Green Hydrogen DC Bridge from Africa to Europe

In this paper, we examine the feasibility of harnessing abundant solar energy resources in North Africa to export it to Europe, via a high voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine cable (SC), where it is used to produce green hydrogen for the European market. The main subsystems used to model green hydrogen production are water desalination by reverse osmosis (RO), water electrolysis using a polymer-electrolyte membrane (PEM), solar PV panels, batteries, and submarine cables to transmit electric energy from Africa to Europe. These models were integrated using an energy management system to simulate the operation of generating renewable electric energy from PV panels and transmitting it to Europe to produce hydrogen. A search space of designs is identified and sampled and then examined to identify the best among these in an ordinal optimization (OO) framework to determine their cost of operation in $/kg of hydrogen. The likely optimal design for an average production rate of around 50 t/ day consisted of a PV plant of 810 MW, a battery of 1350 MWh, a PEM of 86 t/ day, a RO size of 56 m<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup>/h, a SC size of 2000 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> at 320 kV DC, and a buffer hydrogen storage of 32 tons. This resulted in a hydrogen cost of $4.42/ kg, with the Tunis-Italy route being investigated for power delivery. This is deduced based on projected technology costs for the year 2035, which are likely to drop further.