Hydrogen Supply Chain Planning With Flexible Transmission and Storage Scheduling

Hydrogen is becoming an increasingly appealing energy carrier, as the costs of renewable energy generation and water electrolysis continue to decline. Developing scalable modeling and decision tools for the H$_{2}$ supply chain that fully capture the flexibility of various resources is essential to understanding the overall cost-competitiveness of H$_{2}$ use. Here, we develop a H$_{2}$ supply chain planning model that determines the least-cost mix of H$_{2}$ generation, storage, transmission, and compression facilities to meet H$_{2}$ demands and is coupled with power systems through electricity prices. We incorporate flexible scheduling for H$_{2}$ trucks and pipeline, allowing them to serve as both H$_{2}$ transmission and storage resources to shift H$_{2}$ demand/production across space and time. The proposed model provides a reasonable trade-off between modeling accuracy and computational time, with linear relaxations for truck inventory routing and H$_{2}$ production unit commitment. The case study results in the U.S. Northeast indicate that the proposed flexible scheduling of H$_{2}$ transmission and storage resources is critical not only to cost minimization but also to the choice of H$_{2}$ production pathways between electrolysis and natural gas based production. Trucks as mobile storage could make intermittent electrolytic H$_{2}$ production more competitive by providing extra spatiotemporal flexibility.

I. Introduction

Deep decarbonization of the energy system is contingent on identifying pathways for eliminating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from not only the power sector but also other end-use sectors where direct electrification may be challenging [1]. In this context, identifying cost-effective pathways for supplying energy carriers like hydrogen remains an appealing prospect [2]. Recent renewed interest in hydrogen has been spurred, in part, by expectations on cost declines for water electrolyzers [3], which raises the prospect of electrolytic hydrogen produced from variable renewable energy (VRE) resources becoming cost-competitive with fossil-fuel based pathways such as steam methane reforming (SMR) [4]. However, hydrogen production represents only a fraction of the total cost of hydrogen supply for distributed end uses like transportation, owing to the relatively high cost associated with transmission, storage, and distribution [5]. Therefore, identification of cost-effective hydrogen supply chains (HSC) requires a careful consideration of all stages of the supply chain, including production, transport, storage and end-use, as well as their inter-dependencies.