Setting a foundation for carbon capture and storage in product life cycle assessment
Executive summary
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will play a critical role in industrial decarbonization, particularly to abate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inherent to industrial processes and to remove biogenic carbon from the atmosphere. In applications relevant for cement and steel manufacturing, CCS technology is in a nascent state with high capital and operational costs, and a combination of policy, standards, definitions, and labelling mechanisms are required to accelerate technological deployment.
Robust, trustworthy and transparent information about the environmental credentials of industrial products is a key foundation for green markets. Such information enables market actors to differentiate and trade low emission products, but for this information to be understandable and enable comparisons between products, it must conform to interoperable methodological standards.
GHG emission accounting standards for CCS are emerging in several jurisdictions to support emissions trading schemes and other national regulations. Guidance is also emerging from organisations including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and Science Based Targets initiative to inform non-regulatory reporting methods. Despite increased international focus on GHG accounting standards for products, there is little ongoing international work to integrate CCS data into product life cycle assessments (LCA). Doing so would enable manufacturers using CCS to demonstrate the green credentials of their products using environmental product declarations (EPDs), and attract green premiums for those products from environmentally motivated buyers. Without guidance to support such reporting, buyers may not have enough confidence in manufacturers’ claims to make green procurement decisions.
To provide a common basis for guidelines to measure and report CCS at the product level, this report highlights the key questions that must be addressed and the stakeholders that could carry this work forward. By coalescing around a common understanding of how CCS should be integrated in product LCA, governments, industry and standard setting organizations can contribute to building a coherent reporting framework and avoid developing duplicative and potentially misaligned standards. This work is in a fledgling state and as new findings are obtained through sector-specific studies on CCS, it is important that standards development processes are flexible and open to consideration of this information.
The scope of this paper is limited to integrating point-source CCS data into product category rules (PCRs) that guide the creation of EPDs for cement, concrete and steel products. Efforts should be made to engage organisations and other sectors also developing guidance for CCS and carbon capture and utilization accounting.
