Impact of hydrogen onboard storage technologies on the performance of hydrogen fuelled vehicles: A techno-economic well-to-wheel assessment

Hydrogen onboard storage technologies form an important factor in the overall performance of hydrogen fuelled transportation, both energetically and economically. Particularly, advanced storage options such as metal hydrides and carbon nanotubes are often hinted favourable to conventional, liquid and pressurized, storage options. This study assesses the technical and economic performance of four onboard storage technologies in a well-to-wheel assessment. It does so for centralized and onsite hydrogen production scenarios with gaseous pipeline and liquid truck distributed hydrogen. Energetically, centralized production and liquefaction outperforms onsite production and liquefaction by 20% on the average primary energy input, despite the need of pipeline or over the road distribution. The gaseous handling on the filling station performs better with an average driving energy use of 0.11 MJp/km compared to 0.15 MJp/km for liquid handling. The advanced onboard storage technologies perform better by 22% than the conventional storage technologies on primary energy input in the chain. The average driving cost for gaseous and liquid onboard storage are 53% above the gasoline reference cost of 21 € ct / km and the advanced onboard storage technologies as much as 98%, almost double the reference cost. The car expenditure for a fuel cell driven car compared to an internal combustion engine driven car is for a large part responsible for this difference. Advanced onboard storage technologies thus perform better than conventional onboard storage technologies energetically albeit to higher cost.