Can I allocate within a process?

Question

I want to allocate 46% of the environmental impacts due to electricity generation to a process since there are two products being created from this process (of which one product is outside my system boundary) but when I try to enter 0.46 in the allocation tab under causal allocation, it changes back to 1.0 whenever I save.

Is it possible to allocate for a flow within a process?

Answer 1

Hi Helen, I don't understand? You can of course allocate flows to different products in a process. I made this entirely stupid process for illustration:

..it has two products, and I can of course allocate using individual, causal factors:

..save, and the factors remain as I had entered them?

I am using openLCA 1.10.3.

Best wishes,

Andreas

Comments

Maybe my software has a glitch but it saves as 1.0. I am also using 1.10.3.

So just for simplicity, lets say I need electricity to mine an ore. The ore produces two products (A and B) but I am only interested in product A for the purposes of the LCA. So, I've added electricity (twice, I've also tried to add it once) and I've set one of the electricity flows at 1.0 kWh for product A and  0.00001 kWh for product B. Then I try to allocate 0.46 of the electricity to product A and 0.54 to product B. But when I save, it returns as 1.0 for both.

So what's the problem?

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Hm, I don't understand your allocation approach I think. Why did you add electricity twice? If you only need one of the products in your model, add an allocation to the process, as I have tried to show above, and then use the product that interests you in your system. You do not need to worry about the other product.

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Thanks Andreas. Sorry, I was confusing myself earlier. I set up two of the same product and allocated it accordingly. Thanks for the example.