Investigating a single European hydrogen market by looking at the minimum cost of transporting hydrogen via trucks between France and Germany

The study aims then to provide the minimum cost to deploy a transportation system via truck in the German-French border in 2030. This is done by taking into account different hydrogen states of aggregation including compressed gas at different pressure levels, liquefied or chemically bound to a liquid carrier. As primary results, the minimum cost of transporting hydrogen via truck is calculated, taking into account the three different state of aggregation of hydrogen. The levelized cost of transporting hydrogen (LCOTH) includes the transportation, the transformation including liquefaction, compression or chemical bounding and storage depending on the chemical and physical form of hydrogen. As the current market offers a variety of compressed gas trucks (CGT) at different pressure levels, five different pressure levels are taken for the optimization problem to identify the corresponding capacities transported by each of them (at 165.5 bar, 250 bar, 350 bar, 500 bar and 540 bar). Both total capital and operation costs are minimized as a sum of LCOTHs at different hydrogen states of aggregation and as function to the capacity transported over a given distance. The different results are then geographically visualized using the platform QGIS at both sides of the border. On the French side, the region of ‘Grand Est’ is taken with a total population of 5 million. In the other side the three borderer regions Baden-Württemberg, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate have a total population of more than 15 million.