Combining the use of CO₂ and H₂ networks benefits carbon management in Europe

This repository contains the official workflow to reproduce the results of the paper:

Combining the use of CO₂ and H₂ networks benefits carbon management in Europe Fabian Hofmann, Christoph Tries, Fabian Neumann, Elisabeth Zeyen, Tom Brown Nature Energy (2025) DOI: 10.1038/s41560-025-01753-5 Preprint: arXiv:2402.19042

The study investigates how hydrogen and carbon dioxide transport networks can support a climate-neutral European energy system. It finds that a hydrogen network is more cost-effective for transporting hydrogen to demand centers, while both networks complement each other when deployed together—the CO₂ network encourages distributed biomass capture and reduces dependence on direct air capture.

Funding

This project was funded by Breakthrough Energy.

Getting ready

You need mamba to run the analysis. Using mamba, you can create an environment from within you can run it:

mamba env create -f environment.yaml

Run the analysis

snakemake -call

This will run all analysis steps to reproduce results and eventually build the report.

To generate a PDF of the dependency graph of all steps build/dag.pdf run:

snakemake -c1 --use-conda -f dag

Repo structure

• config: configurations used in the study
• data: place for raw data
• report: contains all files necessary to build the report; plots and result files are generated automatically
• workflow: contains the Snakemake workflow
• build: will contain all results (does not exist initially)

Citation

If you use this code, please cite:

@article{hofmann2025co2h2,
  title={Combining the use of CO2 and H2 networks benefits carbon management in Europe},
  author={Hofmann, Fabian and Tries, Christoph and Neumann, Fabian and Zeyen, Elisabeth and Brown, Tom},
  journal={Nature Energy},
  year={2025},
  doi={10.1038/s41560-025-01753-5}
}

License

The code in this repo is MIT licensed, see ./LICENSE.md.