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Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro

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Nunez-Jimenez

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Alejandro

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Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro

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    MIGHTY: Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-08) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; De Blasio, Nicola
    The Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade (MIGHTY) is an optimization model to investigate renewable hydrogen production, consumption, and trade between countries. MIGHTY supports strategic analysis by policymakers and investors about the potential roles that countries and regions will play in future renewable hydrogen markets. For this purpose, MIGHTY uses mixed-integer linear programming optimization to find the combination of domestic renewable hydrogen production and international imports that minimizes annual supply costs—which include production and transportation costs—while meeting the hydrogen demand of one country or a group of countries. This paper introduces the model and describes the model formulation, including a brief explanation of how MIGHTY accounts for pipeline diameters and renewable hydrogen cost curves. Finally, limitations and options for future development are discussed.
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    The Future of Renewable Hydrogen in the European Union: Market and Geopolitical Implications
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-03) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; De Blasio, Nicola
    As countries around the world pledge to remove nearly all carbon emissions from their economies within the next forty years, the spotlight has moved to the deep decarbonization of all energy sectors. This aggressive push to decarbonize has sparked renewed interest in clean hydrogen—defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, renewable hydrogen is now enjoying unprecedented political and business momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier that could be the missing piece in the carbon-free energy puzzle. While success is possible, this transformational effort will require close coordination between policy, technology, capital, and society to avoid falling into the traps and inefficiencies of the past. This report focuses on the market and geopolitical implications of renewable hydrogen adoption at scale in the European Union (EU) and presents long-term strategies based on three reference scenarios. Each scenario focuses on one key strategic variable: energy independence, cost (optimization), or energy security. Our analysis shows that only by working together can the EU become a global leader in clean hydrogen innovation and simultaneously contribute to the EU’s climate and energy security goals, a more robust economy, and a more integrated union. What would it require to become hydrogen independent? Where should production be located for cost-competitive supplies? What is the enabling infrastructure that needs to be developed and deployed at scale? How could supply risks be mitigated? Only a thorough analysis of future scenarios can provide policymakers and investors with answers to these key questions, as well as a deep understanding of the associated market and geopolitical implications.
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    Sustainable Mobility: Renewable Hydrogen in the Transport Sector
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2021-06) De Blasio, Nicola; Hua, Charles; Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro
    The transportation sector is the second-largest source of CO2 emissions, after electricity and heat generation, accounting for about 25 percent of global emissions.1 However, it is also one of the most challenging to decarbonize due to its distributed nature and the advantages of fossil fuels in terms of high energy densities, ease of transportation, and storage. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in decarbonizing varies significantly across the sector, making the challenge even more daunting. So far, emissions reduction strategies have focused on improving vehicle and system-wide efficiencies, mode switching, and electrification. The latter is proving relatively easy for smaller vehicles that travel shorter distances and carry lighter loads. However, sector-wide decarbonization pathways will require a transition to low-carbon fuels and the deployment of enabling infrastructure to support innovation at scale. Renewable hydrogen holds promise in sustainable mobility applications, whether by powering fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) like cars, trucks, and trains or as a feedstock for synthetic fuels for ships and airplanes. Fuel cells convert hydrogen-rich fuels into electricity through a chemical reaction. FCEVs use a fuel cell, rather than a battery, to power electric motors, and operate near-silently and produce no tailpipe emissions. Hydrogen-powered vehicles offer key advantages, including shorter refueling times, longer ranges, and a lower material footprint compared to lithium battery-powered alternatives. However, high costs of ownership and a lack of enabling infrastructure are key challenges that must be addressed through policy support, technological innovation, and financial investment. Hydrogen can complement existing efforts to electrify road and rail transportation and provide a scalable option for decarbonizing shipping and aviation. Figure 1 summarizes the mobility segments for which battery electric vehicles (BEVs), FCEVs, and vehicles running on bio- or hydrogen-based synthetic fuels are most applicable.
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    The European 2030 climate and energy package: do domestic strategy adaptations precede EU policy change?
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022) Ollier, Lana; Metz, Florence; Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; Späth, Leonhard; Lilliestam, Johan
    The European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in EU policy. Disaggregating strategic change into changes in different elements (goals, objectives, instrumental logic), allows us to go beyond analyzing the relative prioritization of different goals, and to analyze how policy requirements for reaching those goals were dynamically redefined over time. To this end, we introduce a new method, which based on insights from social network analysis, enables us to systematically trace those strategic chances. We find that shifts in national strategies of the investigated member states preceded the shift in EU policy. In particular, countries reframed their understanding of supply security, and pushed for the internal electricity market also as a security measure to balance fluctuating renewables. Hence, the increasing focus on markets and market integration in the European 2030 package echoed the increasingly central role of the internal market for electricity supply security in national strategies. These findings also highlight that countries dynamically redefined their goals relative to the different phases of the energy transition.
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    The European Union at a Crossroads: Unlocking Renewable Hydrogen’s Potential
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2021-11) De Blasio, Nicola; Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro
    European countries are at a crossroads on their path to carbon neutrality. Today, they are at the forefront of the global clean hydrogen race but going forward they would be better served by collaborating instead of working alone. Overall, the European Union (EU) is highly competitive in clean technologies manufacturing and thus well-positioned to benefit from the emergence of global hydrogen markets. But a narrow focus on short-term cost considerations could drive member states to implement national roadmaps with little or no coordination among themselves and hence little or no chance of competing globally. As a bloc, the EU has pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Clean hydrogen is a cornerstone of this transformational effort; accordingly, in July 2020, the EU adopted its hydrogen strategy with the ambition of deploying open and competitive clean hydrogen markets for all energy sectors and segments by 2050.1 Success hinges around implementing a cohesive long-term strategy to address a fundamental ques- tion and its associated challenges: where could the EU source competitive and secure renewable hydrogen supplies? As our previous research shows, all countries have access to renewable resources (such as solar or wind), to different degrees, and could produce some renewable hydrogen locally. However, while resource-rich countries, such as Spain, could evolve into regional exporters, no EU member state has the potential to become a global export champion. At the same time, North African countries, such as Morocco, are well-situated to act as key suppliers to the EU. Furthermore, imports from resource-rich regions like North America could help to address security of supply concerns.2 Today, EU hydrogen demand stands at 7.8 million tons per year (Mt/yr), equivalent to about 10% of global demand. Germany and the Netherlands are the largest consumers, accounting for over a third of EU demand, followed by Poland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and France, which consume about 0.5 Mt/yr each.3 According to available projections, as hydrogen use grows across all economic sectors, EU hydrogen demand could reach 76 Mt/yr by 2050. But while the EU strategy sets clear targets on electrolyzer deployment by 2030, it provides very few details on how the bloc could meet demand—and at what cost—by 2050.
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    Combining Technology-Push and Demand-Pull Policies to Create More and Better Energy Jobs
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-09) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; Knoeri, Christof; Hoppmann, Joern; Hoffmann, Volker H.
    Policymakers guiding their economies to a low-carbon, prosperous future must strike the right balance between technology-push and demand-pull. The rapid build-out of solar photovoltaics (PV) in recent years has revealed the benefits of generous demand-pull policies, but also their limits. Here, we show why combining robust demand-pull and technology-push policies results in more effective policy mixes that go beyond innovation and deployment to help competitive domestic industries create more and better jobs.
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    Mission Hydrogen: Accelerating the Transition to a Low Carbon Economy
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2021-10) De Blasio, Nicola; Pflugmann, Fridolin; Lee, Henry; Hua, Charles; Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; Fallon, Phoebe
    To accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, all energy systems must be actively decarbonized. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, clean hydrogen – defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity – has captured increasing political and business momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier in the future carbon-free energy puzzle. But taking full advantage of this potential will require a coordinated effort between the public and private sectors focused on scaling technologies, reducing costs, deploying enabling infrastructure, and defining appropriate policies and market structures. Only in this way can we avoid replicating the system-wide inefficiencies of the past that have characterized regional approaches to deploying new energy infrastructure.
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    Beyond innovation and deployment: Modeling the impact of technology-push and demand-pull policies in Germany's solar policy mix
    (Elsevier BV, 2022) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; Knoeri, Christof; Hoppmann, Joern; Hoffmann, Volker H.
    Governments around the world try to accelerate sociotechnical change toward sustainability by introducing policy mixes that combine technology-push and demand-pull instruments. Beyond innovation and deployment, other objectives, such as domestic job and industry creation, are usually part of these policy mixes. However, little is known about how policy mixes should be designed and interactions between policy instruments considered when governments try to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously. We address these questions using an agent-based model of the sociotechnical system for solar photovoltaics in Germany that simulates technology adoption, industry dynamics, international spillovers and trade. By changing public spending on research and development and the solar feed-in tariff, forty-five variations of the historical policy mix in Germany are systematically evaluated. The results show that a narrow focus on innovation and deployment outcomes by academic researchers can lead to recommendations for the design of policy mixes that compromise key dimensions of sociotechnical change, such as job creation. Moreover, the simulations reveal that, because of path-dependent interactions between policy instruments, minor changes in the design of policy instruments can lead to vastly different policy outcomes. These findings have important implications for the literature on policy mixes, technology-push and demand-pull instruments, and sociotechnical transitions.