Course content

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is the prevailing framework for evaluation of the environmental consequences of products, services and energy systems to mention a few. LCA allows for consistent comparisons of alternate system designs with respect their environmental performance. This involves assessment of multiple environmental impact categories: From climate change via acidification to toxic impacts to mention some. A wide perspective is central to ensure that our efforts to mitigate climate change do not cause other adverse environmental problems. Further, consistent choice of system boundaries is essential. For example, car manufacture and fuel chain emissions account for a quarter of the total life cycle climate impacts for a conventional car today. Consistent assessments of future transportation systems therefore evidently warrants system boundaries extending well beyond the tailpipe. LCA is designed to deal with such issues.
This course provides a master level introduction to life cycle assessment. The course is divided in two main sections: The first section deals with the methodological essentials of LCA. This involves the mathematical structure of LCA, modeling of production systems and methods for environmental impact assessment. The final part presents applications LCA to a variety of systems including on- and offshore wind, photovoltaic systems, bio-energy, bio-fuels, conventional cars and electric vehicles among others. The students will be guided to analyze a selection of these cases themselves through the provided problem sets.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:
– The course provides the student with knowledge about:
– Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a framework for evaluation of the environmental footprint of various systems and technologies.
– Application of Life Cycle Assessment on various energy, product and transport technologies and systems.

The course gives the student insight about:
- How to perform robust assessments of the environmental characteristics of systems.

Skills:
The course should enable the student to:
- Perform a moderately complex LCA under supervision.

General competence:
The course should give the student insight on:
- How to assess the environmental performance of energy and production systems.

Learning methods and activities

The course is taught using a combination approaches. The first part is mainly taught on the board. Throughout this sections some of the lectures involve in-class solving of problem sets using matlab. For the final part of the course a series of case studies are presented, mainly using slides, and a selection of these will be assessed also by the students using provided software tools. The lectures and exercises are in English . Since the teaching is given in English the Examination papers will be given in English only. Students are free to choose Norwegian or English for written assessments.

Compulsory assignments

• Øvinger

Recommended previous knowledge

Basic university maths. Prior experience with programming basic linear algebra in matlab is advantageous but not required.

Course materials

All material will be distributed via it's learning.