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This group of data models include the 2024 NETL models for the NETL Coal Baseline Lifecycle Model in both open LCA and Excel, in addition to basin and transportation inventory data files in Excel supporting the overall model.
Storm-DEPART (Damage Estimate Prediction and Restoration Tool): Each year hurricanes and tropical storms in the United States damage critical infrastructure assets, disrupt the services they provide, and cause millions to billions of dollars in economic impacts due to extended recovery times. The Storm-DEPART tool and analytical output enable more impactful data-driven decision-making capabilities and strengthen national-level disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Storm-DEPART, built through multi-month collaboration between Entergy and INL, combines Entergy’s critical infrastructure inventory data with weather forecasts to predict damages to Electric utility’s assets due to natural disasters and the estimated recovery support needed, including time, materials, and resource allocation. In the event of an approaching hurricane, this innovative solution can assess potential damage to power generation capacity, transmission grids, distribution networks, and communications assets from wind bands, storm surge, and flooding. With more effective predictions, Entergy can more efficiently allocate resources to mitigate impacts and optimize recovery for customers. Storm-DEPART also allows Electric utilities the ability to apply a planning scenario and model expected damage to better inform infrastructure restoration needs leading to enhance system resiliency. The technology is fully transferrable to other electric utilities with the same damage estimating challenges. The INL team is working on the evolution of Storm-DEPART to include ice event damage prediction framework.
Storm-DEPART (Damage Estimate Prediction and Restoration Tool): Each year hurricanes and tropical storms in the United States damage critical infrastructure assets, disrupt the services they provide, and cause millions to billions of dollars in economic impacts due to extended recovery times. The Storm-DEPART tool and analytical output enable more impactful data-driven decision-making capabilities and strengthen national-level disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Storm-DEPART, built through multi-month collaboration between Entergy and INL, combines Entergy’s critical infrastructure inventory data with weather forecasts to predict damages to Electric utility’s assets due to natural disasters and the estimated recovery support needed, including time, materials, and resource allocation. In the event of an approaching hurricane, this innovative solution can assess potential damage to power generation capacity, transmission grids, distribution networks, and communications assets from wind bands, storm surge, and flooding. With more effective predictions, Entergy can more efficiently allocate resources to mitigate impacts and optimize recovery for customers. Storm-DEPART also allows Electric utilities the ability to apply a planning scenario and model expected damage to better inform infrastructure restoration needs leading to enhance system resiliency. The technology is fully transferrable to other electric utilities with the same damage estimating challenges. The INL team is working on the evolution of Storm-DEPART to include ice event damage prediction framework.
Here we quantify the radiative forcing caused by the deforestation of an ecoregion of the U.S. Upper Midwest and the adoption of eight nature-based climate solutions. We combined forest inventory data with over three decades of remote sensing and in situ data from a replicated land use change experiment.
The purpose of this Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report (ATWIR) – 2022 is to document the inventory estimate of transuranic (TRU) waste reported by the TRU waste generator sites as of December 31, 2021. This report also notes major changes to the inventory since the ATWIR-2021, which had a data cutoff date of December 31, 2020. This updated inventory information is available to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) TRU waste complex, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) stakeholders, and regulators. The TRU waste inventory information is used for strategic planning, and supports the DOE Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) input into documents (e.g., WIPP Documented Safety Analysis and National Environmental Policy Act evaluations), performance assessments, planned changes, and other design changes as needed for the WIPP project.
The electrification of U.S. federal, state, and municipal fleets is accelerating rapidly, driven by an increased availability of competitive electric vehicle (EV) options and supportive policies and targets. The dataset described in this report, accessible at data.nrel.gov/submissions/280, provides a critical foundation for identifying fleet electricity demand, projecting these future demands, and developing actionable strategies to support the widespread electrification of government fleets. The dataset incorporates available fleet data, including 54% of federal agency vehicles approved for analysis (notably, the U.S. Postal Service is absent). Additionally, it includes data from 50,000 state government vehicles and 94,000 local government vehicles. While this represents a small fraction of the 4.4 million vehicles owned by state and local governments reported by the Federal Highway Administration (2022), the framework supports future expansion as more fleet inventory data become available.
The purpose of this Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report (ATWIR) – 2020 is to document the inventory estimate of transuranic (TRU) waste reported by the TRU waste generator sites as of December 31, 2019. This report also notes major changes to the inventory used for the ATWIR-2019 that had a data cutoff date of December 31, 2018. This updated inventory information is available to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) TRU waste complex, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) stakeholders, and regulators. The TRU waste inventory information is used for strategic planning, and supports the DOE Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) input into documents (e.g., WIPP Documented Safety Analysis and National Environmental Policy Act analyses), planned changes, and other design changes as needed for the WIPP project.
The purpose of this Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report (ATWIR) – 2021 is to document the inventory estimate of transuranic (TRU) waste reported by the TRU waste generator sites as of December 31, 2020. This report also notes major changes to the inventory used for the ATWIR-2020 that had a data cutoff date of December 31, 2019. This updated inventory information is available to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) TRU waste complex, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) stakeholders, and regulators. The TRU waste inventory information is used for strategic planning, and supports the DOE Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) input into documents (e.g., WIPP Documented Safety Analysis and National Environmental Policy Act analyses), planned changes, and other design changes as needed for the WIPP project.
Large-diameter trees store disproportionally massive amounts of carbon and are a major driver of carbon cycle dynamics in forests worldwide. In the temperate forests of the western United States, proposed changes to Forest Plans would significantly weaken protections for a large portion of trees greater than 53 cm (21 inches) in diameter (herein referred to as “large-diameter trees”) across 11.5 million acres (~4.7 million ha) of National Forest lands. This study is among the first to report how carbon storage in large trees and forest ecosystems would be affected by a proposed policy. We examined the proportion of large-diameter trees on National Forest lands east of the Cascade Mountains crest in Oregon and Washington, their contribution to overall aboveground carbon (AGC) storage, and the potential reduction in carbon stocks resulting from widespread harvest. We analyzed forest inventory data collected on 3,335 plots and found that large trees play a major role in the accumulated carbon stock of these forests. Tree AGC (kg) increases sharply with tree diameter at breast height (DBH; cm) among five dominant tree species. Large trees accounted for 2.0 to 3.7% of all stems (DBH ≥ 1” or 2.54 cm) among five tree species; but held 33 to 46% of the total AGC stored by each species. Pooled across the five dominant species, large trees accounted for 3% of the 636,520 trees occurring on the inventory plots but stored 42% of the total AGC. A recently proposed large-scale vegetation management project that involved widespread harvest of large trees, mostly grand fir, would have removed ~44% of the AGC stored in these large-diameter trees, and released a large amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Given the urgency of keeping additional carbon out of the atmosphere and continuing carbon accumulation from the atmosphere to protect the climate system, it would be prudent to continue protecting ecosystems with large trees for their carbon stores, and also for their co-benefits of habitat for biodiversity, resilience to drought and fire, and microclimate buffering under future climate extremes.
Satellite remote sensing is a promising method of monitoring emissions that may be missing in inventories, but the accuracy of these estimates is often not clear. We demonstrate here a comprehensive evaluation of errors in anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) emission estimates from NASA’s OMI point source catalog for the contiguous US by comparing emissions from the catalog with high-quality emission inventory data over different dimensions including size of individual sources, aggregate vs individual source errors, and potential bias in individual source estimates over time. For sources that are included in the catalog, we find that errors in aggregate (sum of error for all included sources) are relatively low. Errors for individual sources in any given year can be substantial, however, with over- or underestimates in terms of total error ranging from –80 to 110 kt (roughly 10–90th percentile). In this study, we find that these errors are not necessarily random over time and that there can be consistently positive or negative biases for individual sources. We did not find any overall statistical relationship between the degree of isolation of a source and bias, either at a 40 or 70 km scales. For a sub-set of sources where inventory emissions over a radius of 70 km around an OMI detection are larger than twice the emissions within 40 km, the OMI value is consistently overestimated. We find, as expected, that emission sources not included in the catalog are the largest aggregate source of difference between the satellite estimates and inventories, especially in more recent years where source emission magnitudes have been decreasing and note that trends in satellite detections do not necessarily track trends in total emissions. We find that the OMI-based SO 2 emissions are accurate in aggregate, when summed over a number of sources, but must be interpreted more cautiously at the individual source level. Similar analyses would be valuable for other satellite emission estimates; however, in many cases, the appropriate high-quality reference data may need to be generated.
The carbon intensity (CI) of biofuel's well-to-pump life cycle is calculated by life cycle analysis (LCA) to account for the energy/material inputs of the feedstock production and fuel conversion stages and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during these stages. The LCA is used by the California Air Resources Board's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program to calculate CI and monetary credits are issued based on the difference between a given fuel's CI and a reference fuel's CI. Through the Tier 2 certification program under which individual fuel production facilities can submit their own CIs with their facility input data, the LCFS has driven innovative technologies to biofuel conversion facilities, resulting in substantial reductions in GHG emissions as compared to the baseline gasoline or diesel. A similar approach can be taken to allow feedstock petition in the LCFS so that lower-CI feedstock can be rewarded. Here we examined the potential for various agronomic practices to improve the GHG profiles of corn ethanol by performing feedstock-level CI analysis for the Midwestern United States. Our system boundary covers GHG emissions from the cradle-to-farm-gate activities (i.e. farm input manufacturing and feedstock production), along with the potential impacts of soil organic carbon change during feedstock production. We conducted scenario-based CI analysis of ethanol, coupled with regionalized inventory data, for various farming practices to manage corn fields, and identified key parameters affecting cradle-to-farm-gate GHG emissions. The results demonstrate large spatial variations in CI of ethanol due to farm input use and land management practices. In particular, adopting conservation tillage, reducing nitrogen fertilizer use, and implementing cover crops has the potential to reduce GHG emissions per unit corn produced when compared to a baseline scenario of corn–soybean rotation. This work shows a large potential emission offset opportunity by allowing feedstock producers a path to Tier 2 petitions that reward low-CI feedstocks and further reduce biofuels' CI. The prevalence of significant acreage that has not been optimized for CI suggests that policy changes that incentivize optimization of this parameter could provide significant additionality over current trends in farm efficiency and adoption of conservation practice.
Sheet molding composites (SMC) are thermoset based molding compounds with a global market size of USD 2.1 billion in 2020. SMC is usually processed with multilayer barrier/carrier films to prevent emissions from volatile organic compounds (VOC). The plastic barriers are separated from SMC after the curing process and discarded. To illustrate the high consumption volume of SMC barrier/carrier films, Kohler Co., a company which uses SMC in their bath and showering product lines, alone generates over 1M lb/year of SMC barrier/carrier film waste. Therefore, high amount of SMC barrier/carrier film plastic waste creates a great opportunity for reusing, recycling, or valorization at its end of life. This can be achieved through transition from a linear to a circular supply chain design. However, this transition will not be feasible without overcoming the technical and economic barriers. This project aims to tackle this by making the film circular. Different end of life alternatives will be evaluated experimentally. The reusability of the film will be studied through applying different mechanical and solvent cleaning techniques. The operability concerns regarding the utilization of the cleaned film for long run operations will be addressed by thermally stitching the film. Pelletizing of the cleaned film will also be investigated as a viable technique for recycling or downcycling of the film as molded products. In addition to technical barriers, designing a sustainable circular supply chain for SMC carrier film products requires uncovering the collaboration opportunities between suppliers and users at different stages of the value chain to expand its use to other products. These opportunities will be investigated by finding companies willing to buy or treat the plastic film waste. Finally, the economic viability and environmental impacts of these circular design alternatives will be evaluated through techno-economic assessment (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA). Techno-economic and life cycle inventory data for various pathways will also be made available as one of the main outcomes of this project. Preliminary LCA results indicate that the current SMC film supply chain (base case) emits 5.81 tonne CO2 eq. and consumes 104 GJ energy per tonne of SMC film. It is estimated that alternative circular pathways result in 14-20% less CO2 emissions and 34-44% reduction in embodied energy. This project will develop a tool to analyze the circularity and sustainability of hundreds of combinations of alternatives in different life cycle stages. Users of this tool will be able to choose the best combination among these alternatives with respect to the selected economic, environmental and circularity objectives.
Wood pallets are ubiquitous products that can be recovered and reused to enhance their service life and environmental performance. Repair/remanufacturing has an important role in extending the service life of the wood pallet. To quantify environmental performances of wood pallet reuse, this study developed representative life cycle inventory data for pallet repair/remanufacturing in the United States based on comprehensive industry-wide production data for 2018. A gate-to-gate life cycle assessment covering raw material supply, raw material transportation and pallet repair/remanufacturing showed that repair/remanufacturing often had the highest impacts, including primary energy consumption at 5.09 MJ and global warming impact at 0.355 kg CO 2 eq per repaired/remanufactured pallet. Electricity consumed onsite followed by nail input and the fuel used by forklifts during the manufacturing drove much of the impacts on the environment. Finally, the results of this study provide valuable information on the repair/remanufacturing impacts, allowing quantification and evaluation of the recovery stage on the overall environmental performance of wood pallets.
Catalytic hydrothermolysis (CH) is a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway that has been recently approved for use in aircraft fuel production. In alignment with broader sustainable aviation goals, SAF production through CH requires a quantitative assessment of carbon intensity (CI) impacts. In this study, a current-day life-cycle analysis (LCA) was performed on SAF produced via CH to determine the CI. Various oily feedstocks were considered, including vegetable oils (soybean, carinata, camelina and canola) and low-burden oils and greases (corn oil, yellow grease and brown grease). Life-cycle inventory data were collected on all processes within the CH LCA boundary: feedstock cultivation and/or collection, preprocessing, hydrothermal cleanup and CH, biocrude refining, fuel transportation and end use through combustion. Baseline results show that the CH-produced SAF can be generated with CI reductions ranging from 48 to 82% compared with conventional jet fuel. Modest improvements to CI can be achieved through incremental changes to the brown grease CH process, such as relaxing the dewatering specification and implementing renewable natural gas and electricity, which could decrease the CI from 22.9 to 7.9 g CO 2 e/MJ. Total CH fuel production potential was also assessed on the basis of current or near-future feedstock availability and CI. The total biofuel production potential of CH (SAF and renewable fuel co-products) in the US sums to approximately 3487 million gallons per year, with 97% of these volumes having a CI below 50% of that for petroleum jet fuel. The study shows that from an LCA perspective, CH offers a viable SAF pathway that is comparable with existing SAF pathways like hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids.
Past decades have seen an increasing prevalence of natural fiber-reinforced composites (NFRCs) due to growing conscientiousness around sustainability and a push towards vehicle lightweighting. The environmentally friendly and sustainable claims of NFRCs need to be validated due to their large variability and variety, particularly where material substitutions are concerned, such as in substituting glass fiber with natural fiber. Additionally, the objective of this work is to determine the cumulative energy demand (CED) and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with an automotive part (of volume 0.001 m3) made from 40 wt% coir fiber-reinforced polypropylene (PP) and compared with a similar part made from 40 wt% glass fiber reinforced PP. SimaPro v. 9.0.0.49 was used for the analysis, whereas inventory data were collected from databases, such as Ecoinvent 3, Transportation Energy Databook, Greet model 2022, and published papers. The results showed that CED and GHG associated with the coir fiber-reinforced composite part were lower than the glass fiber-reinforced composite part for both cradle-to-gate (~34–40%) and cradle-to-grave (excluding end-of-life) (~24%) analysis.
The objective of this study was to quantify potential mitigation of environmental impacts from the operation and construction of wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) from implementing specific design recommendations. The study investigated small WWTPs, many of which are serving slow growing or declining populations. Life Cycle Assessment methodology was used to evaluate and compare the inventory and environmental impacts of nine small WWTP case studies. Detailed inventory data was collected from the facilities’ engineering design plans and utility bills. One recommended practice was to avoid significant overdesign by planning for no lower than a 75% capacity utilization by the facilities’ end-of-life. A theoretical correction to a 75% capacity utilization was estimated to mitigate 0.4% of lifetime electricity usage and 1% of secondary process concrete for every 1% reduction in design average flow rate. Relatedly, a 0.4% mitigation in the Carcinogenic and Global Warming impacts could be achieved for every 1% reduction in design average flow toward a 75% capacity utilization. Other suggested practices were focused on conveyance, namely, to minimize non-process facility area and to use polyvinyl chloride pipe instead of ductile iron pipe where possible. Furthermore, the latter practice was estimated to mitigate between 1.1 and 4.8% of the Carcinogenic impact in the nine case studies.
Estimates show that 6.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured and utilized across three pathways, concrete, chemical, and minerals, by 2050. However, it is difficult to compare the climate benefit across these three carbon capture and utilization (CCU) pathways to determine the most effective use of captured CO2. The life cycle assessment methods to evaluate the climate benefit of CCU chemicals should additionally account for the change in material properties of concrete due to CO2 utilization. Furthermore, with most CO2 utilization technologies being in the early stages of research and development, the uncertainty and variability in process and inventory data present a significant challenge in evaluating the climate benefit. We present a stochastically determined climate return on investment (ROI) metric to rank and prioritize CO2 utilization across 20 concrete, chemical and mineral pathways based on the realized climate benefit. We show that two concrete pathways, which use CO2 during concrete mixing, and two chemical pathways, which produce formic acid through hydrogenation of CO2 and carbon monoxide through dry reforming of methane, generate the greatest climate ROI and are the only CCU pathways with a higher likelihood of generating a climate benefit than a climate burden.
This study quantifies and compares the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of renewable diesel (RD), sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and biodiesel (BD) produced from two U.S. canola production systems: 1) emerging intermediate winter canola, typically grown in double- or relay-cropping systems between the growing seasons of main crops, and 2) main canola, mostly spring canola but also including winter canola, which are grown as primary crops occupying the field for a full growing season. Using the Research and Development version of the Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (R&D GREET) model and the most up-to-date life cycle inventory data─field trial data for intermediate winter canola (>37,000 acres) and recent national survey data for spring canola─this life cycle analysis (LCA) estimates the direct emissions from canola cultivation and harvest, the conversion of canola into fuels, fuel transportation, and combustion. In addition, we account for market-mediated emissions associated with a scenario of 0.5 billion gallons per year of spring canola-based biofuels, including induced land use change (ILUC), induced other crop (nonfeedstock) production changes, and induced livestock production changes. For intermediate winter canola, these market-mediated effects were not modeled, as ILUC is expected to be negligible due to its integration into existing rotations, and data are currently insufficient to reliably quantify other market-mediated changes. The estimated life cycle direct emissions of RD/SAF derived from intermediate winter canola and main spring canola are about 32 and 33 g of CO2-equivalent per megajoule of fuel (g CO 2 e/MJ), respectively. Corresponding emissions for BD from intermediate winter canola and main spring canola are about 30 and 31 g of CO 2 e/MJ, respectively. Farming is the dominant emissions source for both canola systems, with intermediate winter canola and main spring canola emitting about 19 and 20 g of CO 2 e/MJ, respectively. ILUC and other induced changes increase emissions of main spring canola-derived RD/SAF and BD by about 18 and 17 g of CO 2 e/MJ, respectively. These results indicate that the GHG emissions of biofuels produced from the two canola systems may differ substantially due to the different land use dynamics of the systems.