Session: 13-01: Hydrogen and Fuel Cells

Paper Number: 156301

156301 - Analyzing a Hydrogen Trucking Transportation Corridor From Houston to Los Angeles 

Abstract: 

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for about 7% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Decarbonization of the long-haul freight transportation industry is difficult due to technological limitations of heavy-duty electric vehicles and fueling infrastructure. Because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) have no direct greenhouse gas emissions and can travel long distances with fast refueling, they are an appealing alternative. However, the limited availability and reliability of infrastructure is a major barrier in the decarbonization of the long-haul transportation industry, so hydrogen fueling infrastructure needs to be planned and deployed in an effective manner to enable this transition.

The overall goal of this project is to develop realistic, equitable, and usable hydrogen fueling station infrastructure deployment plans that can be replicated for future hydrogen trucking corridors. Project partners include research organizations (The University of Texas at Austin, GTI Energy, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory), energy retailers and producers, industry associations, truck manufacturers, clean cities coalitions, and community planning organizations. The analysis will be done through three main technical tasks among all project partners: model construction, scenario analysis, and risk analysis. Energy, infrastructure, and deployment strategies will be established for key operating scenarios within the Texas Triangle (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and along the I-10 corridor from Houston, TX to Los Angeles, CA.

We are developing a hydrogen fueling station (HFS) model to examine the interaction between on-site hydrogen production, delivery, on-site storage, and truck demand at the station. We are also determining energy usage profiles and the total cost of ownership of the station. We are upgrading the Hydrogen Optimization with Deployment of Infrastructure (HOwDI) model to study optimal production, distribution, and conversion infrastructure deployment, and to quantify emissions, delivered price of hydrogen, and electricity, natural gas, and water usage from production. The modeling team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is identifying hydrogen refueling station locations, heavy-duty freight truck schedules, and fuel demand profiles. This demand per station is used as an input into the hydrogen fueling station model. The HFS model produces station results for each location within the corridor, while the HOwDI model determines the production and distribution infrastructure needed to meet the demand of all stations in the corridor. We plan on running scenarios with various production (on-site, centralized, steam methane reforming, electrolysis) and distribution (truck, pipeline, liquid, gaseous) methods, and assessing the impacts of increasing market share of HFCVs on the electric grid, the environment, and infrastructure deployment to inform the development of a hydrogen transportation corridor from Houston to Los Angeles.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Fiscal Year 2022 Vehicle Technologies Office Program Wide Funding Opportunity Announcement Award Number DE-EE0010650.

Presenting Author: Lea Daniel The University of Texas at Austin

Presenting Author Biography: Lea is originally from Houston, TX and has also lived in Paris, France and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She graduated from the University of Houston in May 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and minor in mathematics. Lea started graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin in August 2021, specializing in Thermal-Fluid Systems, and joined the Webber Energy Group in January 2022. She completed her master's degree in mechanical engineering in May 2023. For her thesis, she researched the premise of using plug-in electric vehicles to power homes during emergency situations when the electric grid is down. It involved creating a computational tool and investigating how vehicle-to-home solutions compare to other technologies for home backup power. Lea is currently working towards her PhD in mechanical engineering, focused on the analysis of infrastructure deployment for hydrogen heavy-duty vehicles.