Effective climate change mitigation requires global carbon emissions to be reduced at least by 50% over the 2000-2050 period, as recommended by the IPCC. Producing steel accounts for approximately 9% of all energy-related green house gas emissions. With the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the developing countries, demand for steel is anticipated to at least double by 2050. The daunting challenge is how emerging economies like India and China will be able to develop into modern economies without generating significant repercussions for the global climate. Today’s best available steel making processes have optimised energy use to a large extent. For further emission reduction, climate change mitigation policies primarily aim at a response based on carbon sequestration of process and electricity related emissions. However, these approaches are far from proven and carry both technical and financial risks. This research shifts the focus from supply-side to demand-side measures to address this issue. The need to include management of in-use stocks in environmental policy is underlined, as stocks are important drivers for resource and energy consumption as well as waste and emission generation. The central idea behind this work is to highlight that the goal for developing countries should not be to acquire the same level of in-use stock as seen in the developed counties, but to attain the same services enjoyed by them with lower material stocks. This study first attempts to quantify the differences in steel stocks in vehicles, along with the total embodied energy and emissions among a set of developed countries. Using a novel approach, service provided by the vehicle stock is defined using suitable parameters. Further, using passenger car steel stock as an example, scenarios are developed for India, which reflect ways in which India could possibly attain the same level of service as seen in industrialized countries, but with lower steel stock. The approach presented here is based on a static model, which is used to provide an indication of the embedded energy and emissions associated with the instantaneous build-up of the steel stock, to provide a certain level of service. Factors that influence dependence on personal transport are studied and possible ways of making people less reliant on cars are suggested. The results from the scenario analysis indicate that for passenger cars, the emissions embedded in steel stock can be reduced by 75% if India chooses not to replicate the US pattern of development, but instead, with proactive planning and decision making, adopt measures that can make the population less dependent on individual transport. This project therefore, is a step towards drawing attention to the importance of including the role of anthropogenic stocks in environmental policy.

This thesis undertook a whole building lifecycle assessment of a university hospital building in Trondheim, Norway designed to passive house standards. The delivered energy for electricity and heating was estimated to be 122 kWh/m2. Impacts outside the energy used during the operational phase of the building were significant including 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, 41% of terrestrial acidification and 43% of particulate matter formation. Normalized to the number of staff, the building emits roughly 0.75 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year over the 50 year life of the building.

The objective of this work is to provide an environmental assessment of the impacts that the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to formic acid produces. In order to do this, Life Cycle Assessment has been used.

As environmental considerations start playing a major role in consumers’ choices, aluminium recycling becomes an increasingly important topic: indeed, remelting aluminium requires about 5 to 10 % of the energy used for primary production (Quinkert et al., 2001). However, scrap from wrought alloys is more and more used by refiners to produce secondary foundry alloys, which increases the share of primary aluminium in extrusion billets. Besides, a significant fraction of scrap is nowadays leaving Europe to developping countries, limiting the future potential for urban mining in the developed world.Therefore, the W2W project is a pilot case to test in France the implementation of a different end of life management strategy, whose objective is to reuse building joinery scrap to make new extruded products. For this project to be successful, pre-sorting at the beginning of the collection process is paramount: otherwise, separating high quality wrought aluminium alloys from mixed scrap becomes a challenge.The cycle of extruded aluminium in buildings and the current scrap availability in France have been studied using Material Flow Analysis (MFA). To build the model, data have been collected from Hydro internal sources and site visits. The scrap availability and the in-use stocks of extruded aluminium in buildings have been assessed using dynamic stock models based on historic production figures and assumptions on the average lifetime of products. Scenarios on the future production have been studied to estimate the future evolution of these figures.The models predict yearly outputs of post-consumer scrap from aluminium joineries of about 30kt/year, among which 10 kt/year should be reusable for the production of new billets. These numbers have been examined using the tools of sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. Finally, the critical topics for a successful implantation of the W2W project are logistic issues, economic and technological feasibility and the consequences on the different stakeholders.

The aim of this study was to explore the spatial variation in household greenhouse emissions from local transportation in Trondheim, the reasons for this variation, and explore scenarios of what bearing these variations might have on greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Data from a national travel survey was used together with modal emissions coefficients to model the average emissions per capita for 46 geographic zones in Trondheim. Linear regression was used to explain the variation in average emissions using a number of explanatory variables identified from the literature. The regression models explained around 75–80 per cent of the spatial variation in average emissions (0.75 ≤ adj r2 ≤ 0.79), with centre distance explaining the majority of variation. Using a regression function containing centre distance and access to public transport as explanatory variables, five scenarios were constructed for emissions in 2030, which suggest that centralisation of new residential building developments and improvement in the public transport network could limit the growth in annual greenhouse gas emissions to approximately 10 per cent in the presence of approximately 30 per cent population growth.

Petroleum products are an important component of today’s societal energy needs. Petroleum powers everything from the vehicles people rely on, to the ships that carry goods around the world, to the heating of homes in colder climates. The petroleum process chain is complex and the environmental impacts within the process chain are not always well understood. A deeper understanding of where emissions come from along the process chain will help policy makers in the path towards a less carbon intensive society. One of the core processes of the petroleum process chain is refining. Petroleum refining is a complicated process which can have varying crude inputs and varying fuel outputs depending upon the refinery make-up, the crude blend and the market conditions at the time of production. The goal of this paper is to introduce a lifecycle analysis on the UK petroleum refining sector. Where emissions occur along the process chain and which fuels cause the most pollution on a per unit basis will be reported and discussed using lifecycle analysis framework. The refining process is difficult to maneuver around and it can be difficult to discern which processes create which products. The analysis is broadened to understand the refining emissions associated with different fuel types at both a process and country level. The results can be relevant for environmental policy and decision makers. The original intent of this paper was to include gas processing. After discussion between advisor and student, the gas processing was not included after mutual agreement.

Background and contextGeneral and far reaching scenarios of possible futures for humanity's social metabolism have been put forth, outlining strikingly contrasting potential environmental prospects. Lifecycle assessment (LCA) and environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) —the dominant methodologies for environmental assessment of production and consumption activities— have been little used to analyse specific activities within these possible futures.Most LCAs and EEIOs are attributional and retrospective; they use past data with a central tendency approach to determine the impact of activities that are already embedded within a production-consumption system. On the other hand, so-called prospective-consequential LCAs analyse perturbations to a system, e.g. the introduction of new technologies or a change in consumption levels, and are therefore targeted at guiding decisions in the present and near-future. For large scale perturbations or more long-term decisions into the future, however, the consequential approach has been criticised as either losing transparency through complex modelling or relying overly much on ceteris paribus assumptions. It has recently been proposed that a prospective attributional approach to lifecycle studies could fill this void. Such an approach involves estimating the environmental impacts that can be attributed to the lifecycle of a future good or service embedded within exogenously defined scenarios of the future economy. Little has been done in this direction so far.Already in retrospective studies, the separate use of process-based LCA and EEIO has been criticised as leading to either truncated or heavily aggregated assessments. The advantages of using hybridizations of these two techniques seems even greater for prospective attributional analyses, considering how the EEIO framework is a robust vehicle for future economic scenarios. There is thus a need for further development in the direction of prospective attributional hybrid EEIO-LCAs.

Landbrukssektoren har et betydelig miljømessig fotavtrykk, som forventes å øke ettersom verdens befolkning fortsetter å vokse. Verdenssamfunnet har derfor insentiver til å søke etter mer miljøvennlige produksjonsmetoder. Det er også den norske regjeringens mål å minske belastningen fra jordbrukssektoren innen 2020. Siden konsekvensene av jordbruket avhenger av klimatiske og topografiske forhold, samt tradisjoner og politiske insentiver, vil større kunnskap om miljøbelastning knyttet spesifikt til norske forhold være viktig. Denne studien fokuserer på miljøbelastningen av bygg, havre og hvete produksjon i Norge. Ved å bruke en livsløpstilnærming, evalueres miljøbelastningen fra kornproduksjon ved 94 gårder i Norge. Ved å ha en bred system-grense, som omfatter gårdsaktiviteter og innsatsfaktorer som maskiner, kunstgjødsel og pesticider, samt utslipp forbundet med humus mineralisering, ønsker denne studien å gi et grunnlag for å kunne vurdere gjennomsnittlige miljøkonsekvenser forbundet med produksjon av 1 kg korn, samt å vurdere mulig variasjon i belastning mellom regioner og arter.Resultatene viste at utslipp fra åkeren bidro sterkt til miljøkonsekvensene for alle kategorier evaluert, unntatt for toksisitet. Det er derfor av interesse å evaluere mulige tiltak for å minske disse utslippene. Dette gjelder særlig for N$_2$O utslipp assosiert med mineralisering, da disse utslippene var den viktigste stressoren som bidro til klimaendringer. Utslipp fra åkeren var også den viktigste kilden til geografisk variasjon i miljøbelastningen. Resultatene indikerer også at høsthvete var den kornarten som oftest hadde lavest miljøbelastning, per kg produsert. Dette kan i stor grad forklares ved ved at denne arten hadde et høyt utbytte per hektar. Dette viser viktigheten av jordbrukspraksis som optimaliserer utbyttet for å senke miljøbelastningen, per kg produsert.

The overall approach to this thesis would be to start off by making a simple system (with the system boundaries) for steel and aluminium in an average car. The purpose of this would be to find out how one material can be used to substitute the other. The next step would involve looking into the historical stocks of steel and aluminium in cars and predict how they will be in the future. This will be done using dynamic MFA. It will be a global study of cars with a high focus on aluminium.The study will also look into the energy consumption and emissions (focusing on the climate change potential from cars). Historical and future emission scenarios will be made. Different scenarios for climate change mitigation will be tested, including light-weighting, a shift to electrical cars (Blue Map Scenario) and many other steel and aluminium related scenarios. The scenarios would be discussed and compared to results from LCA to show how the results are varying.

An integrated MFA (Material Flow Analyse) model was developed for Russia, based on the year 2009. Integration was done between MFA, energy and greenhouse gas (GHG).Technologies in all production related processes of aluminium cycle were analyzed. Energy consumption and emissions were calculated throughout the aluminium cycle. This technology information and calculations were used in my scenarios for possible reduction of emissions.After the agreement with my supervisor the historical in-use stock was not done. Assumption here is that demand will increase.A sensitivity analyze was not conducted due the fact that that type of analyze can not be used for large changes in the system.If all scenarios are implemented then the decrease of total GHG emissions in aluminium production in Russia will equal to 22.3% and decrease in the total energy consumption will equal to 38,4%.