The job opening is for a full time PhD position at the Energy & Resources group of the
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University. In this project, you will design and optimise the future hydrogen infrastructure for efficient production, transportation, storage, and use.
Your job This PhD position is part of a large research project –
HyTROS, Hydrogen Transport, Offshore and Storage – which is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) within the framework of the Dutch growth fund
GroenvermogenNL. Accordingly, you will be embedded in an interdisciplinary team with 33 parties from universities, research institutions, and industries. HyTROS aims at accelerating the scale-up of green hydrogen in the Netherlands.
The transition to a CO2 net-zero society requires a major rethinking of the energy system, with coordinated, timely deployment of several technologies. Hydrogen is expected to contribute to this transition by reducing the emissions and replacing fossil feedstocks in hard-to-abate sectors, for example the chemical industry. This is particularly relevant for the Netherlands, which is Europe’s second-largest hydrogen producer. Almost all hydrogen currently comes from fossil fuels, but, by 2030, the Netherlands wants to have 4GW of electrolysis capacity (10% of the total EU target for that year). The main challenge to producing green hydrogen on that large scale is to investigate to which extent the current natural gas system on land (onshore) and sea (offshore) can be reused for hydrogen, where new assets are needed, and what needs to be arranged for the new energy system to operate safely and cost-effectively with public support. This requires more research on hydrogen production, transport and storage along the entire hydrogen value chain. The HyTROS programme will research transport (especially via pipelines), above ground and underground storage, offshore transport and storage and safety.
This PhD project will be embedded in the Upscaling and System Integration task of HyTROS, where a team of four PhD candidates will support the scale-up of the Dutch hydrogen infrastructure using model-based system optimisation and technology development. The development of new mathematical models is at the core of the task: to enable the upscaling of a cost-effective and climate-timely hydrogen infrastructure, methods and procedures are needed to optimise the design of national and local H2 systems under varying and uncertain future needs.
More specifically, this PhD project will further develop a system optimisation modelling framework where grids (H2, electricity, including storage points) and technologies (selection, location, size) will be optimised for minimum costs and CO2 emissions based on their hourly operation. Both the H2 transmission and the distribution grids will be embedded in the framework, with special focus on the interconnection between the two. Moreover, it is envisioned that the optimisation framework will include digital twins of technologies of interest, therefore allowing for reliable reproduction of the technology thermodynamic behaviour and the understanding of their role in the energy/H2 infrastructure, for example with respect to e.g., size, purity of H2 at different locations, operating profiles. The technologies of interest will be tested and developed by other partners in HyTROS. The modelling framework will be implemented using mixed integer linear programming (MILP), which allows for solving large NP-hard problems in a computationally efficient manner.
You will focus on the following activities:
- formulation of mixed-integer linear digital twins of the technologies of interest;
- validation and improvement of the models;
- inclusion of the digital twins in the MILP modelling optimisation environment;
- formulation of both transmission and distribution grids in the MILP modelling tool;
- application of the tool to case studies of interest (national level for the transmission, overall national distribution system, plus selected locations for the distribution system design).