Techno-economic Comparison of Three Electrified Hydrogen Production Technologies in The Context of Sweden

Abstract: Hydrogen, as a dense energy carrier with low carbon footprint, will play an important role in energy transition. It only produces water after reaction which is totally environment friendly. There are many different technologies for hydrogen production. Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) is the most largely commercialized technology in the market, but it has a large carbon footprint in its conventional way. An Electrified Steam Methane Reforming (ESMR) has been proposed to improve the reforming efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint. By using biomethane as feedstock, the carbon footprint could be completely removed from the production itself. Water Electrolysis (WE) is now at the beginning stage of large-scale commercializing, but it’s limited due to the high energy consumption which makes this solution rather expensive. In order to decide which technology is better to cater to local climate policies and energy resources’ availabilities, a techno-economic study is essential for the market investigation. This work briefly introduced a technological comparison between the ESMR and WE technologies, followed by a techno-economic analysis in both grid-connected solutions and decentralized solutions. Biomethane is chosen as feedstock of ESMR technologies to produce greener hydrogen. In grid connected cases, the lowest and highest electricity price in SE1 to SE4 are considered to decide the Levelized Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) range in these 4 areas for WE technologies, and together with the lowest and highest biomethane, LCOH for ESMR technologies are decided. In decentralized cases, wind farm and PV farm are considered to evaluate the LCOH of each technology. Generally speaking, in grid connected cases, SE1 and SE2 in Sweden are better locations to build up the hydrogen production plants due to the cheap electricity price there. ESMR is the least sensitive solution to electricity price fluctuation at an average rate 19.5%, while it’s 64.15% with PEM and 65.45% with AWE. Meanwhile ESMR is also the cheapest among all the technologies.In decentralized cases, wind farm solution is slightly cheaper than PV farm solution for all the technologies. Wind farm is feasible in whole Sweden while PV farm is only available in SE3 and SE4 in south of Sweden due to the geography and climate limitations which restricted the solar radiation conditions.When it comes to a specific solution, there are boundaries across different technologies, e.g., in ESMR, when the grid electricity price is lower than 715 SEK/MWh, grid connected ESMR is cheaper than wind farm ESMR, vice versa.