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Comparative techno-environmental analysis of grey, blue, green/yellow and pale-blue hydrogen production

2025· article· en· W4408346849 on OpenAlex
Riya Roy, Giorgio Antonini, Koami Soulemane Hayibo, Md Motakabbir Rahman, Sara Khan, Wei Tian, Michael S. H. Boutilier, Wei Zhang, Ying Zheng, Amarjeet Bassi, Joshua M. Pearce

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Hydrogen Energy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicEnvironmental Impact and Sustainability
Canadian institutionsWestern University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Foundation for InnovationOntario Research Foundation
KeywordsHydrogen productionProduction (economics)Environmental scienceChemistryHydrogenOrganic chemistryEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Hydrogen holds immense potential to assist in the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, but its environmental impact depends on how it is produced. This study introduces the pale-blue hydrogen production method, which is a hybrid approach, utilizing both carbon capture and bioenergy inputs. Comparative life cycle analysis is shown for grey, blue, green and pale-blue hydrogen using cumulative energy demand, carbon footprint (CF), and water footprint. Additionally, the integration of solar-powered production methods (ground-based photovoltaic and floating photovoltaic (FPV) systems) is examined. The results showed blue hydrogen [steam methane reforming (SMR) + 56% carbon capture storage (CCS)] was 72% less, green hydrogen gas membrane (GM) 75% less, blue hydrogen [SMR+90%CCS] 88% less, and green hydrogen FPV have 90% less CF compared to grey hydrogen. Pale-blue hydrogen [50%B-50%G], blue hydrogen (GM + plasma reactor(PR)) PV and blue hydrogen (GM + PR) FPV offset 26, 48 and 52 times the emissions of grey hydrogen. • Life cycle analysis: reduced CO 2 footprint of pale-blue, blue, and green H 2 vs. grey H 2 . • Pale-blue H 2 combines solar power, water electrolysis, carbon capture, and bioenergy. • Pale-blue and blue (gas membrane + plasma reactor) H 2 offsets 26-48X grey H 2 emissions. • Pale-blue H 2 consumes 81.8% lower energy than grey H 2 , with a CED of 16.6 kWh/kg H 2 . • FPV powered green H 2 has the lowest CED at 1.08 kWh per kg H 2 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.478
Threshold uncertainty score0.671

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.252
Teacher spread0.244 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it