Integration of Safety in Optimization of Alternative Transportation Pathways for the Hydrogen Economy

Abstract

Globally, hydrogen is being recognized as an alternate energy source to meet the growing energy demand. Hydrogen carriers and different transportation modes in the hydrogen economy will lead to number of alternative transportation pathways. Specifically, growth in the merchant hydrogen market has drawn attention to develop a fully integrated supply chain network considering all the alternative transportation pathways in a safer way. The purpose of this work is to present a transportation model for the hydrogen economy that considers economic and safety objectives. The pathways to hydrogen will be reviewed and listed into an alternative production pathway superstructure diagram. Potential alternative hydrogen carriers along with the associated processing will be prescreened to solve the optimization problem. The economic objective focuses on transportation cost along with the processing cost for that particular value chain. On the other hand, the safety objective focuses on risk analysis along the route based on hydrogen carrier, transportation mode, and population density. Multi-objective optimization techniques are used to trade-off the economic and safety objectives while detailing the supply chain configurations.