Impacts on producers and customers of conflicting rules for LCA

Research Project, 2020 – 2022

Many guidelines and standards have been produced in attempts to make LCA more uniform. Three of the guidelines are particularly relevant for producers of renewable fuels:

· The EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) includes rules for how the climate impact is to be calculated to show that a fuel meets the requirements of the Directive.

· Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) is an LCA framework recently developed by the EU for communication with customers and possibly also for policymaking.

· Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) is an older framework for communicating LCA results to customers.

The three LCA frameworks present different calculation rules. We applied each framework to eight different renewable and/or waste-based fuels to investigate how important these differences are for the LCA results.