Assessment of Green Hydrogen Production Potential From Solar and Wind Energy in Mauritania

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to estimate the green Hydrogen potential from two sources of renewable energies that are solar and wind. This estimation has been done by using satellite data taken from the Global Solar Atlas (GSA) and Global Wind Atlas (GWA). Data were integrated into a Geographical Information System (GIS) to estimate, first the theoretical electricity from solar and wind by using different models. Then we used a third model to estimate the quantity of hydrogen that can be produced from the two different sources mentioned above. As far as we know this is the first attempt to estimate the green hydrogen potential in Mauritania. The results show that the total annual electricity from solar ranged between 275 and 329 GWh/km 2 /year, with the north of the country having the highest potential, especially in the region of Tiris-Zemour and Adrar, in the other hand the south of the country and across the Senegal River line was the regions with the least potential of solar energy. Concerning wind, the values were between 28 and 108 GWh/km 2 /year with the coastline regions localized in the Nouadhibou-Nouakchott axis having the highest potential. The total values of hydrogen production vary between 5428 to 6272 tons/km 2 /year from solar versus 23 to 620 tons/km 2 /year from the wind.