Updated hydrogen production costs and parities for conventional and renewable technologies

This paper provides first a review of the production costs of hydrogen from conventional, nuclear and renewable sources, reported in the literature during the last eight years. In order to analyze the costs on a unified basis, they are updated to a common year (2009), taking into account the yearly inflation rates. The study also considers whether the hydrogen has been produced in centralized or distributed facilities. From these data, the expected future costs for conventional production of hydrogen are calculated considering several scenarios on carbon emission taxations. Based on these estimations, together with the predicted future costs (2019-2020 and 2030) for hydrogen from alternative sources, several hydrogen cost-parity analyses are exposed for renewable and nuclear energies. From the comparison between these alternative technologies for hydrogen production and the conventional ones (steam methane reforming and coal gasification), several predictions on the time-periods to reach cost parities are elaborated. (C) 2010 Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.