Lifecycle assessment of the HyperCOG solutions
Miguel F. Astudillo of 2.-0 LCA consultants has been working on life cycle sustainability assessments of the HyperCOG solutions, exploring the wider repercussions and impacts of the technologies from environmental, economic and social perspectives. We caught up with him recently to hear about this integral part of the project.
I work for 2.-0 LCA consultants, a Danish company that specialises in life cycle sustainability assessments of goods and services. We are in charge of carrying out life cycle sustainability assessments of the HyperCOG solutions, assessing the consequences of introducing cyber-physical systems in the three case studies from an environmental, economic and social perspective.
People who may not be familiar with the term LCA may be more familiar with carbon footprints of products. LCA is the methodology behind carbon footprint calculations. Essentially, we try to understand the impacts occurring not only at the manufacturing phase but also associated with all the inputs that are used, such as the electricity that is used, and impacts happening during the use phase and end of life, such as in landfills or incineration plants. The idea is to try to avoid a shift in burden. It is this life cycle perspective that helps you to identify trade-offs and quantify them. There are always trade-offs in life, and this methodology helps to take them into account and create the best possible solution.
From the environmental perspective we focus on greenhouse gases, we assess the global warming impacts of introducing these technologies. The economic assessment looks into the changes in costs. The social assessment uses a new method based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework.
In the steel use case at Sidenor, we are looking into changes in the production planning which can reduce the steel scrapped during casting. This has the potential to reduce the waste of additives, electricity and refractories, reducing costs and global warming emissions.
In the cement use case at Çimsa, the changes in the cement mill have reduced electricity consumption at the cement mill, which in turn reduces the economic and environmental impacts of cement production. There will be also changes on the production of clinker. The idea is to reduce fuel consumption when producing clinker, which is the main source of CO2 emissions from cement. If we manage to optimise combustion and reduce fuel use, we will reduce both the costs and the environmental impacts associated with cement production.
In the chemical use-case at Solvay, the main impacts come from reducing the amount of steam needed to separate rare earths. The steam is generated by combusting natural gas, so optimising the production will reduce the amount of steam needed and therefore the amount of natural gas, reducing the environmental impact.
One of the really innovative things that we have done during project that we didn’t originally plan to do is to integrate cutting-edge LCA models directly into the cyber-physical system. I’m very happy about this because we are helping to improve decision making at the factory level by introducing these environmental, social and economic perspectives. Because the LCA model is integrated into the cyber-physical system, access to the data is much better and the quality of the assessment improves substantially. The feedback is also much quicker – in this case, they will see the consequences of the decisions they make every week. As these kinds of systems get more mature, they will become more and more helpful to industries in their day-to-day operations.
We still don’t have definitive results of the impacts of the implementation because we are still finalising some parts of the analysis, but I think what we have shown already will be of great interest to the EU, which is pushing digitalisation in industrial contexts to help reduce costs and environmental impacts. The ideas that we have implemented in the three case studies could be replicated in many other industries, so the results of the HyperCOG project really do have a lot of potential for helping the EU reach its targets in these areas.
