Identifying the opportunities for sustainable bitumen production in India

The present study assessed the environmental impacts due to bitumen production in India using life cycle assessment approach. The impacts were calculated for production of 1 t of bitumen and system boundary covered extraction of resources, processing at refinery, transportation of bitumen and storage at the production site. In this study, five scenarios were considered to estimate the impacts reduction assuming different future electricity mix and thermal energy source. Crude oil extraction phase had contributed highest (91%) followed by refinery phase (4%), then transportation (3%) and at last storage of bitumen (2%). The normalization results found that the bitumen production had highest impacts on abiotic depletion fossil and lowest impact on eutrophication. Scenario S4 had the least environmental impacts and provided the overall reductions of 33% compared to the baseline scenario. Scenario S4 reduced the impacts significantly on acidification (51%), eutrophication (30%), and human toxicity (71%), but the reductions were not significant on global warming (11%) and increased the impacts on abiotic depletion fossil (1%). The results of sensitivity analysis found that thermal energy obtained from hard coal consumed during bitumen production is the most sensitive parameter for all the impact categories. The uncertainty analysis showed that the results of this study are reliable and had standard deviation less than 5% for all the impact categories. The findings of the present study will help the decision makers and concerned authorities to reduce the environmental impacts from bitumen production in India.