Research
LOHC & Hydrogen System Economics
Two threads under one economics lens: mechanism-level catalyst work on liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) dehydrogenation, and techno-economic assessment of hydrogen refueling and compression systems.
- Economics
Background
Materials and systems work only matters commercially if the economics pencil out, and that’s where a lot of my non-lab work sits: translating catalyst and reactor decisions into cost-per-kilogram-of-hydrogen numbers that can be compared across technology options, rather than treating techno-economic analysis as an afterthought bolted onto a finished technical result. Two threads run through this case, tied together by that lens.
The first is a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) thread. LOHCs store hydrogen by chemically binding it to a liquid molecule at one site and releasing it by catalytic dehydrogenation at another — a route that lets hydrogen move through existing liquid-fuel infrastructure instead of requiring new cryogenic or high-pressure handling. My contribution here was on the catalysis side: designing mechanism-verification experiments and providing XPS surface characterization for platinum-based dehydrogenation catalysts, looking at how promoter atoms and catalyst structure change the reaction pathway and the rate at which hydrogen is released.
The second is a techno-economic assessment (TEA) capability that runs across several projects rather than sitting inside a single paper. I’ve used the HDSAM (Hydrogen Delivery Scenario Analysis Model) framework to assess hydrogen refueling station economics, carried out a techno-economic assessment of the compressor stage in a high-pressure hydrogen system — the compressor techno-economic assessment contribution is detailed in Sodium Borohydride for Hydrogen Mobility & Compression— and run levelized cost analyses to compare competing system designs on a common cost basis.
What I did
- Designed mechanism-verification experiments and provided XPS support for a platinum-based LOHC dehydrogenation catalyst study.
- Ran an HDSAM-based techno-economic assessment of hydrogen refueling station economics.
- Contributed a techno-economic assessment of the compressor stage in a high-pressure hydrogen system.
- Carried out levelized cost analyses across competing system designs.
- Built a cost–benefit model for a 1 MW combined heat-and-power plant running on retired vehicle fuel-cell stacks — the analysis behind the contest grand prize.
- Modeled the levelized cost of an overseas LOHC green-hydrogen supply chain feeding a 1,000 MW co-firing power plant, from hydrogenation to maritime transport to dehydrogenation.
Case study: second-life fuel-cell power
The contest-winning analysis starts from an asymmetry in how fuel-cell stacks age. Automotive stacks retire at roughly 90% state-of-health after about 5,000 hours, because vehicle duty — rapid load swings, humidity cycling — is exactly what accelerates degradation. Under steady stationary load the same stack chemistry points to lifetimes approaching 80,000 hours. So a retired vehicle stack still holds most of its useful life, and the model prices what that remainder is worth: a 1 MW plant assembled from ~14 retired stacks (73.8 kW each after first-life degradation), running 7,884 hours a year and selling both electricity and district heat, with by-product hydrogen as fuel. Cost–benefit and break-even trajectories were discounted at 1.7%, the A+ corporate bond rate at the time.
Case study: LOHC supply-chain economics
The LOHC model follows green hydrogen from an overseas production site to a Korean power plant: hydrogenation into the carrier abroad, maritime transport by VLCC, dehydrogenation using the plant’s waste heat, and co-firing in a 1,000 MW LNG turbine. Process simulation sized the CAPEX and OPEX of every stage, and a levelized cost analysis rolled them into a single delivered cost per kilogram. The point of the exercise is the sensitivity sweep: it turns catalyst KPIs into economic requirements, saying exactly how good the dehydrogenation catalyst has to be — in space velocity and in lifetime — before the whole chain clears the bar against LNG-only operation.
Outcomes
The second-life stack analysis above won the Grand Prize at the 1st Future Automotive Industry Idea Contest, organized by the Foundation of Korea Automotive Parts Industry Promotion (KAP). It’s the applied side of the same economics lens that runs through the refueling-station and compressor analyses — same methodology, aimed at a public idea-contest audience rather than a peer-reviewed one.
Related publications
Promoter-guided reaction intermediate dynamics enhance perhydro-benzyltoluene dehydrogenation
ACS Catalysis, 2025
Co-author
Contribution: Experimental design for mechanism-verification studies and XPS support
“How promoter atoms steer reaction intermediates in LOHC dehydrogenation over Pt.”
doi.org/10.1021/acscatal.4c07703Synergistic structural and electronic influences of Pt bead catalysts on dehydrogenation activity for liquid organic hydrogen carriers
Chemical Engineering Journal, 2023/2024
Co-author
“How the structure and electronic state of platinum “bead” catalysts jointly control hydrogen release from a liquid organic carrier.”
doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2024.150446