Hydrogen supply chain planning with flexible transmission and storage scheduling

Hydrogen is becoming an increasingly appealing energy carrier, as the costs of renewable energy generation and water electrolysis continue to decline. Developing scalable modeling and decision tools for the H2 supply chain that fully capture the flexibility of various resources is essential to understanding the overall cost-competitiveness of H2 use. Here, we develop a H2 supply chain planning model that determines the least-cost mix of H2 generation, storage, transmission, and compression facilities to meet H2 demands and is coupled with power systems through electricity prices. We incorporate flexible scheduling for H2 trucks and pipeline, allowing them to serve as both H2 transmission and storage resources to shift H2 demand/production across space and time. The proposed model provides a reasonable trade-off between modeling accuracy and computational time, with linear relaxations for truck inventory routing and H2 production unit commitment. The case study results in the U.S. Northeast indicate that the proposed flexible scheduling of H2 transmission and storage resources is critical not only to cost minimization but also to the choice of H2 production pathways between electrolysis and natural gas based production. Trucks as mobile storage could make intermittent electrolytic H2 production more competitive by providing extra spatiotemporal flexibility.