Life cycle assessment of brackish water reverse osmosis desalination plant in Spain and Singapore

• Main Author: Jang, Eden Chun En
• Other Authors: Chang Wei-Chung
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Environmental engineering::Water treatment
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39726
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Gabi and Simapro are two different product life cycle assessment software manufactured by two different companies. The main purpose of this work is to utilize the Gabi software to perform a life cycle assessment on two identical brackish water reverse osmosis desalination plant that are situated in two different countries, namely Spain and Singapore. A comparison and discussion in the results from Gabi and Simapro will be the highlight of this report since identical studies have been conducted by Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, Singapore Membrane Technology Centre, research fellow; Jin Zhou using the Simapro software. The life cycle assessment with CML 2001 baseline is used in both software to compare the environmental burdens from this two identical brackish water reverse osmosis plants. The input and output values used in this project are obtained from the research of Jin Zhou conducted on the Simapro software in 2009 while her modeling was done in accordance to Munoz’s work in 2008. The results from Gabi’s analysis for both countries have indicated that plant operation stage, out of the entire product life cycle is the key contributor to environmental burden due to the utilization of energy in the form of electricity for the reverse osmosis process. Although the trend of plant operation as key environmental impact contributor was similarly spotted during the studies conducted by Jin Zhou, differences in the values of various environmental impact categories are evident due to the availability and representation of the processes used for construction of the plants on Gabi software. The reason to these differences will be further elaborated in this report.