Unlinked input product flows in coal and natural gas production (US Electricity Baseline)

[fchichorro]

Hello,

I am a data scientist at Earthster and I'm trying to make the U.S. Electricity baseline database available through our app.

I noticed that in the JSON-LD version of U.S. Electricity Baseline (available through LCA Commons) there's several unlinked input product flows, all associated with coal and natural gas production processes:

Coal production

• residual oil | kg
• Ammonium nitrate | kg
• polyvinyl chloride (PVC) | kg
• asphalt | kg
• liquefied petroleum gas | kg
• gasoline | kg
• rubber, styrene-butadiene | kg
• zinc | kg
• Light fuel oil | kg
• natural gas, delivered | kg
• cast iron | kg
• petroleum coke | kg
• copper | kg
• Energy, Waste | MJ

Natural gas production

• residual oil | kg
• liquefied petroleum gas | kg
• gasoline | kg
• natural gas, delivered | kg
• petroleum coke | kg
• Energy, Waste | MJ

Is this a bug? Or am I supposed to link these to processes in other databases?

[m-jamieson]

These are all unconnected inputs in our coal model, so I think it would be appropriate to find inventory for them and connect them. That being said, most of these things are buried in coal mine construction and given how much coal is mined over the life of the mine, these usually end up being small relative to a kg of coal or natural gas and for sure small relative to the emissions at the plants themselves. I think for the most part these would fall into cutoff criteria, but I'm sure at one of them could make a difference in a life cycle impact other than global warming potential.

If you add them, and find something significant, we'd love to hear about it.

[fchichorro]

Thank you for the quick reply! I have been testing mapping those to ecoinvent processes and I will tell you what I find out when I get some results.