Shale gas: a life-cycle perspective for UK production

Tagliaferri, Carla; Clift, Roland; Lettieri, Paola; Chapman, Chris

doi:10.1007/s11367-016-1207-5

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Based hereupon, for all life cycle stages except pre-production and production, GHG emissions were assumed equal to those of conventional natural gas (see calculations above). Extra emissions sources during production were added, following the reasoning in earlier life cycle assessments (Broderick et al, 2011;Qin et al, 2017;Tagliaferri et al, 2017).…”

Section: Shale Gasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Questions are raised about the specific environmental footprint of shale gas in Europe as a whole as well as in individual Member States. Few studies attempted to translate the U.S. based knowledge to the European conditions (Broderick et al, 2011;Foster & Perks, 2012), or perform a life cycle assessment based on U.S. experiences and few explorative measurements (Stamford & Azapagic, 2014;Tagliaferri et al, 2017;Mackay & Stone, 2013). Others (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Future European shale gas life-cycle GHG emissions for electric power generation in comparison to other fossil fuels

Hauck¹,

Sair²,

Steinmann

et al. 2019

Carbon Management

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The carbon footprint of shale gas combusted in Europe was estimated from nine European shale gas plays as potential production regions. Greenhouse gas emission sources during shale gas production, such as fugitives from hydraulic fracturing or combustion emissions from horizontal drilling, were added to emissions occurring for conventional gas extraction. Greenhouse gas emissions are expressed as kg CO2-equivalents per MJ delivered, and calcu-16 lated for a kWh of electricity generated. Estimated total GHG emissions from the use of European shale gas for electricity production range from 0.42 to 0.75 kg CO2-eq/kWh when the combustion in the power plant is included. This is within the range reported in the literature. The cumulative carbon footprints for a number of fossil electricity generation scenarios for Europe were also calculated. The results indicate an advantage of gas over other 21 fossil sources in a wide range of scenarios. These results are only reversed with very high 22 (10%) upstream losses for shale gas. With the current knowledge there is still a substantial 23 climate benefit of replacing coal with (shale) gas even in the EU reference scenario. 24 25

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Section: Shale Gasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Future European shale gas life-cycle GHG emissions for electric power generation in comparison to other fossil fuels

Hauck¹,

Sair²,

Steinmann

et al. 2019

Carbon Management

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“…The works is part of a wider assessment which has analysed UK developing energy types (Evangelisti et al 2015a;Evangelisti et al 2015b;Tagliaferri et al 2016b;Tagliaferri et al 2016a).…”

Section: Environmental Impacts Of Using Lngmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquefied natural gas for the UK: a life cycle assessment

Tagliaferri

Clift

Lettieri

et al. 2017

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is expected to become an important component of the UK's energy supply because the national hydrocarbon reserves on the continental shelf have started diminishing. However, use of any carbon-based fuel runs counter to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Hence, a broad environmental assessment to analyse the import of LNG to the UK is required. Methods A cradle to gate life cycle assessment has been carried out of a specific but representative case: LNG imported to the UK from Qatar. The analysis covers the supply chain, from gas extraction through to distribution to the end-user, assuming state-of-the-art facilities and ships. A sensitivity analysis was also conducted on key parameters including the energy requirements of the liquefaction and vaporisation processes, fuel for propulsion, shipping distance, tanker volume and composition of raw gas. Results and discussion All environmental indicators of the CML methodology were analysed. The processes of liquefaction, LNG transport and evaporation determine more than 50% of the cradle to gate global warming potential (GWP). When 1% of the total gas delivered is vented as methane emissions leakage throughout the supply chain, the GWP increases by 15% compared to the GWP of the base scenario. The variation of the GWP increases to 78% compared to the base scenario when 5% of the delivered gas is considered to be lost as vented emissions. For all the scenarios analysed, more than 75% of the total acidification potential (AP) is due to the sweetening of the natural gas before liquefaction. Direct emissions from transport always determine between 25 and 49% of the total eutrophication potential (EP) whereas the operation and maintenance of the sending ports strongly influences the fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity potential (FAETP). Conclusions The study highlights long-distance transport of LNG and natural gas processing, including sweetening, liquefaction and vaporisation, as the key operations that strongly affect the life cycle impacts. Those cannot be considered negligible when the environmental burdens of the LNG supply chain are considered. Furthermore, the effect of possible fugitive methane emissions along the supply chain are critical for the impact of operations such as extraction, liquefaction, storage before transport, transport itself and evaporation.

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“…Several studies have evaluated the carbon dioxide emissions of water management to estimate the environmental impacts of water and wastewater operations [30][31][32][33]. Just very few works have introduced other impact indicators in their studies, in addition to the global warming potential, such as fossil depletion, particulate matter formation, and human toxicity, among others [34][35][36]. Other studies have been focused on the design of shale gas supply chains for the optimal management of water [20,[37][38][39][40].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental and Economic Water Management in Shale Gas Extraction

et al. 2020

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This paper introduces a comprehensive study of the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) of water management in shale gas exploitation. First, we present a comprehensive study of wastewater treatment in the shale gas extraction, including the most common technologies for the pretreatment and three different desalination technologies of recent interest: Single and Multiple-Effect Evaporation with Mechanical Vapor Recompression and Membrane Distillation. The analysis has been carried out through a generic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the ReCiPe metric (at midpoint and endpoint levels), considering a wide range of environmental impacts. The results show that among these technologies Multiple-Effect Evaporation with Mechanical Vapor Recompression (MEE-MVR) is the most suitable technology for the wastewater treatment in shale gas extraction, taking into account its reduced environmental impact, the high water recovery compared to other alternatives as well as the lower cost of this technology. We also use a comprehensive water management model that includes previous results that takes the form of a new Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) bi-criterion optimization model to address the profit maximization and the minimization Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA), based on its results we discuss the main tradeoffs between optimal operation from the economic and environmental points of view.

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Shale gas: a life-cycle perspective for UK production

Cited by 12 publications

References 39 publications

Future European shale gas life-cycle GHG emissions for electric power generation in comparison to other fossil fuels

Future European shale gas life-cycle GHG emissions for electric power generation in comparison to other fossil fuels

Liquefied natural gas for the UK: a life cycle assessment

Environmental and Economic Water Management in Shale Gas Extraction

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