Sustainaibility assessment of power plants projects firing on different fuels

Abstract

Sustainability is becoming an issue of public concern, particularly for large scale development projects. In this work, a multi-criteria approach, called the Sustainability Assessment Method (SAM), is used to asses and rank the sustainability of various types of power plants firing on different types of fuel. It traces the impacts of using coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation over its full life cycle. The current work studies the impacts that are related to the economy and environment. The environmental impacts comprise of emission to atmosphere, nuisances, footprint, and waste, while the economic impact are taxes, dividends, reinvestment, social investment, and project expenditure. Three different types of fuel in power generation are studied i.e. coal, oil and gas. It was found that coal fired power plant provides the highest positive economic impact because of its lowest fuel price, but it also produces high environmental impact. As a result, coal fired power plant has moderate SAM indicator (SAMi) of 3.55%. On the other hand, gas fired power plant has the lowest environmental impact, even though it has lower positive economic impact relative to those for coal fired power plant. The SAMi for gas fired power plant is 28.56%. The present work also shows that oil fired power plant has negative value for both economic and environmental impact (SAMi = −100%). It means that with the current tariff and price, oil fired combined cycle is not only unsustainable but also not profitable. Among three the fuels investigated, it can be concluded that gas fired power plant is the best alternative in terms of sustainability followed by coal and oil fired power plant.