Green hydrogen production from oil palm wastes: A techno-economic and environmental perspective

As the second-largest producer of palm oil globally, the palm oil industry in Malaysia generates substantial amount of oil palm wastes. These wastes can emit harmful gases and lead to environmental issues. To repurpose the abundantly available palm oil wastes, this study aims to conduct a preliminary techno-economic and environmental analysis via both experimental and simulation study to compare hydrogen production. Four different types of oil palm wastes using biomass gasification are investigated, i.e., oil palm fronds, empty fruit bunches, oil palm trunks, and palm kernel shells. In-house experimental work was conducted to determine the proximate and ultimate composition of these feedstocks, and these data are subsequently input into Aspen Plus for simulation, techno-economic, and environmental analysis. Overall, all four cases can recover the total capital cost within 19 years, with oil palm trunk feedstock being the most superior. It was found that oil palm trunks resulted in the highest hydrogen yield of 118.65 kg h⁻¹ and possessed superior economic performance (i.e., lowest payback period of 10.78 years and highest net present value of 8.31 million USD). In terms of the environmental impact, the use of oil palm trunks contributed to the lowest global warming potential of 1.95 kg CO₂-eq kg⁻¹ H₂. This demonstrated the environmental benefit of using the waste gas from the biomass gasification process to generate electricity for the upstream demand. On the contrary, the empty fruit bunches case resulted in the least satisfactory economic and environmental performance. Overall, this work provides insights into the economic feasibility and environmental impacts of using various oil palm wastes for hydrogen production through gasification to address the environmental issues caused by the underutilized oil palm wastes.