Quantification of Environmental Impacts in Life Cycle of Combined Cycle Power Plant Using Environmental Priority Strategies (EPS)

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an effective tool for decision-making, which could assess and analysis the environmental impacts. Also, appropriate approaches with less environmental impacts could be indicated by LCA. There are some procedures and plans in order to strengthening LCA, which could quantify the environmental impacts of a product or process in the whole of life cycle. One of these strengthening methods is EPS (Environmental Priority Strategies). Environmental impacts could be calculated and compared for different emissions, resources and energy use by EPS system. In order to comparing environmental impacts of resource use, transportation and raw material use, environmental impacts should be quantified. The unit for comparing environmental impact in EPS system is ELU (Environmental Load Unit). In this paper, environmental impacts of air pollutants in life cycle of a combined cycle power plant have been quantified by EPS. The results show that the most important environmental impact based on ELU are respectively CO2, CH4, PM, NOx and SO2.