Techno-economic and life cycle analysis of two different hydrogen production processes from excavated waste under plasma gasification

Focusing on expanding and maturing the technology of excavated waste-to-energy pathways can promise a renewable energy production process in addition to reducing land occupation and greenhouse gas emissions. A very scarce comprehensive literature had covered the exergetic performance, life cycle analysis, and financial feasibility of hydrogen-from-excavated-waste technologies based on the plasma gasification process. This article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison under the exergy, techno-economic, and life cycle environmental analyses for two different hydrogen-from-excavated waste pathways. In this regard, two different configurations (under an innovative methodological and analytical approaches) have been proposed for conceptual design and comparative study of hydrogen fuel generation from excavated waste based on plasma gasification, sorption enhanced/gas-water shift, and gas-water shift processes. The techno-economic and life cycle environmental analyses were compared at two levels (i.e., refuse derived fuel-to-hydrogen and excavated waste-to-hydrogen pathways), which had not been reported in most of the literature. From the outcomes, the proposed excavated waste-to-hydrogen process integrated with the carbon dioxide capture and storage process can provide superior environmental (especially in terms of impacts on human health) and thermodynamic performances compared to the standalone-plasma gasification process. Furthermore, the financial feasibility of the proposed project is completely affected by the selling price of hydrogen. The article's achievements can be competitive with similar pathways and provide attractive design and investment conditions to stakeholders and engineers.