LCAOST: Life Cycle Assessment of Oil Sands Technologies

Producing transportation fuels from Alberta’s oil sands is an energy-intensive process with non-negligible impacts on the environment. The rapid expansion of the oil sands industry, coupled with increasing concern over greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, call for a systems-level evaluation of resource usage and pollutant releases from oil sands activities.

The overall objective of this project is to improve the scientific understanding of the life cycle environmental implications of current and developing oil sands technologies so as to support public and private sector choices about major investments in oil sands technologies as well as to drive further research and development.

The Life Cycle Assessment of Oil Sands Technologies (LCA-OST) project is a collaborative initiative between the University of Toronto and the University of Calgary that has been successful in generating research advances and insights relevant to the field of engineering and the oil sands industry. The project has built a research team with more than two decades of combined experience in the area of LCA.

This project has developed novel LCA techniques to quantify GHG emissions, energy, water and land use associated with current and developing oil sands technologies. The techniques have been applied to several case studies in the industry. The oil sands industry, while offering many benefits to the Canadian economy also comes with significant environmental concerns. Advancing our understanding of the full life cycle implications of the oil sands industry has been a critical first step. We have made significant progress in advancing the state-of-the-art of LCA as it is applied to current and developing oil sands technologies. While challenging, the project team has worked with individual companies to collect sensitive project specific data under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and to present high quality results in a way that competitive information is not released. Specific areas of research include the further development of the GreenHouse gas emissions of current Oil Sands Technologies — GHOST model, evaluation of emerging technologies, the refining stage and the evaluation of the land use associated with different oil sands technologies, input energy alternatives, cogeneration, land use impact. The GHOST model has also been further validated through ongoing collaborations with our industry consortium.