Life cycle assessment of a barrel of diesel refined from lebanese crude oil

Abstract

Lebanon is on the verge of producing crude oil and natural gas. This project focuses on the environmental impacts of fossil diesel extracted from Lebanese crude oil, which is mainly used in diesel vehicles, industries, and electric generators. This objective is achieved by carrying out a full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of diesel from the extraction of crude oil to its combustion in electric generators. SimaPro software and IMPACT 2002+ method are used to build the LCA model where 15 impact categories were assessed. The functional unit is "a barrel of diesel refined from Lebanese crude oil and used to generate electricity from UOB electric generators". System boundaries include the drilling process in the Lebanese offshores for the extraction of crude oil, the transportation of crude oil from "Block 4" to Constanta in Romania, the refining of crude oil to diesel, the transportation of diesel from Romania to the University of Balamand, and finally the combustion of diesel in UOB electric generators. The results indicate that the consumption stage of the diesel life cycle, in particular the combustion of diesel in UOB electric generators, has the highest contribution among the stages of the diesel life cycle. As well, the results depict that the most important impact categories are aquatic ecotoxicity, non-renewable energy, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and ionizing radiation with a cumulative contribution of 98.47% of the total impact. Sensitivity and uncertainty analysis were also performed to check the robustness of the results. These analyses revealed that the transport of crude oil from block 4 to the Lebanese coast by transoceanic tankers has less negative impacts than the transport by offshore pipelines and transporting diesel from the port of Tripoli to the Deir Ammar region using tankers has the least impacts among the other scenarios studied.