Life cycle and cost assessment of a marine scrubber installation

This paper is to provide a guidance as to which scrubber system is applied for marine vessels in both environmental and economic perspectives. It performs a comparative analysis for two different types of wet scrubber systems: they are generally referred as "open loop" and "closed loop" systems. Those systems are evaluated via life cycle assessment technique, which is further used for evaluating the global warming, acidification and eutrophication potentials. The
economic aspect of the scrubber installation will be estimated by establishing the payback time of the installation costs. Sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the effect of various economic scenarios on payback times. Research results reveal that the environmental impacts are higher for the closed loop scrubber than open loop scrubber. The open loop scrubber has a marginally shorter payback time under different scenarios; for No EGCS (MGO) case, it was revealed 3.2 years (with open loop) and 3.6 years (with closed loop), and for No EGCS (VLSFO + MGO) case, 5.4 years (with open loop) and 5.9 years (with closed loop).