Applications & Pathways

Solar photovoltaic (PV) plants coupled with storage for domestic self-consumption purposes seem to be a promising technology in the next years as PV costs have decreased significantly and national regulations in many countries promote their installation in order to relax the energy requirements of power distribution grids. However electrochemical storage systems are still unaffordable for many domestic users and thus the advantages of self-consumption PV systems are reduced. Thus in this work the adoption of hydrogen systems as energy vectors between a PV plant and the energy user is proposed. As a preliminary study in this work the design of a PV and hydrogen-production self-consumption plant for a single dwelling is described. Then a technical and economic feasibility study conducted by modeling the facility within the Homer Energy Pro energy systems analysis tool is reported. The proposed system will be able to provide back not only electrical energy but also thermal energy through a fuel cell or refined water covering the fundamental needs of the householders (electricity heat or cooling and water). Results show that although the proposed system effectively increases the energy local use of the PV production and reduces significantly the energy injections or demands into/from the power grid avoiding power grid congestions and increasing the nano-grid resilience operation and maintenance costs may reduce its economic attractiveness for a single dwelling.

As a non-profit UNIDO project funded 100% by the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources International Center for Hydrogen Energy Technologies (ICHET) has been implementing pilot demonstration projects providing applied R&D funding; organizing workshops education and training activities in Turkey and other developing countries to show potential benefits of “hydrogen and fuel cell systems”. It is important to leap-frog developing countries to hydrogen for eliminating detrimental effect of fossil fuels. To achieve its mission ICHET implements pilot demonstration projects in combination with renewable energy systems to encourage local industry to manufacture similar systems and explore market potential for such use. Support is provided to selected industrial partners in Turkey for developing products or for early demonstrations including a fuel cell forklift a fuel cell boat a fuel cell passenger cart with PV integrated roof-top renewable integrated mobile house fuel cell based UPS installations. As more and more systems demonstrated public awareness on applications of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies will increase and viability of such systems will be realized to change public perception.

Hydrogen delivered at hydrogen refuelling station must be compliant with requirements stated in different standards which require specialized sampling device and personnel to operate it. Currently different strategies are implemented in different parts of the world and these strategies have already been used to perform 100s of hydrogen fuel sampling in USA EU and Japan. However these strategies have never been compared on a large systematic study. The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare the different strategies for sampling hydrogen at the nozzle and summarize the key aspects of all the existing hydrogen fuel sampling including discussion on material compatibility with the impurities that must be assessed. This review highlights the fact it is currently difficult to evaluate the impact or the difference these strategies would have on the hydrogen fuel quality assessment. Therefore comparative sampling studies are required to evaluate the equivalence between the different sampling strategies. This is the first step to support the standardization of hydrogen fuel sampling and to identify future research and development area for hydrogen fuel sampling.

‘E-fuels’ or ‘synthetic fuels’ are hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) where H2 can be produced via electrolysis of water or steam reforming of natural gas and CO2 is captured from the combustion of a fossil or biogenic source or directly from the atmosphere. E-fuels are drop-in substitutes for fossil fuels but their climate change mitigation benefits are largely unclear. This study evaluates the climate change impacts of e-fuels for aviation by combining different sources of CO2 and H2 up to 2050 under two contrasting policy scenarios. The analysis includes different climate metrics and the effects of near-term climate forcers which are particularly relevant for the aviation sector. Results are produced for European average conditions and for Poland and Norway two countries with high and low emission intensity from their electricity production mix. E-fuels can either have higher or lower climate change impacts than fossil fuels depending on multiple factors such as in order of importance the electricity mix the origin of CO2 the technology for H2 production and the electrolyzer efficiency. The climate benefits are generally higher for e-fuels produced from CO2 of biogenic origin while e-fuels produced from CO2 from direct air capture or fossil fuel combustion require countries with clean electricity to outperform fossil fuels. Synthetic fuels produced from H2 derived from natural gas have higher impacts than fossil fuels even when coupled with carbon capture and storage if CO2 is sourced from fossil fuels or the atmosphere. Climate change impacts of e-fuels improve in the future and they can all achieve considerable climate change mitigation in 2050 relative to fossil jet fuel provided that strict climate policy measures are implemented to decarbonize the electricity sector. Under reduced policy efforts future climate impacts in 2050 of e-fuels from atmospheric or fossil CO2 are still higher than those of fossil jet fuels with an average European electricity mix. This study shows the conditions to maximize the climate change mitigation benefits of e-fuels which essentially depend on progressive decarbonization of the electricity sector and on reduced use of CO2 sourced from fossil fuels.

Seaports are responsible for consuming a large amount of energy and producing a sizeable amount of environmental emissions. However optimal coordination and cooperation present an opportunity to transform this challenge into an opportunity by enabling flexibility in their generation and load units. This paper introduces a coordination framework for exploiting flexibility across multiple ports. The proposed method fosters cooperation between ports in achieving lower environmental emissions while leveraging flexibility to increase their revenue. This platform allows ports to participate in providing flexibility for the energy grid through the introduction of a green port-to-grid concept while optimising their cooperation. Furthermore the proximity to offshore wind farms is considered an opportunity for the ports to investigate their role in harnessing green hydrogen. The proposed method explores the hydrogen storage capability of ports as an opportunity for increasing the techno-economic benefits particularly through coupling them with offshore wind farms. Compared to existing literature the proposed method enjoys a comprehensive logistics-electric model for the ports a novel coordination framework for multi-port flexibility and the potentials of hydrogen storage for the ports. These unique features position this paper a valuable reference for research and industry by demonstrating realistic cooperation among ports in the energy network. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed port flexibility coordination from both environmental and economic perspectives.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has set decarbonisation goals for the shipping industry. As a result shipowners and operators are preparing to use low- or zero-carbon alternative fuels. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emission performances are fundamental for choosing suitable marine fuels. However the current regulations adopt tank-to-wake (TTW) emission assessment methods that could misrepresent the total climate impacts of fuels. To better understand the well-to-wake (WTW) GHG emission performances this work applied the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to a very large crude carrier (VLCC) sailing between the Middle East and China to investigate the emissions. The life cycle GHG emission impacts of using alternative fuels including liquified natural gas (LNG) methanol and ammonia were evaluated and compared with using marine gas oil (MGO). The bunkering site of the VLCC was in Zhoushan port China. The MGO and LNG were imported from overseas while methanol and ammonia were produced in China. Four production pathways for methanol and three production pathways for ammonia were examined. The results showed that compared with MGO using fossil energy-based methanol and ammonia has no positive effect in terms of annual WTW GHG emissions. The emission reduction effects of fuels ranking from highest to lowest were full solar and battery-based methanol full solar and battery-based ammonia and LNG. Because marine ammonia-fuelled engines have not been commercialised laboratory data were used to evaluate the nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. The GHG emission reduction potential of ammonia can be exploited more effectively if the N2O emitted from engines is captured and disposed of through after-treatment technologies. This paper discussed three scenarios of N2O emission abatement ratios of 30% 50% and 90%. The resulting emission reduction effects showed that using full solar and battery-based ammonia with 90% N2O abatement performs better than using full solar and battery-based methanol. The main innovation of this work is realising the LCA GHG emission assessment for a deep-sea ship.

The impact of ship emission reductions can be maximised by considering climate health and environmental effects simultaneously and using solutions fitting into existing marine engines and infrastructure. Several options available enable selecting optimum solutions for different ships routes and regions. Carbon-neutral fuels including low-carbon and carbon-negative fuels from biogenic or non-biogenic origin (biomass waste renewable hydrogen) could resemble current marine fuels (diesel-type methane and methanol). The carbon-neutrality of fuels depends on their Well-to-Wake (WtW) emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) including carbon dioxide (CO2) methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide emissions (N2O). Additionally non-gaseous black carbon (BC) emissions have high global warming potential (GWP). Exhaust emissions which are harmful to health or the environment need to be equally removed using emission control achieved by fuel engine or exhaust aftertreatment technologies. Harmful emission species include nitrogen oxides (NOx) sulphur oxides (SOx) ammonia (NH3) formaldehyde particle mass (PM) and number emissions (PN). Particles may carry polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals which cause serious adverse health issues. Carbon-neutral fuels are typically sulphur-free enabling negligible SOx emissions and efficient exhaust aftertreatment technologies such as particle filtration. The combinations of carbon-neutral drop-in fuels and efficient emission control technologies would enable (near-)zero-emission shipping and these could be adaptable in the short- to mid-term. Substantial savings in external costs on society caused by ship emissions give arguments for regulations policies and investments needed to support this development.

As the European Union intensifies its response to the climate emergency increased focus has been placed on the hard-to-abate energy-intensive industries. Primary among these is the steel industry a cornerstone of the European economy and industry. With the emergence of new hydrogen-based steelmaking options particularly through hydrogen direct reduction the structure of global steel production and supply chains will transition from being based on low-cost coal resources to that based on low-cost electricity and therefore hydrogen production. This study examines the techno-economic options for three European countries of Germany Spain and Finland under five different steel supply chain configurations compared to local production. Results suggest that the high costs of hydrogen transportation make a European steelmaking supply chain cost competitive to steel produced with imported hydrogen with local production costs ranging from 465-545 €/t of crude steel (CS) and 380-494 €/tCS for 2030 and 2040 respectively. Conversely imports of hot briquetted iron and crude steel from Morocco become economically competitive with European supply chains. Given the capital and energy intensive nature of the steel industry critical investment decisions are required in this decade and this research serves to provide a deeper understanding of supply chain options for Europe.

The intermittent nature of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar causes the energy supply to be less predictable leading to possible mismatches in the power network. To this end hydrogen production and storage can provide a solution by increasing flexibility within the system. Stored hydrogen as compressed gas can either be converted back to electricity or it can be used as feed-stock for industry heating for built environment and as fuel for vehicles. This research is the first to examine optimal strategies for operating integrated energy systems consisting of renewable energy production and hydrogen storage with direct gas-based use-cases for hydrogen. Using Markov decision process theory we construct optimal policies for day-to-day decisions on how much energy to store as hydrogen or buy from or sell to the electricity market and on how much hydrogen to sell for use as gas. We pay special emphasis to practical settings such as contractually binding power purchase agreements varying electricity prices different distribution channels green hydrogen offtake agreements and hydrogen market price uncertainties. Extensive experiments and analysis are performed in the context of Northern Netherlands where Europe’s first Hydrogen Valley is being formed. Results show that gains in operational revenues of up to 51% are possible by introducing hydrogen storage units and competitive hydrogen market-prices. This amounts to a e126000 increase in revenues per turbine per year for a 4.5 MW wind turbine. Moreover our results indicate that hydrogen offtake agreements will be crucial in keeping the energy transition on track.

As countries seek ways to meet climate change commitments hydrogen fuel offers a low-carbon alternative for sectors where battery electrification may not be viable. Blending hydrogen with fossil fuels requires only modest technological adaptation however since combustion is retained nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions remain a potential disbenefit. We review the potential air quality impacts arising from the use of hydrogen–diesel blends in heavy-duty diesel engines a powertrain which lends itself to hydrogen co-fuelling. Engine load is identified as a key factor influencing NOx emissions from hydrogen–diesel combustion in heavy-duty engines although variation in other experimental parameters across studies complicates this relationship. Combining results from peer-reviewed literature allows an estimation to be made of plausible NOx emissions from hydrogen–diesel combustion relative to pure-diesel combustion. At 0–30% engine load which encompasses the average load for mobile engine applications NOx emissions changes were in the range 59 to +24% for a fuel blend with 40 e% hydrogen. However at 50–100% load which approximately corresponds to stationary engine applications NOx emissions changes were in the range 28 to +107%. Exhaust gas recirculation may be able to reduce NOx emissions at very high and very low loads when hydrogen is blended with diesel and existing exhaust aftertreatment technologies are also likely to be effective. Recent commercial reporting on the development of hydrogen and hydrogen–diesel dual fuel combustion in large diesel engines are also summarised. There is currently some disconnection between manufacturer reported impacts of hydrogen-fuelling on NOx emissions (always lower emissions) and the conclusions drawn from the peer reviewed literature (frequently higher emissions).