Techno-economic assessment of green hydrogen and ammonia production from wind and solar energy in Iran

This paper presents a comprehensive technical and economic assessment of potential green hydrogen and ammonia production plants in different locations in Iran with strong wind and solar resources. The study was organized in five steps. First, regarding the wind density and solar PV potential data, three locations in Iran were chosen with the highest wind power, solar radiation, and a combination of both wind/solar energy. All these lo-cations are inland spots, but since the produced ammonia is planned to be exported, it must be transported to the export harbor in the South of Iran. For comparison, a base case was also considered next to the export harbor with normal solar and wind potential, but no distance from the export harbor. In the second step, a similar large-scale hydrogen pro-duction facility with proton exchange membrane electrolyzers was modeled for all these locations using the HOMER Pro simulation platform. In the next step, the produced hydrogen and the nitrogen obtained from an air separation unit are supplied to a Haber -Bosch process to synthesize ammonia as a hydrogen carrier. Since water electrolysis re-quires a considerable amount of water with specific quality and because Iran suffers from water scarcity, this paper, unlike many similar research studies, addresses the challenges associated with the water supply system in the hydrogen production process. In this re-gard, in the fourth step of this study, it is assumed that seawater from the nearest sea is treated in a desalination plant and sent to the site locations. Finally, since this study in-tends to evaluate the possibility of green hydrogen export from Iran, a detailed piping model for the transportation of water, hydrogen, and ammonia from/to the production site and the export harbor is created in the last step, which considers the real routs using