Building a cleaner future

Con­struc­tion has one of the high­est car­bon foot­prints of all the indus­try sec­tors. A McK­in­sey Sus­tain­abil­i­ty report pub­lished in Jan­u­ary found that 10% of glob­al GDP is in sec­tors with high-emis­sions sup­ply chains, includ­ing con­struc­tion. And it is embod­ied emis­sions, as well as oper­a­tional emis­sions, that must be reduced if the indus­try is seri­ous about meet­ing net-zero goals.

Embod­ied car­bon emis­sions come from the car­bon foot­print of mate­ri­als. This can be mea­sured through­out the entire sup­ply chain, tak­ing into account extrac­tion of mate­ri­als, trans­port, refin­ing, pro­cess­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing, fab­ri­ca­tion, usage and end-of-life dis­pos­al.
For con­struc­tion, car­bon foot­print cal­cu­la­tion can be com­plex and embod­ied emis­sions need to be con­sid­ered. The sup­ply chain includes cement and steel indus­tries, which togeth­er account for 14% of glob­al CO2 emis­sions. The dri­ve towards green­er build­ings requires con­struc­tion com­pa­nies to adapt to new tech­niques, tech­nolo­gies and mate­ri­als.
An impor­tant first step in decar­bon­is­ing the con­struc­tion indus­try is to ensure com­pa­nies under­stand their car­bon foot­prints.

Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion has rev­o­lu­tionised how data is man­aged across mul­ti­ple indus­tries and con­struc­tion is no excep­tion. An engi­neer­ing plat­form that enables data gath­er­ing and analy­sis will help con­struc­tion indus­try pro­fes­sion­als under­stand the envi­ron­men­tal impact of their projects and make good deci­sions before any­one sets foot on a build­ing site. KBR CleanSPEND is one such tech­nol­o­gy that helps the con­struc­tion indus­try from project incep­tion through to com­ple­tion, with analy­sis of life­cy­cle car­bon emis­sions and data that dis­tin­guish­es embod­ied and oper­a­tional emis­sions.

David Cole, direc­tor of KBR Project Solu­tions, said the pro­por­tion of embod­ied car­bon emis­sions is “rel­a­tive­ly low, but it is expect­ed to increase as the grid decar­bonis­es, the pres­sure to build new ener­gy facil­i­ties increas­es and oper­a­tional emis­sions decrease.”
Improv­ing the entire process is essen­tial for a sus­tain­able cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. Steel, for exam­ple, is 100% recy­clable, but recy­cled steel only accounts for 30% of glob­al steel demand. Tra­di­tion­al pro­duc­tion of one tonne of steel cre­ates 1.9 tonnes of CO2, com­pared with 0.1 tonnes of CO2 from one tonne of recy­cled steel pro­duced using renew­able ener­gy – this stark com­par­i­son high­lights the impor­tance of exam­in­ing embod­ied emis­sions.

Cole, and the team at KBR Project Solu­tions, who invent­ed KBR CleanSPEND, described recy­cled steel as “a per­ma­nent mate­r­i­al that under­pins the econ­o­my, while con­tribut­ing to envi­ron­men­tal goals by reduc­ing the use of vir­gin raw mate­ri­als, as well as CO2 emis­sions.”

Reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance with strin­gent envi­ron­men­tal stan­dards across dif­fer­ent mar­kets makes the need for respon­si­ble con­struc­tion prac­tices more impor­tant than ever. In the UK, for exam­ple, as well as rig­or­ous new stan­dards for build­ings, con­struc­tion process­es need to become clean­er and green­er. The Roy­al Acad­e­my of Engineering’s Sep­tem­ber 2021 report, ‘Decar­bon­is­ing Con­struc­tion: Build­ing A New Net Zero Indus­try,’ rec­om­mends reusing build­ing mate­ri­als when pos­si­ble, using non-fos­sil-fuel-pow­ered machin­ery on con­struc­tion sites and reduc­ing reliance on import­ed build­ing mate­ri­als.

Mean­while, the EU’s Car­bon Bor­der Adjust­ment Mech­a­nism is a cli­mate mea­sure that will have an inter­na­tion­al impact on con­struc­tion indus­try sup­ply chains. EU importers will buy car­bon cer­tifi­cates that cor­re­spond to the car­bon price that would have been paid if the goods were pro­duced under the bloc’s car­bon pric­ing rules. In con­trast, non-EU pro­duc­ers that can show they have already paid for car­bon used in the third-coun­try pro­duc­tion of import­ed goods can have the cor­re­spond­ing cost deduct­ed for the EU importer. This aims to encour­age non-EU oper­a­tors to green their pro­duc­tion process­es.

A recent McK­in­sey report, ‘Seiz­ing the decar­bon­i­sa­tion oppor­tu­ni­ty in con­struc­tion,’ found: “Design is the most impor­tant fac­tor in deter­min­ing green­house gas emis­sions… The abil­i­ty to influ­ence emis­sions is high­est very ear­ly in a project and before con­struc­tion has start­ed.” To do this effec­tive­ly and trans­par­ent­ly, find­ing best prac­tice ways to cal­cu­late the car­bon foot­print of a con­struc­tion process from the begin­ning is essen­tial. Com­pre­hen­sive, data-dri­ven mea­sure­ment solu­tions will give com­pa­nies the insights they need to reduce emis­sions dur­ing the entire con­struc­tion project. Under­pinned by cloud data ser­vices and ana­lyt­ics, KBR CleanSPEND allows oper­a­tors to enter inter­nal and exter­nal data and the car­bon foot­print is cal­cu­lat­ed based on rules set with­in the plat­form. Results, analy­sis and sce­nario ana­lyt­ics deliv­ered quick­ly in a clear for­mat.

If the con­struc­tion indus­try is seri­ous about meet­ing ambi­tious car­bon goals in time for the 2050 net-zero dead­line, it needs the right tools for mea­sur­ing and mit­i­gat­ing envi­ron­men­tal impact. It is imper­a­tive that a data-dri­ven process of mea­sure­ment and ana­lysts starts at the design and plan­ning stage, rather than try­ing to reduce emis­sions on an ad hoc basis dur­ing con­struc­tion. Solu­tions such as KBR CleanSPEND will play an increas­ing role in mak­ing smart deci­sions at the right time for a green­er glob­al con­struc­tion indus­try.

To find out more, please reach out to David Cole via linkedin.com/in/david-cole-kbr

Pro­mot­ed by KBR