F2008-06-190
Progress on Efforts for Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure Creation - World-Wide Status and 2008 Update
A key prerequisite for any fuel that is to be widely used in transportation is the necessity to create sufficient distribution infrastructure. Without a reasonable confidence that refuelling is possible, no alternative will ever gain the acceptance of users. However, if there are no vehicles to use the fuel, why should we invest in building any refuelling network? Traditionally, this situation has been known as the "chicken-and-egg" syndrome. Furthermore, there is reasonable consensus that this syndrome is best solved by starting with the fuel availability, and creating "pull". This ought to signal vehicle industry to start the development and consumers to consider buying such vehicles. But developing fuel infrastructure is not an easy task, if it has to be made from a "clean sheet of paper", i.e. without support from the existing infrastructures, which is more or less the case with hydrogen. Various liquid alternative fuels can use the existing fuel distribution infrastructure, because they can be blended with current fuels. Even natural gas has the distribution grid already in place amongst most of the populated areas. However, with hydrogen there are no similar stepping stones, but the infrastructure must be created more or less from ground-up. Therefore, as the needs for the required investments bringing up a hydrogen fuel infrastructure are rather special, not necessarily attractive to normal business venture investors, many public or public/private-partnerships has been created to help this upbringing effort. Each of these initiatives has their own targets and they have developed "roadmaps", how the task should be undertaken. Also other roadmaps have been crafted outside these consortiums by various research projects and even by some private companies. The present-day count of hydrogen fuelling installations intended for vehicle applications is close to 200, and the number increases about 50 sites each year. Most of the sites are providing hydrogen in gaseous form, and most common pressure level is 350 bar. However, the 700 bar technology is progressing fast, and will undoubtly become the favoured option in the next generation of fuel cell vehicles. Furthermore, liquid hydrogen is also gaining support. We have also witnessed the opening of the first hydrogen fuel stations in normal urban areas, as well as offering hydrogen in conjunction with other transportation fuels. However, in most of the cases the processes in hydrogen refuelling station siting and permitting are reported to be extremely complicated, and there is high need for more straightforward approach with harmonised regulations as well as higher degree of standardisation in hardware. Furthermore, most of the initiatives reviewed in this paper supposed to bring hydrogen fuel into public use are based on the pattern that the deployment of the infrastructure shall start from places, where human population and transport activity are dense. Also at least in start-up phase the fuel production shall entail on-site generation using natural gas or grid electricity as primary energy. However, another kind of approach has also been taken in some cases, where the availability and use of surplus by-product hydrogen has taken as the starting point of the development. In some instances these seem even to meet nicely. Analysis show high potential of hydrogen production in existing fuel refineries usually close to major urban concentrations. The paper describes an update on present status of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure development projects as well as public/private type of partnerships initiated for demonstrating the viability of hydrogen as transportation fuel as well as to collect user data from operations in real-world conditions.
Session: Hydrogen