Hydrogen infrastructure pathways

Gaseous hydrogen delivery pathway via pipelines and tube trailers. (After U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen, fuel cells and infrastructure technologies program multi-year research, development and demonstration plan, Section 3.2, Hydrogen Delivery, January 21, 2005.)... 

Dr Christopher Yang is a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is a co-leader of Infrastructure Systems Analysis within the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways (STEPS) Program and his work focuses mainly on the analysis of hydrogen infrastructure, the grid impacts of electric vehicle charging and the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation systems. 

The fossil hydrogen production option dominates during the first two decades while the infrastructure is being developed, and also in later periods if only economic criteria are applied initially on the basis of natural gas, later with increasing gas prices more and more on the basis of coal (where available). Carbon capture and storage will be critical for these pathways, if hydrogen is to contribute to an overall C02 reduction in the transport sector. The production mix between gas and coal is highly sensitive to the ratio of feedstock prices a switch occurs at a gas coal price ratio of about 2.5. 

The SSCHISM infrastructure model calculates the cost of the potential hydrogen pathway-supply options shown in Table 15.3 for 73 of the largest US urbanised areas and selects the cheapest supply pathway in each city at a specified market penetration. The cheapest pathway choice for any given city depends on the size of the city, level of demand, demand density, and local energy and feedstock prices. 

Hilkert, M. (2003). Pathways for a transition to a sustainable hydrogen transportation fuel infrastructure in California. Diploma Thesis at the University of Karlsruhe with support of the University of California, Davis. 

The development of a wide-area hydrogen production infrastructure could take one or more pathways. 

Fig. 13.3 Costs of hydrogen at the filling station, expanded from [19]. Values are based on the data in Table 13.1 for natural gas reforming, wind power electrolysis, and biomass gasificatirai with the addition of infrastructure costs taken from [7] (shaded areas) supplementary data from [5, 7, 13, 15, 16, 20] (see symbols in figure) for further explanations, see text. Note Since the fuel consumption (MJ/lOO km) of passenger cars with fuel cells is better by a factor of 2 than that of cars with internal combustion engines, the pathways considered here with FCVs meant that competitive costs were derived per kilometer driven...

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