Derrick Carlson
DOE, National Energy Technology Laboratory
Derrick is a senior engineer working as a part the Life Cycle Analysis team with the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.
The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is expanding the level of resolution of power plant construction materials to enable an in-depth understanding of construction differences between similar types of thermoelectric power plant configurations. The value of enhanced construction profiles for thermoelectric power plants will become increasingly important in the future as the total contribution to the emission profile will increase as operational emissions are reduced through advanced technology such carbon capture and storage, power plant efficiency improvements, and other innovative environmental reduction technologies. Currently in the model, there are cradle to gate unit processes for each of the materials that go into the construction of the power plant. This work will expand these to include the impacts from the manufacturing of the power plant components, as well as the value added of these manufacturing and construction processes (for example, preparing the land, manufacturing steel beams and other building components, welding steel and putting together building components, manufacturing and installing turbines, architectural and engineering services, etc.).
One method to expand the level of resolution and understanding is with the use of Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) to quantify construction and manufacturing impacts beyond the raw materials. EIO-LCA is a scoping tool that uses monetary inputs to calculate economic activity throughout the supply chain of a product, service, or infrastructure system. Associating energy and environmental impacts with each economic sector on an impact per dollar basis allows us to calculate the total life cycle impacts for a power plant. Some of the missing processes that are accounted for using EIO-LCA to model the construction of a power plant include construction of cooling towers, construction of the building, architectural and engineering services, manufacturing of pipes, manufacturing of turbines, financial services, chemical engineering services, and many others.
Using data that we have from existing reports like Cost and Performance Baseline for Fossil Energy Plants Volume 1a: Bituminous Coal (PC) and Natural Gas to Electricity Revision 3, we estimate economic demands for the construction of a power plant and the manufacturing of its components. This provides a basis for final demands to use in the model. The model produces national average construction impact results for the life cycle of a power plant that can be substituted for the current unit processes in NETL’s model. This output highlights areas of further research or “hotspots” that help to define valuable data collection efforts. The long-term goal is to be able to develop data on the energy and other inputs (e.g. turbines, pipes, etc.) for the construction of power plants to create a hybrid input-output LCA modelling capability.
References
National Energy Technology Laboratory. (2015). Cost and Performance Baseline for Fossil Energy Plants Volume 1a: Bituminous Coal (PC) and Natural Gas to Electricity Revision 3. Morgantown, WV: Department of Energy.
• Environmentally and socially-extended input-output analysis , • Life cycle sustainability assessment , • Advances in methods (e.g., life cycle assessment, social impact assessment, resilience a
