Sustainable stationary hydrogen storage application selection with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy AHP

The transition to a hydrogen-based economy necessitates a comprehensive evaluation of different hydrogen storage options, considering their sustainability performance. This study innovatively applies the Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (IVIF-AHP) to evaluate and compare four hydrogen storage options: Compressed Hydrogen Gas (CHG), Cryogenic Liquid Hydrogen (CLH), Metal Hydride (MH), and Underground Hydrogen (UH). The evaluation criteria are derived from four dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, social, and technical performance, each further decomposed into sub-criteria. The study's novelty lies in using a novel intuitionistic fuzzy AHP, offering a more nuanced and robust understanding of the trade-offs between the various options and effectively capturing the vagueness and subjectivity inherent in human decision-making. Through this methodology, CHG emerged as the most promising option with a preference score of 0.487, closely followed by UH with a score of 0.453. The lowest preference score was accorded to MH, with a score of 0.301. These quantitative insights underscore the relative sustainability performance of each technology under the defined criteria. The findings contribute to the growing body of literature on sustainable hydrogen storage, providing policymakers and practitioners with a multicriteria decision-making tool that captures the complexity of sustainability considerations. This study underlines the critical role of holistic, multicriteria evaluations in advancing sustainable hydrogen storage. It encourages further exploration and validation of its approach in different contexts and with updated technological advancements.