National Research Council. "5. Supply Chains for Hydrogen and Estimated Costs of Hydrogen Supply." The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004. 1. Print.
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs
FIGURE 5-3 Unit cost estimates for 11 possible future hydrogen supply technologies, including generation by dedicated nuclear plants. See Table 5-2 and discussion in text. NOTE: GEA = gasoline efficiency adjusted.
ral gas or coal in central stations would be approximately the same cost to a cost lower than that for gasoline used in GHEVs. The gasoline cost assumes no increases in refining efficiency, and crude oil stays at $30/bbl.13 The committee estimates that hydrogen generated by central station nuclear energy, distributed natural gas steam reforming, and distributed electrolysis using wind-turbine-generated electricity would have costs within about $1.00/kg of the equivalent cost of gasoline used in GHEVs. Figure 5-3 shows that hydrogen generated using grid-delivered electricity or photovoltaic-derived electricity or using biomoss as a feedstock would be substantially more costly. This figure suggests that, if technology does advance as much as assumed possible, then several different technologies, using several different domestically available feedstocks, might become economically competitive with gasoline.
Figure 5-4 shows the detailed cost components for the possible future technologies. For fossil and nuclear technologies, distribution and dispensing costs are still a significant part of the costs. And feedstock costs are high for natural gas conversion. This figure, compared with Figure 5-2, shows that reduced capital costs and reduced electricity costs are the most important differences. The reduced electricity costs result from reduced costs of generating electricity using wind turbines or photovoltaics and estimated increases in the efficiency of electrolyzers.
This figure also suggests that because the electricity cost remains such an important component of overall cost, the price of electricity purchased from the grid and the costs of generating electricity using photovoltaics or wind turbines will be extremely important factors in determining the economic competitiveness of distributed electrolysis. For these possible future technologies, the estimates of the cost of delivered electricity generated using wind turbines14 decreases to $0.04/kWh (from $0.06/kWh), and using photovoltaics to $0.098/kWh (from $0.32/kWh). The price of grid-delivered electricity is kept at $0.07/kWh, the default estimate, under the assumption that advances in hydrogen-production tech-
13
Reductions in oil imports can be expected to put downward pressure on the world oil price. However, over the time horizon of this study, the committee expects that the excess production capacity in the world oil market will disappear and that oil prices will be determined by costs of new oil resources. Thus, although the committee does not expect there to be a very large impact due to hydrogen on world oil prices, the committee does not attempt to examine the magnitude of this feedback.
14
These delivered costs include a 10 percent transmission cost from the wind farms to the distributed hydrogen facility. This transmission cost is consistent with the wind farms’ being located in the geographical vicinity of the hydrogen facility, but not at the facility.
