Hey Everyone -
Our paper on whole building carbon LCA on a high performance Chicago Public Library, led by Argonne National Laboratory, was just officially published in Building & Environment today. I worked specifically on the Refrigerant and MEP sections.
Please see the following link: Whole-building life-cycle analysis with a new GREET® tool: Embodied greenhouse gas emissions and payback period of a LEED-Certified library - ScienceDirect
A lot of interesting takeaways. A few of my favorites:
- Structural only consisted of 33% of the total embodied carbon. A lot less than typically gets advertised.
- Refrigerant impact from 1 packaged chiller with R134a, contributes 3.7 metric tons of CO2e annually, under an industry standard leakage rate scenario. Assuming this is consistent for the life cycle of the building (which is a worse case scenario as technology of systems an refrigerants should advance and can be implemented when replacement occurs), this results in 27% of the total embodied carbon emissions across a 60 year period.
Feel free to read and post all your harsh critiques and criticisms. I’m looking at you, @fredabernstein 
Thanks!
-Scott