Thermo-ecological cost of hard coal with inclusion of the whole life cycle chain Wojciech Stanek a, * , Lucyna Czarnowska a , Krzysztof Piko  n b , Magdalena Bogacka b a Silesian University of Technology, Institute of Thermal Technology, Konarskiego 22, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland b Silesian University of Technology, Department of Technologies and Installations for Waste Management, Konarskiego 18, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland article info Article history: Received 7 November 2014 Received in revised form 27 April 2015 Accepted 8 May 2015 Available online 6 June 2015 Keywords: Non-renewable resources Coal Exergy Life-cycle Thermo-ecological cost abstract Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy in most economic sectors worldwide, particularly in the electric power sector. The transformation and usage of primary energy are connected with various unfavorable environmental effects. Mainly they are as follows depletion of constrained resources of non- renewable energy, emission of harmful wastes to the environment, emission of GHG (greenhouse gas- ses). To investigate these effects variety of methods have been developed, the LCA (Life-Cycle Assess- ment) is one of them. It has emerged as a valuable decision-support tool for both policy makers and industry in assessing the cradle-to-grave impacts of a product or process. Despite many advantages of LCA, it is unfortunately characterized by the lack of inclusion of thermodynamics law, especially second law, which is the basic physical law deciding on the resource economy in any production process. In the paper, the LCA methodology together with TEC (Thermo-Ecological Cost) is proposed to apply for exergo- ecological evaluation of fossil fuels. TEC expresses the cumulative consumption of non-renewable exergy connected with the fabrication of any useful product with additional inclusion of the consumption resulting from the necessity of compensation for environmental losses caused by the removal of harmful substances to the environment. The calculations of TEC of coal are based on the material balances of the whole chain of the production process from mine to the end-user. Within the chain in the coal mine the following sub-processes have been distinguished: preparation of the coal deposit layer for exploitation, exploitation of coal deposits, mechanical processing and enrichment of coal, ventilation of coal mine, transport, energy management of coal mines, compressed air management in coal mines and utilization of methane released during mine exploitation. Besides the processes in the mine, the end use is investigated. For this reason, the different types of coal are assigned for typical users. The potentially negative influence of utilization of coal with inclusion from cradle to grave assessment are examined on the basis of TEC evaluation. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Primary energy in the form of fossil fuels dominates in the structure of the present world's energy demand [1]. Probably for years the worldwide economy will continue to base on the con- strained non-renewable resources of primary energy. Moreover, the depletion of these resources is constantly accelerating by global trends in consumption growth. On the other hand, from the eco- nomic point of view the development of societies causes the in- crease in goods consumption [2]. However, such increase in development, which is currently based on limited resources, pro- vides an ecological and further economic threat to the existence of future generations. In general, two global environmental problems related to the usage of the limited resources of non-renewable fossil fuels can be distinguished 1) depletion of natural resources and 2) environmental damage due to emissions of various substances. The estimated lifetime of fossil fuels and the changes of this estimation through years are presented in Fig. 1; it is based on data published by BP [1]. It is predicted for the Polish economy that the fossil fuels, especially coal, will be the basic source of electric power in the horizon of 2030. It should be noted that Polish energy sector is mainly based on steam power plants fed with hard coal and lignite [3]. Table 1 presents the expected structure of fuel consumption in * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ48 32 237 1124. E-mail address: wojciech.stanek@polsl.pl (W. Stanek). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/energy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2015.05.042 0360-5442/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Energy 92 (2015) 341e348