The environmental impact of container pipeline transport compared to road transport. Case study in the Antwerp Harbor region and some general extrapolations

Increasing mobility demands and growing industrial tissue come with a burden for the environment. Inventive solutions are necessary to address this challenge. This paper compares the environmental impact of two alternative container transportation methods over a 25-year time period for a specific trajectory and transport volume in the Antwerp harbor. One is a pipeline concept; the other a road concept to link the Deurganck dock with the right bank in order to transport 2 million containers per year. With a detailed bill of material and the use of the Ecolizer method, a Monte Carlo simulation was performed to calculate the environmental impact in terms of ECOPOINTS on a life cycle perspective. The results remark that in 94% of the cases the pipeline concept has less than half of the environmental impact of the road concept. Furthermore, in both concepts the operational phase is the largest contributor to the total environmental impact. The pipeline concept results suggest a much lower total environmental impact over a road concept if a large enough volume of containers can effectively be transported. Some considerations have to be given to the used electricity mix, the applied impact assessment method and the case specificities.