pathways: life cycle assessment of energy transition scenarios

Abstract

pathways is a Python package that conducts Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of products, sectors, or transition scenarios over time. Unlike most energy (ESM) or integrated assessment models (IAM), pathways offers a clearer view on impacts caused by a scenario by considering supply chain relations between producers and consumers, thereby addressing direct and indirect emissions. Unlike the reported emissions in ESM and IAM scenarios, which focus primarily on operation, pathways allows reporting the environmental impacts of infrastructure build-up and decommissioning. Finally, scenarios can be characterized across a wide range of indicators which are usually not included in ESM or IAM: land use, water consumption, toxicity impacts, etc.