Life-cycle analysis of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of gas-to-liquid fuel pathway from steel mill off-gas in China by the LanzaTech process

Abstract

The LanzaTech process can convert carbon monoxide-containing gases produced by industries, such as steel manufacturing, into valuable fuel products. The life-cycle analysis (LCA) of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from the LanzaTech process has been developed for a Chinese setting using the original Tsinghua China Automotive LCA model along with a customized module developed principally for the process. The LCA results demonstrate that LanzaTech gas-to-liquid (GTL) processing in China’s steel manufacturing is favorable in terms of life-cycle fossil energy and can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 50% compared with the conventional petroleum gasoline. The LanzaTech process, therefore, shows advantages in both energy-savings and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared with most bio-ethanol production pathways in China.

Keywords

life-cycle analysis (LCA) / gas-to-liquid (GTL) / LanzaTech process

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Acknowledgements

The project is co-supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71041028, 71103109 and 71073095), the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 09&ZD029), MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities in China (No. 2009JJD790029) and the CAERC program (Tsinghua/GM/SAIC-China).

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg