Introduction Strategies for Hydrogen Infrastructure

Efforts to alleviate climate change and curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increasingly anticipate the widespread use of hydrogen for transportation and industrial purposes. Given the increased focus on hydrogen infrastructure development, it is essential to devise measures capable of assessing and mapping strategic choices to guide the further development of the hydrogen market. The goal of this work is to investigate what infrastructure and demand-side strategies best facilitate hydrogen infrastructure development for the transportation and industrial sectors in Germany and thus enable the transition towards a cost-optimized system in the long term. To achieve these goals, a spatially-resolved model to represent relevant features of a hydrogen infrastructure is developed and populated with country-specific data on hydrogen demand allocation and energy infrastructure. The approach incorporates four different aspects of the transition to a hydrogen-based system: transformation of the hydrogen market, reconfiguration of hydrogen production and storage, the evolution of a delivery infrastructure and the changeover of refueling stations. It was found that gaseous (GH2) and liquid (LH2) hydrogen trailers, as well as utilization of the existing infrastructure, such as the use of aging wind power plants and the reassignment of natural gas pipelines, constitute the most attractive pathways for the introduction of a hydrogen infrastructure. A high concentration of supply is favored by LH2 delivery, whereas GH2 pathways benefit from growing demand concentration in industrial and population centers. Accordingly, GH2 pipeline and trailer delivery should be the main focus of infrastructure development, while LH2 transport is better used as a supplementary alternative to optimize the utilization of the existing LH2 infrastructure and seaborne imports. It was shown that cost-competitive hydrogen delivery for transportation could be attained by 2030, and broad market adoption of hydrogen in transport is required if cost-competitive hydrogen delivery for industry is to be achieved