Environmental Load of Iron Ore Transportation, Bayan Obo Mine, China

Abstract

The Bayan Obo Mine in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, is the largest rare earth ore deposit in the world. The Baotou Iron and Steel Group (Baotou Steel) is in charge of the exploitation. Every year, approximately 12 million tons of ore are transported from the mine to the Baotou Steel factory by rail for dressing and smelting. The transportation of these massive quantities of ore has a large environmental impact. Based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) method, this study explores the environmental impact of the railway transportation of ore from the Bayan Obo Mine. Our results indicate that the environmental impact is primarily due to the marine aquatic ecotoxicity potential (MAETP), the abiotic depletion potential of fossil fuels (ADP fossil), and the acidification potential (AP). The environmental impact of the production of raw materials is much greater than that of the railway transportation. Our sensitivity analysis indicates that environmental impact is most sensitive to changes in the amount of diesel fuel used. The annual greenhouse gas emissions is 52.22 million tons, which is approximately 0.45% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in China in 2017. In particular, the direct emission from this transportation is 1.7 million tons, which is approximately 0.007% of the country’s total emissions and 0.3% of Inner Mongolia’s total emissions. A comparison of our study and the European Union railway demonstrates that in both cases, the environmental impacts are primarily due to MAETP, ADP fossil, and global warming potential (GWP).