Life Cycle Assessment of a combined cycle power plant in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper presents the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a 640 MW combined cycle power plant located in West Java, Indonesia. The power plant adopts the dual-fuel firing system, in which both natural gas and high-speed diesel fuels are used. The LCA was performed using the open-source LCA software OpenLCA version 1.9. A functional unit of 1 kWh of electricity generation was used in calculating the environmental impacts. The system boundary was modeled using the gate-to-gate system, which includes all inputs and outputs for the following subsystems: fuel storage, water preparation, electricity production, and supporting subsystems. The life cycle inventory (LCI) used data gathered from July 2018 to June 2019. The CML-IA baseline method was used to perform the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), providing results for ten midpoint impact categories. All impact categories were normalized using World 2000 normalization factors. The result shows that the most significant impact categories are acidification potential (AP), eutrophication potential (EP), and global warming potential (GWP), respectively. The largest acidification source is nitrogen oxide emission from the combustion chamber, with a percentage of 80.32%. Regarding the combustion stage, the post-combustion method is recommended to remove nitrogen oxide from exhaust gases to lower the AP impact category.