Defining Intra-Regional Hydrogen Trading

[yasmine94]

Dear VEDA Community,

I am working on intra-regional hydrogen trading modeling between Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. 


My objective is to allow the national hydrogen demand of each country to be met either by domestic production or through imports from neighboring countries, using three different transport pathways:

1️⃣ Blended Hydrogen (TBH2) – Hydrogen mixed with natural gas in existing pipelines.
2️⃣ Repurposed Pipeline Hydrogen (TRH2) – Converted gas pipelines used to transport 100% hydrogen.
3️⃣ New Dedicated Hydrogen Pipelines (TNH2) – Newly built infrastructure for hydrogen transport.


What I Did:

1- Defined Dummy Processes in the subres File and Created a dummy process for each hydrogen trade method.
Each process has hydrogen as input and a corresponding trade commodity as output (e.g., TBH2, TRH2, TNH2).
Defined these processes under PRE process sets.


2- Set Up a Trade Matrix in the Trade Scenario, Created a regional trade matrix for each commodity (TBH2, TRH2, TNH2) between Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

3- Defined Trade Parameters in ~TFM_INS table.

Issue & Unexpected Model Behavior:

? Algeria is importing all of its hydrogen demand instead of producing locally.

This seems logical because Algeria's national green hydrogen target is much lower than Tunisia & Morocco. However, Algeria is importing more than 3x its domestic hydrogen needs despite having no hydrogen storage. Why is this happening? Is it an unintended consequence of the trade setup?

My Question:
Does my current setup correctly define intra-regional hydrogen trading via blending, repurposed pipelines, and new dedicated pipelines? Is there a better way to structure intra regional hydrogen trade to ensure realistic results?
How can I ensure that each country’s national hydrogen demand is fulfilled by either domestic production or trade, without excessive imports?

I appreciate any guidance, suggestions, or corrections.

Thank you in advance!

[Antti-L]

> How can I ensure that each country’s national hydrogen demand is fulfilled by either domestic production or trade, without excessive imports?

That should be automatically ensured, if hydrogen has a positive price in all timeslices, because any excessive imports would then mean excessive costs as well, which would not happen under optimization (surplus maximized or costs minimized). Therefore, I guess you might either have zero price hydrogen imports or some constraints that are forcing those excessive imports.

You can ensure that there is no oversupply of a commodity com by defining
   COM_BNDNET(r,'0',com,'ANNUAL','FX')=2; 
That would enforce that (domestic supply + imports) equals (domestic demand + exports).