Abstract
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is often used to check the environmental suitability of hydrogen energy systems, usually involving comparative studies. However, these comparative studies are typically affected by inconsistent methodological choices between the case studies under comparison. In this regard, protocols for the harmonisation of methodological choices in LCA of hydrogen are available. The step-by-step application of these protocols to a large number of case studies has already resulted in libraries of harmonised carbon, energy, and acidification footprints of hydrogen. In order to foster the applicability of these harmonisation protocols, a web-based software for the calculation of harmonised life-cycle indicators of hydrogen has recently been developed. This work addresses—for the first time—the validation of such a tool by checking the deviation between the available libraries of harmonised carbon, energy, and acidification footprints of hydrogen and the corresponding tool-based harmonised results. A high correlation (R2 > 0.999) was found between the library- and tool-based harmonised life-cycle indicators of hydrogen, thereby successfully validating the software. Hence, this tool has the potential to effectively promote the use of harmonised life-cycle indicators for robust comparative LCA studies of hydrogen energy systems, significantly mitigating misinterpretation.
Highlights
The current level of fossil fuel use in the energy sector raises significant sustainability concerns, e.g., on environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions [1]
In case of harmonising energy footprints, they have to be quantified as the sum of fossil and nuclear energy demand, while the harmonisation of acidification requires the use of a CML-based method [21]
Regarding the harmonised carbon footprints of hydrogen (Table 1), the values with: (i) a relative difference above 5% between the tool-based GWP and the library-based one and (ii) an absolute difference higher than 0.6 kg CO2 eq per functional unit (i.e., 5% of the harmonised carbon footprint of the reference case, SMR2) were revisited in order to identify the origin of such a significant deviation
Summary
The current level of fossil fuel use in the energy sector raises significant sustainability concerns, e.g., on environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions [1]. Within this context, hydrogen is expected to play a major role in the path towards a clean, decarbonised energy system [2]. A large variety of hydrogen production methods can be applied [3], which leads to the need for comparative analyses that check the suitability of a given hydrogen energy system from a life-cycle perspective. The life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology [4,5] is widely applied to evaluate and compare the environmental performance of (generic) product systems, though
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