Techno-economics of novel refueling stations based on ammonia-to-hydrogen route and SOFC technology

This paper presents the economic assessment of novel refueling stations, in which through advanced and high efficiency technologies, the polygeneration of more energy services like hydrogen, electricity and heat is carried out on-site. The architecture of these polygeneration plants is realized with a modular structure, organized in more sections. The primary energy source is ammonia that represents an interesting fuel for producing more energy streams. The ammonia feeds directly the SOFC that is able to co-generate simultaneously electricity and hydrogen by coupling a high efficiency energy system with hydrogen chemical storage. Two system configurations have been proposed considering different design concepts: in the first case (Concept_1) the plant is sized for producing 100 kg/day of hydrogen and the power section is sized also for self-sustaining the plant electric power consumption, while in the second one (Concept_2) the plant is sized for producing 100 kg/day of hydrogen and the power section is sized for self-sustaining the plant electric power consumption and for generating 50 kW for the DC fast charging. The economic analysis has been carried out in the current and target scenarios, by evaluating, the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH), the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), the Profitability Index (PI), Internal rate of Return (IRR) and the Discounted Payback Period (DPP). Results have highlighted that the values of the LCOH, for the proposed configurations and economic scenarios, are in the range 6–10 €/kg and the values of the LCOE range from 0.447 €/kWh to 0.242 €/kWh. In terms of PI and IRR, the best performance is achieved in the Concept_1 for the current scenario (1.89 and 8.0%, respectively). On the contrary, in the target scenario, thanks to a drastic costs reduction the co-production of hydrogen and electricity as useful outputs, becomes the best choice from all economic indexes and parameters considered