Life cycle assessment of a concentrated solar power plant for the production of enriched methane by steam reforming process

The global energy related challenges, mainly due to the worldwide growing energy consumption gone with a reduction of oil and gas availability, is leading to an increasing interest on hydrogen as energy carrier. Hydrogen could have the potential to reshape the entire energy industry since it can be produced from renewable energy sources and it can be consumed in fuel cells, with a significant reduction of air pollutants or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that is a significant reduction of its environmental impact. Nowadays, the most important tool to evaluate the environmental impact of a product is the life cycle assessment (LCA) that determines the overall impact of a product on the environment. To this aim, several impact categories are defined; among these the most important are the Global Warming, the Abiotic Depletion, the Eutrophication, the Acidification, the Land Use and the Human toxicity. The aim of this work is to present a the Life cycle Assessment of a novel hybrid plant for the production of a mixture of methane and hydrogen, called enriched methane, from a steam reforming reactor whose heat duty is supplied by a molten salt stream heated up by an innovative concentrating solar power (CSP) plant developed by ENEA. The performance of this plant will be evaluated from an environmental point of view by the use of a LCA software (SimaPro7) and compared with that ones of traditional plants (reformer and cracker for the hydrogen production) for the production of enriched methane.