CODEWITHSUNDEEP
brightway
Nick-Be
Nick-Be

Reputation: 1

Missing biosphere flows from the default biosphere3 database

Maybe this is a well known issue, but I did't find any solution. My problem is that I've found that some biosphere flows are missing from the default database biosphere3. For example, all the flows related to water as natural resource for a specific location are not present in the database.

I'm doing an LCA study using the impact assessment method EF 3.1 15804. By looking at the characterization factors (CF) for the category 'water use', only 5 biosphere flows are present.

EF_3 = [met for met in bd.methods if "EF v3.1 EN15804" in str(met)] 
method_key = EF_3[-1] method_data = bd.Method(method_key).load() 
for i in method_data:     
    ef = bd.get_activity(code=i[0][1])     
    print(ef, i[1])

Output

'Water' (cubic meter, None, ('air', 'low population density, long-term')) 42.95
'Water' (cubic meter, None, ('air', 'lower stratosphere + upper troposphere')) 42.95
'Water' (cubic meter, None, ('air', 'non-urban air or from high stacks')) 42.95
'Water' (cubic meter, None, ('air',)) 42.95
'Water' (cubic meter, None, ('air', 'urban air close to ground')) 42.95

From the Excel file of the Impact assessment method EF 3.1 15804, are included much more CFs for this impact category, so I was wondering how to include more biosphere flows in the database and how to define their CFs.

But then I have another issue: when I import ecoinvent 3.9.1, how the biosphere flows are linked? I imagine that the number of biosphere flows, which are consumed or emitted by the ecoinvent activities, are more than the biosphere flows present in the biosphere3 database. Does this reasoning make sense or am I missing something?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 315

Answers (1)

mfastudillo
mfastudillo

Reputation: 1631

The approach to do regionalized LCA with Brightway is more elaborated. As i see it you should use bw2regional and regionalised lcia methods. See some examples here:

https://github.com/brightway-lca/from-the-ground-up/tree/main/regionalization

It doesnt need to be complicated, the location of the elemntary flows can be infered from the activity location. It is much cleaner than exploding the number of elementary flows...

Upvotes: 0

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