The need for effective life cycle assessment (LCA) to enhance the effectiveness of policies such as low carbon fuel standards (LCFS's)

Those jurisdictions that have been the most successful in developing low-carbon-intensity (CI) transportation fuels have used technology-agnostic policies such as Low Carbon Fuels Standards (LCFS's). However, LCFS-type policies require the accurate determination of the CI of the fuel that is produced-and-used, with Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) playing an essential role in this determination. While policies such as mandates have been successfully used to establish biofuel markets such as bioethanol in the US and Brazil, LCFS-type policies have a primary goal of reducing the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. California's LFCS (CA-LCFS) policy uses a variation of the GREET LCA model while British Columbia's LCFS (BC-LCFS) uses the GHGenius LCA, with these different models sometimes resulting in different CI outcomes for various low-CI fuels. Canada's evolving Canadian Clean Fuel Regulation (CFR) will use an OpenLCA fuel model to back-up its LCFS-type policy, with the hope that its more open-and-simple nature will encourage users to provide more up-to-date pathways and data that can be used nationally. However, the various assumptions/default values, pathways, feedstocks and local conditions that are used are known to significantly impact the results. Thus, it will be challenging to develop and use the national and international LCFS-type policies needed to decarbonize the long-distance transport sector such as aviation, marine and long-distance trucking.