Update inventories | Natural Gas

[dt-woods]

The 2020 updated natural gas cradle-to-gate inventories are available¹. I assume that NG_LCI.csv found in eLCI's data directory is the same cradle-to-gate inventory.

The primary difference is that the new natural gas C2G inventories are by basin and by production (e.g., conventional, shale, tight, offshore, or CBM). Production shares are published for each, which could be used to combine production types to get "by basin" inventories, similar to what is currently used.

To accomplish this, I'd recommend creating a new process for each basin (e.g., Anadarko), take the U.S. average fractions for each production type associated with the basin (e.g., 1.83% conv, 2.64% shale, and 1.90% tight for Anadarko), normalize them (e.g., 28.7% conv, 41.4% shale, 29.8% tight), set the output as 1 MJ, run openLCA to create a system process—this would result in an inventory associated with the shares per MJ for each basin. Save each basin's results to Excel and curate into a single table that matches the style of NG_LCI.csv.

Footnotes

1. H. Khutal, K. Kirchner-Ortiz, M. Blackhurst, N. Willems, H.S. Matthews, S. Rai, G. Yanai, K. Chivukula, Priyadarshini, M. B. Jamieson, T. J. Skone, "Life Cycle Analysis of Natural Gas Extraction and Power Generation: U.S. 2020 Emissions Profile - Appendix F: Full Inventory Results - Production through Transmission Network Boundary - using U.S. Average Transmission Network data - File Name: 2020 Full Inventory Results_US Avg_ProdThruTrans," National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pittsburgh, July 29, 2024 ↩

[dt-woods]

Will the new natural gas baseline have a new utility map? See gas_supply_basin_mapping.csv.