How can I reuse results from a previous conducted LCA?

Question

Hello,

I am currently working in a research group at my university in Austria and we are searching for a LCA software which is fullfilling our requierments and it seems that openLCA would be a perfect tool to work with, but we have some questions about the program. 
Is it possible to use a result from a previous conducted LCA, for example from a LCA about a process called "Steel production" which has a kg CO2 equ. from XXX - Can this result be used directly without recreating the whole LCA which was already performed (in excel) or do I need to recreate the whole LCA (which was previously conducted) again in openLCA (Side Note - the process is not part of the ecoinvent database). If this is possible, how can I do that in openLCA? I hope you understand my question/problem. Looking forward to hear from you.

Answer 1

If you just need the inventory from the previous LCA, and I would suggest using the inventory rather than the CO2e result, then I think your best bet is to convert that inventory into a spreadsheet that openLCA can import. You can get a template for what that looks like by exporting a process from openLCA to an Excel spreadsheet.

If you need to have the sub-process level information that went into the previous LCA, I don't think there's straightforward way to do that. You would be repeating the above for all those sub-processes and then connecting them in openLCA.