Quantifying energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions of road infrastructure projects: An LCA case study of the Oslo fjord crossing in Norway

The road sector consumes large amounts of materials and energy and produces large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, which can be reduced with correct information in the early planning stages of road project. An important aspect in the early planning stages is the choice between alternative road corridors that will determine the route distance and the subsequent need for different road infrastructure elements, such as bridges and tunnels. Together, these factors may heavily influence the life cycle environmental impacts of the road project. This paper presents a case study for two prospective road corridor alternatives for the Oslo fjord crossing in Norway and utilizes in a streamlined model based on life cycle assessment principles to quantify cumulative energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions for each route. This technique can be used to determine potential environmental impacts of road projects by overcoming several challenges in the early planning stages, such as the limited availability of detailed life cycle inventory data on the consumption of material and energy inputs, large uncertainty in the design and demand for road infrastructure elements, as well as in future traffic and future vehicle technologies. The results show the importance of assessing different life cycle activities, input materials, fuels and the critical components of such a system. For the Oslo fjord case, traffic during operation contributes about 94 % and 89 % of the annual CED and about 98 % and 92 % of the annual GHG emissions, for a tunnel and a bridge fjord crossing alternative respectively

Tremodellerför kvantifiering av energianvändning och koldioxidutsläpp ur ett livscykelperspektiv för väginfrastruktur i tidiga planeringsskeden

Early environmental assessments provide important information for decision making processes in road construction projects. This report is about a comparative study among different Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools used in road construction. These are, KlimatKalkyl, LICCER and SimaPro. KlimatKalkyl was developed by a consultancy firm and used by Trafikverket, LICCER was developed by a collaboration of three universities and used in research studies and SimaPro is used by industry and academia for environmental studies. In this report the results are referring only to primary energy consumption in GJ/year and Global Warming Potential (GWP) in CO2-eq. kg/year. The following report includes three cases studies based on different road projects. The results generated from each tool are compared in order to evaluate the tools and present the similarities and differences among them in quantitative and qualitative manner. Variations in the outputs regarding the impact in the environment mainly come from the different input formats and calculation processes that the tools have. Regarding the road type, the three models are generating different results for energy or CO2 emissions. In the qualitative comparison it is showed that the tools have different input formats and at some cases one has more input details against the other. QC 20150827</p