🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the critical oversight in existing green hydrogen supply chain planning—the neglect of supply disruption risks, which can lead to substantial welfare losses and systemic vulnerability. To mitigate these issues, the authors propose a risk-aware stochastic optimization model tailored to the European Union’s hydrogen import system, integrating two complementary resilience strategies: diversification of import corridors and strategic overinvestment in infrastructure. The framework holistically evaluates infrastructure configurations and their economic impacts across a range of disruption scenarios. Compared to conventional risk-agnostic planning approaches, the proposed model reduces welfare losses by 12% (approximately €24 billion), achieves performance nearly equivalent to that of an idealized disruption-free system, and yields significantly improved transport network design and terminal deployment.
📝 Abstract
Despite growing concerns over energy security, infrastructure planning and modelling for emerging green fuel supply chains often neglect risks from supply disruptions. Using a stochastic optimisation model of EU hydrogen imports, we show that 'naive' infrastructure planning results in welfare losses of 12 % (24 billion EUR) compared to risk-aware planning that anticipates supply disruptions. Despite requiring higher upfront investments, anticipatory planning achieves welfare levels close to those of an idealised system without disruptions, but entails a markedly different infrastructure configuration. Two complementary resilience strategies emerge: diversification across import corridors and strategic over-investment. This leads to increased intra-European transport capacity, a broader set of import pipelines, and investments in costly shipping terminals for hydrogen carriers. Our results show that incorporating supply risk considerations into infrastructure planning helps prevent the structural vulnerabilities seen in fossil fuel systems when designing future hydrogen supply chains.