Life-cycle assessment of fuel cell stacks

Development and applications of GREET 2.7 -- The Transportation Vehicle-CycleModel.

“…In addition to its high cost, carbon fiber production is very energy intensive, requiring 160.2 million Btu of energy per ton of product (Argonne National Laboratory et al 1998). For comparison, the production of manufactured graphite requires about 137.6 million Btu/ton, with most of the energy coming from electricity (Pehnt 2001).…”

“…Specific data were not available to calculate the energy use required for secondary production; therefore, we assumed that all PGMs are virgin PGMs. However, Pehnt states that the recycling of automotive catalysts can reduce the primary energy demand by a factor of 20 (Pehnt 2001).…”

“…The analysis of the North American PGMs requires allocation of energy use and emissions of mining operations among different mined products because, according to the North American data, for every 1 kg of PGMs mined, there is a yield of 0.02 kg of gold, 29 kg of copper, and 43 kg of nickel (Cluett 2005). In South Africa, for every 1 kg of platinum mined, there is a yield of 0.5 kg of palladium, 0.1 kg of rhodium, 300 kg of nickel, and 200 kg of copper (Pehnt 2001). Recovering and processing these other products contribute to the total mining energy use and emissions, so two methods -market value and weight -were examined for allocation.…”

“…Little has been published on PGM energy and emissions allocation, but a few analyses have favored the market value method (Pehnt 2001;Karakoussis et al 2000;Oko Institute 1997). This approach involves multiplying the market value of each of the products by the amount produced to generate total monetary revenue for each product.…”

Life-cycle assessment of diesel, natural gas and hydrogen fuel cell bus transportation systems

“…The GM studies did not examine hydrogen sourced as a byproduct of petroleum refining, which is the case in the STEP project. Pehnt [15] examined the LCA of fuel cell stacks in accordance with ISO methodology, and included discussion of allocation rules regarding PGMs and recycling concerns. Ahluwalia et al [16] and Schäfer et al [17] provide performance expectations for future fuel cell vehicles, and a range of results due to the large uncertainty associated with both this developing technology and the specific boundary conditions chosen for each study.…”