Application of life cycle assessment to estimate environmental impacts of surface coal mining

TL;DRAbstract

Coal plays an important role in meeting the energy needs of the World. Given its abundance and low cost, its use is bound to increase with the growing energy demand. Despite its importance, there are concerns over coal’s environmental burdens. In order to extract and use coal in a sustainable manner, sustainability assessment has to be comprehensive. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides systematic and quantifiable measures for assessing environmental burdens of products and processes. Extensive LCA work has been done on coal use, particularly in electricity generation, but, the coal mining stage has been neglected, for the most part. This has resulted in data gaps in the life cycle inventory (LCI) of coal and, consequently, in the LCIs for electricity and other products that are linked to coal. The situation has resulted in incomplete assessments of the sustainability of coal extraction and use, and potential for suboptimal strategies for reducing the potential impacts of coal, especia

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