CHAPTER 19: Environmental Life Cycle Assessments of Photobiological Hydrogen Production

Fossil fuel depletion and climate change have motivated the development of biofuels over the past decade. Recently, microalgae have elicited much attention because of their potential to address the food versus fuel issue and lower environmental impacts of energy production. This chapter presents a bibliographic review of four published Life Cycle Analyses of photobiological hydrogen production. These differ by the perimeters used in the studies, the functional units, the production technologies, the methods employed for the environmental impact assessments, and the energy balance computations. General recommendations are given to facilitate comparisons between the different studies and to set preliminary bases for future environmental assessments.