Environmental and health impact assessment of Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC) systems – challenges and preliminary results

M Markiewicz,J Thöming,P Wasserscheid,N Brückner,S Stolte,A Bösmann,Y Q Zhang

doi:10.1039/c4ee03528c

Abstract

This paper presents the first account on the ecotoxicological profile of some potential LOHC structures.

Highlights

Modern societies depend on steady and reliable supply of energy.[1,2] Due to the increasing environmental awareness, many countries try to optimize their economies for a lowcarbon growth, i.e. a growth that happens without a major increase in CO2 emissions, e.g. without burning additionalThe amount of energy that can be harvested from renewable sources, such as sun, wind and hydropower is extremely high
This paper presents the first account on the toxicological profile of some potential Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC) structures
Hydrogen is considered as a main player in future energy systems, especially for mobile applications as it is a clean fuel of very high gravimetric energy density (120 MJ kgÀ1)

Summary

Introduction

The amount of energy that can be harvested from renewable sources, such as sun, wind and hydropower is extremely high. It is possible that during prolonged exposure the compound will be concentrated in hydrophobic phases of living organisms (like fatty tissue, biological membranes) as a result of partitioning or will be ingested as droplets or in the particle bound form (sorbed on humic matter or biomass on which they feed) and build up in the body In such a case the amount of compound that acts upon the test subjects might signi cantly exceed the water solubility limit. For the hydrogen-lean, aromatic form (NEC) and the fully hydrogenated, heterocyclic form (H12-NEC) the likelihood of being classi ed as PBT, based solely on QSARs, would be rather low It is worth noting, that in a preliminary ready biodegradability test performed within this work no biodegradation was observed for NEC within 4 weeks (see Fig. 8) yet model design for predicting results of that test (Biowin3) gave “weeks” as the expected time frame (Table 2). In this context ‘similar’ very o en means having similar Ko/w at

Presumably not T3

Findings

Conclusion