Cost and Performance Comparison Of Stationary Hydrogen Fueling Appliances

This work was funded by the Hydrogen Program Office of the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-FG01-99EE35099 and represents the second task of three to be completed under this contract. The first task presented a broad overview of the costs for creating infrastructures to supply direct hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline to support fuel cell vehicles (FCV’s). A conclusion of the report resulting from the first task was that “the costs of maintaining the existing gasoline infrastructure per vehicle supported are up to two times more expensive than the estimated costs of maintaining either a methanol or a hydrogen fuel infrastructure”. The second task, as detailed in this report, was to provide a detailed analysis of the cost of providing small-scale stationary hydrogen fueling appliances (HFA’s) for the on-site production and storage of hydrogen from natural gas to fuel hydrogen FCV’s. Four potential reforming systems were studied: 10-atmosphere steam methane reforming (SMR) with pressure-swing adsorption (PSA) as gas cleanup, 20-atm SMR with metal membrane gas cleanup, 10-atm autothermal reforming (ATR) with PSA gas cleanup, and 20-atm ATR with metal membrane gas cleanup. The full report for this work is available in pdf format at www.directedtechnologies.com/ pubs/DTI_Task2_Report.html. 1 Proceedings of the 2002 U.S. DOE Hydrogen Program Review NREL/CP-610-32405