Life Cycle Assessment in Early Planning of Road Infrastructure : Application of The LICCER-model

The transport sector stands for a significant share of society’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In planning of new road infrastructure it is mainly direct emissions from traffic on the road that is taken into account. However, construction, operation and maintenance of the road infrastructure can stand for an important part of a road’s environmental load. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology that can be used for quantification of a product’s environmental impacts, from extraction of raw materials to waste treatment. An LCA-model for assessment of life cycle GHG-emissions and energy use of road infrastructure is under development in the project LICCER (Life Cycle Considerations in EIA of Road Infrastructure). The model is for use in early planning of road infrastructure, i.e. in choice of road corridor and construction type (road, bridge, and tunnel). This thesis is contributing to the LICCER-project by evaluating the possibilities of the LICCER-model to show differences between road corridors and by analysing how other road LCA-models can complement the LICCER-model. The LICCER-model is applied to a case study for choice of road corridors in early planning. Three road corridors are analysed based on data available in the feasibility study and compared to the reference alternative. Results show that production of bitumen, explosives and aggregates and earthworks in the construction phase contribute most to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. A sensitivity analysis is performed in order to analyse how quantitative output and ranking of alternative can vary depending on changes in input parameters. Big changes are seen for changes in excavated volumes of rock, fuel use for excavation work, assumption on mass balance, share of fuels for operation of vehicles, soil stabilisation measure and choice of emission factors for aggregates and bitumen. The ranking can change for assumptions regarding estimated volumes of rock in the different road corridors. The LICCER-model and EFFEKT are relatively similar, but there are big differences between JOULESAVE and the LICCER-model. Consequentially, the outcome of studies made with JOULESAVE and the LICCER-model is significantly different, even when the same road corridors are analysed. The LICCER-model could be complemented with additional construction activities from JOULESAVE but other models may in fact complement the LICCER-model better at this stage of the model development, by providing background data or methods to account for uncertainties. Results from this thesis contribute with additional knowledge on GHG-emissions and energy consumption from road infrastructure. Results show that it is possible to use LCA-methodology and LCA-models such as the LICCER-model in early planning of road infrastructure for choice of road corridor and/or construction type and that data from the road’s feasibility study can be used to evaluate a road corridor from a life cycle perspective. Results can be useful also outside of the LICCER-project for planners and for development of LCA-methodology for early planning of road infrastructure.