Integrated Building Energy Simulation–Life Cycle Assessment (BES–LCA) Approach for Environmental Assessment of Agricultural Building: A Review and Application to Greenhouse Heating Systems

A substantial reduction in the environmental impacts related to the construction and operation of agricultural buildings is needed to adapt to the continuing development of agriculture. The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to quantify the environmental impact of different processes involved in the production and therefore has been increasingly applied to assess the environmental burden. However, most LCA-related research studies have focused on the overall environmental impact of the entire system without considering the energy load of the agricultural buildings. By integrating the LCA tool with other design tools such as the building energy simulation (BES), the identification of environmental hotspots and the mitigation options become possible during the design process. Thus, the objective of the paper was to identify the current integration approaches used to combine BES and LCA results to assess the environmental impact of different heating systems such as absorption heat pump (AHP) using energy from thermal effluent, electricity-powered heat pump and kerosene-powered boilers used in a conventional multi-span Korean greenhouse. The assessment result revealed that the environmental impact caused using a kerosene-powered boiler is largest in terms of the acidification potential (AP), global warming potential (GWP) and Eutrophication Potential (EP) of 1.15 × 100 kg SO2-eq, 1.13 × 102 kg CO2-eq and 1.62 × 10−1 kg PO4-eq, respectively. Detailed analysis of the result showed that the main contributor for greenhouse gas emission was caused by the type, amount and source of energy used to heat the greenhouse, which contributed to a maximum of 86.59% for case 1, 96.69% for case 2 and a maximum of 96.47% for case 3, depending on the type of greenhouse gas being considered.