Time development of new hydrogen transmission pipeline networks for France

•Development of a hydrogen economy.•Transportation infrastructure to deliver hydrogen from production sites to end users.•Determination of the temporal deployment of a new hydrogen transportation infrastructure.•Backward heuristic approach.•French regional hydrogen transportation.

The development of a hydrogen economy will need a transportation infrastructure to deliver hydrogen from production sites to end users. For the specific case of hydrogen, pipelines networks compete with other hydrogen carriers: compressed gas trucks and liquid cryogenic trucks. In this paper, we deal with the determination of the temporal deployment of a new hydrogen transportation infrastructure. Starting from the expected final horizon pipelines network, we propose a backward heuristic approach. The proposed approach is illustrated on a French regional hydrogen transportation network tacking into account two scenarios for hydrogen penetration into the fuel markets. We showed that for the mid term perspective and low market share, the trucks are the most economical options. However, for the long term, the pipeline option is considered as an economical viable option as soon as the hydrogen energy market share for the car fueling market reaches 10%.