Synthetic natural gas as an alternative to coal for power generation in China: Life cycle analysis of haze pollution, greenhouse gas emission, and resource consumption

Abstract

Natural gas is regarded as a cleaner alternative to coal combustion-based power generation (CPG) for urban use. Because of the insufficient natural gas reserve in China, coal-based synthetic natural gas (SNG) has been under rapid development. However, coal-based SNG production process has problems of environmental pollution and emission transfer. This paper uses life cycle assessment to compare the CPG and SNG energy production and usage routes, in order to find a reasonable way to reduce the environmental pollution and production cost. Results show that the CPG route is superior to the SNG route in terms of the haze pollution emissions, greenhouse gases emissions, coal resource consumption and life cycle cost. However, the water consumption of the CPG route is much higher than that of the SNG route. The SNG route is more suitable to adopt in water-deficient areas.