Hydrogen Infrastructure Decisions through a Real Option Lens

Hydrogen has emerged as a possible transportation fuel for addressing long-term, sustainable energy supply, security, and environmental problems. The transition from fossil-fuel based energy consumption towards sustainable energy solutions is a complex societal process. The innovation process for any emerging technology like hydrogen fuel cell technology is usually characterized as complex, with high R&D costs and encompassing high degrees of uncertainties regarding the future of the technology and the diffusion into markets. Hydrogen fuel cells have a high potential in the long run, but they are currently surrounded by many uncertainties. It is generally believed that the transition to hydrogen-powered transportation mainly faces challenges and uncertainties from market, technical and policy aspects. Market barriers include building a supporting fuel infrastructure, creating a market for new and unfamiliar vehicles, and achieving economies of scale in vehicle production while providing an attractive selection of vehicle models for car-buyers. Whether potential customers will accept the products or whether public users such as transportation companies are willing to procure hydrogen vehicles, still remains unknown. Moreover, technical uncertainty is also important.It relates to uncertainty of the technology and how it will develop, of crucial technological barriers and possibilities to solve them. Last but not the least, policy uncertainty is a crucial factor too. The position and attitude of public decision makers and the predictability and consistency of policy measures like subsidies, tax-breaks, regulatory requirements and the public procurement of vehicles and energy services are crucial to the deployment of hydrogen fuel cell technology into society. In this thesis, I aim to apply real options theory to model uncertainties perceived by potential investors connected to the transition process towards a hydrogen infrastructure. I will develop a collection of dynamic approaches to model multiple sources of uncertainties and outline strategies for coping with uncertainties and their resolutions. My aim is to guide investors to make a series of optimal decisions. Throughout this thesis, I measure different sources of uncertainties and develop various real option models to investigate the optimal investment strategy of hydrogen infrastructure development in the Netherlands. In the analysis, I will make extensive use of the phased roadmap HyWays, laid out for the development of hydrogen stations in 10 European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom). Our case study is designed by scaling back the European HyWays projections to the Dutch market, based on its population and kilometres of roads.