The Green Hydrogen Blueprint: Optimizing America’s Clean Energy Future

Abstract

Green hydrogen has moved from the margins of United States energy policy to the centre of its industrial decarbonisation strategy, yet the conditions under which it can scale remain contested. This review develops an integrated assessment of the U.S. green hydrogen economy by examining technological, regulatory, and socio-economic dimensions as interdependent rather than separate domains. Existing scholarship has tended to treat these strands in isolation, producing accounts of electrolyser efficiency that neglect political feasibility, or policy analyses that abstract away from thermodynamic and infrastructural limits. The synthesis offered here argues that such separation obscures the mechanisms that actually govern deployment. Technologically, the review traces the maturation of Proton Exchange Membrane, alkaline, solid oxide, and anion exchange membrane electrolysis, alongside the storage and transport pathways that link production to demand. Analytically, it shows that the binding constraint on green hydrogen is rarely the electrolyser itself, but the cost and temporal profile of the electricity supplied to it, which accounts for the majority of levelised production cost. Politically, the Inflation Reduction Act and its 45V production tax credit are found to have altered project economics decisively, while simultaneously transferring the central question of what counts as clean hydrogen from the laboratory to the rulemaking process, where additionality, temporal matching, and deliverability requirements now determine viability. The review further contends that the risk of blue hydrogen lock-in is best understood not as a technical shortcoming but as a path-dependent political economy problem, in which transitional infrastructure generates constituencies that resist subsequent transition. Socio-economic analysis of employment, regional equity, and community acceptance indicates that distributional outcomes are not incidental to deployment but conditions of its durability. The paper concludes by identifying persistent knowledge gaps in lifecycle emissions accounting, integrated regional infrastructure planning, safety standardisation, and equitable benefit-sharing, and by outlining a research agenda oriented toward a coherent national roadmap.