Publications

On 14 July 2026 Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 published the references of the first six harmonised Digital Product Passport (DPP) standards – EN 18216 and EN 18219 to EN 18223 – in the Official Journal of the European Union, giving the horizontal framework of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) a concrete technical baseline. No ESPR delegated act covers hydrogen, yet renewable-hydrogen traceability, mass-balance accounting and certification impose demanding lifecycle requirements. This study asks to what extent a Hydrogen DPP (H₂DPP) architecture built on the Lifecycle-Dependent Hydrogen Unit (LDHU) can be operationalized against that baseline.

Twenty-one normative requirements were extracted from ESPR Articles 10–13 and the eight EN 182xx standards, classified into eight interoperability dimensions and mapped to architectural mechanisms with an explicit implementation status: five are implemented and evidenced, ten architecture-ready, five planned and one unsupported. An executable reference validator classified all eight LDHU transition cases correctly, and a 10 000-trial Monte-Carlo reconciliation of a commingled two-producer pipeline pool reduced over-certification from 49.96 % to 0.11 % under a coverage factor of three. The principal gap is that the model, batch and item identification levels of EN 18219 offer no counterpart for identity-destroying hydrogen events.

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is emerging as a central instrument for product-level sustainability transparency, formalized in the European Union through the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and already operationalized for batteries. Prevailing DPP models assume a stable, serialized product instance that persists from manufacture to end of life. Hydrogen violates this assumption: it is produced continuously, compressed, liquefied, stored, blended in shared tanks and pipelines, divided into consignments, converted into ammonia, methanol and other derivatives, and traded through overlapping physical, contractual and certificate transactions before final consumption. Across these operations the meaning of a hydrogen unit changes, and physical identity is frequently lost through mixing and transformation while sustainability claims must nonetheless be preserved.

This paper proposes a lifecycle-aware, multi-granularity business framework for a Hydrogen DPP (H₂DPP). Its core construct is the Lifecycle-Dependent Hydrogen Unit (LDHU), a digital business object whose identity and granularity are determined by physical state, containment, business process, custody, ownership, certification boundary, transformation state and required assurance. The framework separates four concerns into distinct but linked ledgers, namely physical quantity, custody, ownership and sustainability claim, and defines a seven-level granularity model spanning item, batch, consignment, flow, pool, mass-balance and book-and-claim representations together with auditable transition rules for aggregation, disaggregation, mixing, transformation, reconciliation and retirement.

It integrates the chain-of-custody models of ISO 22095 and allows the model to change at controlled transition points rather than fixing one model for the entire lifecycle. A set of enforceable business invariants prevents double allocation, double retirement and over-certification, and a governance model assigns rights across data, custody, ownership and claim roles. We demonstrate the framework through an end-to-end renewable-hydrogen-to-ammonia scenario and evaluate it ex ante against single item-level, batch-level, pure mass-balance and certificate-only approaches, explaining why no single granularity is adequate for the complete hydrogen lifecycle. The contribution is positioned as a business-architecture and information-system design artifact rather than a specific software implementation.