Pre-normative research on hydrogen release assessment

Hydrogen could play a crucial role in achieving climate neutrality by serving as an energy carrier for renewable sources, offering an alternative to traditional fossil fuels. However, researchers are investigating the impact of hydrogen emissions, as its leakage into the atmosphere poses a concern due to its potential to indirectly influence methane’s atmospheric lifetime and thereby extending its greenhouse effect. Therefore, minimising hydrogen emissions would reduce any potential environmental impact while enhancing safety and efficiency throughout the hydrogen value chain. Thus far, the literature lacks a verified data inventory on the amount of hydrogen emitted from the value chain. Little to no standardized data are present for many elements of the value chain. Otherwise, when present, efforts are still needed for their collection and validation in a unique inventory. The research community needs to address this by improving the capability to quantify small and large emissions and delivering validated methodologies and techniques for measuring or calculating them. An open-access and comprehensible user-friendly tool is urgently needed to better quantify the emissions from the whole hydrogen value chain. The pre-normative research on hydrogen release assessment (NHyRA) project is specifically designed to address these urgent needs. As a first step in this process, the project defined the hydrogen value chain, identifying its main components’ typical operative conditions and recognizing the potential sources of hydrogen emissions.  The next step, the project is working to update an open-access first version of the hydrogen emissions inventory to serve as a reference for the scientific and industrial community. Therefore, by welcoming and validating any contribution of new data, including from outside the NHyRA Consortium, subsequent versions of the inventory will include a more significant amount of data for some of the archetypes (i.e. processes or equipment) in the hydrogen value chain section, to ensure consistent scenario analysis and provide mitigation action recommendations. Furthermore, the NHyRA Consortium experts have identified hydrogen detection and quantification techniques and instruments, covering those which are commercially available and emerging. In this regard, partners of the Consortium have identified three monitoring categories: Detection of emissions at the component level, Detection and quantification of emissions at the component level, and detection and quantification of emissions at the area/site level. Additionally, new or adequately adapted experimental, theoretical, and simulation methodologies will be validated to perform laboratory or in-field measurements to achieve the ambitious goal. Experimental tests will also be performed on the most critical elements of the hydrogen value chains by the partners of the Consortium. A complete picture of the hydrogen emission scenarios, applied on the middle (2030) and long (2050) term European hydrogen economy, will be developed to enable decision-makers to quantify the impact of hydrogen emissions in the energy system transition, identifying  and prioritizing effective risk mitigation actions. Finally, the project will formulate recommendations for Standards and Technical Specifications.