TOTAL HYDROGEN EMISSIONS OF THE U.S. HYDROGEN SUPPLY CHAIN: CURRENT INVENTORY AND FUTURE PROJECTIONS
Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
Department
Mechanical, Industrial and Systems Engineering
First Advisor
Anthony J. Marchese
Abstract
With worldwide interest in hydrogen technology as a climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels, research on possible development paths for a hydrogen economy and its net benefit is necessary. This net benefit is largely dependent on hydrogen emission rates, as hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas. Currently, most publications criticize the severe lack of data in this sector. To be able to derive new insights, existing data must be aggregated in one central location, and existing analysis methods must be adapted to the current depth of data available.
This work utilizes a novel dataset of hydrogen facilities created at the University of Rhode Island called “Hydrogen Emissions Inventory” (H2EI) published by Duroha et al. (n.d., forthcoming) and combines it with future scenarios from literature to project development paths of the US hydrogen supply chain. After a basic statistical analysis of the dataset using R, three common methods used to analyze similar emission inventories are evaluated. To foster improved insights, a variation called the scenario-based numerical scaling approach (SBNS) is developed and implemented in this study and finally used to visualize said future development scenarios. The SBNS is presented as a MATLAB script that automates the calculation, curve-fitting, and plotting process and outputs numerical values, datasets, or plot graphs according to user preference.
The scenario analysis presented and the resulting graphs show that hydrogen’s effectiveness as a greenhouse gas mitigation tool can be significantly improved by considering hydrogen leakage early in the development process of both technical equipment and regulation, for example by incentivizing active leakage mitigation. A large-scale field measurement campaign is needed to validate many of the values in current literature and this study. The resulting values can, in turn, be processed using the SBNS method.
Creative Commons License
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Recommended Citation
Vad, Nicolas Maximilian, "TOTAL HYDROGEN EMISSIONS OF THE U.S. HYDROGEN SUPPLY CHAIN: CURRENT INVENTORY AND FUTURE PROJECTIONS" (2024). Open Access Master's Theses. Paper 2527.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/2527
Scenario Calculation Using the H2EI Results