A critical review of exergy based cost accounting approaches

Exergy is a thermodynamic quantity capable of measuring the conversion of material and energy flows into comparable terms on the basis of the capacity of such flows to generate mechanical work as a useful effect and Identifying and quantifying the thermodynamic inefficiencies of a generic process by means of the exergy destruction term. Because of its properties, exergy is a convenient tool for the calculation of the global resource consumption of both natural and engineering processes. Therefore, there are different exergy based approaches. Every exergy based approaches has its advantages and its drawbacks. It even has its own spatial and temporal domain. Reviewing different exergy approaches especially the approaches that introduce the externalities like Labour, Capital, and environmental cost with their equivalent exergy values will help to develop an approach that avoids the drawbacks and take advantages of other approaches. There are different exergy based approaches that have been reviewed within this paper which are EMergy, Extended Exergy, Cumulative Exergy Consumption, Exergetic life cycle assessment, and Thermoeconomics. Similarities and differences between all of these approaches have been described, highlighting many aspects like; the allocation procedure, including the Fuel-Product definition and the choice of magnitude used for measuring energy, the representation of externalities like labour and capital by their equivalent exergy values, and last but not the least the data availability for applying these theoretical approachs.