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The renewal of old bridges is sometimes restricted to avoid the high carbon emissions caused by materials and construction, which however might not be conductive to climate change mitigation due to their insufficient functions. In order to facilitate the optimization of renewal timing and strategy from the perspective of reducing the comprehensive global warming impacts, we put forward the low-carbon bridge renewal decision method referring to the ideas of consequential life cycle assessment (LCA) and dynamic LCA. In the proposed method, a comparative system boundary matching the bridge renewal characteristics is constructed, where the carbon emission reduction owing to the traffic efficiency improvement by functional updating is incorporated as the low-carbon benefits of renewal, and three types of time-dependent factors, i.e., time-dependent characterization factor, trend factors and changes of traffic demands, are introduced to characterize the influence of renewal timing. The proposed method provided guidance for the renewal of Maogang Bridge, the first long-span cable-stayed bridge in Shanghai. Results illustrate that the global warming impacts of renewal construction activities and the low-carbon benefits from functional updating decrease with the renewal timing. For Maogang Bridge, the rapidly increasing traffic demands inevitably advocated renewal in advance, and the reduction of global warming impacts from emission reduction or carbon uptake could be manifested for renewal in advance. Adopting material recycling in the disposal of old bridge helped reconstructing a new bridge while deconstructing the old one in 2019 becoming the finally selected low-carbon renewal strategy, which is expected to reduce 15.04 kt CO 2 e-2019 compared to the essential renewal in 2050 with the landfill disposal method. The robustness of the strategy choice has been justified, given the variations of analytical time horizon, expected emission trends and repair emissions. In this way, the low-carbon renewal decision method could build a quantitative basis for judging the urgency of functional updating and verifying the low-carbon benefits of immediate concrete recycling in up-coming urban renewals. • Low-carbon bridge renewal decision optimizes renewal timing and strategy. • System boundary is expanded for quantifying benefits from functional updating. • Emission trends and time-dependent characterization factors are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A 500 MW e oxy-coal power plant (PP) with CO 2 capture and storage (CCS) was considered. • 5% CO 2 emitted from the PP can be methanized using surplus electricity from renewables. • 80 % replacement by the PP with CCS contributed to lower 0.09 °C of global temperature. • Realistic implementation of coal PPs with CCS using renewable energy was provided. CO 2 -free power plants (PPs) with renewable electricity have promising sustainability implications, but the impact of their widespread use is yet to be determined. Here, the effect of an oxy-coal PP equipped with CO 2 capture, water electrolysis, and CO 2 methanation on electricity efficiency, CO 2 emission rate, CO 2 capture cost, and global surface temperatures (T g) was investigated. By exploiting surplus electricity from renewable sources for electrolysis, we estimated that 5 % of the CO 2 emitted from the coal PP was methanized. The process flow diagram of a 500 MW e decarbonized oxy-coal PP was constructed and its impact on energetic, economic, and environmental values was evaluated. The results were applied to a model of the global carbon cycle to predict T g considering the prospective global population and carbon emission rate (r ff) of fossil fuels by 2050. An 80 % replacement of conventional coal PPs worldwide by decarbonized oxy-coal PPs contributed to reducing r ff by 6.1 Gt CO2 /y in 2050 and lowering T g by 0.09 °C. The additional capital cost to replace 80 % of conventional coal PPs with decarbonized oxy-coal PPs, including associated geological storage costs, was estimated to be $43/t CO2. This study elucidates the promise and limitations of coal PPs designed for CO 2 capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). Combining CCUS technologies with global warming estimates can be extended to examine the economic and climatic impact of CCUS under various CO 2 emission sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]