Comparative assessment of renewable energy-based hydrogen production methods

Abstract

Hydrogen is acknowledged as a potential fuel as it can be used as an energy carrier, a storage medium, in fuel cells and as a fuel as well and offers carbon-free solutions. This paper investigates three renewable energy based configurations for hydrogen production. The renewable energy sources considered in this study are solar PV, geothermal power generation and biomass gasification. The proposed study also presents a novel configuration of biomass gasification for hydrogen production via multistage water gas shift reactors. The solar PV and geothermal energy based hydrogen production systems are analysed employing the EES software while the hydrogen production system employing biomass gasification is simulated employing Aspen Plus. All three designed configurations are proceeded through numerous parametric analyses to investigate the system behavior and effect on system efficiencies. The hydrogen production using biomass gasification technique provides with the energetic and exergetic efficiencies of 53.6% and 49.8% and the efficiencies for the geothermal power generation based hydrogen production system are found to be 10.4% and 10.2% respectively. The exergetic and energetic efficiencies of hydrogen production system employing solar PV system are found to be 17.45% and 16.95%, respectively and the system is designed to produce 1.13 mol/s of hydrogen. Furthermore, the results of the parametric studies and sensitivity analyses are presented and discussed.