Offshore wind to hydrogen for powering port land mobility : Case study in Port of Valencia.

Abstract: Maritime cargo transport is a major energy consumer and polluting sector, accounting for 90% of world trade in goods and responsible for 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions per year. The Port of Valencia, as Spanish and European Mediterranean leader in containerized cargo traffic, aims to reduce its carbon footprint in cargo operations by introducing green initiatives based on hydrogen and offshore wind energy generation; as established by the European Green Deal and the Valencia port strategy towards zero emissions by 2030. Thus, the objective of this study is to evaluate the potential of hydrogen generation by offshore wind energy to replace fossil fuel in the mobility of land cargo in the Port of Valencia. For this case study, it was analysed the feasibility of deploying an offshore wind farm 45 km from the Port of Valencia by studying more than 100 000 wind data collected at an altitude of 10 metres and using the Kubik formula to approximate this data to the altitude of the wind turbines and the continuous Weibull function to calculate the energy and power recovery from the wind. In addition, were assessed the input requirements of the largest operational PEM electrolyser to produce hydrogen, and were studied the hydrogen requirements of inland freight mobility vehicles, such as container yard tractors, RoRo tractors, reach stackers and about 3 000 inland connection trucks travelling 85,000 km per year. For the conversion of diesel to hydrogen, different methodologies were applied based on the accuracy of the data, where the most important factor is the selection of tank-to-wheel efficiencies. To give a flexible view to the project, Scenarios 1 to 5 have been presented depending on the scope of the diesel-to-hydrogen change and linked to the future development of this technologies. Scenario 1 sideline the truck consumption, which represents 94% of the totalenergy demand, while Scenario 5 considers the overall daily consumption of 200 000 liters of diesel that could be replaced with 34 000 kilograms of hydrogen, produced by a 100 MW electrolyser powered by about 350 MWp of offshore wind power.  This work demonstrates that there is a great opportunity for ports to become major hydrogen producers in the coming decades, reducing their inland footprint and presenting a major business opportunity. This study confirms that, efforts in vehicle performance studies are vital to obtain an accurate transition to green mobility in port logistics.