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This study examines the usability of a real-world, large-scale natural gas transport infrastructure for hydrogen transport. We investigate whether a converted network can transport the amounts of hydrogen necessary to satisfy current energy demands. After introducing an optimization model for the robust transient control of hydrogen networks, we conduct computational experiments based on real-world demand scenarios. Using a representative network, we demonstrate that replacing each turbo compressor unit by four parallel hydrogen compressors, each of them comprising multiple serial compression stages, and imposing stricter rules regarding the balancing of in- and outflow suffices to realize transport in a majority of scenarios. However, due to the reduced linepack there is an increased need for technical and non-technical measures leading to a more dynamic network control. Furthermore, the amount of energy needed for compression increases by 364% on average.
Optimizing the transient control of gas networks is a highly challenging task.
The corresponding model incorporates the combinatorial complexity of determining the settings for the many active elements as well as the non-linear and non-convex nature of the physical and technical principles of gas transport.
In this paper, we present the latest improvements of our ongoing work to solve this problem for real-world, large-scale problem instances:
By adjusting our mixed-integer non-linear programming model regarding the gas compression capabilities in the network, we reflect the technical limits of the underlying units more accurately while maintaining a similar overall model size.
In addition, we introduce a new algorithmic approach that is based on splitting the complexity of the problem by first finding assignments for discrete variables and then determining the continuous variables as locally optimal solution of the corresponding non-linear program.
For the first task, we design multiple different heuristics based on concepts for general time-expanded optimization problems that find solutions by solving a sequence of sub-problems defined on reduced time horizons.
To demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach, we test our algorithm on particularly challenging historic demand scenarios.
The results show that high-quality solutions are obtained reliably within short solving times, making the algorithm well-suited to be applied at the core of time-critical industrial applications.
The German high-pressure natural gas transport network consists of thousands of interconnected elements spread over more than 120,000 km of pipelines built during the last 100 years. During the last decade, we have spent many person-years to extract consistent data out of the available sources, both public and private. Based on two case studies, we present some of the challenges we encountered.
Preparing consistent, high-quality data is surprisingly hard, and the effort necessary can hardly be overestimated. Thus, it is particularly important to decide which strategy regarding data curation to adopt. Which precision of the data is necessary? When is it more efficient to work with data that is just sufficiently correct on average?
In the case studies we describe our experiences and the strategies we adopted to deal with the obstacles and to minimize future effort.
Finally, we would like to emphasize that well-compiled data sets, publicly available for research purposes, provide the grounds for building innovative algorithmic solutions to the challenges of the future.