Life cycle assessment of various combustion-based electricity generation technologies with carbon capture and storage: A review

With the continuous advancement of the industrialization process, climate change continues to intensify. Traditional electricity production consumes a lot of energy and fuel and is accompanied by huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the rapid development of renewable energy electricity generation technologies (e.g. solar, water, wind, geothermal, tidal) plays an increasing role and proportion in the energy generation portfolio, it is still difficult to meet the increasing electricity demand. Traditional fossil fuels electricity generation (mainly coal and natural gas) still dominates in the short term. Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is a set of integrated technologies that can capture CO2 from large industrial CO2 emission sources such as power plants, oil refineries, cement plants, and steel plants. Then, CO2 is transported to the storage site and injected into underground. CCS technology has the flexibility, compatibility, and huge potential for the emission reduction in combination with the current energy infrastructure. The life cycle assessment (LCA) is usually used to quantify the various potential environmental impacts of the CCS system and seek the improvement measures to reduce the environmental issues. However, the existing methodologies of LCA research still have some deficiencies. This work reviewed the related studies in the past 10 years and found that CCS can effectively reduce the global warming issues, and also increase other environmental impacts (e.g. acidification and eutrophication). When comparing the life cycle environmental benefits of different combustion power generation systems, more standards need to be included to eliminate differences caused by conditional assumptions, system boundaries, and evaluation methods. In addition, the present CCS development barriers and challenges were discussed detailedly. The research perspective needs to shift from the application of CCS at the level of a single power plant to the impact evaluation during the large-scale deployment, and also from a single discipline to interdisciplinary research. This paper also provides effective information for the large-scale implementation of CCS through the comprehensive LCA studies.