Research On Fuel Pathways Of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles Based On LCSA Method

Global energy shortage and increasingly severe environmental problems have prompted various countries to promote the research and use of new energy.As an important application of hydrogen energy industry and one of the main technological paths of the new energy vehicle industry,fuel cell vehicles(FCV)have great strategic significance for alleviating our country’s increasingly serious environmental pollution and energy security issues.In 2020,the State Council issued the “New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan(2021-2035)” which requires that by 2035,the commercial application of fuel cell vehicles will be realized,the construction of hydrogen fuel supply system will be steadily promoted,and the supporting technologies of fuel cell vehicles such as hydrogen energy storage and transportation,hydrogen refueling station and on-board hydrogen storage will be conquered.This puts forward higher requirements for the development and improvement of the fuel path of fuel cell vehicles.The fuel path of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle involves many sections from the production of hydrogen fuel to its storage and transportation,and then to the refueling.Different path has different technologies.For example,the hydrogen fuel may produce from fossil fuel or from electrolytic water.Technologies in different section are combined to form a variety of fuel paths of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.Different fuel path has different environmental,economic and social impacts.As feasible technical substitute for traditional fuel vehicles,hydrogen fuel cell must have good performance in sustainability in order to get long-term development.Therefore,research on the sustainability of fuel paths of fuel cell vehicles has become a very important topic.The current research in China on fuel cell vehicles more focus on environmental impact assessment,and lack of sustainability assessment of the fuel paths of fuel cell vehicles.The sustainability analysis in view of the whole life cycle process of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles from fuel production,storage,transportation and then refueling to vehicles can not only provide reference for relevant departments to choose the sustainable fuel path of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles,but also help automobile enterprises and government departments to make reasonable decisions related to investment,production and operation.Aiming at the sustainability of the fuel path of fuel cell vehicles,this paper adopts the life cycle sustainability assessment method to establish an evaluation model from three dimensions: environment,economy and society.Based on the development status of our country’s fuel cell vehicles industry and the development status of fuel path technology,four hydrogen fuel cell vehicle fuel paths are selected as the research objects.After obtaining the evaluation results of the three dimensions,the analytic hierarchy process and the entropy weight method are combined to determine the weight of the sustainable dimensions,and finally the TOPSIS method is used to obtain the final result of life cycle sustainability assessment.The results show that the path coke oven gas from factory has relatively good sustainability performance,followed by the path of natural gas steam reforming from factory,and the worst path is on-site hydrogen by electrolysis of water.Therefore,considering the current situation of our country’s resources and technological level,the path to produce hydrogen by traditional energy sources are still the options that should be considered in the near future.