Beyond LCI: Towards EPD-conforming LCAs for vehicle fuels

About the project

Environmental product declarations (EPD’s) of vehicle fuels, based on LCA, will likely be increasingly required by the market in the near future. EPD is in the broad sense a market driven format for communicating LCA based environmental information business-to-business and more recently also business-to-consumer.

A key component in LCA based EPD’s is a method prescription document, referred to as Product Category Rules (PCR). A PCR defines the necessary method and data requirements, as agreed by the interested stakeholders in a process of iterated drafting, open consultation and revising. This project has focused on initiating the work towards a PCR as a necessary background requirement before the actual PCR development can start.

One of the main challenges for correct LCI data and consequently EPDs for fuels lies in the traceability of the fuel to its source, meaning exactly where it comes from and how it is produced. Today, this is more developed for biofuels than for fossil fuels due to the implementation of the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED), and, more specifically, fulfilment of the so-called sustainability criteria. This is called Guarantees of origin (GO). One difficulty lies in the fact that fuels from different sources are often mixed before distribution to the fuel retailer.

The purpose of this project has been to explore conditions and opportunities to develop EPDs for vehicle fuels including the customer demands for life cycle based environmental data on vehicle fuels. It is a continuation of the previous f3 project Well-to-wheel LCI data for fossil and renewable fuels on the Swedish market.