Building consensus in life cycle assessment: the potential for a Canadian product category rules standard to enhance credibility in greenhouse gas emissions estimates for Alberta's oil sands

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of greenhouse gas emissions is often used to compare products in the global crude market. While Alberta's oil sands face particular pressure to improve performance, a lack of consensus on methods, data, and assumptions specific to the LCA of products derived from crude oil weaken such comparisons. This paper investigates the potential for a Canadian product category rules standard to enhance the credibility of life cycle emissions estimates of products derived from Alberta's oil sands. Increasing comparability of Canadian crudes to those of other countries in such a way would make this an attractive tool with the potential to be adopted internationally. The potential of the standard is investigated through a case study, based on in-depth expert interviews, focusing first on the potential of the standard to mitigate specific data and communication issues with respect to Alberta's oil sands, and second on strategies to mitigate predicted process issues in its development by a Canadian standards development organization. Findings indicate that while there is a consensus on the need to further standardize LCA methods and data quality requirements for crude oil products to make comparisons more accurate, participants in the standards-setting process may be unwilling to share the information that would make this possible. It was found that a credible standards-setting process may help to overcome this challenge, only if the ability to revise the standard can be anticipated in its initial development process, particularly with respect to its long-term effects on the development of new technologies.