Exploring Waste-to-Hydrogen for decarbonizing maritime transport in small islands

Tourism-based economies and isolated geographies of heavenly small islands lead to great challenges to ensure sustainable municipal solid waste (MSW) management. This paper focuses on the small tourism-based island of Phi-Phi Don in Thailand, that generates 2600 ton of annual waste, positing the challenge of analyzing several waste-to-H2 technologies with the aim of using H2 to decarbonize hard-to-abate maritime transportation sector. Combining water electrolysis through renewable electricity and anaerobic digestion produces 141 tHjavax.xml.bind.JAXBElement@47848fa0/y of green H2 that can be used to cover 58% of the energy to transport the non-organic MSW to the mainland and for the tourist transfer to Phuket by the Andaman Wave Master Thai company. Moreover, we compare this scenario with anaerobic digestion combined with reforming of biogas and with a scenario that uses photovoltaic energy and batteries to fulfill the island electricity demand. Results show that the hypothesized system outperforms the anaerobic digestion in terms of CO2 emissions and H2 productions. Moreover, it does not increase CO2 emissions,compared to direct usage of PV energy while allowing contemporary treatment of municipal solid waste.