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The environmental performance of competing water electrolysis systems for hydrogen production is not fixed, as it depends on the electricity system in which the electrolyzer operates and on how that system evolves. This study presents a prospective, scenario-based life cycle assessment comparing alkaline (AEC), proton exchange membrane (PEMEC), and solid oxide (SOEC) electrolysis under Saudi Arabian conditions from 2025 to 2060, implemented within the Brightway 2.5.

Foreground electrolyzer inventories based on the component-level dataset of Gerloff (2021) were built as custom Brightway process activities, with technology-specific stack replacement logic and time-varying efficiency parameters. Sixteen custom Saudi electricity market activities were constructed by mapping four nationally calibrated KAPSARC/GCAM-KSA policy scenarios (No Policy, Current Policy, NDC Target, and Net Zero 2060) at four milestone years to ecoinvent 3.11 cutoff background processes. A custom NGCC+CCS proxy activity was created to represent gas with carbon capture, which is absent from ecoinvent 3.11. Coupling the 16 electricity configurations with three electrolyzer technologies produced 48 cradle-to-gate LCA cases, supplemented by 72 source-specific electricity cases and 16 SOEC heat-source sensitivity cases, all computed using CML v4.8 2016 GWP100.

Results show that electricity policy ambition, not technology choice, drives over 99% of the GWP reduction from 2025 to 2060. The preferred technology reverses from SOEC to AEC at a calculable crossover grid carbon intensity (0.20–0.42 kg CO₂-eq/kWh), confirmed empirically through the source-specific analysis. Under the most ambitious scenario, AEC approaches the EU RFNBO threshold (3.38 kg CO₂-eq/kgH₂) within 2.4%. The Brightway-based workflow, including custom electricity markets, scenario coupling, and analytical decomposition, is fully reproducible and transferable to other national deployment contexts.