Multicriteria Environmental and Economic Analysis of Municipal Solid Waste Incineration Power Plant with Carbon Capture and Separation from the Life-Cycle Perspective

This paper presents multicriteria environmental and economic analyses of municipal solid waste (MSW) grate incineration power plants without and with CO 2 capture and separation (CCS) technologies, including monoethanolamine (MEA) absorption, pressure/vacuum swing adsorption (P/VSA), and oxy-fuel combustion (Oxy). The life-cycle analysis (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA) are integrated with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) approaches for systematic environmental and economic analysis. This systematic methodology is applied to investigate the applicability of CCS technologies in MSW incineration power plants from perspectives of local government, enterprise, residents, and “equal” weight. The results show that application of CCS reduces the ecosystem quality and the human health impacts, but increases the resource use and yields an economic penalty of from ∼$33.45 to ∼$45.98 per ton of CO 2 avoidance. From the perspective of residents only, the MSW incineration power plant with CCS performs better than that without CCS. The promotion in energy efficiency and carbon price are the critical factors for CCS to attract the support from government and enterprise, respectively. In terms of the three CCS technologies, P/VSA and Oxy have similar comprehensive performances, better than MEA absorption.