Spatio-temporal trends in the propagation and capacity of low-carbon hydrogen projects

TL;DR

This study analyzes global low-carbon hydrogen project trends over two decades, using advanced statistical methods to examine capacity growth, geographic spread, and regional differences in green versus fossil fuel plants.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive application of regression, geographic variance analysis, and distance correlation to study hydrogen project propagation and capacity trends.

Findings

Most regions show linear growth in hydrogen plants.

North America and Europe exhibit nonlinear dependence in project capacity.

Regional contributions of green vs fossil fuel plants vary over time.

Abstract

This paper uses established and recently introduced methods from the applied mathematics and statistics literature to study trends in the propagation and capacity of low-carbon hydrogen projects over the past two decades. First, we judiciously apply a regression model to estimate the association between various predictors and the capacity of global hydrogen projects. Next, we turn to the geographic propagation of low-carbon hydrogen projects, where we apply a recently introduced method to explore the geographic variance of hydrogen projects over time. Then, we demonstrate that most geographic regions display linear growth in cumulative plants and apply distance correlation to determine the nonlinear dependence between the two most prolific regions - North America and Europe. Finally, we study the time-varying regional consistency between the contribution of green vs fossil fuel plants to the total number and capacity of hydrogen plants.