Hydrogen Accreditation Project
Why we are doing this?
Hydrogen is expected to become one of the critical next-generation energy resources that can positively contribute to the fight against climate change because of its potential to enable decarbonisation across the industrial sectors. Australia is well-placed to become a leading player in the global hydrogen market due to the abundance of natural resources (e.g., solar, wind, and fossil fuels).
Different hydrogen production approaches vary in terms of carbon emission. Similarly, the delivery process includes multiple transformations and modes of transport, contributing to different carbon emissions levels. Therefore, the degree of cleanness (i.e. degree of carbon emission) of hydrogen at the time of use depends on fossil fuel consumption in the entire supply chain. Certification is viewed as an effective way of proving the cleanness of hydrogen by standardising the process for attesting the degree of cleanness in a unit of hydrogen. Such a certificate is an important asset that needs to be shared across stakeholders within the hydrogen supply chain.
Blockchain is a decentralised database/ledger that creates a lasting “immutable record” of shared data and business transactions. This ledger enables decentralised and trustable sharing of transactional data across a large network of participants. Blockchain also permits the automatic execution of so-called “smart contracts” (i.e., user-defined scripts) that can implement business logic with similar guarantees. Due to its unique features and capabilities, blockchain is an attractive potential technology to enable and support information sharing and business collaborations across the whole process of hydrogen manufacturing, transporting, storing, and consuming.
What we are doing?
To facilitate transparency and build stakeholder trust in hydrogen certification, this project aims to develop an end-to-end data integrity platform for hydrogen certification and to monitor hydrogen’s whole lifecycle. To this end, we aim to understand the business requirements for a hydrogen data platform that supports hydrogen certification. Additionally, we assess the feasibility of adopting blockchain technology for realising such a data platform. Moreover, based on the requirements and feasibility analysis outcomes, we plan to develop an architecture for the proposed data platform and a proof-of-concept prototype.
What we will do next?
Through conducting this project, the following outcomes are expected to achieve:
- Australia has its 1streference architecture and prototype of a data integrity platform for Hydrogen accreditation, which can be customised to provision Hydrogen export provenance services.
- CSIRO will establish its hand-on capability for architecting and building real data management platforms for Hydrogen supply chain, which can be quickly transferred and reused for the other domains, such as food provenance for Agriculture, material traceability for construction and mining industries.
For more information, please contact Dr Qinghua Lu