Analysis on Hydrogen Economics Focusing on Automobile Fuel Production in Oil Refinery

摘要

This paper presents an analysis on hydrogen economics focusing on automobile fuel production in an oil refinery in Japan. Hydrogen is a promising automobile fuel and the oil refining industry would play a big role in producing, distributing and retailing it because the industry constructed the supply chain of automobile fuels like gasoline and diesel oil in the past. The production of hydrogen for retail will much affect the operation of refining equipment because an oil refinery produces and consumes a huge amount of hydrogen in its operation. In this analysis, the authors developed a linear programming model expressing a detailed oil refining process and analyzed the optimal hydrogen production amount for retailing and its marginal production cost. Through the analysis, it was found that the hydrogen retail amount is determined in the operational balance between reforming, cracking and hydrogen production units. The upper limit of the production for retailing was estimated at around 12 billion Nm~3/year.