A review of geothermal energy-driven hydrogen production systems

This paper presents a review of hydrogen production systems using geothermal energy, showing the importance and potential of this technology in addition to the main obstacles facing this domain. The effect of several parameters was taken into consideration, such as geothermal fluid temperature, water electrolysis temperature, working fluid, and type of power cycle. The different types of geothermal power plants were also compared, namely, flash, binary, flash-binary, recuperative, regenerative, and organic Rankine flash cycles. This study covers a wide range of investigations regarding hydrogen production rate, hydrogen production cost, energetic efficiency, exergetic efficiency, exergetic cost, and electricity generated. Hydrogen production rate is one of the most important mentioned parameters in which it was found to vary from 5.439 kg/h to 13958 kg/h. Multigeneration systems have shown great potential to enhance the overall system's efficiency, leading to reduced production costs. The integration of another energy source was found to be interesting in geothermal-driven hydrogen production systems. This would promote the adoption of multigeneration system as well as increasing the geothermal fluid's temperature before entering the power cycle.