Lewis County Transit, a participant in the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, is the first transit agency in Washington state to take delivery of hydrogen fuel cell buses. Its three new coaches, including this one, are undergoing testing this summer before anticipated entry into service around November and December.
Courtesy of Lewis County Transit
Lewis County Transit will continue with plans to add six hydrogen-fueled buses to its fleet in the coming months, despite the Trump administration’s announcement last week that it will cancel $1 billion in grants for hydrogen infrastructure around the Northwest.
The so-called hydrogen hub was a planned fuel network in Washington, Oregon and Montana. Its developers learned about the funding cuts in a tweet from the White House last week.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote Oct. 1 when announcing the cuts, which targeted energy projects in more than a dozen Democratic-led states.
“A big development that we had planned is on hold until that money can be secured again,” said Chehalis Mayor Tony Ketchum. “But it doesn’t stop the local project that we’re doing now.”
Lewis County Transit is in the process of building a 1-megawatt hydrogen electrolyzer to generate hydrogen fuel out of water, with oxygen as its byproduct, according to Ketchum. When complete, the project will fuel six hydrogen buses. The county will lose out on $36 million in federal investments that would have allowed the transit agency to scale up commercial hydrogen production.
The county had planned to build three 10-megawatt stations to sell hydrogen fuel to other users. Funding for the project was announced in 2024. A groundbreaking ceremony was held with Lewis County officials in August and the facility was planned to open in spring 2026. Work will continue on the same timeline, but with a scaled-back vision.
“The domino effect is people buying hydrogen equipment can’t use it because we can’t make the hydrogen,” Ketchum said. “And then other regions in the area were going to do the same thing to produce hydrogen and so, domino effect, it just stops everything.”
Lewis County Transit secured state and local grants to fund its 1-megawatt facility and has spent no federal dollars on the project, so hydrogen bus service is still in the works, despite cuts to the broader hydrogen hub. The transit agency’s fuel is considered green because the process of creating hydrogen from water will mostly come from green sources like hydroelectric, solar or wind power versus fuel generated from natural gas.
Seven hydrogen hubs were planned around the country. The Northwest project was in the second of its eight-year timeline, according to Chris Green, the president of the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association.
“The hydrogen hub and the entire program, all the hydrogen hubs, were really designed to be a catalytic event to accelerate these investments,” he said. “You’re stunting the growth of an industry that’s going to grow.”
Hydrogen fuel infrastructure will take longer and will cost more in the region because of the reduced investment, according to Green. His organization is evaluating their options, including the possibility of appealing the federal cuts.
