Volume 10: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Changing the World: Part II

CO2 emissions reduction by switching conference online: Uncertainty analysis of global air travel Yinan Li, Xiaonan Wang, Jinyue Yan, Mingkun Jiang, Dan Fang, Jin Yang, Haoran Zhang

Abstract

Ideally, primary data collection is recommended for every life cycle assessment (LCA) study. However, due to limited availability or accessibility to first-hand data, related sources of secondary data can be a good alternative in practice. In this work, the uncertainty of using secondary data from the Ecoinvent Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database is illustrated with an LCA case study on global air travel. Inside the database, both parameters’ basic uncertainty from measurements and additional uncertainty from data quality criteria are considered with the pedigree approach. The effect of updated pedigree matrix coefficients is also evaluated. Furthermore, the sensitivity with respect to the choice of system boundary is studied with a hotspot analysis for air travel. Outside the database, the uncertainty associated with mapping real world processes to those available in the database is analyzed. In particular, the influence of flight specific parameters, e.g. plane type and occupancy level, is assessed by comparing the International Civil Aviation Organizations (ICAO) carbon emissions calculator with database calculations. The results show that emissions calculated by ICAO generally lie on the lower end of confidence intervals provided by uncertainty analysis of the database, especially for very long-haul flights. Finally, for the LCA case study on air travel, a two-step method combining the advantages of both the ICAO calculator and the Ecoinvent database is proposed.

Keywords life cycle assessment, life cycle inventory database, global air travel, uncertainty analysis, hotspot analysis