Ecoinvent processes not showing up in OpenLCA

Question

Hi there,

I have an issue that crops up fairly often. I like to use the database search on ecoinvent.org to find processes and understand how they are built, what assumptions they make, etc. However, often when I try to include some of those processes using the same database, e.g. ecoinvent 3.7, in OpenLCA, I'm not able to find the exact match. 

Sometimes this is a small difference, e.g. I can find an ...RoW process in OpenLCA that shows up as a ...GLO process online. Other times, the difference is that whole processes seem to be missing, e.g. hard coal preparation, GLO (here) which only exists for India. Is this a problem when I installed the database, or is this process missing in the OpenLCA version?

Any advice would be very welcome.

Thanks for your help,

Mik

Answer 1

Hi Mik,

we take the processes from ecoinvent and automatically convert and process them, and only in some few cases, we need to manually delete processes; e.g., in the consequential system model, there are two (or so) processes which prevent every life cycle to be calculated in this original database. For the Indian or Global dataset you mention, the ecoinvent documentation says

which is somewhat interesting. If you have a list of processes where you think we deviate, could you maybe post it here? Of course, our idea is not to suppress useful information from ecoinvent.

Best wishes,

Andreas