Determination of environmental effects of energy production in coal-fired thermal power plants by life cycle assessment method

In this study, the environmental impacts of coal-fired thermal power plants were determined and compared with the life-cycle assessment method. Coal power plants using pulverized subcritical boiler technology are considered as the current situation, and pulverized supercritical, pulverized ultrasupercritical and fluidized bed boiler technologies are evaluated as alternative technologies. By comparing these technologies, the effect of life cycle assessment on the categories was examined. For comparison, ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) method was used using SimaPro 9.1 software. In characterization categories; It has been observed that the environmental impact of fluidized bed technology is higher than pulverized systems in terms of all impact categories except freshwater eutrophication potential and fossil resource consumption potential. On the other hand, in pulverized systems, the environmental impact is higher in subcritical systems, and ultra-critical systems are used in all categories except for particulate matter generation potential (8.9%), ozone formation terrestrial ecotoxicity potential (18.7%) and terrestrial acidification potential (8.8%). It has been observed that it has more effect than supercritical systems.