Region, Sector and Operation-Specific Process Model

The region, sector and operation- specific process model will serve to integrate the national average data from the EIO-LCA model with the data collected from companies within the oil sands industry.  This model will be process based and will provide the regional and sectoral specificity required for the proposed analysis.

For example, the economic sector that oil sands production falls into is “oil and gas extraction”.  Not only do we want to be specific about the difference between conventional oil extraction and oil sands operations, we also want to be able to distinguish between in situ and mining of oil sands in Alberta.  This deeper level of granularity can only be achieved by applying the process-based LCA framework. 

There will be several research questions that are geographically specific to the Alberta area.  Since the current Canadian EIO-LCA model is at an aggregated national level, more specific data will be used to supplement the results from the model.  As noted in the previous section, this can either be done by modifying the EIO-LCA model or by using data specific to the oil sands area outside of the model.

Finally, EIO-LCA is a cradle-to-gate model.  Therefore, model results will need to be supplemented with use and end-of-life data (as applicable) in order to have a complete LCA. The following diagram shows the interaction between the various models in this project: