Hydrogen production technologies: Attractiveness and future perspective

Transition to more renewable energies to render current energy demand and set aside conventional resources for the next generation needs promising strategies. Frame the future energy plan to address the energy crisis requires to have insight and foresight about the hereafter of technologies and their markets. Among different renewable energy resources, hydrogen demonstrates an encouraging future. Therefore, understanding the flexibility and compatibility of hydrogen production technologies is important to pave the way for this transition. One strategy to achieve the mentioned targets is to evaluate different hydrogen technologies based on their life cycle and their acceptance at the commercial scale. For the very first time, various hydrogen production technologies are evaluated in terms of the technology life cycle. A novel approach is employed to find the current state of the hydrogen production technologies market. By applying simple and free tools such as search traffic and patent search, the technology adoption curve and technology life cycle of each hydrogen production technology is assessed. Two criteria are utilized for this matter, patents as a technical indicator and Google trend as a technology interest indicator. For this matter 35 088 patents have been extracted and analysed. Then the data are fitted by logistic function curve to foresight different technologies' life cycle. The technology attractiveness of each hydrogen production technologies is determined by obtaining the ratio of published patents to granted ones. The level of acceptance of each hydrogen technology is assessed by using an adaptation diagram. By the combination of these two diagrams, the current status and future of the technologies are achieved and validated. Findings show that most of the hydrogen production technologies are in the slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity stages.