Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of Hydrogen Energy Systems: Framework & Case Study

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations emphasize the necessity for progress towards peace, prosperity, and sustainability by 2030. There is an incentive for businesses to progress towards achieving these goals, as reputational risk represents a significant market value. Progress toward these SDGs requires the use of a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), which is the accumulation of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA).

This work presents a framework for a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of hydrogen systems. The LCC and LCA of hydrogen have been heavily researched. In the case of the Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) of hydrogen, this work seeks to support the establishment of a consensus on social impact categories, the SLCA database, and methodology. The medium risk hours (mrh) metric of quantifying social indicators is presented to be the best option for hydrogen systems. It allows businesses to improve the quality of their outputs by emphasizing the ”workers” stakeholder group [1]. Other potential metrics that are assessed include social costing and value-added but are dismissed as environmental or economic indicators [1]. A fine line between environmental, social, and economic indicators needs to be drawn. Green hydrogen systems such as wind-powered electrolysis have been sought after due to their low emissions quantified by an LCA. However, the reduction in emissions often comes at the cost of increased prices and decreased social welfare [2]. A combination of different hydrogen systems including green hydrogen and conventional hydrogen is proposed towards a sustainable hydrogen system, which can be assessed through an analysis such as the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA).

References

[1] B. Monique, G. Norris, C. Norris Benoit, Shdb documentationv5, The Social Hotstpots Database (2022).

[2] A. Valente, D. Iribarren, J. Dufour, Comparative life cycle sustainability assessment of renewable and conventional hydrogen, Science of the Total Environment 756 (2021) 144132.