Author
Listed:
- Schropp, Elke
- Campos-Carriedo, Felipe
- Iribarren, Diego
- Naumann, Gabriel
- Bernäcker, Christian
- Gaderer, Matthias
- Dufour, Javier
Abstract
The need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions is driving the development of existing and new technologies to produce and use hydrogen. Anion exchange membrane electrolysis is one of these rapidly developing technologies and presents promising characteristics for efficient hydrogen production. However, the environmental performance and the material criticality of anion exchange membrane electrolysis must be assessed. In this work, prospective life cycle assessment and criticality assessment are applied, first, to identify environmental and material criticality hotspots within the production of anion exchange membrane electrolysis units and, second, to benchmark hydrogen production against proton exchange membrane electrolysis. From an environmental point of view, the catalyst spraying process heavily dominates the ozone depletion impact category, while the production of the membrane represents a hotspot in terms of the photochemical ozone formation potential. For the other categories, the environmental impacts are distributed across different components. The comparison of hydrogen production via anion exchange membrane electrolysis and proton exchange membrane electrolysis shows that both technologies involve a similar life-cycle environmental profile due to similar efficiencies and the leading role of electricity generation for the operation of electrolysis. Despite the fact that for proton exchange membrane electrolysis much less material is required due to a higher lifetime, anion exchange membrane electrolysis shows significantly lower raw material criticality since it does not rely on platinum-group metals. Overall, a promising environmental and material criticality performance of anion exchange membrane electrolysis for hydrogen production is concluded, subject to the expected technical progress for this technology.
Suggested Citation
Schropp, Elke & Campos-Carriedo, Felipe & Iribarren, Diego & Naumann, Gabriel & Bernäcker, Christian & Gaderer, Matthias & Dufour, Javier, 2024.
"Environmental and material criticality assessment of hydrogen production via anion exchange membrane electrolysis,"
Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 356(C).
Handle:
RePEc:eee:appene:v:356:y:2024:i:c:s0306261923016112
DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.122247
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:356:y:2024:i:c:s0306261923016112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/description#description .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.