Assessing China’s green hydrogen supply and end-use diffusion in hard-to-abate industries

The deep decarbonization of China’s hard-to-abate industries requires urgent expansion of clean hydrogen deployment, which is still in its infancy ascribed to its weak cost-competitiveness compared with the fossil-based counterparts and uncertain diffusion prospects. To address this problem, this study evaluates the supply potential and levelized cost of hydrogen production from onshore wind and solar PV on a 1 km-grid level, which collaborates with the established bottom-up plant-level hydrogen demand inventory to reveal the spatial heterogeneity and sectoral disparity of the hydrogen layouts for the first time. A total maximum hydrogen demand potential of 108.9 Mt H2/yr is identified considering industrial layouts nowadays, which can be fed by 313 hydrogen hubs with the weighted-average levelized cost of 1.26 – 4.53 USD/kg H2 in 2060. Furthermore, a top-level strategy for scaling up shared hydrogen infrastructure networks is envisaged built upon the multi-criteria and multi-scale comparison of these hydrogen hubs, which may provide insights into the design of policy instruments tailored to specific hydrogen hubs.