Integration of techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment for sustainable process design - A review

For sustainable design, technology developers need to consider not only technical and economic aspects but also potential environmental impacts while developing new technologies. Techno economic analysis (TEA) evaluates the technical performance and economic feasibility of a technology. Life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with a product system throughout its life cycle from raw material extraction to disposal. Generally, TEA and LCA performed separately for technology assessment. Understanding of the trade-off between economic and environmental performance is crucial for sustainable process design, which is not fully available if TEA and LCA is performed separately. In contrast, integration of TEA and LCA enables systematic analysis of the relationships between technical, economic, and environmental performance and provides more information to technology developers for trade-off analysis. Integrated TEA-LCA tool can also reduce inconsistency between system boundaries, functional units, and assumptions that can arise from using standalone TEA and LCA findings in decision making. There is also growing interest of prospective application of integrated TEA-LCA tool to evaluate emerging technologies at early technology readiness level (TRL). Integration of TEA and LCA is still an evolving area and requires further exploration to develop a consistent methodological guideline. The goal of this study is to review the current state-of-the-art in TEA and LCA to identify the methodological challenges of TEA-LCA integration approaches. This study also identifies major challenges to perform integrated TEA-LCA analysis of emerging technologies at low TRLs. Lack of consistent methodological guidelines and compatible software tools, inconsistent system boundary and functional unit selection, limited data availability and uncertainty are key methodological challenges for integration of LCA and TEA. Future research should focus on developing integrated TEA-LCA tool, formulating approach to incorporate optimization method with integrated TEA-LCA tool, and developing strategy of proper communication of results from integrated LCATEA tool to broad range of stakeholders.