Economic comparison of electric fuels for heavy duty mobility produced at excellent global sites-a 2035 scenario

The transformation of economies worldwide towards climate neutrality will require not only renewable elec-tricity but also climate-neutral energy carriers such as hydrogen and its derivatives. The production cost of electric fuels (e-fuels) are to a large extent driven by the energy-intensive electrolytic water splitting. The option of producing e-fuels in highly industrialized countries, as Germany, competes with production at international locations, with excellent conditions for renewable energies and thus very low levelized cost of green hydrogen and its derivatives. In this paper, we examine the economic efficiency of various imported e-fuels that are under consideration in different scenarios for the year 2035: Fischer-Tropsch diesel, methanol, and hydrogen trans-ported as cryogenic liquid or in form of liquid organic hydrogen carriers. We develop a mathematical model that covers the entire process chain, from the production of the e-fuels at various excellent locations worldwide to the energetic utilization of the fuels in a heavy duty vehicle. We find that the choice of production site has a major impact on the mobility cost using the respective fuels. Under the selected boundary conditions and assumptions, methanol, cryogenic hydrogen, and liquid organic hydrogen carriers are the most favourable options for all seven locations examined. Which e-fuel is cheapest varies with the production site. Especially in case of diesel, the levelized cost of electricity determined by the full load hours of the applied renewable energy source have a huge impact. An LOHC-based system is shown to be less dependent on electricity source compared to other tech-nologies due to its comparatively low electricity consumption. The length of the transportation route and the price of the filling station infrastructure, however, increase mobility cost for LOHC and LH2.