Consultation about BioSTEAM and BioSTEAM LCA

[zasddsgg]

Hello, may I ask you some questions about BioSTEAM for LCA. Thanks for your help.

a) In recent years, BioSTEAM’s papers on LCA seem to use the BioSTEAM tool, why not use the BioSTEAM-LCA tool in paper “BioSTEAM-LCA: An Integrated Modeling Framework for Agile Life Cycle Assessment of Biorefineries under Uncertainty”? Is it because the BioSTEAM-LCA tool stopped developing?

b) When using BioSTEAM tool to conduct LCA, do I need to input characterization factor manually? Where should I get characterization factor?

c) In addition, for the same substance, characteristic factor is also different with different LCA methods (such as CML, Recipe), so how to choose the characteristic factor?

d) In addition to GWP, where can characteristic factor of other environmental impact types (such as acidification, abiotic depletion) be found? It seems to be a little inconvenient to find characteristic factor in this way in BioSTEAM tool.

[yoelcortes]

Sure thing,

a) Rui Shi from Penn State is the lead developer of biosteam-lca, I think the project might be abandoned but you can ask her to make sure. b1) Yes, please see the documentation: https://biosteam.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/Life_cycle_assessment.html b2, c, d) BioSTEAM does not provide characterization factors. It is not in it's scope. We do not offer free consulting services, so please ask elsewhere if you need detailed help performing an LCA (including finding characterization factors, etc.).

Thanks,