Life Cycle Inventories of the Latin-American Electricity Production Systems

PEÑA, CLAUDIA; ZAROR, CLAUDIO; ARENA, A.P.; UGAYA, CASSIA; QUISPE, ISABEL; SUPPEN, NYCIA; VALDIVIA, SONIA

Berlin

Conferencia; Vth Int. Conference on Life Cycle Management ? LCM 2011; 2011

Technical University of Berlin

The goal of this project was to enhance the use of the life cycle approach within the Latin-American Region. It was focused on capacity building for developing Regional Life Cycle Inventories. The project was developed by researchers belonging to the LCA community in cooperation with UNEP, and Governmental representatives and statistic offices providing the data. More precisely, this project aimed at building home-grown expertise, including capacity for South-South cooperation, environmental leadership, and also at supporting the use of science-based approaches and evidence-based decision-making in mainstreaming environment in government policies in each of the countries participating in the project. The critical review process is still to be done, but it must be accomplished by June of 2011. The project started with the establishment of general rules for harmonization of sound and comprehensive life cycle inventory data and information. These rules were applied to the field of electricity production, transmission and distribution. This productive sector was chosen due to the fact that it is a common and necessary key input to all economic activities. Results: A quality guideline was developed for the project, based on the one used to build the national Brazilian LCI. Four different LCI were built in ecospold format, based on information collected in four different countries, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru, which cover the hydroelectric and thermoelectric generation processes, and the transmission and distribution systems. Lack of LCA acknowledge in the industrial and public sectors, and difficulties to find reliable public data and information, arise as the major problems in most of the participating countries, even though the electric sector is more incline than other sectors in providing the public with more and more information regarding its emissions and compliances. The capacity building process and differences between the countries in terms of structure, technology, environmental regulations, among other factors, made the use of a common and detailed quality guideline very difficult to be applied. Thus, capacity building process on LCA in emerging regions seems better to be conducted on a step-by-step basis, which must consider the development of a simpler approach to build generic prototype models that can undergo later a continuous improving process. Data consistency and harmonization appears to be two of the major issues that must be specifically addressed in a Regional quality guideline.