Publications

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.