Sonja Ziehn’s research while affiliated with Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and other places

Smart product functions can be used to enhance customer experience in various end-user products. They can potentially also illustrate real-time sustainability metrics depending on individual user behaviour. When implemented, customers can gain personalized insights into the environmental impacts of their actions and make decisions considering the provided sustainability aspects. On the other hand, an integration of smart product functions typically also leads to increased environmental burdens in product manufacturing and can cause challenges at the end-of-life regarding circularity. Currently, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing domain face difficulties in weighing environmental benefits against disadvantages occurring in different life cycle stages. This is due to the limited access of such businesses to designated experts for life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. Moreover, the complex nature of predicting environmental impacts before defining product specifications bares further challenges. To help SMEs understand the effects of product smartification on all life cycle stages early in the product development process, this contribution explores common interdependencies between life cycle stages and suggests best practises when and how to screen environmental impacts of the implementation of smart functionality.

The transition to a carbon-neutral economy requires innovative solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and promote sustainable energy production. Additionally, carbon dioxide removal technologies are urgently needed. The production of biomethane or biohydrogen with carbon dioxide capture and storage are two promising BECCS approaches to achieve these goals. In this study, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches regarding their technical, economic, and environmental performance. Our analysis shows that while both approaches have the potential to reduce GHG emissions and increase energy security, the hydrogen-production approach has several advantages, including up to five times higher carbon dioxide removal potential. However, the hydrogen bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (HyBECCS) approach also faces some challenges, such as higher capital costs, the need for additional infrastructure, and lower energy efficiency. Our results give valuable insights into the trade-offs between these two approaches. They can inform decision-makers regarding the most suitable method for reducing GHG emissions and provide renewable energy in different settings.

In order to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality, hydrogen generated from renewable sources will play an important role. Additionally, as underlined in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), new technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere are required on a large scale. A novel concept for hydrogen production with net negative emissions referred to as HyBECCS (Hydrogen Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage) combines these two purposes in one technological approach. The HyBECCS concept combines biohydrogen production from biomass with the capture and storage of biogenic carbon dioxide. Various technology combinations of HyBECCS processes are possible, whose ecological effects and economic viability need to be analyzed in order to provide a basis for comparison and decision‐making. This paper presents fundamentals for the techno‐economic and environmental evaluation of HyBECCS approaches. Transferable frameworks on system boundaries as well as emission, cost and revenue streams are defined and specifics for the application of existing assessment methods are elaborated. In addition, pecularities concerning the HyBECCS approach with respect to political regulatory measures and interrelationships between economics and ecology are outlined. Based on these considerations, two key performance indicators (KPIs) are established, referred to as levelized cost of carbon‐negative hydrogen (LCCNH) and of negative emissions (LCNE). Both KPIs allow deciding whether a specific HyBECCS project is economically viable and allows its comparison with different hydrogen, energy provision or negative emission technologies (NETs).