There was a recent discussion regarding the life cycle analysis of various forms of energy, principally to be converted to electricity. Given that everything I know about sustainability and life cycle analysis suggests is it is a very complicated business, I decided to dig into this a bit. (See also.) The discussion only considers a few major scholarly references, notably Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, who I’ve written a lot about on these pages, his colleague, Mark Delucchi, and then critics of their work, Barry Brook, Charles Barton, and Howard Hayden.

The primary reference I have found is:

Hertwich, Edgar G., Thomas Gibon, Evert A. Bouman, Anders Arvesen, Sangwon Suh, Garvin A. Heath, Joseph D. Bergesen, Andrea Ramirez, Mabel I. Vega, and Lei Shi. “Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 20 (2015): 6277-6282.

I have also found

Thomas Gibon, Álvaro Hahn Menacho, Mélanie Guiton, “Life cycle assessment of electricity generation options,” UNECE, draft report, 17 September 2021.

but it is available only in draft.

There were a number of references in an earlier version of this blog post, but they have become dead links.