Journal
ENERGY
Volume 37, Issue 1, Pages 540-548Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2011.10.050
Keywords
Carbon capture and storage; Life-cycle assessment; Environmental impacts; Climate change mitigation
Categories
Funding
- US Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), US Department of Energy
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Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is increasingly seen as a way for society to enjoy the benefits of fossil fuel energy sources while avoiding the climate disruption associated with fossil CO2 emissions. A decision to deploy CCS technology at scale should be based on robust information on its overall costs and benefits. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a framework for holistic assessment of the energy and environmental footprint of a system, and can provide crucial information to policy-makers, scientists, and engineers as they develop and deploy CCS systems. We identify seven key issues that should be considered to ensure that conclusions and recommendations from CCS LCA are robust: energy penalty, functional units, scale-up challenges, non-climate environmental impacts, uncertainty management, policy-making needs, and market effects. Several recent life-cycle studies have focused on detailed assessments of individual CCS technologies and applications. While such studies provide important data and information on technology performance, such case-specific data are inadequate to fully inform the decision making process. LCA should aim to describe the system-wide environmental implications of CCS deployment at scale, rather than a narrow analysis of technological performance of individual power plants. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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