LCA Links!

The US Department of Energy (DOE), National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has just released its baseline LCA model for energy.  This model calculates the 2005 national average life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for petroleum-based fuels sold or distributed in the United States in the year 2005. Specifically, the model reports, by life cycle stage, the life cycle GHG emissions for conventional gasoline, conventional diesel fuel, and kerosene-based jet fuel. The model served as the primary calculation tool for the results reported in the NETL November 26, 2008, report entitled “Development of Baseline Data and Analysis of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Petroleum-Based Fuels”. The model was created in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and requires macros to be enabled to solve iterative calculation functions.

A download of the model can be found here: http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/refshelf/detail.asp?pubID=283

After more than a year of hard work the folks at OpenLCA are proud to release the new version of openLCA, beta 1.1:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openlca/

You will find there a version for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Maybe this is the first LCA software that runs “directly” on Mac and Linux.

They have also released the full source code, at the same location.

Installation is straightforward, as is also described in the release notes available at the given location; the release notes describe also hard- and software requirements that should be met by most modern computers.

Some of the features of openLCA 1.1:

- graphical modelling of Life Cycle Assessments

- goal and scope, inventory, impact assessment, and interpretation are covered

- import of all data in EcoSpold format

- parameters on various levels, from process to project

- uncertainty calculation & simulation

- allocation, also on the flow level; system expansion

- fast database, client/server structure -> openLCA can run on a desktop and in a client server environment

- help included in the application

- a nice and clean user interface

- modularity of the software, which is now able to deal with various plugins / modules …

Compared to the previous release, it is now possible to model very large systems with several thousand processes, in a fluent manner. OpenLCA can be used with ecoinvent version 2 or 2.1

This is a HUGE step to making LCA more accessible to a broader group of LCA practitioners!

For more information on the OpenLCA project, visit their website here: www.openlca.org