 billion to the EPA’s Clean Ports Program to fund zero-emission equipment and climate planning at U.S. ports.

From Your Site Articles

The Goodwill Clean Tech Accelerator is a partnership between Goodwill and Accenture that will equip participants with employability and technical skills for entry-level jobs across the energy transition. Photo via Getty Images

Green jobs accelerator to launch to Houston, other cities with corporate and nonprofit partnership

growing the workforce

A major nonprofit and a worldwide corporate leader have teamed up to advance clean tech jobs.

The program launch next year in Houston, as well as in Atlanta, Nashville, and Detroit, as the two organizations announced in at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Talent Forward event. According to Accenture and Goodwill, the plan is to grow the program to 20 cities in the next seven years and train an estimated 7,000 job seekers.

"As our labor market transitions, we see important opportunities for people to move into more promising roles with better pay. It is essential that we provide the training and other support needed to ensure people capture these opportunities," Steve Preston, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International, says in the release. "The Goodwill Clean Tech Accelerator will open doors for people in an expanding industry and provide support to employers who are helping us transition to a more sustainable world."

The accelerator is targeting a specific set of advanced energy jobs — the 40 percent that don't require college degrees and and pay more than the median salary in the United States.

"The clean energy transition is demanding new sources of talent who understand clean tech and can apply that knowledge to achieve decarbonization," Manish Sharma, CEO of Accenture North America, shares in the statement. "Through the Goodwill Clean Tech Accelerator, we're proud to unlock skilling opportunities that are accessible to everyone, benefitting workers, industry and our local communities."

The program, which was co-designed by Accenture, will be run by Goodwill. Participants identified as under and unemployed individuals and accepted into the program will be compensated as they undergo the training and career placement services.

Beginning through an Accenture Corporate Citizenship investment, the accelerator is based on experience from Skills to Succeed. GRID Alternatives, ChargerHelp! and BlocPower are additional training partners for the program, with more to be announced as the initiative is scaled.

According to the facts, Houston's energy transition is moving in the right direction. Photo via Getty Images

Report: Houston's energy transition economy sees momentum, including $6.1B in financing in 2022

Houston facts

In Houston, the energy transition movement is in full effect — at least, according to the facts and figures from a recently released report.

The Greater Houston Partnership released its 2023 Houston Facts report, which analyzes the business community across sectors. The report highlights the fact that last year Houston's energy transition brought in $6.1 billion in financing from private market investments, which represents a 61.9 percent increase compared to 2021.

"Over the last five years, Houston has seen constant growth in annual energy transition investments, with a notable surge observed from 2020 onwards," reads the report.

Corporate and strategic merger and acquisition investments are what dominated the five deal types, according to the report, representing 68.8 percent of the total investment in 2022. Additionally, private equity accounted for 19.3 percent of all deals, with venture capital comprising 9.5 percent.

Source: GHP analysis of data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP)

According to Houston Facts, there are 550 Houston-based energy transition companies working in battery/energy storage, biofuels, carbon capture, use, and storage, circular economy, and other energy value chains.

The report also looked at clean energy job growth, which increased from 66,047 professionals in the Houston metro area in 2021 to projected increase to 71,305 jobs in 2022. The fastest growing type of clean energy job is within energy efficiency, a section that accounts for 68.1 percent of total clean energy employment last year, which increased 28.2 percent from 2021. Additionally, clean vehicle employment also saw a 14.7 percent increase while job counts in grid and storage and clean fuel applications declined notably in 2022, per the report.

Compared nationally, personal finance website SmartAsset recently ranked the Houston metro area as the fifth best place in the U.S. for green jobs, which pay an average of 21 percent more than other jobs. The SmartAsset study found that 2.23 percent of workers in the Houston area hold down jobs classified as “green.”

Source: GHP analysis and estimates of data from the U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER) and The Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), BW Research Partnership (BWRP) and E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs)

The report also analyzed Houston's progress when it comes to emissions. Here are some of the Houston Facts on emission data from the U.S. Environment Protection Agency and the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program:

Houston's power plant sector was as the largest greenhouse gas emitter with 43.2 percent of the region's total industrial emissions, and the sector has had an overall increasing trend over the past few years.
With 27.5 percent of industrial emissions, the chemicals sector came in No. 2, but the sector peaked in 2018, slightly declined in 2019, and have remained relatively constant through 2021.
Refineries ranked third, with for 21.2 percent of emissions, and have remained stable without notable increase over the past few years.
Petroleum and natural gas sector emissions have consistently increased since 2012, except for 2017. That year, Houston's overall emission rate reached its lowest point in the past decade at 225.1 mtCO2e.
Currently, Houston's emission rate is slightly below the highest point of the past ten years, which was 243.2 mtCO2e recorded in 2012.

Houston Facts, as well as other reports and resources, is available on GHP's website.

Houston ranks in the top five cities for green jobs, which pay on average 21 percent more than other jobs. Photo via Getty Images

Report: Houston recognized in the top 5 cities for green jobs

clean tech biz

Green jobs are generating more green — aka money — for workers in the Houston area.

Personal finance website SmartAsset recently ranked the Houston metro area as the fifth best place in the U.S. for green jobs, which pay an average of 21 percent more than other jobs. The SmartAsset study found that 2.23 percent of workers in the Houston area hold down jobs classified as “green.”

“Houston is known as being an energy hub, especially for oil. So this metro area ranking fifth may surprise some people. However, the green industry is pretty big around Houston, too,” says SmartAsset.

Topping the SmartAsset list is Dallas, followed by Denver; Newark, New Jersey; Oakland, California; and Houston.

The release of the SmartAsset study preceded a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy showing Texas added slightly more than 5,100 jobs in clean energy from 2021 to 2022. That’s a gain of 3.5 percent. Last year, Texas boasted a little over 396,000 jobs in the clean energy sector, the report says.

In the energy sector as a whole, Texas added the most jobs (nearly 51,000) of any state from 2021 to 2022, followed by California (almost 21,200), and Pennsylvania (nearly 15,200), according to the DOE report.

To determine the best places for green jobs, SmartAsset crunched data for the 50 largest U.S. metro areas that included the percentage of workers holding down green jobs, the average earnings for green jobs, and the average green worker’s earnings compared with the average worker’s earnings.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supplies two definitions for green jobs:

Jobs in businesses that provide goods or provide services benefiting the environment or conserving natural resources.
Jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their employers’ processes more environmentally friendly.

The bureau lists these as the 10 highest-paying green jobs (followed by the median annual pay in 2021):

Biochemist or biophysicist, $102,270
Materials scientist, $100,090
Environmental engineer, $96,820
Atmospheric scientist, $94,570
Hydrologist, $84,030
Geoscientist, $83,680
Chemist, $79,430
Microbiologist, $79,260
Environmental scientist, $76,530
Conversation scientist, $63,750

Even though many green jobs in the U.S. are in renewable energy, that sector remains smaller than the traditional oil and gas industry, according to a recent report from career website LinkedIn. However, the growth of U.S. job postings in renewable energy (69 percent) surpassed the growth of job postings in the oil and gas industry (57) during the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022.

Globally, the growing demand for green-job skills is “outpacing the increase in supply, raising the prospect of an imminent green skills shortage,” the LinkedIn report says.

Among the sectors seeking workers with those skills are solar and wind power. Texas tallied almost 11,800 solar energy jobs and nearly 25,500 wind energy jobs in 2021, according to a DOE report.

Some observers believe Texas is positioned to become the world’s clean energy capital — and home to thousands more green jobs — with Houston poised to lead the way.

“Industry leaders believe the [Houston] region’s relatively high concentration of engineering talent, a solid base of support services for complex, large-scale offshore and onshore drilling projects, and legacy oil and gas infrastructure can be leveraged to assist in the energy transition and decarbonization,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas says in a 2022 report.

Ad Placement 300x100

Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Houston researchers land four projects in DOE's Genesis Mission

federal funding

The U.S. Department of Energy has named the nearly 300 projects selected under the Trump Administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to address some of the largest science and technology challenges in the country. The group features four projects from Houston universities and companies.

The initiative aims to unite government, industry, academia and philanthropy to lead to breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security, according to a release.

The selected projects feature 87 led by DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) National Laboratories, 168 led by universities, 19 led by companies and 4 led by nonprofit organizations—totalling 342 participating institutions.

“America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a news release. “The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio.”

Twelve Texas-based projects were selected among the 278. The Houston projects and their researchers include:

Caroline Ajo-Franklin

Ajo-Franklin recieved a Phase I grant for her project "Predictive AI to Map Point Mutation Effects on Protein Function: Measurement and Biosynthesis of Isoprenoids." Ajo-Franklin is a professor of biosciences at Rice University, a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research and member of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute. The project aims to accelerate the engineering of microbes that can produce isoprenoids, which are natural compounds that could replace petroleum-derived fuels, solvents and materials.

“This project creates a continuous feedback loop in which AI guides experiments and each experiment generates more detailed data to better hone the AI model,” Ajo-Franklin said in a news release. “In addition, it demonstrates the extraordinary star power Rice has recruited in protein engineering and synthetic biology.”

Anastasios Kyrillidis

Kyrillidis recived a Phase I grant for his project "Cracking the VQA Optimization Bottleneck: AI Methods for Quantum Chemistry and Materials." Kyrillidis is the Noah Harding Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rice and a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute. The project aims to develop AI tools to resolve bottlenecks in quantum computing for chemistry and materials research.

“Our goal is to replace fragile, hand-tuned optimization methods with intelligent systems that can learn from quantum computations while still operating within frameworks that provide strong mathematical guarantees,” Kyrillidis added in the release.

Myoungkyu Lee

Lee received a nearly $750,000 Phase I grant for his project "Physics-Informed AI Surrogates for Turbulent Forced Convection in Energy System." Lee is an assistant professor of mechanical aerospace engineering at the University of Houston. Lee will collaborate with researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Pennsylvania on the project and develop artificial intelligence to accelerate the design of materials for advanced nuclear fission and fusion reactors.

“The goal is to develop a tool that runs much faster than today’s most detailed simulations while keeping errors small,” Lee said in a news release. “If successful, the approach could support better heat-transfer predictions for molten-salt reactor design and provide a starting point for studying heat removal in fusion blankets. This is one contribution among many toward reliable, carbon-free energy.”

Amit Padhi

Padhi recieved a grant for his project "Probabilistic Inference of Subsurface Fracture Connectivity for Stimulation Control with Physics-Informed AI." Padhi is a scientific advisor for Halliburton.

The DOE first called for applications for the Genesis Mission in March. At the time, the DOE shared that it would grant approximately $293 million to the selected teams via Phase I awards, ranging from $500,000 to $750,000 for nine-month project periods, and Phase II awards, for $6 million to $15 million over a three-year project period.

Since then, however, the initiative has grown with 15 federal agencies now granting research awards and funding opportunities under the Genesis umbrella. The White House announced this week that it had secured more than $5 billion in federal commitments to expand the initiative.

SLB teams with Liberty Energy on modular power for AI data centers

ai alliance

Houston-headquartered SLB and Denver-based Liberty Energy Inc. announced a strategic agreement this month to support the rapid growth of new data center capacity.

Under the agreement, SLB will supply modular data center infrastructure and oversee large-scale execution, while Liberty will provide modular power generation systems and behind-the-meter power management technology for developers looking to add capacity. According to Reuters, the power will come from natural gas generation.

“The bottleneck in AI infrastructure is no longer just compute. It is the ability to deliver infrastructure and power on the timelines the market now demands,” Gavin Rennick, president of SLB’s New Energy and Industrial business, said in a news release. “By bringing together complementary infrastructure and power capabilities, we will help developers accelerate deployment of new data center capacity.”

The companies seek to specifically offer the modular technologies in areas without traditional grid connections or where grid capacity is limited.

They also aim to improve the "efficiency, flexibility and environmental performance of future data center energy systems," potentially through solutions like hybrid power systems and digital energy management, according to the news release.

Goldman Sachs estimates that U.S. data center capacity will more than double from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts in 2027. Other reports predict that Houston and Texas will be home to a significant portion of the data center boom, with capacity in the city and the state also expected to double in the next few years.

“The scale and complexity of AI energy infrastructure is fundamentally changing how power systems are built and deployed,” Ron Gusek, CEO of Liberty Energy, added in the release. “Liberty’s comprehensive power service platform is engineered to meet this transition, as customers increasingly prioritize tailored, integrated solutions. Building on our long-standing relationship with SLB, we are excited to bring power solutions that address immediate capacity constraints while supporting the next generation of energy systems.”

SLB sold its onshore hydraulic fracturing business in the United States and Canada to Liberty Energy in December 2020 in exchange for a 37 percent equity interest in the company.

New Rice study details how carbon capture could reduce AI data center emissions

by the numbers

A new study out of Rice University points to carbon capture and storage methods as pivotal solutions to addressing emissions from AI-driven data centers.

The study was authored by Hon Chung Lau, an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University and founder of Low Carbon Energies LLC, and Steve C. Tsai, an energy transition consultant at Low Carbon Energies LLC, and published in the journal Energy & Fuels.

According to the study, U.S. data center power capacity could more than quadruple in five years, growing from 40 gigawatts in 2025 to 169 gigawatts by 2030. Without proper regulation of emissions, the report estimates that carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fuel power plants supplying electricity to data centers could grow at the same scale, increasing from 90 million metric tons to more than 404 million metric tons over the same time period.

The researchers analyzed publicly available data on announced U.S. data centers, which included energy sources, locations, and projected power capacity before estimating data center-related carbon emissions based on each state’s electricity mix. From there, they examined whether those emissions could be captured and stored underground in saline aquifers.

The team estimates that 34 states have enough saline aquifer storage capacity to store more than 100 years of projected data center-related carbon dioxide emissions beyond 2030. Aquifers could store an estimated 59 million metric tons of data center-related carbon dioxide, or about 66 percent of the sector’s emissions in 2025. However, that calculation could grow to 299 million metric tons, or about 74 percent of projected data center-related emissions by 2030.

The researchers found that more than 90 percent of data center-related carbon dioxide emissions could potentially be mitigated through carbon capture and storage when out-of-state storage options are included, even though they note that carbon capture isn’t the only solution.

“It does show that the geology exists to make a meaningful impact, especially in states where data center growth is strongest,” Lau said in a news release.

Rapid growth in states including Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Illinois was considered in the study. According to the findings, Texas would need to add 25 gigawatts of power capacity by 2030 to meet projected data center demand, as data centers require reliable electricity 24/7.

“Data centers are becoming one of the defining energy challenges of the AI era,” Lau added in the news release. “The question is not only whether we can build enough computing infrastructure, but whether we can power it in a way that is reliable, affordable and compatible with decarbonization goals.”

View All Listings

ENERGYCAPITALHTX EMAILS ARE AWESOME