Charting the path to a hydrogen economy
Climate – Energy Solutions Update
Charting the path to a hydrogen economy
The CRL Energy-led project, Transitioning to a Hydrogen Economy, is part of the search for a long-term solution to New Zealand’s need for both energy security and environmental sustainability.
A hydrogen economy offers the prospect of ‘decarbonised’, very low emissions transport, greatly reduced dependence on imported fuels, high process efficiencies, and the development of clean, efficient small-scale distributed energy systems.
Mass market hydrogen cars are still some years away, but informed investment decisions need to be made well before then. By the end of the year, when this project ends, the team will have produced a discussion paper on how New Zealand could move to a hydrogen economy.
This project uses a modified version of the methodology employed in the European Union HyWays project, which developed a hydrogen ‘roadmap’ there.
There are four objectives:
- Summarise national and international issues.
- Identify the hydrogen supply chains of most relevance to New Zealand.
- Develop scenarios for ways the country might move to a hydrogen economy, based on the selected supply chains. This includes subjecting various scenarios to sensitivity analysis, and identifying how infrastructure could be built up to support hydrogen energy in New Zealand.
- Identify what New Zealand needs to do move to a hydrogen economy, and what the technical challenges are.
The research team is from CRL Energy, IRL, and Unitec. The project is worth just over $500,000 and will be complete by the end of 2007