Harmonized Techno-Economic and Environmental Analysis of Biogas-Reforming Pathways for Sustainable Hydrogen Production

Abstract

The rising demand for low-carbon hydrogen has intensified interest in biogas-reforming as a renewable, decentralized alternative to fossil-based production. However, published assessments of the competing reforming routes rely on inconsistent system boundaries and assumptions, which prevents a reliable comparison between them. This study addresses that gap by evaluating four biogas-reforming pathways, steam reforming (SR), dry reforming (DR), partial oxidation (POX), and autothermal reforming (ATR), within a single, consistent techno-economic and environmental assessment framework. Thermodynamic performance, life-cycle global warming potential, and the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) are analyzed together, with cost uncertainty quantified through a 10,000-iteration Monte Carlo simulation and a six-parameter sensitivity analysis. The harmonized comparison shows that steam reforming is simultaneously the most favorable route for hydrogen yield, energy efficiency, levelized cost, and life-cycle carbon intensity, establishing it as the benchmark, whereas dry reforming, although it uniquely consumes CO2, incurs the highest cost and the greatest catalyst-deactivation risk. Across all pathways, plant scale and capacity factor emerge as the dominant cost drivers, and biogas-derived hydrogen remains more expensive than conventional gray hydrogen, so its deployment depends on impurity-tolerant catalysts, improved heat integration, life-cycle-verified CO2 management, and supportive low-carbon incentives. The novelty of this work lies in its unified, multi-criteria framework, which enables a like-for-like ranking of biogas-reforming routes and clarifies the conditions under which each becomes competitive.