Life Cycle Assessment of 1kW PEMFC system with the focus on critical materials

Fuel cell and hydrogen (FCH) technologies are expected to add to decarbonisation of energy and transport sector. One thing that prevents FCH commercialization is lack of recycling and dismantling strategies, due to not available lists of critical materials. One of the considered FCH technologies within the EU funded HyTechCycling project is polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), which is the focus of this paper. One of the goals of EU project HyTechCycling is to carry out a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of PEMFC technology. Main focus of this paper is to gather and properly set all the data needed for LCA study of the PEMFC system. First the PEMFC was broken down to core components to identify all materials constituting the PEMFC components. For PEMFC the LCA numerical model was done in GaBi Thinkstep software. In first part of the paper the list of common PEMFC materials were identified. Furthermore with this list of materials a LCA study for 1kW PEMFC system was done. The scope of the study was “cradle to gate” with four different scenarios of hydrogen production and 20,000 h of operation. For environmental impact assessment the CML2001 life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methodology was used. LCA results of 1kW PEMFC system shows that in manufacturing phase the stack contributes 60-90% in total environmental impacts and the BoP components are in range of 10-20%. In operation phase the hydrogen production with electrolysis using hydroelectricity and natural gas reforming are scenarios with lowest environmental impacts. The platinum group metals (PGM's), among which Pt is standing out the most, are the biggest contributors in the total environmental impact in the manufacturing phase of 1 kW PEMFC system. Therefore, on average 61% reduction in environmental impacts can be achieved with an assumption of 95% recycling of Pt.