Development of electricity production from lignite and hard coal LCA processes for future national database of Turkey

The reliability of life cycle assessment (LCA) studies is determined by the quality of the inventory data used in the analysis and the degree to which the processes reflect the true production conditions of the country. The goal of this study is to develop country-average LCA processes for electricity production from lignite and hard coal of Turkey. Air emissions for 15 lignite and 8 hard coal power plants operating in Turkey were estimated based on coal combustion and emission control technologies and the properties of coal utilized at the plants using the emission factors of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) WebFIRE database. The calculated emission values were then used to developed the country average electricity production processes from lignite and hard coal using Ecoinvent template datasets. The environmental impacts of the newly developed and the original Ecoinvent processes were compared for consistency using LCA methodology. The air emission calculations for CO2, CO, N2O, NOx and SOx have yielded values that are close to the values in Ecoinvent datasets, with most accurate results obtained for CO and SOx emissions in lignite and CO2 and NOx emissions in hard coal processes. LCA comparison has revealed the environmental impacts of the newly developed processes to be comparable with their Ecoinvent counterparts, where difference in total normalized environmental impacts are less than 2% for lignite and 21% for hard coal processes. In overall, the obtained results demonstrate the adequacy of the approach utilized in the study for developing the LCA energy processes.