A plant configuration with full acid recycling located in the fossil-dominated electricity generation regions comes with a significant environmental burden. The published LCA studies of CNC production in USA and China report significantly lower CC impact per kg of CNC: 30~50 kgCO2eq/kgCNC for China and 29.64 kgCO2eq/kgCNC for USA. These studies did not consider acid recycling or CNC drying .