Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE)
Embodied Energy & Carbon
Embodied energy may be taken as the total primary energy consumed during resource extraction, transportation, manufacturing and fabrication of a product. Typically embodied energy is confined within the boundaries of Cradle-to-Gate (factory gate) or Cradle-to-Site (site of use) to separate it from operational impacts.
Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE)
Professor Geoff Hammond and Craig Jones from the Department of Mechanical Engineering (University of Bath) have been working on a database to determine the embodied energy and carbon of a large number of building materials. The database has been used to release an Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE). The Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) is available for download as a pdf file by completing the form below.
Please also view the new ICE Wiki here. The ICE Wiki is a supplementary information resource and may be used to submit data and provide feedback. It does not contain the quantitative ICE data but you will find additional information that does not appear in the current ICE pdf.
ICE was originally a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, but for ease of distribution and usability it has been converted into a pdf file (around 62 A3 pages of information). ICE has many features and a wealth of information on embodied energy and carbon, including:
- Over 400 values of embodied energy/embodied carbon broken down into approx. 170 different (building) materials, the vast majority of these values can be applied outside of the building sector with sufficient accuracy
- Embodied energy/embodied carbon of primary and secondary materials
- A detailed material profile for over 30 main material classifications (i.e. Aggregates, Aluminium, Concrete, Steel...etc) the following points are included in the material profiles
- Statistics on all data sources used to compile the information within ICE (e.g. number of data points, mean embodied energy, standard deviation & full data range)
- A scatter graph displaying year of data versus embodied energy
- Fuel split
- Embodied carbon breakdown
- Historical embodied carbon (per unit embodied energy)
- Material properties (density, thermal conductivity...etc)
This work contributes to Carbon Vision under the project Building Market Transformation (BMT) and was jointly funded by The Carbon Trust and EPSRC.