IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v11y2019i13p3633-d244943.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Environmental and Economic Benefits from the Phase-out of Residential Oil Heating: A Study from the Aosta Valley Region (Italy)

Author

Listed:
  • Alessandro Casasso

    (Department of Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy)

  • Pietro Capodaglio

    (ARPA Valle d’Aosta, località La Maladière 48, 11020 Saint-Christophe (Aosta), Italy)

  • Fulvio Simonetto

    (ARPA Valle d’Aosta, località La Maladière 48, 11020 Saint-Christophe (Aosta), Italy)

  • Rajandrea Sethi

    (Department of Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy)

Abstract

Although its use is declining, oil heating is still used in areas not covered by the methane grid. Oil heating is becoming more and more expensive, requires frequent tank refill operations, and has high emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutants such as SOx. In addition, spills from oil underground storage tanks (USTs) represent a serious environmental threat to soil and groundwater quality. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis on technical alternatives to oil heating with reference to the Aosta Valley (NW Italy), where this fuel is still often used and numerous UST spills have been reported in the last 20 years. We assess operational issues, GHG and pollutant emissions, and unit costs of the heat produced for several techniques: LPG boilers, wood boilers (logs, chips, pellets) and heat pumps (air-source, geothermal closed-loop and open-loop systems). We examine the investment to implement such solutions in two typical cases, a detached house and a block of flats, deriving payback times of about 3–8 years. Wood log boilers turn out to be the most economically convenient solutions; however, heat pumps provide several benefits from the operational and environmental points of view. In addition, including solar thermal panels for domestic hot water or a photovoltaic plant would have payback times of about 6–9 years. The results highlight the economic feasibility and the multiple benefits of a rapid phase-out of oil heating in Italy.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandro Casasso & Pietro Capodaglio & Fulvio Simonetto & Rajandrea Sethi, 2019. "Environmental and Economic Benefits from the Phase-out of Residential Oil Heating: A Study from the Aosta Valley Region (Italy)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(13), pages 1-16, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:13:p:3633-:d:244943
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3633/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3633/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Toscano, G. & Duca, D. & Amato, A. & Pizzi, A., 2014. "Emission from realistic utilization of wood pellet stove," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 644-650.
    2. Böttcher, Fabian & Casasso, Alessandro & Götzl, Gregor & Zosseder, Kai, 2019. "TAP - Thermal aquifer Potential: A quantitative method to assess the spatial potential for the thermal use of groundwater," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 85-95.
    3. Ürge-Vorsatz, Diana & Cabeza, Luisa F. & Serrano, Susana & Barreneche, Camila & Petrichenko, Ksenia, 2015. "Heating and cooling energy trends and drivers in buildings," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 85-98.
    4. Snape, J.R. & Boait, P.J. & Rylatt, R.M., 2015. "Will domestic consumers take up the renewable heat incentive? An analysis of the barriers to heat pump adoption using agent-based modelling," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 32-38.
    5. Saner, Dominik & Juraske, Ronnie & Kübert, Markus & Blum, Philipp & Hellweg, Stefanie & Bayer, Peter, 2010. "Is it only CO2 that matters? A life cycle perspective on shallow geothermal systems," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 14(7), pages 1798-1813, September.
    6. Karytsas, Spyridon, 2018. "An empirical analysis on awareness and intention adoption of residential ground source heat pump systems in Greece," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 167-179.
    7. Bayer, Peter & Saner, Dominik & Bolay, Stephan & Rybach, Ladislaus & Blum, Philipp, 2012. "Greenhouse gas emission savings of ground source heat pump systems in Europe: A review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 1256-1267.
    8. Chinese, Damiana & Nardin, Gioacchino & Saro, Onorio, 2011. "Multi-criteria analysis for the selection of space heating systems in an industrial building," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 556-565.
    9. Matteo Rivoire & Alessandro Casasso & Bruno Piga & Rajandrea Sethi, 2018. "Assessment of Energetic, Economic and Environmental Performance of Ground-Coupled Heat Pumps," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(8), pages 1-23, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alessandro Casasso & Marta Puleo & Deborah Panepinto & Mariachiara Zanetti, 2021. "Economic Viability and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Budget of the Biomethane Retrofit of Manure-Operated Biogas Plants: A Case Study from Piedmont, Italy," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(14), pages 1-18, July.
    2. Edoardo Ruffino & Bruno Piga & Alessandro Casasso & Rajandrea Sethi, 2022. "Heat Pumps, Wood Biomass and Fossil Fuel Solutions in the Renovation of Buildings: A Techno-Economic Analysis Applied to Piedmont Region (NW Italy)," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(7), pages 1-25, March.
    3. Marco Ravina & Costanza Gamberini & Alessandro Casasso & Deborah Panepinto, 2020. "Environmental and Health Impacts of Domestic Hot Water (DHW) Boilers in Urban Areas: A Case Study from Turin, NW Italy," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(2), pages 1-18, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Somogyi, Viola & Sebestyén, Viktor & Nagy, Georgina, 2017. "Scientific achievements and regulation of shallow geothermal systems in six European countries – A review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 68(P2), pages 934-952.
    2. Antonio Novelli & Valentina D’Alonzo & Simon Pezzutto & Rubén Aarón Estrada Poggio & Alessandro Casasso & Pietro Zambelli, 2021. "A Spatially-Explicit Economic and Financial Assessment of Closed-Loop Ground-Source Geothermal Heat Pumps: A Case Study for the Residential Buildings of Valle d’Aosta Region," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(22), pages 1-22, November.
    3. Bayer, Peter & Attard, Guillaume & Blum, Philipp & Menberg, Kathrin, 2019. "The geothermal potential of cities," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 17-30.
    4. Casasso, Alessandro & Sethi, Rajandrea, 2016. "G.POT: A quantitative method for the assessment and mapping of the shallow geothermal potential," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 765-773.
    5. Hähnlein, Stefanie & Bayer, Peter & Ferguson, Grant & Blum, Philipp, 2013. "Sustainability and policy for the thermal use of shallow geothermal energy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 914-925.
    6. Santamarta, Juan C. & García-Gil, Alejandro & Expósito, María del Cristo & Casañas, Elías & Cruz-Pérez, Noelia & Rodríguez-Martín, Jesica & Mejías-Moreno, Miguel & Götzl, Gregor & Gemeni, Vasiliki, 2021. "The clean energy transition of heating and cooling in touristic infrastructures using shallow geothermal energy in the Canary Islands," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 505-515.
    7. Böttcher, Fabian & Casasso, Alessandro & Götzl, Gregor & Zosseder, Kai, 2019. "TAP - Thermal aquifer Potential: A quantitative method to assess the spatial potential for the thermal use of groundwater," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 85-95.
    8. Karytsas, Spyridon & Choropanitis, Ioannis, 2017. "Barriers against and actions towards renewable energy technologies diffusion: A Principal Component Analysis for residential ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 252-271.
    9. Kircher, Kevin J. & Zhang, K. Max, 2021. "Heat purchase agreements could lower barriers to heat pump adoption," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 286(C).
    10. Francesco, Tinti & Annamaria, Pangallo & Martina, Berneschi & Dario, Tosoni & Dušan, Rajver & Simona, Pestotnik & Dalibor, Jovanović & Tomislav, Rudinica & Slavisa, Jelisić & Branko, Zlokapa & Attilio, 2016. "How to boost shallow geothermal energy exploitation in the adriatic area: the LEGEND project experience," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 190-204.
    11. Andrea Aquino & Flavio Scrucca & Emanuele Bonamente, 2021. "Sustainability of Shallow Geothermal Energy for Building Air-Conditioning," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(21), pages 1-30, October.
    12. Violante, Anna Carmela & Donato, Filippo & Guidi, Giambattista & Proposito, Marco, 2022. "Comparative life cycle assessment of the ground source heat pump vs air source heat pump," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 188(C), pages 1029-1037.
    13. Stemmle, Ruben & Blum, Philipp & Schüppler, Simon & Fleuchaus, Paul & Limoges, Melissa & Bayer, Peter & Menberg, Kathrin, 2021. "Environmental impacts of aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES)," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    14. Matteo Rivoire & Alessandro Casasso & Bruno Piga & Rajandrea Sethi, 2018. "Assessment of Energetic, Economic and Environmental Performance of Ground-Coupled Heat Pumps," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(8), pages 1-23, July.
    15. Xingchi Shen & Yueming Lucy Qiu & Pengfei Liu & Anand Patwardhan, 2022. "The Effect of Rebate and Loan Incentives on Residential Heat Pump Adoption: Evidence from North Carolina," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 82(3), pages 741-789, July.
    16. Rivera, Jaime A. & Blum, Philipp & Bayer, Peter, 2015. "Analytical simulation of groundwater flow and land surface effects on thermal plumes of borehole heat exchangers," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 421-433.
    17. Nicola Bartolini & Alessandro Casasso & Carlo Bianco & Rajandrea Sethi, 2020. "Environmental and Economic Impact of the Antifreeze Agents in Geothermal Heat Exchangers," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(21), pages 1-18, October.
    18. Hu, Jinzhong, 2017. "An improved analytical model for vertical borehole ground heat exchanger with multiple-layer substrates and groundwater flow," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 202(C), pages 537-549.
    19. Sivasakthivel, T. & Murugesan, K. & Sahoo, P.K., 2015. "Study of technical, economical and environmental viability of ground source heat pump system for Himalayan cities of India," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 452-462.
    20. Menberg, Kathrin & Heberle, Florian & Uhrmann, Hannah & Bott, Christoph & Grünäugl, Sebastian & Brüggemann, Dieter & Bayer, Peter, 2023. "Environmental impact of cogeneration in binary geothermal plants," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 218(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:13:p:3633-:d:244943. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.