(504a) Enabling Low Carbon Hydrogen Production Using Resource Integration Approach

Under the Paris emissions reduction protocol, the global energy sector is expected to shift from carbon-heavy industries to achieve a climate-safe target of 1.5 ^oC. To divest from fossil fuel, however, turns out to be more challenging to achieve. Concerns about environmental degradation and dwindling fossil fuel supplies have spurred efforts into adopting renewable energy resources. Hydrogen has been recognized as a key material in the decarbonization of the energy sector and in tackling the global warming challenge. Nevertheless, hydrogen can only exist in combined with other elements in the chemical-bound form. Thus, it has to be produced by means of known energy-intensive processes and thus generates significant amounts of CO₂. One promising alternative in making hydrogen production greener is to incorporate renewable energy in hydrogen production. However, the green hydrogen pathway seems to be more optimistic to see the light in near terms since it suffers from the high cost and the scalability of the hydrogen produced. Therefore, the need for an effective and efficient solution to allow simultaneous production of hydrogen, assess renewable energy use, and incorporate CO₂ management, which is possible through carbon capture utilization and storage. This could serve as the missing link towards a profound energy transformation. This work presents a framework for hydrogen infrastructure design and CO₂ utilization strategies in an industrial park while identifying optimum decisions related to production, storage, and transportation technologies. A techno-economic optimization model based on a superstructure approach has been developed to identify the best possible hydrogen network configurations from a number of technologies, which is achieved by a combination of many possible hydrogen networks (this includes storage and transportation routes) and CO₂ utilization scenarios. A case study that resembles Qatar’s industrial sector is set out to investigate the application of the proposed approach.