On environmental LCA for selected transport fuels

Abstract

This short report is part of the project ”Integrated assessment of vehicle fuels with sustainability LCA - social and environmental impacts in a life cycle perspective” financed by the Swedish Knowledge Centre for Renewable Transportation Fuels (f3) and the Swedish Energy Agency. The project aims at a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) of a few selected transport fuels including biomass based and fossil based fuels. The selected transport fuels include (i) Petrol from crude oil originating from oilfields in Nigeria, (ii) Petrol from crude oil originating from oilfields in Russia, (iii) Ethanol based on sugar cane from Brazil and (iv) Ethanol based on corn produced in the USA. The purpose with this report is to present comparable life cycle inventory results for a selection of environmental aspects for the studied transport fuel chains. A brief review of a few existing life cycle assessments of the four selected transport fuel chains was performed. It was found that the reviewed studies did not provide results that are easily comparable. Thus, in order to obtain comparable life cycle assessments, judged crucial for the continued analysis in the project, adapted life cycle inventories from the Ecoinvent centre (Ecoinvent centre, 2014) were adopted and presented in this study. The result will be further analysed in the project