Scenario data for article: Environmental impacts of key metals' supply and low-carbon technologies are likely to decrease in the future

This dataset contains the background scenarios for metal supply used for the publication "Environmental impacts of key metals' supply and low-carbon technologies are likely to decrease in the future" in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (2021).

Scenario description:

These background scenarios comprise five variables for the metals of copper, nickel, zinc, and lead for the time period of 2010-2050. These variables are:
V1: ore grade decline and energy requirements

V2: market shares of primary production locations

V3: energy efficiency improvements during smelting and refining

V4: market shares of primary production routes

V5: market shares of primary and secondary production.

The associated article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology describes the modelling assumptions and data sources of the scenarios. It also conducts impact assessments for future metal supply and low-carbon technologies with these metal scenarios as well as additional electricity supply scenarios from the IAM of IMAGE from Mendoza Beltran et al. (2020) in the background .

How to use this dataset:

The background scenarios are suitable for the life cycle inventory database of ecoinvent version 3.5 or 3.6 (allocation, cut-off by classification). They can be incorporated into ecoinvent either via the brightway-based module of presamples or using the activity-browser and its scenario-based calculation set-up. Thereby, they can be used as background scenarios for any other prospective LCA based on ecoinvent 3.5 or 3.6.

Moreover, they can be combined with the electricity supply scenarios of the IAM of IMAGE from Mendoza Beltran et al. (2020) using the superstructure approach of the activity-browser (de Koning & Steubing 2020).

Before using the dataset, please adjust the "database" columns to the name of your database, e.g. "ecoinvent3.5", and potentially also the "key" columns.

Versions of the scenarios applicable to ecoinvent 3.7.1 or 3.8 may be added later.

License: The metal supply scenario data is licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 license.