Techno-economic analysis of transporting hydrogen and hydrogen based energy carriers in the Netherlands

As the transition to a low-carbon economy is imminent in the view of global warming and climate change, there comes a need to identify energy carriers that can completely or partially replace fossil fuels that are used today. Green hydrogen in this respect has been proposed and researched into as a possible replacement for currently used fossil fuels. Despite hydrogen being a relatively cleaner source of energy and a good energy storage medium, the transportation and storage of hydrogen acts as a barrier for the large-scale implementation of a hydrogen economy. The low density of hydrogen requires it to be compressed to high pressures or liquefied to transport and store it while the explosive nature makes it difficult to handle hydrogen. These drawbacks open up opportunities for other hydrogen energy carriers to be considered instead of hydrogen. The aim of this thesis is to identify bottlenecks in the supply chain of hydrogen and hydrogen energy carriers which include production, storage, transportation, imports and reforming of the energy carriers. The hydrogen energy carriers that have been shortlisted other than hydrogen include ammonia, methanol, dimethyl ether and synthetic methane while the transport modes considered include road transport, maritime shipping and pipeline transport. The Netherlands is chosen as a case study taking into account the demand for hydrogen across the six industrial clusters for the year 2050. The demand for hydrogen includes hydrogen for energy and for feedstock which resulted in a total demand of 444 PJ for the year 2050. Hydrogen production which also serves as a starting point for the production of the other energy carriers, is based on the predicted 15 GW surplus offshore wind energy available in the Netherlands from the North Sea wind farms by the year 2050. Considering the supply and demand, the supply chain of each energy carrier within the three transport modes are modelled resulting in the estimation of the energy efficiency and the system costs. Further, region specific costs are estimated to identify what factors affect the costs of delivering the energy carriers to the different regions in the Netherlands. The results indicate that pipeline transport was the most economical transport mode followed closely by liquid road transport. Compressed road transport was not as attractive, as the high transport pressures resulted in high loading and unloading costs and lower system efficiencies. Hydrogen pipelines was the most economical energy carrier and transport mode followed by liquid hydrogen road transport and ammonia pipeline. Transporting synthetic methane was the most expensive energy carrier across all transport modes while methanol and DME had very similar system costs. The production and import costs were the two main factors determining the system costs while transport costs had an vital impact only in the case of compressed road transport. Storage and reforming costs of the energy carrier were almost negligible in most cases. The Capex and the efficiency of the hydrogen electrolyser played a major role in determining the production costs of all the energy carriers. Ammonia reforming was identified as a bottleneck pushing the system costs of transporting ammonia higher than the system costs of transporting hydrogen. Liquefaction of hydrogen and synthetic methane resulted in higher import costs for these energy carriers and higher transport costs when transported as a liquid by road, in comparison to the other three energy carriers. Estimating region specific costs for hydrogen pipeline transport resulted in a variation in the costs of hydrogen delivered to the different regions in the Netherlands. The allocation of cheaper imports and relatively expensive domestic production across the six industrial clusters in the Netherlands was a major factor in determining the costs of the energy carrier delivered to the industrial clusters.