Embodied Carbon Accounting through Spatial-Temporal Embodied Carbon Models

Abstract

Embodied carbon is the total carbon released from the processes associated with a product from cradle to gate. In many industry sectors, embodied carbon dominates the overall carbon footprint. Embodied carbon accounting, i.e., to estimate the embodied carbon of a product, has become an important research topic. Existing studies derive the embodied carbon through life cycle analysis (LCA) reports. Current LCA reports only provide the carbon emission of a product class, e.g., 28nm CPU, yet a product instance can be manufactured from diverse regions and in diverse time periods, e.g., a winter period of Ireland (Intel). It is known that the carbon emission depends on the electricity generation process which has spatial and temporal dynamics. Therefore, the embodied carbon of a specific product instance can largely differ from its product class. In this paper, we present new spatial-temporal embodied carbon models for embodied carbon accounting. We observe significant differences between current embodied carbon models and our spatial-temporal embodied carbon models, e.g., for 7nm CPU the difference can be 13.69%.