Laurence Stamford

The University of Manchester · Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science

The role of nuclear power in a more sustainable, ‘net zero’ energy sector is an important focal point of research. Given the large volume of existing legacy wastes and the future waste arisings that nuclear expansion would entail, attention is needed in the ‘back-end’ of the nuclear fuel cycle: processing (including treatment and conditioning) and...

This study aimed to compare hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, and waste-derived biofuels as shipping fuels using life cycle assessment, to establish what potential they have to contribute to the shipping industry’s 100% greenhouse gas emission reduction target. A novel approach was taken where the greenhouse gas emissions associated with one year of glo...

The annual global growth rate for geothermal power generation between 2021 and 2030 is targeted to be 13 % to meet net-zero emissions by 2050. Repurposing abandoned oil and gas wells (AOGWs) presents a strategic alternative to boost geothermal power by minimising the drilling requirements. This study performed the first cradle-to-grave life cycle a...

Geothermal power generation is expected to increase fivefold worldwide by 2040 compared to 2018. The upcoming growth of geothermal power plants (GPPs) requires assessments of its role in tackling climate change and other impacts within complex environmental, economic and social systems. This study presents the first literature review of GPPs, inclu...

Globally, around half a million tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) will be in dry or wet storage by around 2050. Continued storage is not sustainable, and this SNF must eventually either be disposed (the open nuclear fuel cycle) or recycled (the closed fuel cycle). Many international studies have addressed the advantages and disadvantages of these...

Global electrification of mobility and energy storage is driving an unprecedented demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for which graphite is one of the major components. Multiple prior studies have attempted to assess the environmental footprint of LIBs by way of life cycle analysis (LCA), and the poor quality of inventory data on the production...

Businesses are increasingly focussing their efforts on developing sustainable technological innovations. In doing so, they face obstacles in the systemic nature of innovation processes, the uncertain and ambiguous nature of sustainability, and in reconciling their business model and strategy with social and environmental value creation. This is par...

Heating and hot water within buildings account for almost a quarter of global energy consumption. Approximately 90% of this heat is derived directly from the combustion of fossil fuels, primarily natural gas, leading to the unabated emission of carbon dioxide. This paper assesses the environmental sustainability of a range of heating technologies a...

We report measurements of methane (CH4) mixing ratios and emission fluxes derived from sampling at a monitoring station at an exploratory shale gas extraction facility in Lancashire, England. Elevated ambient CH4 mixing ratios were recorded in January 2019 during a period of cold-venting associated with a nitrogen lift process at the facility. Thes...

Cement production is a highly energy-intensive process, contributing 7% to the global CO2 emissions. Over 80% of the energy used in cement production is consumed by the calcination process. This paper considers a novel solar thermal technology for calcination, to investigate if it could help mitigate the climate change and other environmental impac...

Improving access to energy and water in remote communities is an important step towards sustainable development. However, integrated sustainability studies at the community or household scale are rare compared to industrial or national studies. Thus, this paper presents an integrated approach to the development and evaluation of energy and water su...

Access to clean water is one of the targets in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, millions of people are still without basic water services, predominantly in rural areas in developing nations. Previous studies have investigated the environmental impacts of water provision, but they mostly focused on large-scale urban systems. This paper...

The success of deploying energy and water technologies in remote communities in developing countries can be improved by considering their synergistic relationships and their social, economic and environmental implications. This paper first evaluates social implications of current energy and water supply in a prototypical remote community against fi...

Access to clean cooking fuels and technologies is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in developing countries, to minimise human health and environmental impacts. This paper assesses for the first time the environmental sustainability of household cooking, focusing on remote communities in developing countries in...

Tackling the pressing sustainability needs of society will require the development and application of new technologies. Biotechnology, emboldened by recent advances in synthetic biology, offers to generate sustainable biologically-based routes to chemicals and materials as alternatives to fossil-derived incumbents. Yet, the sustainability potential...

This paper presents a life cycle assessment for three stationary energy storage systems (ESS); lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) and liquid air energy storage (LAES). The global warming potential (GWP) is assessed in relation to uncertainties in usage of the storage, use-phase energy input, cell replacement an...

This paper presents a new framework for evaluating life cycle eco-efficiency of different products and sectors. The framework incorporates life cycle assessment, life cycle costing and multi-criteria decision analysis to enable estimations of the overall eco-efficiency and benchmarking of products and sectors. Overall, 17 eco-efficiency indicators...

Small-scale off-grid renewable energy systems are being increasingly used for rural electrification, commonly as stand-alone home systems or community micro-grids. With the variety of technologies and configurations available, it is not clear which options are sustainable for remote communities. This study investigates the life cycle environmental...

This study uses life cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental impacts of electricity generated from fossil fuels in Chile over a ten–year period, from 2004 to 2014. The focus on fossil fuels is highly relevant for Chile because around 60% of electricity currently comes from natural gas, coal and oil. The impacts are first considered at the le...

Thin-film technologies have been part of the rapidly-expanding solar photovoltaics (PV) market for many years, led by cadmium-telluride (CdTe) and copper‑indium‑gallium-selenide (CIGS). However, their environmental impacts remain largely unknown, particularly considering state-of-the-art CIGS manufacturing techniques. This study estimates the life...

Although there is a growing body of literature on the environmental impacts of food, virtually none of the studies has addressed baby foods. Therefore, this work explored the life cycle environmental impacts of different ready-made baby foods, both at the level of individual meals and their combinations within a weekly menu. Twelve different meals...

Although electricity supply is still dominated by fossil fuels, it is expected that renewable sources will have a much larger contribution in the future due to the need to mitigate climate change. Therefore, this paper presents a new framework for developing Future Electricity Scenarios (FuturES) with high penetration of renewables. A multi-period...

Biscuits are a major product category in the global confectionary sector. Despite this, their environmental impacts are poorly characterised. Therefore, this paper sets out to evaluate the life cycle environmental sustainability of the following widely-consumed types of biscuit, both at the product and sectoral levels: crackers, low fat/sugar, semi...

Emerging technologies are increasingly promoted on the promise of tackling the grand challenge of sustainability. A range of assessment and governance approaches seek to evaluate these claims, but these tend to be applied disparately and lack widespread operationalisation. They also face specific challenges, such as high levels of uncertainty, when...

Cakes are a favourite food across the globe and yet little is known about their environmental sustainability. To address this research gap, this paper evaluates the life cycle environmental impacts associated with the production and consumption of industrially-produced cakes. The following main product categories are considered: whole cakes, cake s...

The confectionary and frozen desserts sectors are important parts of the food industry but have received relatively little attention from a life cycle cost perspective. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to evaluate the life cycle costs (LCC) and value added (VA) in these sectors in the UK, focusing on four major product categories: biscuits...

Scant information is available on the environmental impacts of baby food. Therefore, the aim of this work is to evaluate the life cycle environmental sustainability of one of the most common baby foods consumed for breakfast – ready-made porridge – and to identify options for improvements. Two variants of the product are considered: dry and wet por...

The main objective of the SOLPART H2020 project is to develop, at a pilot scale (30-50 kW), a high temperature (800-1000°C) 24h/day solar process suitable for particle treatment in energy intensive non-metallic minerals’ industries. Calcium carbonate decomposition (Calcination reaction: CaCO3= CaO + CO2) is the most representative and most endother...

Ice cream is consumed daily worldwide and yet its environmental impacts are scarcely known. This paper presents a first comprehensive life cycle assessment of market-leading vanilla and chocolate ice creams, considering both regular and premium products. The results suggest that their impacts are broadly similar across the 18 impact categories cons...

Around 40% of electricity in Chile is supplied by renewables and the rest by fossil fuels. Despite the growing electricity demand in the country, its environmental impacts are as yet unknown. To address this gap, the current study presents the first comprehensive assessment of the life cycle environmental sustainability of electricity generation in...

The UK is in the early stages of developing a shale gas industry and to date six test wells have been drilled but none yet exploited commercially. Some argue that shale gas could reduce energy prices and improve national energy security. However, the costs of bringing commercial-size wells into operation are uncertain and the impact shale gas could...

Supplementary information contains: description of the SMART method; definition of sustainability indicators used in the study; variations in sustainability indicators for different electricity options; changes needed in each indicator for shale gas to be comparable to other electricity options; data pedigree matrix; and data quality results.

Solar power deployment is expanding rapidly alongside improvements in manufacturing processes and solar technology performance. This has coincided with great cost reductions and a shift in manufacture to China, but the environmental effects of these developments remain unclear. This study uses life cycle assessment to estimate environmental impacts...

This study evaluates life cycle environmental impacts associated with chocolate products made and consumed in the UK. The paper focuses on three representative chocolate products occupying 90% of the market: ‘moulded chocolate’, ‘chocolate countlines’ and ‘chocolates in bag’. The impacts were estimated using life cycle assessment (LCA) as a tool an...

Micro-combined heat and power (micro-CHP) systems have gained prominence in Europe and elsewhere, often attracting government incentives. Of the various micro-CHP technologies, Stirling engine (SE) systems are often preferred over internal combustion engines, but their economic and environmental sustainability is unclear. This paper uses life cycle...

Purpose: The implementation of life cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprinting represents an important professional and research opportunity for chemical engineers, but this is not broadly reflected in chemical engineering curricula worldwide. This study presents the implementation of a coursework that is easy to apply, free of cost, valid worl...

The majority of shale gas studies so far have focused on environmental impacts with few considering societal aspects. This paper presents a first and most comprehensive assessment of the social impacts of shale gas production and utilisation for electricity generation, focusing on the UK context. The assessment has been carried out based on 14 indi...

Many countries are considering exploitation of shale gas but its overall sustainability is currently unclear. Previous studies focused mainly on environmental aspects of shale gas, largely in the US, with scant information on socio-economic aspects. To address this knowledge gap, this paper integrates for the first time environmental, economic and...

Assessing the level of sustainability of a system is challenging, since sustainability studies need to cover simultaneously a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects. In this work we explore the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the extent to which a system adheres to sustainability principles. We proposed an enhance...

Nuclear power capacity is growing rapidly in China, expected to reach 58 GW by 2020. However, it is not clear at present if the country can meet its increasing demand for uranium. This paper presents a first comprehensive uranium flow analysis in China covering a ten-year period from 2003 to 2012, with the aim of identifying near-future fuel demand...

The growth of the shale gas industry in the US has raised expectations that other nations could boost domestic gas production, leading to lower energy prices and improved energy security. However, the degree to which the US experience is transferable to other countries is uncertain. Furthermore, sustainability implications of shale gas development...

Quantifying the level of sustainability attained by a system is a challenging task due to the need to consider a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects simultaneously. This work explores the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the sustainability ‘efficiency’ of a system. We propose an enhanced DEA methodolog...

The idea of sustainable production and consumption is becoming a widely-accepted societal goal worldwide. However, its implementation is slow and the world continues to speed down an unsustainable path. One of the difficulties is the sheer complexity of production and consumption systems that would need to be re-engineered in a more sustainable way...

Achieving sustainable development is a priority nowadays, and electricity systems play an especially relevant role. In 2014, Chile consumed 70.4 TWh of electricity generated mainly from hydropower and thermal plants. Since 2008 Chile has experienced consistently high prices of electricity affecting the national economy. In addition, society is not...

In the recent Comment on our paper ‘Life cycle environmental impacts of UK shale gas’ (Applied Energy 134 (2014) 506-518), Westaway et al. (Applied Energy, available online 20th March 2015) allege that we exaggerated the potential impacts of shale gas extraction in the UK. They first take an issue with our inclusion of worst case scenarios despite...

As nations face the need to decarbonise their energy supply, there is a risk that attention will be focused solely on carbon and climate change, potentially at the expense of other environmental impacts. To explore the trade-offs between climate change mitigation and other environmental impacts, this work focuses on electricity and considers a numb...

Exploitation of shale gas in the UK is at a very early stage, but with the latest estimates suggesting potential resources of 3.8 × 1013 cubic metres – enough to supply the UK for next 470 years – it is viewed by many as an exciting economic prospect. However, its environmental impacts are currently unknown. This is the focus of this paper which es...

Decarbonising the UK electricity mix is vital to achieving the national target of 80% reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, relative to a 1990 baseline. Much work so far has focused only on costs and GHG emissions ignoring other sustainability issues. This paper goes beyond to assess the life cycle sustainability of different electri...

Groundbreaking Shale Gas Research: The cover image illustrates a typical shale gas well consisting of vertical and perforated horizontal sections for hydraulic fracturing. As described in the Full Paper by Adisa Azapagic and colleagues at the University of Manchester on page 1012, a life cycle analysis of the environmental impacts of UK shale gas u...

This paper presents life cycle environmental impacts of UK shale gas used for electricity generation, in comparison with other fossil, nuclear and renewable options. Per kWh of electricity generated, shale gas has higher environmental impacts than the other options, except for coal. Thus, if it were to replace coal, most impacts would be reduced, i...

Driven by the security of supply and climate change concerns, decarbonisation of energy supply has become a priority for many countries. This study focuses on Mexico, the world’s 14th largest economy, and considers the environmental implications of decarbonising its electricity supply. Eleven scenarios are considered for the year 2050 with differen...

A discussion on the cost of micro-generation covers questions on whether heat pumps, micro-wind turbines, and solar photovoltaics offer a sustainable alternative to conventional energy; role of sustainable alternatives in greening energy systems; conventional large-scale provision of heat and electricity; public awareness and efforts to encourage u...

The UK electricity mix will change significantly in the future. This provides an opportunity to consider the full life cycle sustainability of the options currently considered as most suitable for the UK: gas, nuclear, offshore wind and photovoltaics (PV). In an attempt to identify the most sustainable options and inform policy, this paper applies...

Electricity supplies an increasing share of the world’s total energy demand and that contribution is set to increase. At the same time, there is increasing socio-political will to mitigate impacts of climate change as well as to improve energy security. This, in combination with the desire to ensure social and economic prosperity, creates a pressin...