Life Cycle Assessment and Decarbonization: What is LCA Good At? | 9am PT Tues Apr 29, 2025

[Grigory Bronevetsky]

Modeling Talks

Life Cycle Assessment and Decarbonization: What is LCA Good At? Emily Grubert, Notre Dame University Tues, April 29, 2025 | 9am PT Meet | Youtube Stream Hi all, The presentation will be via Meet and all questions will be addressed there. If you cannot attend live, the event will be recorded and can be found afterward at https://sites.google.com/modelingtalks.org/entry/life-cycle-assessment-and-decarbonization-what-is-lca-good-at More information on previous and future talks: https://sites.google.com/modelingtalks.org/entry/home Abstract: Life Cycle Assessment is a quantitative decision support tool that is increasingly deployed in carbon accounting and similar settings. Yet, it is far more powerful when applied in the prospective design contexts for which it was developed. Although the framework and related life cycle methods can be leveraged for calculations to support compliance mechanisms and other high precision (and often retrospective) contexts, LCA is not a calculator. Deploying LCA for system design questions, including policy and process design, typically yields more valuable outcomes and demonstrates the power of a multicriteria, multistage evaluation tool. This talk will demonstrate some of LCA's specific strengths in decarbonization contexts by highlighting scenario analysis and other design-stage applications of LCA. Bio: Dr. Emily Grubert is Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy, and, concurrently, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on justice-oriented deep decarbonization and decision support tools for large infrastructure systems. Grubert holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford.

[Grigory Bronevetsky]

Video Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-XGcyHjHU

Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_fjY7BfMhl2Tufh_eVWfdVBEKALqFwXb/view?usp=sharing

Summary:

• Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)

  • Formalized decision support framework

    • Use depends on on the decision being informed

    • Primarily tool to structure thinking and support decisions

    • Not a calculator or push-button tool

    • Distinct from lice cycle analysis or life cycle thinking (less formal)

    • Assumption: linear impact 

  • Standardized as 

    • ISO 14040: https://www.iso.org/standard/37456.html

    • ISO 14044: https://www.iso.org/standard/38498.html

    • Specific steps, approaches and methods

    • Formalized as flows and impacts of those flows

    • Must be a complete inventory of impacts

    • LCA is a formal accounting tool

• Cross product of

  • Life cycle: Production, Processing, Transportation, Conversion, Use, Disposal

  • All outcomes: Climate, Smog, Water pollution, Toxicity, Habitat, …

• LCA is very data intensive

  • Requires detailed records of what happened in the real world

  • Project management data: use of concrete, trips by trucks, use of water, etc.

  • Impact on/Use of common resources: clean air, CO2, etc.

  • These are typically poorly tracked in reality (unlike money in normal accounting)

• Full LCA accounting requires fully accurate data

• Less accurate LCA is still very useful for comparing options, as long as the errors go in a consistent way across the options

• LCA and carbon accounting: 

  • Using a prospective design tool to look backwards about what happened in the past for purposes of compliance

  • Much of the required data is not available (e.g. methane leaks) but must be approximated from industry averages/trends

• Example: renewable natural gas

  • Sources: biogenic waste, biogenic non-waste, non-biogenic non-waste

  • Arguably, burning biogenic methane to turn it into CO2 makes this methane a carbon-neutral source

    • Reasoning can be used to argue that a fuel that is partially biogenic methane and mostly fossil methane is net carbon neutral (by avoidance of methane emissions)

  • LCA can document all the flows of material to possible uses or environment, as well as alternative flows we can design

    • Assumption that non-burned methane would have been vented into the atmosphere can be analyzed precisely

    • Incentives to use ventable biogenic methane cause people to cause more biogenic methane where you can avoid venting it

      • Creates new methane that would not have otherwise existed

      • Also, there are already many regulations to require methane to be burned to avoid uncontrolled flaring in the open air

    • Combining LCA with analysis of incentives uncovers that burning biogenic methane creates emissions rather than avoids them

• Example: LCA for tax credits: 

  • 45v (hydrogen)

    • Estimates that this hydrogen policy would cost $T while generating 3Gt excess CO2E relative to strict climate policy scenarios

    • Incentives would have promoted avoidance of biogenic methane emissions and would have shut out clean hydrogen generation

  • 45Q (carbon capture)

    • Incentivizing carbon capture in dirty plants

    • Additional finance stream will cause dirty plants to run for longer and more actively, causing more CO2 emissions