Presentation for the Imperial Network of Excellence

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).