Environmental assessment of biomass gasification combined heat and power plants with absorptive and adsorptive carbon capture units in Norway

For both configurations in which CCS processes are incorporated, negative values for climate change potential are reported. A decrease of 144.7% is observed for ADS and a decrease of 195% is estimated for ABS, when employing specially modelled characterisation factors that take into account the temporal asymmetry between CO2 emission and removal fluxes. For most of the other environmental performance indicators analysed in this work, higher life cycle values have been quantified for the plants with installed CCS processes despite lower on site emissions for some stressors due to co-capture by the separation agents (H2S, SOx and PM for ADS). For the plant with post combustion solvent based unit, larger absolute (per kWhe basis) and specific (per kg of captured CO2) increases have been estimated thus exhibiting a worse environmental performance than the CHP plant with pre-combustion adsorption CO2 capture technology.