Toward Integrated Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Cost Analysis for Road and Multimodal Transportation Alternatives: A Case Study of the Highland Copper Project

Freight transportation of goods and commodities is a necessity and is often a significant portion of the overall investment in industrial development, especially in the natural resource industry. The economic costs of developing infrastructure have long been factored into the project costs, but environmental or social impacts have received less attention. In addition, alternative transportation modes are rarely compared from both economic and environmental perspectives. This paper performs a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for truck-only, multimodal and rail transportation options to transport ore and concentrate. In this paper, LCA is performed in SimaPro for construction/manufacturing, operations, maintenance, and end of life phases to obtain the overall Global Warming Potential (GWP) in terms of kilogram equivalents of CO2 (kg CO2eq). After emissions from alternative options have been defined, the cost of each option can be investigated through Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) This paper also discusses the past work on LCCA and its application to transportation projects. The final part provides a methodology to convert the emission results from LCA for integration with the costs from LCCA.