Towards a sustainable hydrogen economy: role of carbon price for achieving GHG emission targets

摘要

This work studies the role of carbon price in the development of a sustainable hydrogen infrastructure that satisfies the concerted greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets in the United Kingdom (UK) for the next decades. In particular, the optimal design of a hydrogen infrastructure for the transport sector in the UK that leads a transition towards a sustainable hydrogen economy is sought. The problem is solved with an optimisation-based framework consisting of a multi-period spatially-explicit mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. The future hydrogen demand is predicted according to a logistic diffusion model that reaches the 50% of the market share in 2070. Additionally, UK carbon price policies that penalise carbon emissions are incorporated into the economic objective function to be minimised, which consists of the total cost for constructing and operating the infrastructure. By comparing the CO2 emissions obtained in the optimisation problem with the carbon budgets set by the UK Government to succeed in the 2050 European GHG emission directives, it is possible to determine the pertinence of carbon prices.