Comparative impact assessment of CCS portfolio: Life cycle perspective

Abstract This study presents life cycle assessments of different capturing technologies with natural gas and hard coal feedstock for fossil fuel power plant. Post-combustion capture with amine-based absorption, pre-combustion capture with selexol absorption and oxyfuel-combustion capture by condensation of flue gas from oxygen fired fuel combustion are considered. The captured CO2 is transported over 500 km pipeline and sequestered in secure geological storage. Results show a substantial decrease in greenhouse gas emissions for all CO2 capture approaches in comparison with power plants without CCS, reducing the net global warming potential (GWP) by 64–78% depending on the technology used. The emissions at the plant and in the chain leads to considerable increase in toxicity and eutrophication impacts. Human toxicity impact increases by 40–75%, terrestrial ecotoxicity by 60–120%, and freshwater eutrophication by 60–200% for different technology. The detailed assessment of the impacts quantifies impact contribution from various processes in the chain and identifies the energy penalty and infrastructure as the major contributing processes to the increase in most of the impacts.