Presentation of Christopher Weber for the "Workshop Virtual Sugarcane Biorefinery" Apresentação de Christopher Weber realizada no "Workshop Virtual Sugarcane Biorefinery " Date / Data : Aug 13 - 14th 2009/ 13 e 14 de agosto de 2009 Place / Local: ABTLus, Campinas, Brazil Event Website / Website do evento: http://www.bioetanol.org.br/workshop4

1. LCA and Input-Output Analysis:
GDI Experience
Christopher Weber
Asst. Research Professor, Green Design Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA

2. Outline
 Why Life Cycle?
 Driving feature: Greenhouse Gas Assessments
 Types of Life Cycle Assessment: strengths and weaknesses
 Process LCA
 Input-Output Analysis (IO-LCA)
 examples of different types of assessments from our lab
 General thoughts on sustainability accounting for biofuels
 Summary

3. LCA in Decision-making: Why and why not?
 Recent interest in including life cycle info in policy and
decision-making
 LCA has much to offer for policy
 Comparative assessments can often only be done reasonably at
life cycle level (ex: corn ethanol)
 Supply chains are important for impacts of policy (ie,
implications of carbon pricing)
 However . . . LCA is complicated!
 To compare between products, completeness, specificity, and
comparability all very important
 Uncertainty and variability—how to deal?
3

4. An example of the problem
Not including indirect land use change!
Farrell et al (2006) in Science

5. Policies involving Carbon Footprinting
 US and EU considering border tariffs on embodied CO2
as protection for heavy industry
 Low Carbon Fuel Standard (California) and Renewable
Fuels Standard (US, EISA 2007)
 Both contain standards written in life cycle terms, controversial
 Indirect Land Use Change (iLUC) particularly controversial
 Carbon labeling taking hold in several markets
 Led by large retailers (W-M, Tesco) for consumer products in
US and UK
 Japan, Germany, Sweden, California have all considered
national/state policies
 All assume a single answer, no uncertainty/variability

6. The Big Driver: Greenhouse Gas Accounting
aka carbon footprinting
Geographical
Project Accounting
Inventories by country
(CDM, WRI/WBCSD)
(UNFCCC)
Global GHG Emissions
Emissions by product
Emissions by company
(ISO, BSI,
(WRI/WBCSD)
WRI/WBCSD)

7. Current Happenings in Carbon Footprinting
 New and Developing standards work
 PAS 2050—British Standards and Carbon Trust UK
 ISO 14025 series—standards for type III environmental
declarations
 WRI/WBCSD developing product and supply chain standards
(GDI highly involved)
 Carbon Disclosure Project, Climate Registry, and
voluntary markets continue to grow
 EU ETS trading strong and current debates about phase
III goals (20% RPS, 20% CO2 reduction by 2020)

8. Product Accounting
 LOTS of people working on this
 ISO 14044 series for LCA (more than just GHG)
 Carbon Trust/BSI: PAS 2050
 ISO 14025: Environmental Product Declarations
 Coming ISO Standard on product accounting (2011)
 Now WRI/WBCSD GHG Protocol writing one
 ALL in addition to policy bodies (CARB, EPA, govts)
 Overall, new standards look similar to ISO 14044 but
more specific for GHGs

9. Product Accounting Issues
 System Boundary selection—use of PLCA vs. matrix
PCLA vs. HLCA
 Capital equipment accounting
 Allocation of co-products: attributional vs. consequential
 End of Life accounting—esp recycling
 Land Use Change—direct vs. indirect
 Uncertainty and Variability analysis—require? How?
 Primary vs. secondary data requirements
 Geographic and Temporal averaging

10. Types of LCAs: Strengths and
Weaknesses in GDI’s experience

11. Types of Life Cycle Assessments
 What is purpose of Analysis?
 Tool use should depend on purpose of analysis
 LCA in policy, internal corporate use, public reporting, etc. all
require different levels of precision
 In any LCA, balance between primary data, secondary data, and
different levels of data quality
 General Classes of Analyses
 Process LCA—ISO 14044, PAS 2050, etc.
 Input-output analysis—economic tool developed in 1950’s for
top-down economic modeling
 Hybrid LCA—Combination of strengths of both approaches

12. Advantages of Process vs. IO
 Conventional PLCA:
 Process and product specific
 Detailed improvement and scenario analysis
 Analysis of existing and future products
 Easy to link to functional unit
 IOA
 Economy-wide impacts (complete system boundary)
 Publicly available data, reproducible results
 Data available on every commodity

13. Disadvantages of Process vs. IO
 Conventional PLCA:
 Subjective System Boundary
 Can take substantial time and money
 Proprietary data issues
 Substantial uncertainty in many numbers
 IOA
 Aggregation
 Price uncertainty (linking to functional unit difficult)
 Data time issues (5 years to obtain typical)
 Uncertainty in data

14. In summary. . .
 Process LCA
 Advantages: Specific process-level data, functional units easy
 Disadvantages: Arbitrary System Boundaries, Proprietary data,
can take substantial time and money
 Typical uses: product footprints, phys/chem process analysis,
policy and disclosure-level comparisons
 Input-Output Analysis
 Advantages: Fast, Complete, can model product and social
impacts
 Disadvantages: Aggregation, Upfront learning, Functional units
difficult
 Typical uses: large-scale analyses of many products/services,
sustainable consumption research, structural economics

15. Current Hierarchy: GHGP Data Quality Tree

16. Examples and Experience in PLCA
and IOA

17. Examples: GDI Process LCA
CO2 SO2
Local
NOx CO2 –
US CO2
Electricity uncertainty in the US

18. Examples: GDI Input-output analysis
 Total consumption by US households
Education
Health
Communications
Clothing/Footwear
Mis Goods/Services
DirectCO2
Rec/Culture CO2
Utilities CH4
N2O
Furnish,Equip,Maint
HFCs
Housing
PrivateTransport
AlcBev,Tobacco
Food/NalcBev
0,0 1,0 2,0 3,0 4,0 5,0 6,0 7,0 8,0
ton CO2e/cap-yr

19. Examples: GDI Input-output analysis
 Embodied CO2 in global trade: Annex B vs. non-B

20. Examples: GDI Input-output analysis
 Production and Consumption-based US Land use

21. Examples: GDI Hybrid LCA

22. LCA and IOA in biofuel sustainability
assessment
 Process LCA has the specificity necessary to analyze:
 Different production pathways
 Different feedstocks
 IOA still may have something to offer
 Land use—huge issue in LCA/IOA today
 Socioeconomic impacts:
 economic production related to infrastructure investment and policy
decisions
 Job creation
 Both methods have strengths to exploit for sustainability
analysis

23. Questions
 Contact: clweber@cmu.edu