Life Cycle Assessment of the Overall Energy Consumption of a Road Construction Project and its Management in Cameroon

A methodological approach of Life Cycle Assessment is presented in order to compare the energy consumption of three variants of a road tracing in Cameroon. The three variants are stretches of 11.99 km (variant 1), 9.68 km (variant 2) and 11.11 km (variant 3) on the road from Ngaoundere (departure point in the North of Cameroon) to Moundou (arrival point in South-West of Chad). In assessing this energy, construction, exploitation and maintenance phases are taken into consideration in two scenarios . Scenario 1 assumes that unit consumption based on traffic is constant, and scenario 2 assumes that this consumption is reduced by 50% as from 2022. The results obtained show that in both cases, variant 1 consumes more energy than variant 3. Variant 2 consumes the least energy. The contribution of the exploitation phase to the energy consumption is high, amounting 85.5% in scenario 1 and 78.1% in scenario 2. Energy consumption in construction mainly depends on the presence of architectural arts works on the section and its contribution to the overall energy consumption that remains weak lower than to 5.32% or 8.08% in scenario 1 and 2, respectively Keywords: energy consumption, road construction project, Cameroon Citation: Mpele , M . , A. Elime Bouboama, L. M. Ayina Ohandja, and J . Madjadoumbaye . Life cycle assessment of the overall energy consumption of a road construction project and its management in C ameroon . Agric Eng Int: CIGR Journal, 2010, 12(1): 63 － 73 .