Abstract
Recent decades have witnessed wave and tidal energy technology receiving considerable attention because of their low carbon emissions during electricity production. However, indirect emissions from their entire life cycle should not be ignored. Therefore, life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied as a useful approach to systematically evaluate the environmental performance of wave and tidal energy technologies. This study reviews recent LCA studies on wave and tidal energy systems for stakeholders to understand current status of methodological practice and associated inherent limitations and reveal future research needs for application of LCA on wave and tidal technologies. The conformance of the selected LCAs to ISO 14040 (2006) and 14044 (2006) are critically analyzed in strict accordance with the ISO stepwise methodologies, namely, goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory (LCI) analysis, as well as life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). Our systematically screening of these studies indicates that few of the selected studies are of strict conformance with ISO 14040 and 14044 standards, which makes the results unreliable and thus further reduces the confidence of interested stakeholders. Further, our review indicates that current LCA practice on wave and tidal energies is lacking consideration of temporal variations, which should be addressed in future research, as it causes inaccuracy and uncertainties.
Highlights
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely recognized as an efficient approach to evaluate the life cycle environmental impacts of a product or service by comprehensively encompassing all processes and environmental releases for specific environmental impact categories
Definition of goal and scope is the first step of an LCA study, as it defines the purpose or application of the study, as well as the scope of assessment to be conducted
Our analyses show that most of current LCA practices on wave and tidal systems are not commendably following the framework, guidelines and requirements established by ISO 14040 and
Summary
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely recognized as an efficient approach to evaluate the life cycle environmental impacts of a product or service by comprehensively encompassing all processes and environmental releases for specific environmental impact categories. As the most significant contributor to climate change, life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emission has been adopted by laws and regulations as an indicator to evaluate the environmental performance of clean energies. U.S Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, Section 526 [1] requires that life cycle GHGs for nonconventional petroleum sources must be less than or equal to such emissions from the equivalent conventional fuel produced from fossil sources. Declaration of life cycle GHG emissions has been required by current and future environmental regulations [3,4]. Among viable techniques for environmental assessment, LCA is a comprehensive stepwise method, including goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory (LCI)
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