Standards Development

Scope

This document describes methodologies that can be applied to estimate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the production of ammonia, its storage and transport, and the conversion of ammonia into hydrogen. The transport of hydrogen from the ammonia cracking facility to any delivery point up to the hydrogen consumption gate is covered in ISO 19870-2 (see Figure 2).

This document describes in the annexes the requirements and evaluation methods applied to several ammonia production pathways of interest. It also describes the requirements and evaluation methods applied to several ammonia cracking pathways of interest.

This document considers the GHG emissions associated with ammonia production up to the delivery gate. This document applies to and includes every steps from ammonia production to any ammonia delivery gate and to ammonia cracking.

ISO 14044 requires the goal and scope of an LCA to be clearly defined and be consistent with the intended application. Due to the iterative nature of LCAs, it is possible that the LCA scope needs to be refined during the study.

The goals and scopes of the methodologies correspond to either approach a) or b), given below, that ISO 14040:2006, Annex A2 gives as two possible approaches to LCAs.

a)       An approach that assigns elementary flows and potential environmental impacts to a specific product system, typically as an account of the history of the product. See 4.1.2.

b)       An approach that studies the environmental consequences of possible (future) changes between alternative product systems. See 4.1.3.

In this document, approach (a) is referred to as an attributional approach, while approach (b) is referred to as a consequential approach. Complementary information is accessible in the ILCD handbook [1].

A Carbon Footprint of a Product or Partial Carbon Footprint of a Product as defined by ISO 14067 may be estimated using either the attributional or the consequential approach, the latter corresponding to the use of “system expansion via substitution” to avoid allocation when a unit process yields multiple co-products. Complementary documents in the ISO 19870-X series will consider hydrogen production and other conditioning, conversion and transport methods.