Consequential ex-ante life cycle assessment on clinker production in the EU: How will the future influence its environmental impact?

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate how the environmental impact of clinker production might change in the future. This is assessed by the use of a consequential ex-ante life cycle assessment in which the changes to both the fore- and background system are taken into account. For the background system the focus is the electricity and fuel market. Cornerstone scenarios where developed using projections found in literature to estimate future trends. These scenarios consist of a reference scenario and two climate goal scenarios, one for clinker and one for energy. The climate goal scenarios are further divided up in pathways to reach the climate goal. Results indicate that the environmental impact of clinker production could be reduced by a factor of five in comparison with its current impact, going from 0.21 points in the reference scenario in this decade to as low as 0.04 in the other timeperiods and scenarios when using ReCiPe's single weighted score. This reduction is mainly a result of the introduction of carbon capture and the electrification of kilns. Results also showed that because of the increased electricity use of the cement sector, the environmental impact of clinker production becomes very sensitive to evolutions in the electricity sector.