Belgium

Authored by the Hydrogen Council in collaboration with McKinsey and Company Hydrogen Insights 2022 presents an updated perspective on hydrogen market development and actions required to unlock hydrogen at scale.

The pipeline of hydrogen projects is continuing to grow but actual deployment is lagging.

680 large-scale project proposals worth USD 240 billion have been put forward but only about 10% (USD 22 billion) have reached final investment decision (FID). While Europe leads in proposed investments (~30%) China is slightly ahead on actual deployment of electrolyzers (200 MW) while Japan and South Korea are leading in fuel cells (more than half of the world’s 11 GW manufacturing capacity).

The urgency to invest in mature hydrogen projects today is greater than ever.

For the world to be on track for net zero emissions by 2050 investments of some USD 700 billion in hydrogen are needed through 2030 – only 3% of this capital is committed today. Ambition and proposals by themselves do not translate into positive impact on climate change; investments and implementation on the ground is needed.

Joint action by the public and private sectors is urgently required to move from project proposals to FIDs.

Both governments and industry need to act to implement immediate actions for 2022 to 2023 – policymakers need to enable demand visibility roll out funding support and ensure international coordination; industry needs to increase supply chain capability and capacity advance projects towards final investment decision (FID) and develop infrastructure for cross-border trade.

The paper can be found on their website.

This paper introduces a Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) on present and future scenarios of different energy storage technologies comprising hydrogen and batteries: Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Hydrogen Energy Storage System (H2ESS) and Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS). These three configurations were assessed for different time horizons: 2019 2022 and 2030 under both on-grid and off-grid conditions. For 2030 a sensitivity analysis under different energy scenarios was performed covering other trends in on-grid electric consumption and prices CO2 taxation and the evolution of hydrogen technology prices from 2019 until 2030. The selected case study is the Research Park Zellik (RPZ) a CO2- neutral sustainable Local Energy Community (LEC) in Zellik Belgium. The software HOMER (Hybrid Optimisation Model for Electric Renewable) has been selected to design model and optimise the defined case study. The results showed that BESS was the most competitive when the electric grid was available among the three possible storage options. Additionally HESS was overall more competitive than H2ESS-only regardless of the grid connection mode. Finally as per HESS hydrogen was proved to play a complementary role when combined with batteries enhancing the flexibility of the microgrid and enabling deeper decarbonisation by reducing the electricity bought from the grid increasing renewable energy production and balancing toward an island operating mode.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reaffirmed the importance of scaling up renewable energy to decarbonise Europe’s economy while rapidly reducing its exposure to foreign fossil fuel suppliers. Therefore the question of sources of flexibility to support a fully decarbonised European energy system is becoming even more critical in light of a renewable-dominated energy system. We developed and used a Pan-European energy system model to systematically assess and quantify sources of flexibility to meet deep decarbonisation targets. The electricity supply sector and electricity-based end-use technologies are crucial in achieving deep decarbonisation. Other low-carbon energy sources like biomethane hydrogen synthetic e-fuels and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage will also play a role. To support a fully decarbonised European energy system by 2050 both temporal and spatial flexibility will be needed. Spatial flexibility achieved through investments in national electricity networks and cross-border interconnections is crucial to support the aggressive roll-out of variable renewable energy sources. Cross-border trade in electricity is expected to increase and in deep decarbonisation scenarios the electricity transmission capacity will be larger than that of natural gas. Hydrogen storage and green hydrogen production will play a key role in providing traditional inter-seasonal flexibility and intraday flexibility will be provided by a combination of electrical energy storage hydrogen-based storage solutions (e.g. liquid H2 and pressurised storage) and hybrid heat pumps. Hydrogen networks and storage will become more critical as we move towards the highest decarbonisation scenario. Still the need for natural gas networks and storage will decrease substantially.

Hydrogen is commonly used as feedstock in industrial processes and is regarded as a potential future energy carrier. However its reactivity and low density make it difficult to handle and store safely. Indoor hydrogen dispersion can cause a fire or explosion hazard if encountering an ignition source. Safety practices often use time expensive modelling techniques to estimate risk associated with hydrogen. A neural network based surrogate model could efficiently replace Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling in safety studies. To lower the dimensionality of this surrogate model a dimensional analysis based on Buckingham’s Pi-theorem is proposed. The dimensional analysis examines stratified filling and highlights the functional parameters involved in the process. Stratified filling occurs for buoyancy dominated releases and is characterized by layers of decreasing concentration starting at the ceiling of the enclosure and developing towards the bottom. The study involves four dimensional cases that were simulated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed dimensionless time and dimensionless volume. The setup considered in this paper consists of a parallelepiped enclosure with standard atmospheric conditions a single release source and one pressure outlet to ensure constant pressure during the release. The results of the CFD simulations show a distinct pattern in the relation of hydrogen molar fraction and dimensionless time. The pattern depends on the dimensionless height of the measurement location. A five-parameter logistic (5PL) function is proposed to fit the data from the CFD models. Overall the paper provides insights into the functional parameters involved in the evolution of hydrogen mass fractions during stratified filling. It provides a nondimensional surrogate model to compute the evolution of the local concentrations of hydrogen during the development of stratification layers.

This report of the High Level Group for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies sets out a vision for these technologies in future sustainable energy systems - improving energy security of supply and air quality whilst mitigating climate change. The report recommends actions for developing world-class European hydrogen technologies and fostering their commercial exploitation.

The weather-dependent nature of renewable energy production has led to periodic overproduction making hydrogen production a practical solution for storing excess energy. In addition to conventional storage methods such as physical tanks or chemical bonding using the existing natural gas network as a storage medium has also proven to be effective. Households can play a role in this process as well. The purpose of these experiments is to evaluate the parameters of a household heating device currently in use but not initially designed for hydrogen operation. The appliance used in the tests has a closed combustion chamber with a natural draft induced by a density difference which is a common type. The tests were conducted at nominal load with a mix of 0–40 V/V% hydrogen and natural gas; no flashbacks or other issues occurred. As the hydrogen ratio increased from 0 to 40 V/V% the input heat decreased from 3.9 kW to 3.4 kW. The NOx concentration in the flue gas dropped from 26.2 ppm to 14.2 ppm and the CO2 content decreased from 4.5 V/V% to 3.4 V/V%. However the CO con centration slightly increased from 40.0 ppm to 44.1 ppm. Despite these changes efficiency remained stable fluctuating between 86.9% and 87.0%. The internal flame cone height was 3.27 mm when using natural gas but reduced sharply to just 0.38 mm when using 62 V/V% hydrogen. In addition to the fact that the article examines a group of devices that has been rarely investigated but is also widely distributed it also provides valuable experience for other experiments since the experiments were carried out with a higher hydrogen ratio compared to previous works.

Hydrogen refueling stations (HRS) can cause a significant fraction of the hydrogen refueling cost. The main cost contributor is the currently used mechanical compressor. Electrochemical hydrogen compression (EHC) has recently been proposed as an alternative. However its optimal integration in an HRS has yet to be investigated. In this study we compare the performance of a gaseous HRS equipped with different compressors. First we develop dynamic models of three process configurations which differ in the compressor technology: mechanical vs. electrochemical vs. combined. Then the design and operation of the compressors are optimized by solving multi-stage dynamic optimization problems. The optimization results show that the three configurations lead to comparable hydrogen dispensing costs because the electrochemical configuration exhibits lower capital cost but higher energy demand and thus operating cost than the mechanical configuration. The combined configuration is a trade-off with intermediate capital and operating cost.