Environmental quality evaluation of hard coal using LCA and exergo-ecological cost methodology

The world's global economy is based on the access to energy. The majority of useful energy is still produced by combustion of fossil fuels that belongs to non-renewable natural resources. Besides the depletion of non-renewable resources there is also a problem related to release of waste substances into the natural environment. Moreover, efficient power and energy sector is one of the factors determining the competitive management of countries or regions. Often the improvement of energy management is focused on power technologies or effectiveness of final production processes. However, some improvement can be found in the stage of extraction, processing and transportation of fuels. To evaluate chains of the processes inside the system the ecological analysis such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Thermo-Ecological Cost (TEC) analyses is necessary. LCA in association with characterization factors is commonly used; however, TEC which is based on second law of thermodynamics is not so widespread. In the papers fundamentals of both TEC and LCA methods are described. The example results of TEC and LCA application in the case of extraction of hard coal from Polish coal mines are presented.