The hydrogen Gulf: Quantitative supply chain optimisation for a trans-regional green hydrogen economy in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

Abstract

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region is exceptionally well positioned for large-scale green hydrogen development, combining among the highest global solar irradiance levels with strategically significant export access to both the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf maritime corridors. However, despite strong policy momentum and ambitious national decarbonisation targets, the systematic design of resilient, economically viable, and temporally robust green hydrogen supply chains (HSCs) in the GCC remains insufficiently addressed in the literature. Existing approaches are predominantly static, single-criterion, or single-country in scope, and fail to capture the dynamic interplay between evolving stakeholder priorities, multi-period technology maturation, and multi-objective trade-offs inherent in large-scale hydrogen infrastructure deployment. This thesis develops a multi-objective optimisation framework for green HSC design in the GCC, integrating Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) with an adaptive Analytic Hierarchy Process–Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (AHP–TOPSIS) methodology. The framework incorporates time-dependent stakeholder preferences and multi-period planning horizons to represent the evolution of technology performance, cost trajectories, and sustainability objectives under demand uncertainty. The model is applied to two regional case studies: Kuwait, analysed under a single-period static framework representing a 2050 planning horizon, and Saudi Arabia’s Northwestern region (Al Jawf, Tabuk, Hail, and Al Madinah provinces; 477,089 km²), evaluated under a dynamic multi-period framework spanning 2025 to 2060. Both cases assess alternative hydrogen production technologies (PEM, AEM, and alkaline water electrolysis), storage options (compressed gas tanks, cryogenic tanks and salt caverns), and transportation modes (compressed gas trucks, cryogenic trucks, and pipelines). Results indicate that production technology selection is the most demand-sensitive component of the supply chain. Alkaline water electrolysis is preferred under low-to-medium demand conditions due to operational stability and lower capital intensity, while PEM electrolysis becomes preferable under high-demand conditions in 2060, where sustained high utilisation enables its higher efficiency to be fully realised. Across both case studies, geological storage consistently dominates surface alternatives under all evaluated scenarios, with substantial performance margins in both MILP and TOPSIS frameworks. Pipeline transportation emerges as the preferred long-term transport mode, with increasing dominance at higher demand levels and under capital cost prioritisation, reflecting strong scale economies relative to cryogenic logistics. Collectively, these findings support a regionally coordinated hydrogen infrastructure design, conceptualised as a GCC Hydrogen Corridor Architecture comprising a pipeline backbone and geographically distributed geological storage network. This framework highlights the potential efficiency gains from coordinated infrastructure development across GCC states, particularly through shared transport corridors, diversified storage siting, and spatial optimisation of production and demand centres. The thesis contributes four principal advances: an integrated MILP- AHP-TOPSIS framework for hydrogen supply chain optimisation across multiple GCC contexts; the identification of regime-dependent technology optimality as a structural feature of hydrogen system design; a quantitative basis for assessing coordinated GCC hydrogen infrastructure at the regional scale; and a methodological demonstration that static and multi-period optimisation frameworks provide complementary insights into different dimensions of system behaviour under uncertainty.