Developing LCI background data for oil and gas over a period of 30 years
The Imperial Network of Excellence in Sustainability through Life Cycle Approaches will host Niels Jungbluth, who will deliver a talk on LCI background data.
Abstract:
Crude oil, crude oil products and natural gas are (still) at the core of many product life cycles. Therefore, it is crucial to have life cycle inventory data that represent the current supply.
In 1994 first investigations were started in India. Between 2000-2003 a major update and extension of oil and gas data for the ecoinvent database has been done. Between 2018 and 2024 different projects were finalized by ESU-services, in which the LCI for crude oil and natural gas delivered to different countries and world regions. During these projects the underlying model was refined to allow simplified updates and provision of the LCI data to database providers. A part of these updates has been implemented in ESU-data, KBOB-data, ecoinvent data v3.x and the CarbonMinds database
The updates cover the following stages:
- Crude oil and natural gas extraction in several countries onshore/offshore/mix (Meili et al. 2023a), integrated in ecoinvent v3.10
- Transport of crude oil to refineries including the import mixes for Switzerland and Europe (Meili et al. 2023b), integrated in ecoinvent v3.10
- Transport of natural gas via pipeline and LNG to several markets, Natural gas import mix and transport in high- and low-pressure network (Bussa et al. 2023), integrated in ecoinvent v3.10
- Refining of crude oil to crude oil products in Swiss and European refineries (Jungbluth et al. 2018a, not yet integrated in ecoinvent v3.x)
- Distribution of mineral oil products to the Swiss and European market including imports and blending with biofuels (Jungbluth & Meili 2018, not yet integrated in ecoinvent v3.x)
- Heating with fuel oils (Jungbluth et al. 2018b, not yet integrated in ecoinvent v3.x)
With the archetype model it is possible with little effort to update the before mentioned datasets with the latest figures for methane and flaring emissions, energy consumption, produced water and other key indicators based on data from global sources such as BP, IOGP, World Bank, and IEA.
All LCI data include full documentation and are available in the EcoSpold v1 format, as excel-export with ecoinvent v3 nomenclature and in the ESU database (in SimaPro-format), which is based on UVEK 2018 (ESU-services 2024).
References
- Bussa et al. 2023. Bussa M., Jungbluth N. and Meili C. (2023) Life cycle inventories for long-distance transport and distribution of natural gas. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by ecoinvent, Schaffhausen, CH.
- ESU-services 2024. ESU-services (2024) The ESU background database based on UVEK-LCI DQRv2:2018. ESU-services Ltd., Schaffhausen, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/database/.
- Jungbluth et al. 2018a. Jungbluth N., Meili C. and Wenzel P. (2018a) Life cycle inventories of oil refinery processing and products. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by BFE, BAFU, Erdöl-Vereinigung, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/public-lci-reports/.
- Jungbluth & Meili 2018. Jungbluth N. and Meili C. (2018) Life cycle inventories of oil products distribution. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by BFE, BAFU, Erdöl-Vereinigung, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/public-lci-reports/.
- Jungbluth et al. 2018b. Jungbluth N., Wenzel P. and Meili C. (2018b) Life cycle inventories of oil heating systems. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by BFE, BAFU, Erdöl-Vereinigung, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/public-lci-reports/.
- Meili et al. 2023a. Meili C., Jungbluth N. and Bussa M. (2023a) Life cycle inventories of crude oil and natural gas extraction. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by ecoinvent, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/public-lci-reports/.
- Meili et al. 2023b. Meili C., Jungbluth N. and Bussa M. (2023b) Life cycle inventories of long-distance transport of crude oil. ESU-services Ltd. commissioned by ecoinvent, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, retrieved from: www.esu-services.ch/data/public-lci-reports/.
Bio:
Niels Jungbluth is since 2006 owner and managing director of ESU-services Ltd. He conducts critical reviews and validation according to different standards for case studies and inventory data. Niels is listed as an approved individual verifier for the international EPD® System and IBU-Bau. He can also work for other EPD systems like PEP or KBOB. Niels Jungbluth is in the editorial board of the “Int. Journal of LCA” and in the board of the LCA foods conference.
Niels started working with ESU-services in 2000. Since starting with LCA in 1994, he has worked on more than 300 consultancy projects in the areas food, biomass, energy systems, building products, metals, input-output-analysis, sustainable consumption, as well as several other topics.
Niels Jungbluth studied environmental engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. He started working with LCA in 1994 and prepared his diploma thesis during a six-month stay at the TATA Energy Research Institute in New Delhi, where he carried out a life cycle assessment for cooking fuels in India. Between 1996 and 2000 he worked on a Ph.D. Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich at the chair of Natural and Social Science Interface. His Ph.D. thesis on the environmental consequences of food consumption has been awarded the Greenhirn Prize 2000 by the German Öko-Institut. In this thesis, he investigated food consumption patterns by means of life cycle assessment.
Information for attendance
Registration is required. Register your interest in attending this seminar. The seminar will be hosted on Microsoft Teams and the link will be emailed to all registered attendees. Register here.