Techno-Economic Optimisation of Green and Clean Hydrogen Production

Abstract Energy is typically generated from fossil fuels, leading to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, cleaner energy needs to be used to reduce GHG emissions in the energy sector. Hydrogen (H 2 ) is identified as a potential resource suitable for replacing fossil fuels as H 2 burns with oxygen to produce water (H 2 O) and generates no emissions as a result of this. However, H 2 is normally produced through steam reforming of natural gas, which is a fossil fuel. Clean H 2 can be produced if its derived from renewable pathways, such as solar powered water electrolysis, gasification of biomass, etc. However, determining a feasible renewable pathway is challenging. In addition, storage of H 2 is another challenge as the energy density of H 2 is considerably low. To increase the energy density, H 2 must stored at high pressure and low temperature. This causes high storing costs for H 2 before being transported to the end-users and high energy consumption requirements. H 2 production from renewable sources is also lower in efficiency when compared with conventional production technology. Thus, it is critical to develop a systematic optimisation tool to analyse and optimise the production of clean H 2 to overcome the abovementioned challenges. This work presents an optimisation model to optimise the production of clean H 2 based on total annualised cost, yield, efficiency, storage and energy consumption of each technology. To illustate the proposed model, a case study with several scenarios, such as an economically feasible and clean H 2 process and optimal H 2 production and storage technologies in terms of energy consumption, is solved.