Assessment of the Climate Change and Metal Depletion Impacts of a Cobalt Fischer–Tropsch Catalyst with Prospective Life Cycle Assessment

Fischer–Tropsch (FT) catalyst production, use, and end-of-life (EoL) phases are often omitted in Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) studies as the required data are not publicly available. Consequently, the environmental effects of these catalysts are unknown. This study presents the prospective LCA of a novel cobalt-based FT catalyst. The objectives were to evaluate future production pathways and identify a best-case and a worst-case foreground scenario. The foreground was modelled with upscaled data from lab-scale experiments and patents. The effects of different prospective background scenarios were also investigated. A superstructure database was constructed with the Python library premise for 2030 and 2050. The climate change impact ranged from 0.088 to 8.77 kg CO2 eq/tonne syngas, and the metal depletion impact from 0.012 to 1.26 kg Fe eq/tonne syngas. The environmental impacts of the catalyst depended mainly on the catalyst loading and the EoL. The best-case scenario showed a high catalyst loading, regeneration at the EoL and autothermal reforming (ATR) of biomass for hydrogen production consumed in all processes. In the worst-case scenario, the catalyst is recycled, while the hydrogen is produced via ATR of natural gas. The background scenarios were less influential than the foreground scenarios.