How to add carbon emission from fuel combustion & transportation in Process?

Question

Hello!

So I am trying to do perform (Gate to Gate) LCA study for manufacturing of a chemical product and it includes utilization of fuel, say coal & diesel and transportation of RM to the unit as their major contributing sources. I have calculated the equivalent CO2 emissions that shall be generated from fuel combustion & transportation in terms of tons of CO2 equivalent. I want to know how should I enter this detail in my process and calculate the overall impact of the production of the product?

Also, is there any way to select the parameters to be assessed for the selected impact category. For instance, I do my calculation with ReCiPe method, but I just want to check climate change, ozone depletion & photochemical smog. So is there a way to select these parameters?

Thanks in advance!

Regards

Jesal

Answer 1

Hello Siddhi,

There are two ways to approach this:

1: Combine background and primary data. If you know the elementary flows from transport and combustion of coal, you can add the elementary flows to the process, along with a process of extraction of those fuels. Adding the rest of the product system will then give you a more or less complete model.

2: Use solely background data. There are some issues with combining data from several sources. Most databases have a way to calculate energy from coal combustion, and emissions from transport. Unless you have very specific data on these two processes, or data of a very high quality from elsewhere, i would suggest not mixing data sources unless necessary.

Regarding the impact assessment, if youre using OpenLCA 2, you can create your own impact assessment method, and add the GWP, Ozone depletion, and photochemical smog impact categories from ReCiPe. Using this LCIA method you created will yield results only on these categories.

Best of luck

Comments

Hello Jesal,
In most cases in LCA we would use the tonkm unit, as well as a generic process for transportation, such as the one you mentioned. In your case, you would omit the number of trucks and the empty return (that is included in the procesS). Instead you would calculate the one way distance (i suppose 250 km) and the total mass of the transported goods (either 20.000 tons, or 200.000 tons, depending on which of your comments i look at). You then identify the total amount of tonkm needed: 250*(20.000 or 200.000). Thus your final result is either 5.000.000 tonkm, or 50.000.000 tonkm.

This is the total transport value for all transportation. If you want it at a product level, then you must allocate this transport to the production.

Hope this helps :)