Life Cycle Assessment of Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies: Inventory of Work Performed by Projects Funded Under FCH JU

This report is the public version of the deliverable B.3.7 'Life cycle assessment of Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies - Inventory of work performed by projects funded under FCH JU'; it provides an overview of the progress achieved so far and a comprehensive analysis on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for various hydrogen technologies and processes. The review considers 73 Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking (FCH 2 JU) founded projects: for some of those the LCA study was requested in the call topic, while other projects decided to perform the LCA study on a voluntary basis. The LCAs have been assessed regarding the adherence to guideline recommendations (e.g. reported properties, system boundary definitions, goal and scope definitions), methodology and overall quality of the work. Methodology is a critical issue for the comparability of results, as this is only possible if all LCAs follow the same guidelines; in addition, LCAs were often only partially fulfilling the selected guideline requirements. It is recommended that future FCH 2 JU call topics asking for environmental analysis to be performed are setting out some minimum requirements, such as the guidelines to be used and the impacts to be assessed. Based on the outcome of this analysis, a harmonisation effort in the approach to LCA for the FCH JU founded projects is proposed; in particular a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database useful for the projects is required togheter with the identification of a reference cases to be used as benchmark for future LCAs.