Life cycle assessment and life cycle costing of hydrogen production from biowaste and biomass in Sweden

Abstract

In this study, an environmental and economic assessment of hydrogen production from biowaste and biomass is performed from a life cycle perspective, with a high degree of primary life cycle inventory data on materials, energy, and investment flows. Using SimaPro LCA software and CML-IA, 2001 impact assessment method, ten environmental impact categories are analyzed for environmental analysis. Economic analysis includes capital and operational expenditures and monetization cost of life cycle environmental impacts. The hydrogen production from biowaste has a high climate impact, photochemical oxidant, and freshwater eutrophication than biomass while it performs far better in ozone depletion, terrestrial ecotoxicity, abiotic depletion-fossil, abiotic depletion, human toxicity, and freshwater ecotoxicity. The sensitivity analysis of LCA results indicates that feedstock to biogas/pyrolysis-oil yields ratio and the type of energy source for the reforming process can significantly influence the results, particularly climate change, abiotic depletion, and human toxicity. The life cycle cost (LCC) of 1 kg hydrogen production has been accounted as 0.45–2.76 € with biowaste and 0.54–3.31 € with biomass over the plant's lifetime of 20 years. From the environmental impacts of climate change, photochemical oxidant, and freshwater eutrophication hydrogen production from biomass is a better option than biowaste while from other included impact categories and LCC perspectives it’s biowaste. This research contributes to bioresources to hydrogen literature with some new findings that can be generalized in Europe and even globally as it is in line with and endorse existing theoretical and simulation software-based studies.