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RESEARCH
LICCER (Life Cycle Considerations in the EIA
of Road Infrastructure) is a project funded
by the Energy: Sustainability and Energy Ef-
ficient Management of Roads programme
of ERA-NET ROAD II, which is a Coordination
Action funded by the 7th EC Framework Pro-
gramme. There are several tools for life cycle
assessment of transport infrastructure; how-
ever, in general few of them are tailored at ex-
amining the environmental performance of
projects at the very early stages of planning.
This is a drawback; since it is in the early plan-
ning it is possible to influence the most the
choice of solutions of the road infrastructure
and locations of new road corridors in order
to minimize environmental impacts.
On the other hand, this is also the stage of
planning where there is generally lack of
accurate quantitative information of road
projects, which is needed for environmental
evaluations. IndEcol’s responsibility in the
LICCER project is development of an LCA tool
for calculation of the cumulative energy con-
sumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-
sions of new road projects, to provide such
information as input to the Environmental
Impact Assessment of early stage road plan-
ning. The LCA tool is to be used in road plan-
ning in different European countries, but first
it is validated for Sweden and Norway. For a
given new road project, alternative road cor-
ridors can be compared with each other and
with the reference of today’s system, with
respect to how each stage of the life cycle
(production, construction, operation, end-of-
life) and each elements of the road infrastruc-
ture (plain new road, extended road, tunnels,
bridges, etc.) and the traffic during operation
contribute to energy consumption and GHG
emissions.
The tool has already clearly demonstrated
the dominant importance of traffic versus
road infrastructure, the relative importance
of ‘heavy’ elements such as tunnels and
bridges within road infrastructure, and the
importance of local (project-specific) condi-
tions. Below is presented estimated annual
GHG emissions from 1 km of each road infra-
structure element the model includes in its
calculations.
With this model the future research will em-
phasize what are the critical variables and as-
sumptions within a variety of road projects
and how they can influence towards improv-
ing the overall energy and GHG performance
of road transportation. In addition, of course,
national road administrations and road plan-
ners in several countries will use the model.
The LICCER Project
-
by Helge Brattebø
The EPISCOPE project
-
by Helge Brattebø
EPISCOPE (Energy Performance Indicator
Tracking Schemes for the Continuous Optimi-
sation of Refurbishment Processes in Europe-
an Housing Stocks) is funded by the Intelligent
Energy Europe programme, and co-ordinated
by IWU (Institute for Housing and Environ-
ment, Darmstadt).
The project aims to extend national resi-
dential building typologies from a previ-
ous project (TABULA) to new countries, and
carry out pilot studies on how advanced
refurbishment strategies can significantly
reduce the direct and indirect energy con-
sumption of residential building stocks. IndE-
col’s responsibility in EPISCOPE, with assist-
ance from SINTEF Byggforsk, is to develop a
national residential building typology for Nor-
way, where case buildings within a defined set
of national building type-age classes and tem-
perature zones are examined in detail regard-
ing energy use and potential effects of ‘nor-
mal’ and ‘advanced’ refurbishment strategies.
Similar efforts are already done for more
than 10 other countries in Europe, and our
expectations are that such methods will be
very useful in dynamic building stock mod-
eling and scenario research work. This is an
area where IndEcol has carried out advanced
modeling research since 1996, including sev-
eral masters and doctorate studies. However,
despite the power of such dynamic (MFA-
based) models for examining future trends
and policies for management of resources
(materials, energy, waste generation) and
environmental impacts (climate change, etc.),
it is necessary to improve the models so that
they can better represent important type-
age segments of the total stock, and examine
more in detail what are the beneficial effects
of different refurbishment solutions and en-
ergy efficiency opportunities within the most
relevant type-age stock segments.
This means that our research strategy in this
field goes in the direction of ‘segmented dy-
namic building stock modeling’, where differ-
ent policies and technological solutions are
studied more in detail regarding medium- and
long-term effects on energy use, energy effi-
ciency and environmental impacts.
Contact person for LICCER and EPISCOPE at
IndEcol:
Professor Helge Brattebø
helge.brattebo@ntnu.no