The fuel-travel-back approach to hydrogen station siting

The problem of hydrogen station location is often studied through understanding refueling behavior or reviewing the experience of gasoline stations. Driven by the notion “where you drive more is where you more likely need refueling”, this paper develops a new approach where station siting is treated as a “fuel-travel-back” problem and the only required data is the distribution of vehicle miles traveled. Such a fuel-travel-back problem is in nature a typical transportation problem and can be solved using a mix-integer-programming model. When the total fuel-travel-back time is minimized, so is the average refueling travel time of a random motorist, for which theoretical deduction is provided. The model is applied to derive an optimal station roll-out scheme for Southern California. The results show that, if station size constraints are relaxed, only 18% of the existing gasoline station number is needed to achieve the current fuel accessibility of gasoline in the region. Fewer stations lead to a larger station size, suggesting a need to re-examine the current thinking on designs of hydrogen station and distribution systems and to conduct more regional studies to identify more or less promising regions for hydrogen. The results also indicate that early stations should be located strategically in a regional sense, and sometimes including low-demand locations, which is contradictory to the conventional wisdom.