Hydrogen storage and distribution

R&D Focus Areas:
Whole supply chain

Lead Organisation:
Griffith University

Partners:
CSIRO

Status:
Completed

Start date:
July 2020

Completion date:
February 2021

Key contacts:
Professor Evan Gray; e.gray@griffith.edu.au

Funding:
Blue Economy CRC

Project summary description:
To limit emissions and meet future sustainability goals for a growing blue economy, future energy (and other resource) demands of the offshore/high energy sectors could be met by harvesting the abundant renewable energy resources (sun, wind, wave, tidal, thermal, etc.) available in the offshore environment.  In the context of the Blue Economy CRC, hydrogen plays a key role in integrating the supply side with the demand side, which needs not just electricity, but also oxygen and fresh water for aquaculture, and clean fuel for transport and survey vehicles.

The intermittency of most of these energy resources makes the inclusion of energy storage mandatory. Direct electricity storage in batteries will be included necessarily in the offshore demonstration system that will be built by the CRC, but hydrogen constitutes a second energy carrier in the energy system and likewise needs some storage capacity, depending on the relationships between energy availability, energy capture and conversion technologies, and demand profiles.

The objective of this scoping study was to identify and characterise hydrogen storage and distribution technologies, including chemical carriers, so that their applicability to the Blue Economy CRC and enterprises supported by it is understood. The study considered the technological suitability of particular hydrogen carriers and storage technologies for the range of energy scales from small islanded microgrid to major export industry.

Related publications and key links:

A short summary of the project and its findings is available for download at https://blueeconomycrc.com.au/project/hydrogen-storage-and-distribution/

 

Reviewed: August 2024