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I performed a LCA of natural gas production to produce electricity. The units of NG is cubic meter as per ecoinvent.

I need to extrapolate to a 1 million ton of NG.

Has anyone does this? What's the right method for this?
in Miscellaneous by (130 points)

1 Answer

+1 vote
by (124k points)
Hi, an answer depends on the inventory model you use, attributional or consequential. Since attributional LCAs are strictly speaking linear systems, you can simply multiply by whatever extrapolation factor you imagine - evidently, a largely increased system might not be realistic any more, which asks you to apply rather a consequential modeling, where you try to catch, simply speaking, the consequences of consuming the modeled quantity, over the life cycle. There is quite some literature about this, in LCA books e.g.. I do not want to start a large discussion here but it is probably fair to say that in consequential LCA, a challenge is to identify the changes caused, and to reflect these then in your model. Answering questions like: If your system consumes 1 million ton of NG, do other consumers have sufficient gas, or do they switch to other fuels, and if yes, to which ones.
by (130 points)
That makes sense. Thanks for answering.
Well, the project is for NG extraction system, my system is overall NG extraction to electricity production, include NG to LNG to shipping to regasification and then electricity production,  The values I have got from ecoinvent are in the m3 of NG. While we are extracting huge quantities, about 25 million tons a year, and need to show comparable electricity production in terra Wh.
The ecoinvent entries are m3 and kwh .
I was hoping that if increase the input value of NG to 1 MT (converted to m3) it will calculate the rest of the processes to that quantity, Is that right? or I am missing something here?
by (130 points)
On a side note, any LCA books recommendation?
by (124k points)
to your first comment - that is correct, you only need to increase the quantitative reference of the product system, the rest will be scaled accordingly (mathematically correct). My point was that it can become unrealistic, since you might not have suppliers that can deliver all the input products you need, e.g.
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