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The thematic area studied in this paper considers environmental issues such as atmospheric pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels, and the environmental impacts from the generation of urban agricultural solid wastes. This study has estimated the potential for hydrogen and biogas production from solid urban waste (SUW) and wine waste from Bento Goncalves, which is a region in Brazil with the largest wine throughput and subsequent waste generation, thus providing a potential high-energy feedstock. The resulting hydrogen and biogas are assumed to displace the existing fuels in the local bus fleet. The analytical work consisted of three scenarios - scenario 1: production of biogas using SUW, sourced exclusively from the municipality of Bento Goncalves; Scenario 2: the possibility to supply SUW from Bento Goncalves and surrounding cities, to produce biogas; Scenario 3: the possibility to use wine waste and SUW for biogas production. Scenario 3 showed the greatest energy yield with 37.9 Gg of biomethane produced per year, which can supply the entire public bus fleet of Bento Goncalves. The resulting hydrogen production potential using steam reforming of biomethane is 1.09 E+08 Nm3H2.d−1 which can generate 2.62 TW h.year−1 of electrical energy, avoiding approximate emissions of 355 ktonCO2.year−1. These findings indicate value in the production of biogas from urban and agricultural wastes, especially for the generation of methane, hydrogen and useful energy outputs. Its production from renewable and clean sources contributes to the gradual transformation of an economy currently dependent on non-renewable resources into a circular and renewable economy.

For hydrogen to play a meaningful role in a sustainable energy system, all elements of the value chain must scale coherently. Advocates support electrolytic (green) hydrogen or (blue) hydrogen that relies on methane reformation with carbon capture and storage, however, efforts to definitively choose how to deliver this scaling up are premature. For blue hydrogen, methane emissions must be minimised. Best in class supply chain management in combination with high rates of CO2 capture can deliver a low carbon hydrogen product. In the case of electrolytic hydrogen, the carbon intensity of power needs to be very low for this to be a viable alternative to blue hydrogen. Until the electricity grid is deeply decarbonised, there is an opportunity cost associated with using renewable energy to produce hydrogen, as opposed to integrating this with the power system. To have a realistic chance of success, net zero transition pathways need to be formulated in a way that is coherent with socio-political-economic constraints.

In comparison with the power sector, large scale decarbonisation of heat has received relatively little attention at the infrastructural scale despite its importance in the global CO2 emissions landscape. In this study we focus on the regional transition of a heating sector from natural gas-based infrastructure to H2 using mathematical optimisation. A discrete spatio-temporal description of the geographical region of Great Britain was used in addition to a detailed description of all network elements for illustrating the key factors in the design of nation-wide H2 and CO2 infrastructure. We have found that the synergistic deployment of H2 production technologies such as autothermal reforming of methane, and biomass gasification with CO2 abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are critical in achieving cost-effective decarbonisation. We show that both large scale underground H2 storage and water electrolysis provide resilience and flexibility to the heating system, competing on cost and deployment rates. The optimal regions for siting H2 production infrastructure are characterised by proximity to: (1) underground H2 storage, (2) high demands for H2, (3) geological storage for CO2. Furthermore, cost-effective transitions based on a methane reforming pathway may necessitate regional expansions in the supply of natural gas with profound implications for security of supply in nations that are already highly reliant, potentially creating an infrastructure lock-in during the near term. We found that the total system cost, comprising both investment and operational elements, is mostly influenced by the natural gas price, followed by biomass price and CapEx of underground caverns. Under a hybrid Regulated Asset Base (RAB) commercial framework, with private enterprises delivering production infrastructure, the total cost of heat supply over the infrastructure lifetime is estimated as 5.2–8.6 pence per kW h. Due to the higher cost relative to natural gas, a Contract for Difference payment between £20 per MW h and £53 per MW h will be necessary for H2-derived heat to be competitive in the market.

In this paper, results from comprehensive thermoeconomic assessments of small-scale solar organic Rankine cycle (ORC) systems are presented based on weather data in London, UK, which is taken as representative of a temperate climate with modest temperature changes, mild winters and moderate summers. The assessments consider a range of: (i) solar collector types (flat-plate, evacuated-tube, and evacuated flat-plate collectors); (ii) power cycle configurations (basic/recuperative, partial/full evaporating, and subcritical/transcritical cycles); (iii) expander types (scroll, screw, and piston) and designs; and (iv) a set of suitable working fluids. All possible solar-ORC system designs are optimised by considering simultaneously key parameters in the solar field and in the power cycle in order to obtain the highest electricity generation, from which the best-performing systems are identified. Selected designs are then subjected to detailed, annual simulations considering the systems’ operation, explicitly considering off-design performance under actual varying weather conditions. The results indicate that, among all investigated designs, solar-ORC systems based on the subcritical recuperative ORC (SRORC), evacuated flat-plate collectors (EFPCs), a piston expander, and isobutane as the working fluid outperforms all the other system designs on thermodynamic performance, whilst having the highest annual electricity generation of 1,100 kW·h/year (73 kW·h/year/m2) and an overall thermal efficiency of 5.5%. This system also leads to the best economic performance with a levelised cost of energy (LCOE) of ~1 $/kW·h. Apart from the specific weather data used for these detailed system simulations, this study also proceeds to consider a wider range of climates associated with other global regions by varying the solar resource available to the system. Interestingly, it is found that the optimal solar-ORC system design remains unchanged for different conditions, however, the LCOE can drop below 0.35 $/kW·h and payback times can be shorter than 16 years in high solar-resource regions, even in the absence of incentives that would otherwise lead to even better economic performance. This work complements previous efforts in the literature by considering the full design and operational features of solar-ORC systems, thereby providing valuable guidance for selecting appropriate cycle configurations, components, working fluids and other characteristics and, for the first time, presents a comprehensive comparison of such systems in small-scale applications.

Carbon capture and storage is considered a key option for decarbonising the energy sector. However, both the necessity of deploying large-scale infrastructures between the nodes of production and sequestration of CO2, and the uncertainty related to the effective storage availability of sequestration basins still represent major challenges. Here, a mixed integer linear programming approach is proposed for the optimisation of a European supply chain model for carbon capture, transport, and storage. A quantitative assessment of storage uncertainty is incorporated to represent the volumetric capacity of basins to date considered capable of efficiently trapping the anthropogenic CO2 emissions (i.e., deep saline aquifers, hydrocarbon fields and coal fields). The objective is to minimise the total expected cost required to install and operate, over a 10 years’ time horizon, the overall network for carbon capture, transport and storage, while also taking into account the financial risk that is generated by uncertainty in geological capacity. The model defines economically optimal European supply chains, whilst simultaneously minimising the financial risk generated by uncertainty in local sequestration availability to ensure a robust design.

Hydrogen (H2) is one of the most important raw materials in the chemical and refinery industries. H2 is also regarded as a future “energy vector” due to its potential to act as an ultraclean fuel in the heat, power, and transport sectors. Therefore, development of efficient, low carbon routes to produce H2 is essential to meet its current and growing demand. In particular, this has placed an imperative on improving the efficiency of steam reforming of hydrocarbons (SRH), this process being considered the most feasible and economic route to large scale H2 production. The water gas shift reaction (WGS) is one of the most important stages of SRH, but is equilibrium limited and requires improvements in energy efficiency. In this study, we demonstrate that the overall efficiency of the WGS can be improved by removing CO2 in situ and co-feeding alcohols such as methanol and ethanol. The feasibility of this novel concept is investigated by conducting thermodynamic analyses of the alcohol reforming/WGS (alcohol-to-shift) reactions for H2 production alone and with simultaneous CO2 adsorption (sorption-enhanced, SEalcohol-to-shift). To this end, a non-stoichiometric approach based on the minimisation of the Gibbs free energy is used. The results show that adding alcohols to the feed facilitates autothermal operation of the shift unit and significantly increases the amount of H2 produced. The H2 productivity can be further enhanced by adsorbing CO2 in situ. The theoretical studies presented here are carried out under relevant operating conditions for SRH and aim to serve as a guideline for future work on alcohol-to-shift processes enhanced by adsorption.

FOZCIL (Framework for Object Z Conversion to Implementation Language) captures and implements language-independent features as the fixed part of a framework, and language-dependent properties as the extensible part of a framework. Once the framework has accepted the language-dependent features of a target OO language, it generates a FOZCIL tool instance. The tool instance is capable of accepting Object-Z specifications and of converting those specifications to skeletal code with dynamically-checkable design contracts written in that target language. This provides a significant improvement over existing tools that are custom built to provide automatic conversion from Object-Z only to a specific implementation language. FOZCIL streamlines the process of developing both the reusual language-independent portions and the language dependent portions of such tools.