Understanding emission standards and calculations

Education/Research
1

Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone would be kind enough to help me understand the emissions standards better, I’ve been reading through the EN16258 and I don’t quite understand it since I’ve got no prior experience or understanding of emissions and keywords, terminologies related to it so I’m trying to learn as much about it as possible. My goal is to hopefully create a decent emissions calculator: so I’m kindly asking, if anyone is willing to help please do. I’m mostly confused about:

  • well to wheels
  • tank to wheels
  • what it takes to calculate emissions of road, sea and air freight/ transport and all the factors that affect it (I’m not really interested in the manufacturing process)
  • types of fuel and how to accurately calculate how much co2 or equivalents a diesel truck would emit for example over a specified distance - and how much the weight of the load it carries matters
  • how would I actually be able to calculate sea freight emissions
    I’ve been reading through the clecat guide on calculating emissions and if anyone has previously read and understood their methodology please contact me if you’ve got any spare time so we can discuss please
    I’ve found some estimates on all of these types of transport for their emissions but it’s not really helpful since I believe that there’s a lot of factors which may influence these as they are fixed figures.
    Thanks for taking the time to read through my topic.
2

Hey, Mario! I noticed your questions hadn’t been answered yet. Likely, this is because the CLF’s work is mostly focused on embodied carbon in buildings and your questions are about transportation. But I see why this forum might seem a good place to ask.

First off, I’d recommend the resources on Transportation LCA put together by Professor Mikhail Chester at ASU (http://www.transportationlca.org/), the GHG protocol guidance on Scope 3 Category 4 or category 6 emissions, and a general search within the Journal of Cleaner Production or Journal of Industrial Ecology. Lots of great work happening along your lines of interest is out there.

One note, though (now that you’re here) is that I would be curious to hear why you’re not interested in the manufacturing process. The work that people on this forum do on buildings has borne out that we can’t just think about energy-related emissions, and that the manufacturing process should always be considered ‘in scope’ to get a full picture of the decision space. When manufacturing is ignored, major emission sources are obscured. Often, because of where manufacturing is sited, these manufacturing-related emissions create outsize environmental justice burdens.

Hope this helps to clarify and point you toward venues more closely engaged with transportation emissions.

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