Environmental assessment of carbon capture and utilization: a new systemic vision -application to valorization of nickel slags

Anne Ventura (1) , Nicolas Antheaume

1 IFSTTAR/MAST - Département Matériaux et Structures

With increasing social awareness, concerning impacts of climate change, carbon capture and utilization (CCU) is gaining traction on a world scale. It is being pushed forward by the European Union as one of the important levers to mitigate its greenhouse gases emissions. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and its derived carbon footprint method, is thus becoming a crucial point of support to provide a strategic political vision. However, these guidelines rely on current LCA standards and practices and are not adapted to provide a strategic vision. System modelling of environmental impacts of valorization technologies with LCA use substitution scenarios and/or consequential LCA. Consequential LCA only considers unconstrained markets: every product issued from a valorization or CCU process is always considered as a substitute for a determining product. However, this is not always what is observed, especially in the construction and demolition sector. Valorization technologies are always developed according to a given state of external constraints defined by waste composition and amounts as well as existing regulations and their amounts and nature is constantly changing. Thus, the first focus of waste treatment industries is thus to find possible technological means to "get rid of" undesirable amounts of waste or carbon dioxide, but the fact that it can replace existing and determining products is by and large ignored. To reflect actual situation, there is a need to introduce the possibility of constrained markets in the models. With constrained markets, price elasticity cannot be used as the basic relationship between price, demand and produced amounts. Thus, for constrained markets, the product scale is not adapted. To overcome the abovementioned obstacles, we propose a transdisciplinary approach described in this paper. This approach is currently being developed through its application to valorization of New Caledonia nickel slags by CCU, in the CARBOSCORIES 2 and CARBOVAL projects.

Domaines: Ingénierie de l'environnement

Anne Ventura, Nicolas Antheaume. Environmental assessment of carbon capture and utilization: a new systemic vision -application to valorization of nickel slags. Proceedings of the International Workshop CO2 Storage in Concrete, Jun 2019, Champs sur Marne, France. ⟨hal-03377330⟩