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

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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.

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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.

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Tesla, Houston City College to receive millions for workforce training

texas talent

Gov. Greg Abbott announced $1.73 million in workforce training grants for the Houston and Rio Grande Valley regions late last month, with the bulk of the funding heading toward Houston.

The funding comes through the Skills Development Fund (SDF) grant program from the Texas Workforce Commission. The grants will help train 689 current and new workers in technology, manufacturing, technology, logistics and other fields in high demand.

Three grants totaling $1.56 million will go to Houston City College to develop training programs for 602 Houston-area workers.

The largest grant, totaling $782,998, will go toward training 261 employees for Tesla Inc. as welders, maintenance technicians, process technicians and other jobs. In addition to Tesla’s $200 million megafactory in Brookshire, Texas, the electric vehicle company is also considering building a $10.1 billion solar cell manufacturing facility in Fort Bend County called Project Sun City. The company recently expanded its self-driving Robotaxi service throughout 610 Loop and northwest Houston.

A second grant of $690,044 will go toward training 300 workers at Texas Tissue LLC and Karsten Management LLC as frontline supervisors, production line operators, design specialists and maintenance technicians. An allocation of $83,963 will go toward training 41 workers at Watchfire Signs LLC as production supervisors, operations specialists, industrial maintenance technicians, and more.

According to HCC, its Corporate Training and Development will coordinate the program in partnership with the college’s Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence Southwest and the Material Science Center of Excellence Welding Department.

“These grants demonstrate how state agencies, employers and Houston City College can work together to meet evolving workforce needs, strengthen Texas businesses and create meaningful opportunities for workers,” HCC Chancellor Margaret Ford Fisher said in a news release.

TWC granted an additional $169,087 to Workforce Solutions Lower Rio Grande Valley to train 87 workers at Denso Ten America Limited, Alps Logistics (USA) Inc., Index Fresh Inc. and Emerson Electric Co.

“When we align local training directly with the needs of expanding industries, we strengthen the regional economy,” TWC Chairman Joe Esparza said in the news release. “These Skills Development Fund grants empower Houston City College and Workforce Solutions Lower Rio Grande Valley to provide the specialized, high-demand training that employers need to succeed right here in Texas.”

Texas A&M wins $5.4M DOE grant for advanced nuclear fuel research

fresh funding

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) a $5.4 million grant to research ways to turn nuclear waste into fuel.

The goal of the project, “Turning Nuclear Waste into Fuel with a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor,” is to develop innovative reactor fuel technology that could help transform long-lived nuclear waste into a valuable energy resource while advancing the future of nuclear power, according to Texas A&M.

Lin Shao, a Texas A&M professor of nuclear engineering, will lead the project and unite researchers from TEES, Savannah River National Laboratory and Abilene, Texas-based nuclear power company Natura Resources. The team will use experimental testing, fuel preparation, reactor design and computational modeling in their work.

“Texas A&M Engineering is honored to receive this support from the Department of Energy to advance groundbreaking nuclear energy technologies,” Robert H. Bishop, vice chancellor and dean of Texas A&M Engineering and director of TEES, said in a news release. “This research aligns directly with our mission to solve the nation’s most pressing engineering challenges through innovation and collaboration. We have an opportunity to develop solutions that reduce nuclear waste, improve energy reliability and help maintain American leadership in advanced nuclear technologies.”

Texas A&M’s award is part of the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) $50 million advancement for next-generation nuclear fuels through the High-performance Optimized Recycled Nuclear Isotopes for Gen IV reactors (HORNIG) program. Texas A&M was one of eight projects selected as part of the ARPA-E efforts.

“America’s energy future depends on bold innovation and strong partnerships between the federal government, national laboratories, universities and industry,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy James P. Danly said when he awarded the grant on campus Oct. 29. “This project demonstrates how we can address long-term nuclear waste challenges while advancing technologies that strengthen our nation’s energy security. The Department of Energy is proud to support research that has the potential to unlock new value from existing nuclear materials and accelerate the deployment of advanced reactor systems.”

Zero-emission electric air taxi network to land in Texas in 2027

Electric Travel

San Jose, California-based aerospace company Archer Aviation is bringing its air-taxi system to the “Texas triangle” of Houston, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Currently, the planned zero-emission electric air taxi networks will use Archer’s Midnight air taxi to “turn 60- to 90-minute drives to major airports, business districts and major destinations into 10- to 20-minute flights,” the company said in a news release. Archer plans to begin flights in the Texas triangle next year.

The Midnight air taxi is an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. It can carry four passengers and a pilot and is designed for consecutive flights of about 20 miles.

Archer cites the Texas triangle as one of the busiest and fastest-growing “megaregions” in the country due to its proximity to coastal regions, major airports, and a number of business districts.

Archer Chief Commercial Officer Nikhil Goel described the air taxi experience to CW Houston as “100 times quieter than a helicopter for the price of an Uber Black.” He added that the air taxis are a combination of a helicopter, a small airplane and a drone.

In Houston, Archer’s air taxi network will aim to connect George Bush Intercontinental, William P. Hobby and Sugar Land Regional Airport with downtown destinations, including the Thompson Hotel helipad, and Galveston.

In Austin, it plans to link the city's Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and Austin Executive Airport with the F1 Circuit Helipad at the Circuit of the Americas. Archer debuted its Midnight aircraft at the F1 Prix in the Fan Zone and the F1 Paddock at Austin’s COTA.

The Dallas-Fort Worth network is slated to include Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, Dallas Love Field, Addison Airport, Arlington Municipal Airport, Fort Worth Meacham International Airport and Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, plus major business hubs like Frisco Station.

“Texas is setting the bar for America’s leadership in the next generation of aviation,” Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation, said in the release. “Our planned networks will make the benefits of electric air taxis real for Texans — trading hours in traffic for minutes in the air, while connecting the biggest airports, business districts and sporting hubs in ways that America’s largest megaregion needs to grow.”

Archer is working with state and local partners to develop charging infrastructure and plans to pursue Texas operations through the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, according to the release. It recently completed its "No Roads" flight tour, which included multiple flights over the San Francisco Bay, and flew to seven cities over three days.

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This article first appeared on InnovationMap.com.

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