(107c) Application of Chemical Engineering Tools for Development of Life Cycle Inventories In the Chemical Processing Industry

Traditional consensus based life cycle inventory (LCI) generation is time consuming and often yields inconsistent data. A review of commercial databases shows life cycle inventories that are not balanced on an atom level. In addition, energy inputs are sometimes inconsistent with thermodynamic laws. These inconsistencies can be caused by allocation of inventories in multiple product processes or by averaging several field measurements of inputs and outputs.

Chemical engineers have the tools to generate internally consistent LCI data from publicly available information using the process-based methodology. Two strengths of this method are generating reports that are easily peer reviewed and doing so relatively quickly. These characteristics are very important to the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries, where life-cycle supply chains quickly grow large in scale.

We will discuss our experience generating a database commodity chemicals, solvents, catalysts, etc. using the process-based system. Issues specific to LCA include model complexity, allocation, presentation of cradle to gate data, and systems for managing data. A case study will be used to illustrate these concepts.