Hydrogen Supply Chain Optimisation for a Multi-Sector End-Use Scenario at the Regional Scale

Hydrogen is a promising solution for the decarbonization of several hard-to-abate sectors, which are mainly among industrial and transport end uses. The development of an extensive hydrogen delivery infrastructure is essential to effectively activate and deploy a hydrogen economy, connecting production, storage, and demand. This work adopts a mixed-integer linear programming model to study the cost-optimal design of a future hydrogen infrastructure, taking into account spatial and temporal variations. The model includes all supply-chain stages from production to end use, allowing multi-mode transport and storage. The analysis looks at cross-sectoral hydrogen uses from mobility and industrial sectors. The model is applied to a case study in the region of Sicily in Italy, comparing a single-sector scenario, which considers demand only from light mobility, and a multi-sector scenario, which includes demand from heavy road mobility (buses and trucks), industry (heat generation and feedstock supply), aviation, and shipping. The average cost of hydrogen delivered to demand points ranges from 3.75 EUR/kgH2 in the single-sector scenario to 3.61 EUR/kgH2 in the multi-sector scenario, showing that the integrated supply chain is able to exploit more efficiently the sustained infrastructure investments.