Energy and Environmental Implications of Large-Scale Electric Vehicle Adoption (2015-present)
The purpose of this study is to assess the potential life-cycle energy and environmental impacts of a large-scale adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) from 2015 to 2025 in the Detroit-Ann Arbor-Flint Combined Statistical Area. These impacts will be simulated across several scenarios that incorporate factors such as improvements in the Corporate Average Fleet Economy standards and change in the electricity fuel mix. The results of the study will be used to provide policy recommendations that might be effective at determining the environmental costs and benefits of the adoption of EVs and also incentivize the need to increase the renewable energy portion of Michigan’s electricity grid.
Development of open-source life cycle inventory data for electricity generation (2014-present)
Electricity is ubiquitous in the life cycle of products, and it is responsible for a significant contribution to total environmental impact, especially for energy-intensive materials or energy-consuming devices. Several sources of LCI data for electricity have been developed, however there is not a consensus around a single account of electricity-related environmental releases for use in the U.S. context. Given the high regional and technological variability in processes used to provide electricity, the choices made in modeling the electricity sector have a significant effect on the results of an LCA study. The goal of this study is to demonstrate a method for developing an open-source LCI for electricity generation in the U.S. We do this in the context of selecting regionalized, point-of-use electricity data, appropriate for characterizing a suite of environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, water depletion, fossil fuel and mineral depletion, and land use.
Sustainability Methods for the Assessment and Predictive Design of Industrial Supply Chains (2012-present)
Part of collaboration between the U.S. EPA and P&G through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to develop new tools to optimize sustainability improvements for P&G’s tissue and towel product manufacturing facilities, and their associated supply chains. The main purpose of the collaboration is to generate holistic baseline assessments of environmental, social, and economic impacts for single and multiple product scenarios, and use them to develop new models, metrics, and integrated systems to predict and guide the sustainability of a consumer product business.
Sustainable Industrial Systems for Urban Regions (SISFUR) (2007- 2011)
Seeking to build collaborative expertise, this proposal is a cooperative research effort between the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Washington at Seattle and Peking University, China. It involves an interdisciplinary research team from Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and City and Regional Planning in Modeling Material Flows for Sustainable Industrial Systems in Urban Regions (SISFUR). The long-term objective is to encourage new manufacturing activity through recycling and remanufacturing in distressed urban areas, which is a promising economic development strategy that advances both urban and industrial sustainability simultaneously. Urban centers contain significant and growing fractions of population and material and energy flows associated with the use and disposal of products, but the urban landscape, and its associated material flows, has been underrepresented in models of sustainable industrial system growth. Re-engineering the flows of materials - particularly the patterns of their disposal - is critical to achieving sustainable systems within national boundaries, across international boundaries, and across generations.
For more information, visit http://sisfur.coa.gatech.edu/
Life Cycle Design of Emerging Energy Generation Technologies (2006-2007)
Efforts to take advantage of LCA early in the design process have led to both general and product-specific design software tools. "General" tools (i.e., tools that assess a wide variety of products) include PRe's ECO-it, Boothroyd Dewhurst's DFE software, Granta Design's Materials EcoSelector, and Carnegie Mellon's Economic Input-Output LCA, and more. Example product-specific LCA tools include those from the buildings sector such as the BEES and BSLCA tools. Although the general tools serve a much broader audience, product-specific tools are able to include very detailed results for the arguably smaller number of materials used in the products of interest, can be based on multi-material components for selection by the user, and can be based on terminology and the design-process characteristics of the sector. Movement of emerging energy generation technologies from development to production provides an example of the importance of product-specific design tools. Because fuel cell system manufacturing and fuel delivery infrastructures are not yet in place, LCA design tools keyed to technology materials and fuels promise important contributions to decision making in the private and public sectors. Learning from LCA tools developed for use in building design and leveraging the growing body of LCA data available, an opportunity exists to develop fuel cell life cycle design tools that: (1) Assess a wide variety of system hardware options, fuels, and fuel production scenarios, (2) Base assessments on publicly available, highly peer reviewed quantitative LCA data that provide transparent results suitable for both internal decision-making and external communications, and (3) Are able to produce results in a timeframe and format useful to the design process. This presentation will describe the development of EcoScores meeting the above goals. The presentation includes discussion of modeling methods, key data issues, and design interface issues in the development of a set of life cycle design tools for PEM fuel cell stacks and fuel production systems. Finally, we generalize the tool development process to product-specific tool development beyond fuel cells.
