Modeling the evolvement of regional fuel cell vehicle supply chain: Implications for enhancing supply chain sustainability

Fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) represent one important pillar for transport low-carbon transition. While FCV supply chain has received growing attentions, its regional evolvement mechanism remains unclear, impeding the insights into future supply chain development and the measures needed to cope with possible challenges. To fill such a research gap, this study establishes a system dynamics model and forecasts the evolvement of regional FCV supply chain by taking China as the example. The results show that with peak annual demands for vehicle use fuel cells of China growing to 350-600 GW in the coming decades, the country will likely face the challenges of high import dependence (>50%) on upstream advanced technology commodities, uncertain degree of FCV market penetration and a huge annual platinum demand up to 86 t. To cope with these challenges and improve the FCV supply chain sustainability, China needs to enhance industrial competitiveness in the upstream supply chain with priority, prepare the whole FCV supply chain in a highly elastic way, and reduce the dependence on imported platinum by improving the end-of-life recycling rates of platinum and increasing imports of platinum containing scraps. With proper measures taken, China's FCV supply chain has the potential to evolve in a sustainable way and support the low-carbon transition of the transport sector.

Automated summary

This study establishes a system dynamics model to forecast the evolvement of regional fuel cell vehicle (FCV) supply chain in China. The results show that China will face challenges of high import dependence, uncertain market penetration, and high platinum demand. To cope with these challenges, China needs to enhance industrial competitiveness in the upstream supply chain, prepare the whole FCV supply chain in a highly flexible way, and reduce the dependence on imported platinum.