Understanding the lifecycle carbon footprint and costs of sustainable hydrogen energy systems

Hydrogen is considered as a clean fuel for the future. Yet it is important to recognize that its production, distribution, and usage may have negative impacts on the environment, society, and the affordability. Examining the carbon footprint, energy requirements, costs and social impacts from a life cycle viewpoint of different hydrogen technology routes (e.g., green turquoise or blue hydrogen) will form a complete picture of the sustainability of the future hydrogen technology options.
Here the research challenge is to gain insights into the whole energy and industrial system around the new hydrogen production and application routes over the entire lifecycle, instead of just looking at single point. Sustainability may only be assessed by means of a systems-wide approach, which combines economic, environmental, and social impact indicators. This project will combine system integration (SI), technoeconomic and lifecycle assessments (TEA & LCA) and multi-criteria decision making (MCDA) framework as essential tools, to enable such industrial symbiosis innovation, by systemic assessing hot spots of carbon footprint
and their associated economic, environmental, and social impacts, and identifying opportunities for improvement at the whole industrial system level. We will integrate the aforementioned suite of whole system tools, and link them with a process digital twins to create a real-time assessment platform for the wider hydrogen systems. The innovative aspect is the proposed digital-twin informed MCDA framework embracing the SI, TEA, LCA and social impact data, allowing real time reflection of impacts with changing processes and technologies, and thus, enabling advisory features for sustainability- aware decision making during the early stage of sustainable hydrogen technology development.
Deliverables
-A novel methodology and framework that can systemically assess the life cycle carbon footprint, and their associated life cycle cost and environmental impact for novel hydrogen systems, infrastructures, and integrations; compared to the state-of-the art technology
evaluations in the UK, Asia and global context.