Hydrogen as a clean cooking fuel: Technical and economic viability and barriers in developing countries

Traditional carbon-based energy sources, including charcoal, wood, and animal manure, are used for cooking by almost 3 billion people every day. Biomass cooking results in loss of biodiversity and deforestation, greenhouse gases emission and toxic smoke that compromises human health. By mitigating indoor air pollution and lowering emissions of greenhouse gases, hydrogen can contribute to the realization of clean and secure cooking. The hydrogen models and experiments are also part of our rigorous evaluation. An analysis is conducted on renewable hydrogen technologies and their potential for implementation in low-income countries. Lastly, we establish a plan for how underdeveloped nations can produce hydrogen. Hydrogen is a safe and efficient cooking fuel, as we have identified in our analysis. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to develop new, innovative models to change the traditional methods of cooking. Hydrogen models centered on the global south should prioritize adoption and account for the difficulties faced by underdeveloped nations. Furthermore, there is a large disparity in the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) because the simulations' techno-economic factors differ greatly. This paper is a review study and synthesis of the current state of hydrogen cooking technologies and systems. It also examines current modeling research and provides a conceptual framework for adoption in developing countries. This review concludes that although hydrogen cooking technologies hold the potential to reach up to 78–80 % efficiency and do not produce indoor air pollution, their cost is still considerably higher than LPG and charcoal, because of the high cost of electrolysers and infrastructure. These results demonstrate the importance of using thorough techno-economic hypotheses in order to forecast how much hydrogen cost precisely.