D7.2 – Report on the LCAs of the developed technologies in industrial plant environment

This report presents the Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of hydrogen-based heating technologies investigated within the HyInHeat project, evaluating their environmental performance in industrial plant environments and comparing them with conventional fossil-fuel-based heating solutions. The assessment covers eight case studies across the aluminium and steel sectors, including six aluminium applications and two steel applications. The analyses consider different industrial processes and furnace configurations, comparing natural gas, fuel oil and CO-rich gas baselines with hydrogen-based alternatives using air, oxygen-enriched air and oxyfuel combustion. 

The case studies cover ladle preheating, aluminium melting and holding in rotary and reverberatory furnaces, aluminium preheating in a pusher furnace, annealing of aluminium components, steel reheating in a walking beam furnace, and steel ladle preheating. Using the ReCiPe 2016 methodology, the report evaluates a broad range of environmental impact categories and examines how factors such as the hydrogen production route, electricity mix and oxidiser influence the overall environmental performance of hydrogen combustion. The results highlight that replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen can significantly reduce direct CO₂ emissions and, under suitable conditions, life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, but that the environmental benefits depend strongly on how the hydrogen and electricity are produced. The assessments also identify potential trade-offs in areas such as water consumption, resource use and other environmental impacts. 

In addition, the report assesses current and alternative approaches for reporting NOx emissions from hydrogen-fired industrial furnaces. It examines the limitations of conventional dry concentration-based reporting when applied to hydrogen, oxygen-enriched and oxyfuel combustion, and evaluates mass-flow, moist concentration-based, input-based and output-based alternatives using data from the CTEC and SWERIM demonstrators. The analysis identifies input-based reporting combined with measurements in moist off-gas as a particularly suitable approach for comparing future fuel-flexible combustion systems. 

WP7 is led by RWTH IOB, with contributions to this deliverable from TME, SWE and NTNU.

Authors

Andrés Ramírez Sánchez | RWTH IOB
Elsa Busson | RWTH IOB
Magdalena Coventry | TME
Leo Cailliau | TME
Xingqiang Song | SWE