Optimization of Hydrogen Supply Chain Network Design Involving Transportation by Organic Hydride

<p>Fuel-cell vehicles that use hydrogen as the fuel are one of the next-generation vehicles in the world. However, an inefficient hydrogen supply chain network (HSCN) hinders the spread of fuel-cell vehicles, and the main cause of inefficiency is the danger of transporting super-cold liquefied hydrogen or highly compressed hydrogen gas. In order to solve this problem, organic hydride is currently being developed. This technology transports hydrogen as methylcyclohexane, and this enables the use of the same infrastructure as petrol. Due to the novelty of organic hydride, there's no research regarding a HSCN involving organic hydride. In this research, a HSCN with three ways of obtaining hydrogen and three ways of transporting is modeled as Mixed Integer Linear Programming. Hydrogen is obtained through domestic production, importation, or production at onsite hydrogen fueling stations (HFSs), and transported as liquid, gas, or organic hydride. In order to test the effectiveness of organic hydride, three scenarios are compared for 25 different sized instances, and a sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine the changes in operational cost affected by a budget crunch. From the results, it is possible to say that organic hydride makes a HSCN more effective when ports, dehydrogenation plants, and HFSs are sufficiently close. Additionally, the more choices involved in the HSCN, the more effective the HSCN can be designed, regardless of the size of the problem. Furthermore, the actual decisions of what to use in a HSCN are decided based on the relative positions between each infrastructure, capacity, level of demand, and budget. In addition, when the amount of budget decreases, operational cost contrarily increases due to the impossibility of constructing an onsite HFS, and the longer traveling distance required due to the reduction of the number of possible construction locations.</p>