Abstract
Purpose
Increasing mobility demands and growing industrial tissue come with a burden for the environment. Inventive solutions are necessary to address this challenge. This paper compares the environmental impact of two alternative container transportation methods over a 25-year time period for a specific trajectory and transport volume in the Antwerp harbor. One is a pipeline concept; the other a road concept to link the Deurganck dock with the right bank in order to transport 2 million containers per year.
Materials and methods
With a detailed bill of material and the use of the Ecolizer method, a Monte Carlo simulation was performed to calculate the environmental impact in terms of ECOPOINTS on a life cycle perspective.
Results and discussion
The results remark that in 94% of the cases the pipeline concept has less than half of the environmental impact of the road concept. Furthermore, in both concepts the operational phase is the largest contributor to the total environmental impact.
Conclusions
The pipeline concept results suggest a much lower total environmental impact over a road concept if a large enough volume of containers can effectively be transported. Some considerations have to be given to the used electricity mix, the applied impact assessment method and the case specificities.
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Notes
Significance is determined by the author as a p value of less than 0.01 over all simulation scenarios and a difference between the average values of no less than 25% based on the lowest average value.
I distinguished three major phases in the cradle-to-grave approach based on Curran (2006): construction, operational phase (use), end-of-life phase.
The nuclear energy scenario is applicable to regions were nuclear power is being used for production of Electricity such as France, Belgium, the UK, and recently Finland.
As most harbors are likely to be situated in areas with important wind fields, the implementation of windmills for electricity production gives an important opportunity contribution to the pipeline concept.
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Interviews
BIG (2010) Additional information on pipeline constructions, interview with BIG members, 29 April 2010, Headquarters BIG Roosendaal; see also http://www.bigleidingen.org
Bogaerts W (2009) Modeling and data supply of road concept, interview with site manager Wegebo NV, 20 April 2009, Headquarters Wegebo NV
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Acknowledgements
I mainly want to thank the sector experts that provided data for this study. These are for the road concept of Laurens Hermans, engineer and official of the Flemish government responsible for road constructions in the Antwerp region (MOW), and Walter Bogaerts, site manager at Wegebo NV; for the pipeline concept of Dominique Delbaere, R&D director at Denys NV and the Benelux Pipeline Guild BIG “Buizenleiding Industrie Gilde”.
Next, I would like to thank Tim Vissers for having started this research as a master student at our university (Vissers 2009); Mark Pecqueur for his expert opinion on fuel consumption of lorries; and Richard Limpens, process engineer at Tebodin, for his help with the SimaPro software. Thanks to Braecis BVBA for funding this research and to Sven Vermeulen for helping me with the redaction and performing the calculations.
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Braet, J. The environmental impact of container pipeline transport compared to road transport. Case study in the Antwerp Harbor region and some general extrapolations. Int J Life Cycle Assess 16, 886–896 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-011-0326-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-011-0326-2