Techno-Enviro-Economic Study of Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil Production from Crude Palm Oil and Renewable Hydrogen

From the perspective of technical, environment, and economics, hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO) production with renewable hydrogen from biomass gasification (BG), geothermal electrolysis (GEO-E), and solar photovoltaic electrolysis (PV-E) is compared to steam methane reforming (SMR). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the energy efficiency, greenhouse gases emission factor, and production cost of HVO from various hydrogen production technologies. Production technologies are simulated using Aspen Plus ®. HVO is produced by hydrotreating and hydroisomerization reactions. The processes produce three main products: HVO, green naphtha, and bio-jet fuel. The feedstock used to produce hydrogen from BG is empty fruit bunch (EFB). Renewable electricity produced by geothermal combination of flash system and organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and solar photovoltaic (PV) with battery. Technical analysis is done by calculating the energy efficiency of overall system. Production cost of HVO is calculated by levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Life cycle analysis (LCA) is carried out to calculate CO₂-eq intensity. The result shows that HVO production with SMR has the highest energy efficiency, 55.67%, which then followed by BG, 31.47%, PV-E, 9.34%, and GEO-E, 7.89%. The order of LCOE obtained from lowest to highest is HVO production from hydrogen produced by SMR (15.78/GJ-HVO), BG ($16.37/GJ-HVO), GEO ($22.83/GJ-HVO), and PV ($27.29/GJ-HVO). However, for CO₂-eq intensity, the order is HVO productions with the hydrogen produced by GEO-E, PV-E, SMR, and BG are 1.63 kgCO₂-eq/kg HVO, 1.86 kgCO₂-eq/kg HVO, 5.57 kgCO₂-eq/kg HVO, and 16.52 kgCO₂-eq/kg HVO, respectively.