Hydrogen energy systems technology study

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of Energy Programs initiated the Hydrogen Energy Systems Technology (HEST) Study in the autumn of 1974. The Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was made responsible for conducting the study and reporting the results, with active support from several NASA Centres through a Working Panel. Objectives of the study were defined to be the assessment of national needs for hydrogen, based on current uses and visible trends, and determination of the critical research and technology activities required to meet these needs, with attention to economic, social, and environmental considerations, providing a basis for the planning of a hydrogen research and technology program.The HEST Study found current U.S. hydrogen utilization to be dominated by chemical-industry and petroleum-processing applications, and to represent 3% of total energy consumption. The study's projections of hydrogen uses show growth the remainder of this century by at least a factor of five, and perhaps a factor of twenty. New applications in the manufacture of synthetic fuels from coal and directly as an energy storage medium and fuel are expected to emerge later this century. Of these new uses, electric utility energy storage for peak-shaving, supplements to the natural gas supply and special purpose transportation fuel such as aircraft, show promise.The Study concludes that the development and implementation of new means of supplying hydrogen, replacing the use of natural gas and petroleum feedstocks, are imperative. New production technology is essential to support even the lowest growth estimate. Methods based on alternative fossil feedstocks, such as coal and heavy oils, which are less expensive and nearer to technical maturity than non-fossil production systems, should be made operational while these feedstocks are abundant. Concurrently, the long-term tasks of advancing electrolysis technology, researching other water-splitting techniques, and integrating these with developing nuclear and emerging solar primary-energy systems, must be carried on, together with work on hydrogen combustion systems and research in materials and safety engineering. Systems studies and assessments of the economic, social and environmental impacts of hydrogen technology are also called for.     

A perspective on hydrogen energy research,development and innovation activities in Turkey

Hydrogen can be considered as the most promising fuel towards the greenization. Developed and developing countries around the world have formed their research, investments and directives on hydrogen. The leading countries in this field can be cited as members of the European Union and the United States. Laws and regulations have been shared with the public under the aegis of the established policies. Additionally, determined targets for the short, medium and long term and their feedbacks are recorded by the reports of the competent authorities. Although the Republic of Turkey was aware of the importance of the issue, though there is no open source inventory as disclosed. In Turkey, governmental organization, General Directorate of Energy Affairs (YEGM), and foundations, such as the National Hydrogen Association (NHA), have been encouraging and supporting multidisciplinary studies and activities within the country and internationally. In this study, it is aimed to provide numerical analyses from 1970 to the present by considering hydrogen energy. Related information and data were compiled from online resources on scholarly publications, organizations, groups, books and book chapters, master and doctorate theses, patents received and completed projects. It is also aimed to create a unique information source to refer with respect to planning and activities.     

Bibliometric analysis of the research on hydrogen economy: An analysis of current findings and roadmap ahead

Based on literature research, this comprehensive analysis of 1275 articles published in the past five decades provides quantitative and objective insight into research trends in the hydrogen economy. Scholars and experts agree that by 2030, hydrogen will play a critical role in energy transition by complementing other renewable energy technologies. We applied indicators such as the Field-Weighted Citation Impact index, cited by and usage count (180 days) to evaluate countries, authors, documents, journals and so on. We also used VOS viewer to visualize the evolving trend using keyword analysis and cluster analysis of documents. Results show that the literature on the hydrogen economy has been recently increasing, particularly from 2016 to 2020. Scopus database was employed to acquire the required data for the study. From preliminary analysis, it was established that from 218 journals, 1275 documents related to hydrogen economy had been published so far. The average publication per year since introducing the term “hydrogen economy” is 6.62 and increasing. The average citation per document is 47.21. There have been 3760 authors so far who have been associated with publications related to a hydrogen economy. Of which 139 authors have written 156 documents individually, and 3621 authors have collaborated to publish 1119 documents, thus forming a collaborative index of 3.24. The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy contributes 40% of the overall publications. In terms of countries, China and United States are the leaders, with 126 papers each. Our analysis shows that the study on hydrogen economy mostly deals with multidisciplinary aspects like hydrogen production, storage, transportation, application, and public policy formulation. We adopted the 180 days usage count offered by the Web of Science database to better understand the research hotspot and evolving trends. It helped us view the existing gaps and potential scope of study that future researchers working on the hydrogen economy can explore. Aspects like pipeline transportation, risk assessment studies, blending, public safety and hazard mitigation can play a vital role in the hydrogen economy research in the future. Cooperation between nations and research institutes should be fostered with cross-disciplinary interchange to boost the hydrogen economy's multidisciplinary growth.     

An updated overview of Canada's hydrogen related research and development activities

Finding nature-friendly replacements for fossil-fuels based energy sources are considered vital, and such a task becomes critical for sustainable development. In this regard, hydrogen carries a significant weight potentially and becomes an essential driver in transitioning the economic sectors to carbon-free ones. While the world experiences this kind of transition with hydrogen, Canada appears to be among top ten countries conducting research, development and innovation activities extensively on hydrogen and intending to make hydrogen a key player in their green energy transition. In this study, the contributions of Canadian academic institutions, research centers and other organizations to hydrogen-related research, development and innovation activities over the last fifty years are studied and evaluated comparatively. A comprehensive literature search is conducted to identify the number of hydrogen-related research articles, books, dissertations, patents and funded projects affiliated with Canadian institutes. The findings are presented graphically and discussed from various perspectives. The conducted literature search results show that Canadian institutes have contributed to hydrogen research with a total of 112,454 scholarly publications from 1971 to 2021. During period, the number of hydrogen-related academic articles and books has become 108,437 and 2995, respectively. In the subject area of energy, the relatively young Canadian institution, Ontario Tech University, has contributed the highest to hydrogen research in Canada by producing about 11% of academic articles and about 27% of books, book chapters, and editorials in the subject matter field of hydrogen research and development activities.     

A scientometric review of research in hydrogen storage materials

Hydrogen is a promising sustainable energy carrier for the future due to its high energetic content and no emissions, other than water vapor. However, its full deployment still requires technological advances in the renewable and cost-effective production of hydrogen, cost reduction of fuel cells and especially in the storage of hydrogen in a lightweight, compact and safe manner. One way to achieve this is by using materials in which hydrogen bonds chemically, or by adsorption. Different kinds of Hydrogen Storage Materials have been investigated, such as Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), Simple Hydrides (including Magnesium Hydride, MgH₂), AB₅ Alloys, AB₂ Alloys, Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, Borohydrides, Alanates and Ammonia Borane. Billions have been invested in Storage Materials research, resulting in tens of thousands of papers. Thus, it is challenging to track how much effort has been devoted to each materials class, by which countries, and how the field has evolved over the years. Quantitative Science and Technology Indicators, produced by applying Bibliometrics and Text Mining to scientific papers, can aid in achieving this task. In this work, we evaluated the evolution and distribution of Hydrogen Storage Materials research using this methodology. Papers in the 2000–2015 period were collected from Web of Science and processed in VantagePoint® bibliometric software. A thesaurus was elaborated relating keywords and short phrases to specific Hydrogen Storage Materials classes. The number of publications in Hydrogen Storage Materials grew markedly from 2003 to 2010, reducing the pace of growth afterwards until a plateau was reached in 2015. The most researched materials were MOFs, Simple Hydrides and Carbon-based materials. There were three typical trends in materials classes: emerging materials, developed after 2003, such as MOFs and Borohydrides; classical materials with continuous growth during the entire period, such as Simple Hydrides; and stagnant or declining materials, such as Carbon Nanotubes and AB₅ Alloys. The main publishing countries were China, countries from the European Union (EU) and the USA, followed by Japan. There is a division between countries with continued growth in recent years, such as China, and those with stagnant production after 2010, such as the EU, the USA and Japan. The results of this work, compared to a previous study in storage materials patenting by our group, and the recent launch of commercial hydrogen cars and trains and stationary hydrogen production and fuel cell solutions, indicates that although the Hydrogen Energy field as a whole is transitioning from lab and prototype stages to commercial deployment, materials-based hydrogen storage still has base technological challenges to be overcome, and therefore still needs more scientific research before large scale commercialization can be realized. The developed thesaurus is made available for refinement and future works.     

A bibliometric analysis of the hydrogen production from dark fermentation

Hydrogen energy plays an important role in solving the environmental problems caused by the fuel crisis and greenhouse gas emissions. However, hydrogen application on an industrial scale still requires technological advances, especially in choosing the best technological route for the recovery of renewable and cost-effective hydrogen. Therefore, this bibliometric review evaluated the research progress, trends, updates, and hotspots on hydrogen production from dark fermentation. The Web of Science© database was used to select the documents from 2000 to 2021, and the VOSviewer© and Bibliometrix softwares were used to carry out the bibliometric investigation. The results demonstrated that 3071 documents (2755 articles and 316 reviews) studied the hydrogen production from dark fermentation over the last 21 years. The number of publications exponentially increased in the last five years, which can be associated with the demand for new technologies to produce clean energy sources and decrease the environmental impacts caused by petroleum-based fuel. Keyword analysis revealed that the studies focused on the operational parameters, process optimization, pretreatment, and microbial community, aiming to increase the hydrogen yield during dark fermentation. Finally, this comprehensive review provides future directions for applying dark fermentation to produce hydrogen as a sustainable and renewable fuel in a biorefiney concept.     

Status and research of highly efficient hydrogen production through high temperature steam electrolysis at INET

Hydrogen generation through high temperature steam electrolysis (HTSE) using solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC) has recently received increasingly international interest in the large-scale, highly efficient nuclear hydrogen production field. The research and development of HTSE technology was initiated in INET of Tsinghua University from 2005 as one of the approaches in National Key Special Projects for HTGR which aims at promoting highly efficient and sustainable application of nuclear process heat in the future. In the past three years, the research team mainly focused on preliminary investigation, feasibility study, equipment development and fundamental research. Currently, two bench-scale equipments for the study of HTSE process and SOEC components have been designed and constructed. In addition, the research group made rapid progress in the development of novel anode materials, effective microstructure control of cathodes and theoretically quantitative analysis of hydrogen production efficiency through HTSE coupled with HTGR.     

The exploitation of hydrogen sulfide for hydrogen production in geothermal areas

Hydrogen is a valuable energy resource and it is widespread in nature. As a matter of fact, researches on hydrogen production are currently experiencing an increasing interest from scientists around the world since this resource is clean and renewable. Several methods of producing hydrogen have been developed in industrialized countries such as the United States of America and Germany.This paper is interested in the process by which hydrogen sulfide of geothermal areas is exploited for hydrogen production. In fact, research advances in this field have concluded that hydrogen sulfide of geothermal resources can contribute significantly and economically in the process of hydrogen generation.The present paper was principally conducted from a literature study and a synthesis of works achieved in recent years in order to highlight the various aspects of hydrogen production from hydrogen sulfide and particularly to study the possibility of the exploitation of Algeria’s thermal resources in this field.     

A comprehensive review on biodiesel as an alternative energy resource and its characteristics

As the fossil fuels are depleting day by day, there is a need to find out an alternative fuel to fulfill the energy demand of the world. Biodiesel is one of the best available resources that have come to the forefront recently. In this paper, a detailed review has been conducted to highlight different related aspects to biodiesel industry. These aspects include, biodiesel feedstocks, extraction and production methods, properties and qualities of biodiesel, problems and potential solutions of using vegetable oil, advantages and disadvantages of biodiesel, the economical viability and finally the future of biodiesel. The literature reviewed was selective and critical. Highly rated journals in scientific indexes were the preferred choice, although other non-indexed publications, such as Scientific Research and Essays or some internal reports from highly reputed organizations such as International Energy Agency (IEA), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and British Petroleum (BP) have also been cited. Based on the overview presented, it is clear that the search for beneficial biodiesel sources should focus on feedstocks that do not compete with food crops, do not lead to land-clearing and provide greenhouse-gas reductions. These feedstocks include non-edible oils such as Jatropha curcas and Calophyllum inophyllum, and more recently microalgae and genetically engineered plants such as poplar and switchgrass have emerged to be very promising feedstocks for biodiesel production.It has been found that feedstock alone represents more than 75% of the overall biodiesel production cost. Therefore, selecting the best feedstock is vital to ensure low production cost. It has also been found that the continuity in transesterification process is another choice to minimize the production cost. Biodiesel is currently not economically feasible, and more research and technological development are needed. Thus supporting policies are important to promote biodiesel research and make their prices competitive with other conventional sources of energy. Currently, biodiesel can be more effective if used as a complement to other energy sources.     

The recent areas of applicability of palladium based membrane technologies for hydrogen production from methane and natural gas: A review

In the wake of the devastating consequences of climate change, many countries are searching for alternative renewable energy. Hydrogen, the most abundant element on earth, is an alternative clean and non-toxic energy source. Palladium-based membranes and their alloys are categorized as inorganic metallic membranes with the highest selectivity and permeation rate for hydrogen production. Pd-based membranes have great potential for resolving environmental concerns and adverse side effects of greenhouse gases resulting from industrial processes. This paper analyses Pd-based membranes and their industrial applications while focusing on natural gas and methane as non-renewable feedstocks for hydrogen production. Steam reforming of natural gas and methane, partial oxidation reaction, auto thermal reforming, dry reforming, and gas to liquid process are among the processes that take place in a Pd-based membrane reactor and are discussed in this paper. Finally, all the ongoing research and development on both laboratory and industrial scales are reviewed.     

A bibliometric review on the application of fuzzy optimization to sustainable energy technologies

Sustainable energy production has been one of the contemporary concerns of society. In order to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions while generating the required demand for energy, various energy technologies, and production systems must be considered. In the consideration of different energy technologies, optimization is one of the important tools to optimally design energy systems. This study aims to analyze the progress of current research related to energy and sustainability that utilizes fuzzy optimization approach. Bibliometric methods based on the database of Web of Science core collection are used for the analysis. Of the 96 retrieved publications, 87% were journal articles. Analysis on the patterns for these articles were conducted such as highly cited articles, journals, subject categories, institutions, countries, and impact factor. The articles are evaluated into three categories such as technological, environmental, and economy and are comprehensively reviewed. The results showed a significant increase in publication related to fuzzy optimization in sustainability and energy technologies. The analysis showed China with 26 publications, which has the largest contribution in terms of the number of articles published. North China Electric Power University ranked as the number 1 institution with 10 publications. Based on the comprehensive analysis, fuzzy optimization showed significant results on technological, environmental, and economical factors. These findings help to identify hotspots in energy technology optimization for sustainability research. Similarly, the study gives useful inputs for selecting subtopics and strategy on publication related to fuzzy optimization on energy technologies.     

Hydrogen production and technology: today,tomorrow and beyond

Hydrogen is produced on a large scale by a wide variety of processes starting with feedstocks like natural gas, crude oil products to coal as well as water-using processes like steam reforming, partial oxidation, coal gasification, metal-water processes and electrolysis. Hydrogen is also recovered from various gas streams especially in refineries.Depending on the basic energy scenarios to be used, steam reforming natural gas will remain the major hydrogen source from today till tomorrow, i.e. the turn of the century. Coal gasification will significantly increase in its share for hydrogen production. This will be achieved via newly developed coal gasification processes.The development of thermochemical hydrogen production technology as well as biological hydrogen production technologies will progress, but their widespread application remains to be seen in the next century.     

Nonthermal atmospheric plasma reactors for hydrogen production from low-density polyethylene

Hydrogen is largely produced via natural gas reforming or electrochemical water-splitting, leaving organic solid feedstocks under-utilized. Plasma technology powered by renewable electricity can lead to the sustainable upcycling of plastic waste and production of green hydrogen. In this work, low-temperature atmospheric pressure plasma reactors based on transferred arc (transarc) and gliding arc (glidarc) discharges are designed, built, and characterized to produce hydrogen from low-density polyethylene (LDPE) as a model plastic waste. Experimental results show that hydrogen production rate and efficiency increase monotonically with increasing voltage level in both reactors, with the maximum hydrogen production of 0.33 and 0.42 mmol/g LDPE for transarc and glidarc reactors, respectively. For the transarc reactor, smaller electrode-feedstock spacing favors greater hydrogen production, whereas, for the glidarc reactor, greater hydrogen production is obtained at intermediate flow rates. The hydrogen production from LDPE is comparable despite the markedly different modes of operation between the two reactors.     

Industrial scale production of hydrogen from natural gas,naphtha and coal

This paper reviews the three major routes for the production of hydrogen from fossil fuels.Today there is considerable interest in the production of hydrogen via the gasification of coal. Existing processes and developments are listed.The partial oxidation processes which utilize feedstocks ranging from light hydrocarbons to heavy fuel oil are attractive due to feedstock flexibility.Hydrogen production based on the steam reforming of light hydrocarbons has become the most widely used process as a result of, in general, better economics.     

Retrospective and prospective of the hydrogen supply chain: A longitudinal techno-historical analysis

The objective of this study was to investigate the evolution of hydrogen research and its international scientific collaboration network. From the Scopus database, 58,006 relevant articles, published from 1935 until mid-2018, were retrieved. To review this massive volume of publication records, we took a scientometric network analysis approach and investigated the social network of the publication contents based on keywords co-occurrence as well as international collaboration ties.An interesting observation is that despite publications on hydrogen occurring since 1935, the growth of this research field ignited with the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The publication profile reveals that more than 93% of the existing records have been published over the last two decades. More recently, the accelerated growth of renewables has further motivated hydrogen research with almost 36,000 academic records having been indexed from 2010 till mid-2018. This accounts for ~62% of the total historical publications on hydrogen. The conventional hydrogen production pathway is fossil fuel-based, involving fossil fuel reforming for synthesis gas generation. The keyword analysis also shows a paradigm shift in hydrogen generation to renewables. While all components of hydrogen supply chain research are now growing, the topic areas of biohydrogen and photocatalysis seem to be growing the fastest.Analysis of international collaboration networks also reveals a strong correlation between the increase of collaboration ties on hydrogen research and the publications. Until the 1970s, only 25 countries had collaborated, while this has reached 108 countries as of 2018, with over 17,500 collaboration ties. The collaborations have also evolved into a substantially more integrated network, with a few strong clusters involving China, the United States, Germany, and Japan. The longitudinal network evolution maps also reveal a shift, over the last two decades, from US-Europe centred technology development-interaction to a world in which Asian economies play substantial roles.     

Commentary on: “Indicators of European public research in hydrogen and fuel cells—an input–output analysis”

The output of European public research in hydrogen and fuel cells in terms of number of publications is reported in the paper by Seymour et al. [Indicators of European public research in hydrogen and fuel cells—An input–output analysis. Int J Hydrogen Energy 2007; 32(15): 3212–22]. The counting method for publications is not stated but whole counting has been used. It is not mentioned that the rankings of different countries might have changed if other counting methods had been used. The paper also reports measurements of citations based on the publications counted. The difference in results obtained by using different counting methods will be larger for citations but this is not mentioned. The values for the number of publications for the European countries have been added to provide the value for EU+$\mathrm{EU}+$. However, values obtained by whole counting for individual countries cannot be added to provide correct values for a union of these countries. Therefore the comparison reported in the paper between the publication output for EU+$\mathrm{EU}+$ and for US, Japan and China is invalid.     

Evaluation of hydrogen and methane production from municipal solid wastes with different compositions of fat,protein, cellulosic materials and the other carbohydrates

Municipal solid wastes (MSW) collected in Kyoto city were carefully separated, and the waste-type proportion in MSW was surveyed. A hydrogen/methane fermentation batch experiment was conducted under thermophilic condition using twenty different types of MSW components. Biodegradable wastes in the MSW almost consist of vegetable kitchen waste, and the characteristics of hydrogen and methane fermentation of MSW were similar to that of vegetable kitchen waste. Hydrogen production per g VS added was considerably positively correlated with easily degradable carbohydrates concentration and negatively correlated with cellulosic materials concentration. The various feedstocks could be classified into four groups according to nutrient composition (protein, fat, cellulosic materials and easily degradable carbohydrates), and the feedstocks belonging to carbohydrates rich group showed higher hydrogen yields than the other feedstocks. Rough hydrogen yield could be easily predicted by concentration of easily degradable carbohydrates.     

Progress in the production of hydrogen energy from food waste: A bibliometric analysis

The exponential increase in food waste generation has prompted the scientific community to convert it into value-added resources. Hydrogen energy provides a sustainable option to fossil fuels due to its purity, high energy content, with no emissions other than water vapor. Combining the two aspects, a bibliometric analysis was performed for the conversion of food waste to hydrogen energy to evaluate the research trends based on literature in the Scopus database over the last two decades. The cluster analysis supported with the visualization tool aided in conducting a systematic study revealing growing themes and hot issues. The results showed a growing interest in the conversion of food waste to hydrogen energy research with the number of publications increasing by nearly 50 times in the last two decades. Comprehensive journals like the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy were most popular in publishing articles contributing to almost 30% in the research area. The country-wise analysis revealed that China accounted for more than 25% of the articles published followed by South Korea and India while the USA dominated in terms of the number of citations. Lastly, keyword cluster analysis revealed five major research hotspots for future discussion. The study concludes that further perspectives on fuel delivery, environmental impacts, and social acceptance could aid in positive developments in the biohydrogen energy industry.     

Potential structural material problems in a hydrogen energy system

Potential structural material problems that may be encountered in the three components of a hydrogen energy system—production, transmission/storage, and utilization—have been identified. Hydrogen embrittlement, corrosion, oxidation, and erosion may occur during the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen embrittlement is of major concern during both transmission and utilization of hydrogen. Specific materials research and development programs necessary to support a hydrogen energy system are described. An awareness of probable shortages of strategic materials has been maintained in these suggested programs.     

Users in the design of Hydrogen Energy Systems: A systematic review

The energy transition is a major societal issue to which hydrogen energy can make an important contribution. If the technical aspects of hydrogen energy seem paramount, it is also important to focus on the end users of these future systems. Indeed, users play an important role in the success of energy systems: they may not accept it, they may not use it as intended. But not only, users can also be a source of innovation. Thus, it is possible to mobilize different approaches, which if they are all legitimate, do not have the same efficiency. In this systematic review of the literature, which combines lexical analysis and data analysis of 152 publications, we identify the approaches implemented to take into account users in Hydrogen Energy Systems. Our results indicate that final users are mostly perceived as a barrier to the deployment of Hydrogen Energy Systems, or as a parameter to be assessed rather than as a resource for the design. Researches have mainly the aim of improving technology adoption. Since Hydrogen Energy Systems are emerging, we recommend focusing studies on upstream user research aimed at stimulating and enhancing technologies and systems design. We also recommend increasing the share of study which focus on the case of hydrogen energy stationary applications and buildings.