| Abstract
| - The focus in environmental research is shifting fromemission abatement to critical process analysis, includingassessment of resource consumption. The exergy theoryoffers a thermodynamic methodology to account forthe consumption of natural resources. However, exergydata on mineral resources available in the literature areinadequate to apply to exergetic life cycle analysis, due toincompleteness, inconsistencies, and a dated thermochemical basis. An uncertainty assessment of the data hasto be performed as well. In this work, three recentthermochemical databases were applied to evaluate thechemical exergy of 85 elements and 73 minerals, 21 of whichhad not yet been quantified in the literature. The processrequired the choice of a new reference species foraluminum. Muscovite was selected, giving rise to a chemicalexergy of 809.4 kJ/mol for aluminum. The theory provedto be robust for the exergy of chemical elements, as exergyvalues differing by 1.2% on average from most recentliterature were found. On the contrary, the exergy valuesfor minerals differed by factors up to 14 from literature values,due to the application of recent thermochemical valuesand consistently selected reference species. The consistentdataset of this work will enable straightforward resourceintake evaluation through an exergetic life cycle assessment.
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