LCI data for oil and gas production over a period of 30 years

The Imperial Network of Excellence in Sustainability through Life Cycle Approaches has hosted Niels Jungbluth. He presented research results for "Developing LCI background data for oil and gas over a period of 30 years". The reports for different updates are available on the ESU webpage.

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.

Life cycle inventory data (LCI) developed by ESU-services in the last 30 years

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 major improvement made in 2018 was the integration of unintended methane emissions in oil and gas extraction, which had been discovered by satellite observations. 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, integrated in ecoinvent v3.10 and carbon minds
• Transport of crude oil to refineries including the import mixes for Switzerland and Europe, integrated in ecoinvent v3.11
• Transport of natural gas via pipeline and LNG to several markets, Natural gas import mix and transport in high- and low-pressure network, integrated in ecoinvent v3.11
• Refining of crude oil to crude oil products in Swiss and European refineries
• Distribution of mineral oil products to the Swiss and European market, including imports and blending with biofuels
• Heating with fuel oils

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.

Presentation of the research on methane emissions in oil and gas production

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). The reports for different updates are available on the ESU webpage.

Niels Jungbluth present research results for "Developing LCI background data for oil and gas over a period of 30 years" for the Imperial Network of Excellence on Thursday, 28 November 2024.