Questa, New Mexico, has always been an industrial community. John Ortega, mayor of the Village of 1,797 in northern New Mexico, said his father worked at the Chevron Molybdenum mine for around thirty years until it closed in 2014.

The mine has been in remediation ever since, resulting in a reduction of about half of the jobs it previously provided.  But now, thanks to a $231 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Questa is at the forefront of energy innovation—building a green hydrogen power plant on the former mine property and current Superfund site—that will bring Taos County to 100% renewable energy. 

“Questa has always been an energy community, a production community. We love the land, and we’re going to continue to be an energy community,” Ortega told the Daily Yonder in an interview.  

Being the mayor is in Ortega’s blood, in a community where history has a lot of weight. His grandpa, uncle, and aunt were all previous mayors of Questa. He started his career as an EMT and at the local fire department, as a way to “make this place better,” But when that didn’t make the change he wanted to see, “the next step is to run for public office,” said Ortega. 

Now, Ortega and the Village of Questa are working with Kit Carson Electric Cooperative and other community organizations to build a green hydrogen plant in Questa.

An Innovative Electric Cooperative

Luis Reyes was into solar before it was cool. It was the year 2000, and coal-powered electricity was still king in the Southwest. But the members of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, where Reyes was the CEO, wanted solar. 

Reyes saw it as a smart economic decision, living in a place where the sun shines 300 days a year. It wasn’t a climate issue, it was an economic one. 

“If you really want to lower people’s energy bills, you should give them the lowest-cost energy resource in that region. If someone wants to pay five and a half cents for fossil fuel, I’m not going to oppose them,” said Reyes in his office in Taos, New Mexico, in April of 2025, just as the temperatures were starting to warm up in the southwestern mountain town. 

In Taos County, the cheapest type of energy was solar. 

Kit Carson Electric Co-op (KCEC) has been 100% daytime solar powered since 2022, thanks to Reyes’ efforts. But the problem with solar-generated electricity is that if the sun isn’t out, there’s no energy being produced. Another challenge is how to store that energy for later use.

KCEC started looking into battery options for long-term storage, with at least 100 hours of storage capacity. At the time, the best commercial battery options were only 6 hours of storage, so KCEC started considering other options, like green hydrogen.

In mid-January 2025, KCEC received $231 million dollars from the USDA’s Empowering Rural America Program (New ERA) to fund green hydrogen power generation and battery storage. 

“We weren’t the cool kids, and now it’s like we’re the cool kids,” said Reyes, remarking on how much has changed in the energy world since he first started pursuing renewable energy in the early 2000s. 

When asked if the community of Questa could ever have pursued a project like this without federal funding, Ortega replied, “Absolutely not. These grants have been incredible. I don’t know that of a 231 million project that’s ever come into Taos County. Even northern New Mexico, for that matter.”

The Future of Renewable Energy?

Green hydrogen is hydrogen produced through electrolysis — using electricity, in this case, solar, to separate the hydrogen from water. Green hydrogen is currently mostly used in transportation — hydrogen fuel cells power long-haul trucking and other heavy transportation. 

Most hydrogen production currently comes from natural gas, and the process produces carbon dioxide emissions. Green hydrogen production does not emit any carbon dioxide, although there are some “embedded emissions” due to the production of solar panels. The only thing left over once the hydrogen is split from the oxygen is some water. 

Kit Carson Electric Co-op partnered with the Village of Questa, where they planned to build the green hydrogen plant, and other community partners to create the Questa Community Coalition. The coalition applied for and was accepted into the Communities Local Energy Action Program (LEAP), a Biden-era energy transition program. 

Green hydrogen acts as a battery for renewable energy from sources like solar and wind. When energy is being produced, it’s used to power electrolyzers that split the hydrogen from the oxygen and store it in a fuel cell. When needed, the fuel cell is burned to produce electricity.

“In the wintertime, when there’s less sun and maybe the wind isn’t blowing as much, or if you have some sort of long duration outage, then you can do the second half of this process, which is to use that stored hydrogen in a fuel cell,” said Elaine Hale, one of National Renewable Laboratory researchers who helped with a feasibility study to see if green hydrogen was a good fit for Questa.

The answer was yes. The ideal site for the green hydrogen plant? The Chevron-owned former molybdenum mine.

When asked for a comment, Chevron replied that it is “considering the sale of land and water rights to KCEC for their project.”. 

Water in the Desert

Green hydrogen is a water-intensive process. In a place that receives an average of only 12 inches of rain a year, like Taos County, this is a concern.

But the coalition’s hope is that reclaimed water from both the Chevron mine and Questa’s municipal wastewater can provide needed supply without pulling from revered irrigation systems.

Earlier in 2025, Chevron settled a water dispute with the state, which claimed that the water rights were not in use and were forfeited under the “use it or lose it” clause of New Mexico’s water law. The fight began when Chevron tried to sell 7 acre feet of water to a Questa business, and the state claimed that those rights were not valid because they had not been in use.

Water is a big deal in the desert, and water rights are a day-to-day issue for residents of Questa and Taos County. Ortega and other residents expressed gratitude for the settlement because those water rights will remain in their community and could be used for local projects like the green hydrogen plant.

“We didn’t lose water,” said Ortega, “they actually kept a lot of the water rights, and they didn’t lose water rights. The fear was that they were going to take water rights that were originally in the Questa-Taos area and sell ’em to Santa Fe.”

Chevron planned to donate 120 acre-feet of water to Questa, which will help fill a deficit in water rights that the Village has had since the 70s and support future developments like the green hydrogen. An acre-foot of water is valued at around $16,000 in Taos County. 

“The settlement ensures Chevron has sufficient water rights for environmental remediation of the mine site,” said Chevron in an email, “surplus water rights are also available for communities in the Questa area and Taos County.”

Ortega said that Chevron is also putting about a million gallons of treated water into the Red River a day. That, along with treated municipal wastewater, could be used to power the green hydrogen plant. 

“Might as well use it for something,” said Ortega, “It’s perfect use for it, it’s not going to waste. And we’re not using water from our well or the aquifer.”

Hale, the NREL researcher, said that “the water that goes into the electrolyzer does need to be really pure,” so additional purification might be necessary even after initial treatment of something like wastewater.

Benefits to Questa

“The tax benefit of that build in Questa is going to be tremendous,” said Ortega, “it’s going to allow us to fix roads maybe, or at least get engineering done on roads and some of our projects long term, it’s going to provide jobs at the facility itself.”

According to an economic impact study done by NREL as part of the Communities LEAP program, Questa would receive about $800,000 in tax revenue during construction of the green hydrogen plant and $210,000 annually once the plant is built. It will also produce around 20 full-time jobs, once it is up and running, with many more jobs initially for the construction phase. 

“It’s going to be mostly skilled laborers,” said Ortega. “There’s going to need to be a training process, but we’ve actually already engaged the school, the university, and UNM Taos.”

Lynn Skall, executive director of Questa Economic Development Fund, said that they’re always working towards sustainable economic growth for the village. “We don’t want to lose what makes Questa unique and what makes it have a cultural and strong heritage,” Skall told the Daily Yonder. She sees the green hydrogen plant as the right direction for the Village. 

“I think it’s going to be a tremendous asset for the community, and the growth that will come from it will hopefully stay in line with the direction that the community wants it to go,” said Skall. 

The community, however, is currently concerned about the safety of green hydrogen.

“Hydrogen is a really small molecule, so all the materials that are used to contain the hydrogen need to be at a different level of standards for holding that in. On the plus side, because it’s so small, it dissipates faster, kind of just floats away,” said Hale. 

Kit Carson is currently in the process of conducting a safety study, with a $500,000 grant from the Department of Energy. Hydrogen has been used industrially for over 80 years and is seen as just as safe if not safer, than flammable fuels like propane, gasoline, and natural gas. 

“Everybody in Questa has a propane tank in their yard and everybody drives cars,” said Skall. “So everything explodes if you don’t handle it correctly. Green hydrogen is safe. It just has to be handled right.”

The First of Its Kind

Questa’s green hydrogen plant would be one of the first of its kind in the United States, paving the way for other similar projects to follow suit. Similar projects are also being pursued in California,  Utah, and Illinois, although most of those are producing hydrogen for other markets, not to power their own local electricity.

“If a small distribution co-op in North-Central New Mexico can figure it out, the Xcels [major for-profit electric companies] of the world surely can figure it out and fill the gaps that we may miss,” said Reyes.