Life cycle assessment of geothermal power plants

Geothermal energy is a natural resource of renewable energy that can provide baseload power generation and heat. Despite its large potential, nowadays only a small part of such a valuable resource is exploited worldwide. One of the main reasons for such limited exploitation is that electric energy production by geothermal sources generates nonnegligible impacts on the environment related to the site-specificity of the source itself. Such environmental burdens should be decreased or even suppressed to overcome social concerns. Technological developments could play an important role in this respect. A life cycle assessment is a consolidated methodological tool to assess an energy systems’ environmental performances, largely employed also for the evaluation of the ecoprofile of geothermal power plants throughout their whole life cycle. The aim of this chapter is to provide a panorama of environmental impacts, particularly related to emissions in the atmosphere as well as geothermal power plants in relation to their geomorphological characteristics and the variety of technologies used to exploit the resource. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.