Life-cycle assessment of hydrogen production via catalytic gasification of wheat straw in the presence of straw derived biochar catalyst

Abstract

The environmental footprints of H₂productionviacatalytic gasification of wheat straw using straw-derived biochar catalysts were examined. The functional unit of 1 kg of H₂was adopted in the system boundaries, which includes 5 processes namely biomass collection and pre-treatment units (P1), biochar catalyst preparation using fast pyrolysis unit (P2), two-stage pyrolysis-gasification unit (P3), products separation unit (P4), and H₂distribution to downstream plants (P5). Based on the life-cycle assessment, the hot spots in this process were identified, the sequence was as follows: P4 > P2 > P1 > P3 > P5. The end-point impacts score for the process was found to be 93.4017 mPt. From benchmarking analysis, the proposed straw-derived biochar catalyst was capable of offering almost similar catalytic performance with other metal-based catalysts with a lower environmental impact.

Keywords: Biochar; Biomass; Gasification; Hydrogen; Life-cycle analysis.