Supply risk considerations for photoelectrochemical water splitting materials
Creators: name: Hillenbrand, Martin
name: Helbig, Christoph
name: Marschall, Roland
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
subject: Engineering Science and Materials
subject: Environmental Sciences
subject: Natural Resources Management and Policy
subject: Materials Science and Engineering
subject: Economics
subject: Risk Analysis
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Engineering
subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
subject: Chemical Engineering
subject: FOS: Chemical engineering
subject: Criticality
subject: Energy &amp; Environmental Science
subject: Engineering
subject: Engineering Science and Materials
subject: Hydrogen
subject: Industrial Ecology
subject: Materials Science and Engineering
subject: Photoelectrochemistry
subject: Supply Risk
subject: Supply Risk Assessment
subject: Sustainability
subject: Water Splitting

description: This OSF registration contains all files required to run the model for the article "Supply risk considerations for photoelectrochemical water splitting materials" by Martin Hillenbrand, Christoph Helbig, and Roland Marschall in Energy &amp; Environmental Science. It also contains the Python script, generated result data, and figures. The article and further supplementary information are available via: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3EE04369J

Abstract:
Hydrogen is a key enabler of a carbon neutral economy. The main production route of renewable hydrogen is via renewable wind and solar power and water splitting via electrolyzers. Photoelectrochemical water splitting is an alternative production route using incoming solar radiation to produce hydrogen and oxygen via a photoabsorber material with suitable band gaps and positions. Various absorber materials are being discussed in research and further developed at the lab scale. However, these materials need to be scalable in production, with low supply risk, because of the scale of hydrogen production needed to satisfy the global need for green hydrogen. Here, we semi-quantitatively assess the short-term and long-term supply risks due to potential supply reduction, demand increase, concentration risks, and political risks of eight chemical elements contained in nine promising absorber materials for photoelectrochemical water splitting. On an element level, supply risks are lowest for iron, copper, and tantalum in the present scenario and tin in the future scenario. The supply risks are highest for bismuth in the present scenario and vanadium in the future scenario. On a material level, present supply risks are lowest for hematite tantalum nitride and highest for bismuth vanadate. Bismuth vanadate has the highest future supply risks, but tin tungsten oxide achieves the lowest supply risk score in the future scenario. The results show that some frequently discussed photoelectrochemical absorber materials have higher supply risks than typically perceived. In contrast, other materials should be more intensively studied because of their promising low long-term supply risk evaluation. Our method provides a separate assessment of present and future supply risks, which was previously unavailable for the criticality assessments.