Material use for electricity generation with carbon dioxide capture and storage: Extending life cycle analysis indices for material accounting

• We present a matrix framework to evaluate cumulative material use.
• Framework used to evaluate material use in electricity system with and without CCS.
• Coal, limestone, selected chemicals, copper and steel are studied.
• Sensitivity to grid loss, efficiency, lifetime and CO2 transport distance analyzed.
• Electricity system with CCS uses 20–50% more coal, steel and copper than without CCS.

Understanding of life cycle material use from novel technologies can assist informed decision making on technology and material selection consistent with natural physical boundaries. Though an intermediate process in conventional life cycle assessment (LCA), the information on material use is only translated into environmental impact potentials. In this study, we present a procedure to extract the intermediate information on material evaluation and perform a systematic life cycle material use analysis. The approach is then used to analyze electricity systems including electricity generation and transmission, with and without post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Scenario analysis is then performed to understand the relations to the respective annual material production volumes.Results from the analysis of life cycle material use in the studied systems show that the implementation of CCS in a hard coal power plant results in the increased use of about 35% coal and limestone, 20% copper, 60% steel and 400% of the selected chemicals, as compared to the without CCS system. In addition to the complementary increase in specific resource use, the CCS technology uses over 35% and 70% increase in land and water requirement respectively. CCS scenario with coal power plant using CO2 capture (scenario S4) provides 83% reductions in the life cycle CO2 emissions and significant increase in the life cycle material use varying from 13% for coal to 168% for ammonia, as compared to the scenario with no CCS and with global average coal power plant efficiency (scenario S1).