Life Cycle Assessment of Solid Recovered Fuel Gasification in the State of Qatar

Abstract

Gas products from gasified solid recovered fuel (SRF) have been proposed as a replacement for natural gas to produce electricity in future power generation systems. In this work, the life cycle assessment (LCA) of SRF air gasification to energy was conducted using the Recipe2016 model considering five environmental impact categories and four scenarios in Qatar. The current situation of municipal solid waste (MSW) handling in Qatar is landfill with composting. The results show that using SRF gasification can reduce the environmental impact of MSW landfills and reliance on natural gas in electricity generation. Using SRF gasification on the selected five environmental impact categories—climate change, terrestrial acidification, marine ecotoxicity, water depletion and fossil resource depletion—returned significant reductions in environmental degradation. The LCA of the SRF gasification for the main four categories in the four scenarios gave varying results. The introduction of the SRF gasification reduced climate change-causing emissions by 41.3% because of production of renewable electricity. A reduction in water depletion and fossil resource depletion of 100 times were achieved. However, the use of solar technology and SRF gasification to generate electricity reduced the impact of climate change to almost zero emissions. Terrestrial acidification showed little to no change in all three scenarios investigated. This study was compared with the previous work from the literature and showed that on a nominal 10 kg MSW processing basis, 5 kg CO2 equivalent emissions were produced for the landfilling scenarios. While the previous studies reported that 8 kg CO2 produced per 10 kg MSW is processed for the same scenario. The findings indicate that introducing SRF gasification in solid waste management and electricity generation in Qatar has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission load and related social, economic, political and environmental costs. In addition, the adoption of the SRF gasification in the country will contribute to Qatar’s national vision 2030 by reducing landfills and produce sustainable energy.