Life Cycle Assessment of a Pulverized Coal-fired Power Plant with CCS Technology in Japan

Abstract

Abstract This study evaluates the potential environmental impacts of deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) for pulverized coal power plants in Japan by using LCA, focusing on selected environmental impact categories including global warming. The LIME (Life-cycle impact assessment method based on endpoint modeling) method is used to assess and compare the environmental impacts between three cases, a typical ultra-supercritical pulverized coal-fired power generation system (case 1) and two CCS systems, one comprised of CO2 capture with monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent, compression, seafloor pipeline transportation and below seafloor storage (case 2) and the other case was the same as case 2 except that CO2 transportation by ship was used (case 3). The life cycle GHG emissions for case 1 were 0.89 kg-CO2 (eq.)/kWh. GHG emissions for case 2 and case 3 were 20% and 29%, respectively, of emissions for case 1. However non-GHG emissions increased for case 2 and case 3, especially emissions of NH3 from the CO2 capture process and ethylene oxide from the MEA production process. The results for the 3 cases at the endpoint level, which estimated the damage on four safeguard subjects (human health, social asset, biodiversity and primary production), showed that for case 2 and 3, damage to biodiversity and primary productivity increase by 40% respectively caused by increased feed coal to meet energy consumption on CO2 capture process while the damage to human health decreased by approximately 60% due to the large reduction in CO2 emissions. The increased damage to social assets caused by NH3 emission and increased energy consumption due to CCS is similar with the reduction in damage due to reduction of CO2 emissions.