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Climate Change Will Influence the Cost for Green Hydrogen Globally

CSS Publication Number
CSS24-62
Full Publication Date
December 9, 2024
Abstract

Hydrogen (H2) is critical for the decarbonization of transportation and industrial sectors, but its production cost and carbon footprint are vulnerable to the variability of renewable energy. Also, existing studies have shown that stricter carbon limit and firm H2 demand will increase the H2 cost, with the extent of increase varying by the renewable energy profile of a specific location.

 

However, the impact of climate change on H2 production remains unclear, given climate change will influence the potential, variability, and complementarity of wind and solar resources. This study addresses two underexplored aspects: a) the impact of climate change on renewable energy generation for H2 production, and b) the need for a geographically explicit, hourly optimized analysis of hybrid H2 systems under varying carbon cap and flexibility constraint for H2 demand.

 

Using plant-level investment and operational optimization at the specific location, we model hybrid H2 systems with local solar and local wind generation, imported electricity from power grid, a battery, and H2 storage to minimize costs while accounting for flexibility constraints of hourly H2 demand. We derive the renewables output from four CMIP6 global climate models (GCMs) to represent historical period (2000-2010) and future period (2065-2075). We model the global hybrid H2 investment optimization in a geographically explicit manner, with 1°×1° spatial resolution for global land locations, to assess climate impacts on the H2 systems.

 

We show that climate change could raise the cost of green hydrogen production globally by up to 20%, with significant geographical heterogeneity. About 16% of investigated global locations could see levelized cost changes exceeding 5% under carbon constraint of 1kgCO2/kgH2. And notably, Southeast Asia and Europe are expected to see cost reductions, while the Midwest United States and Southern Australia are projected to face cost increases.

 

The hybrid H2 systems under strict carbon emissions cap or with a firm H2 demand constraint shows greater changes in cost. This highlights the need for proactive investment strategies to accommodate the climatic variations affecting renewable hydrogen production, especially countries with stricter H2 carbon limit and with firm H2 demand for industrial process.

Research Areas
Energy Systems
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding
Full Citation

Wu, Haochi, and Michael Craig. "Climate Change Will Influence the Cost for Green Hydrogen Globally." AGU24 (2024). CSS24-62