Life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions regarding passenger vehicles in South Korea

📆 Date and time: Mar 15, 2024 11:00 AM Bangkok

✒️ Prof. Han Ho Song

Department of Mechanical Engineering Seoul National University

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To achieve carbon neutrality, it is important to understand the holistic effect of applying a new technology, in order to avoid un-intended emissions either in upstream or downstream processes due to such application. In estimating the holistic effect, one of the most promising and accepted methodologies nowadays is life cycle assessment (LCA). The history of standardized LCA started mid ’90s, but it is only recently that LCA is widely adopted in various government rules and regulations, and such adoption keeps accelerated ever.

Transportation sector (road, sea, rail, and air) has always been one of the main contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout the world, and thus it is no doubt that it has strict rules and regulations regarding GHG emissions and now adopts LCA-based approaches for the new rule settings. In this presentation, LCA results on the GHG emissions of passenger vehicles will be introduced in the context of South Korea. The general concept and history of LCA are firstly introduced, and the detailed approaches and results about automotive LCA are provided, i.e., fuel cycle and vehicle cycle. In the end, various decarbonizing options depending on the powertrain, are discussed to achieve the carbon neutrality in the future road transport.