Life-Cycle Assessment of Sour Gas Abatement at Hellisheiði compared to Conventional Carbon and Sulphur Abatement Projects
Author: Selma-Penna Utonih
Year: 2017
Supervisors: Einar Jón Ásbjörnsson, David C. Finger & Edda Sif Aradóttir
Abstract
A Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the ongoing SulFix CO2 and H2S abatement project at Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in Iceland is conducted in this study. The purpose of this is to evaluate the environmental effects and carbon footprint of this project. A comparison of the results to the Sleipner project in Norway that looks at sequestration of CO2 in the Utsira saline aquifer formation and the Weyburn Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) that sequesters CO2 for oil recovery are evaluated as well to quantify how the SulFix II project measures up on a global scale.
A comprehensive and quantitative Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) involved the collection of first hand data from Reykjavik Energy the company in ownership of the abatement project based on the process parameters of the capture process, pipeline and injection technology and injection well specifications and energy requirements for each stage of the CO2 and H2S abatement project at Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. From this data, a flow model was created depicting the system boundaries of the study which excluded power generation from the power plant.
Secondary data was taken from a pre-existing Ecoinvent 3.3 LCI database which models inputs/outputs of various processes in detail and their associated emissions. An own model of the SulFix II process was created using company data, secondary data as well as calculations done for various assumptions made where data was not available and were aggregated per the functional unit of tonnes CO2 and tonnes H2S mineralized chosen for this project.
Each phase of the SulFix project (capture, transportation, storage) was modelled as separate processes within the OpenLCA software and in the final stage were combined into one product system. The environmental impacts of the inputs and outputs of the product system were weighed against chosen impact categories Global Warming Potential (GWP), Acidification Potential (AP), Eutrophication Potential (EP), Land use and Resource depletion of Water using the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD, 2011) within the Ecoinvent Life Cycle Impact assessment database in the OpenLCA software.
It was found that across the aforementioned environmental impact categories through the SulFix II abatement process chain, the capture plant which consists of an absorption column that separates and captures CO2 and H2S from the power plant for re-injection contributed the highest percentage share of the impacts due to its high-energy consumption rates derived from geothermal energy production and its associated emissions factors. It was therefore concluded that the capture phase was the environmental hotspot in the SulFix chain. The share of the transportation pipelines, storage and monitoring phases on the assessed impact categories in comparison to the capture phase had the smallest percentage contributions due to the short transportation distance, exclusion of the drilling of the storage in the study as well as the lower energy consumption rates of these stages.
With an assessed Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 0.28 kgCO2-eq per ton of CO2 and H2S mineralized it was found that SulFix II had a low carbon footprint when compared to the Sleipner and Weyburn EOR project, this also rained true across all the other environmental impacts studied. The SulFix II project presented the best and lowest results attributed to the projects far lower total energy consumption rates than the more larger scale projects it was compared to.
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