Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Coal‐Fired Electricity Generation

By M. Whitaker, G. Heath, P. O'Donoughue, M. Vorum. 2012

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This systematic review and harmonization of life cycle assessments (LCAs) of utility‐scale coal‐fired electricity generation systems focuses on reducing variability and clarifying central tendencies in estimates of life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Screening 270 references for quality LCA methods, transparency, and completeness yielded 53 that reported 164 estimates of life cycle GHG emissions. These estimates for subcritical pulverized, integrated gasification combined cycle, fluidized bed, and supercritical pulverized coal combustion technologies vary from 675 to 1,689 grams CO2‐equivalent per kilowatt‐hour (g CO2‐eq/kWh) (interquartile range [IQR]= 890–1,130 g CO2‐eq/kWh; median = 1,001) leading to confusion over reasonable estimates of life cycle GHG emissions from coal‐fired electricity generation. By adjusting published estimates to common gross system boundaries and consistent values for key operational input parameters (most importantly, combustion carbon dioxide emission factor [CEF]), the meta‐analytical process called harmonization clarifies the existing literature in ways useful for decision makers and analysts by significantly reducing the variability of estimates (−53% in IQR magnitude) while maintaining a nearly constant central tendency (−2.2% in median). Life cycle GHG emissions of a specific power plant depend on many factors and can differ from the generic estimates generated by the harmonization approach, but the tightness of distribution of harmonized estimates across several key coal combustion technologies implies, for some purposes, first‐order estimates of life cycle GHG emissions could be based on knowledge of the technology type, coal mine emissions, thermal efficiency, and CEF alone without requiring full LCAs. Areas where new research is necessary to ensure accuracy are also discussed.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c058e0fde50dc009ff1d239e072453dfef3c92ab

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Citations in the corpus

Life cycle water use for electricity generation: a review and harmonization of literature estimates (2013, methodology): “The range of parameters used match the extremes found in the published literature or reported in reviews on electricity generated by coal (Whitaker et al 2012), natural gas (O’Donoughue et al 2012), nuclear power (NETL 2012a, Warner and Heath 2012), CSP (Burkhardt et al 2012, DOE 2012), PV (Hsu et…”
Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies (2014, background): “which can be attributed to direct land use of open pit mines and the timber used for the support of underground mines (92).”
A review of LCA greenhouse gas emissions results for advanced biofuels: The use of meta-regression analysis (2013, result): “It has been shown, however, that the calculation method for global warming impact has an insignificant influence in LCA results [37,89].”
Life cycle inventories of electricity generation and power supply in version 3 of the ecoinvent database—part I: electricity generation (2016, background): “5, PM10), are another key element for regional impacts on human health (von Stackelberg 2011; Whitaker et al. 2012; Corsten et al. 2013; Liang et al. 2013; Volkart et al. 2013).”
Climate benefits of natural gas as a bridge fuel and potential delay of near-zero energy systems (2016, background): “Most of the life cycle GHG emissions from fossil fuel (coal and natural gas) energy systems occur during the operational period and not the construction period [6,26,27].”