Design concepts of hydrogen supply chain to bring consumers offshore green hydrogen

Abstract

This study presents design concepts for hydrogen supply chains as a way to investigate how to transport green hydrogen from offshore sites to onshore sites where it would be available to consumers. The six concepts suggested are based on compressed hydrogen, a pipeline, liquefied hydrogen, liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHC), ammonia, and a subsea cable. Most of the concepts transported the hydrogen from production to con-sumption sites, but in the case of the subsea cable transferred electricity from the offshore wind farm. All the design concept were created to satisfy the same specific case study. For this case study, the East Sea was selected as the hydrogen production site, Busan port was chosen as the hydrogen consumption site. The six concepts were applied to the suggested case study before being compared from the viewpoint of each system's complexity. The results show that the pipeline-and subsea cable-based hydrogen supply chains are rela-tively simple relative to the other concepts, the LOHC-and ammonia-based hydrogen supply chains are inherently more complex because they require de-hydrogenation and cracking processes to extract hydrogen from the LOHC and ammonia. On the other hand, ammonia and liquefied hydrogen have advantages in terms of ship transportation because they both provide high volumetric densities. In the case of ammonia, the infrastructure required would be significantly reduced if it could be directly used as a fuel without the cracking and purification processes. This study proposes and compares various hydrogen supply chain concepts with the goal that the results will prove helpful to those attempting to create an offshore hydrogen supply chain by providing fundamental data to decision -makers in the early design stages. (c) 2023 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.