Life Cycle Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Options for Bhumibol Hydropower Plant

The activities of humans are important factors that cause global warming through the release of various toxic gases from industrial sectors and vehicle transportation. This paper evaluated the environmental impacts of the Bhumibol Hydropower Plant since construction, operation and maintenance, and decommissioning phases and also explored the possible impact mitigation options that may be possible in each phase. 1 MWh of electricity production was used as a functional unit. All raw material input and emission output were based on this unit. Data on the construction, operation, and decommissioning of the powerplant were gathered from Bhumibol Hydropower Plant through a questionaire survey and an interview. The life cycle impact assessment was analyzed using The International Reference Life Cycle Data 2011 passing through SimaPro 8.0 software. The result of characterization showed that the construction phase had the highest impact, and the main sources of construction materials came from using cement and steel. After normalization impacts, the results indicated that climate change, water resources depletion, and human toxicity-cancer effects should be given importance. To reduce the environmental impact, replacing eco-concrete for future dam construction could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by 52.2% and human toxicity by 55.0%. Recycling steel during power plant decommissioning could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by up to 84.0%. Aside from this, integrating both options could potentially reduce 88.4% of greenhouse gas emissions and 74% of human toxicity.