Evaluation of sector-specific AWARE characterization factors for water scarcity footprint of electricity generation

Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) links the emissions and resource abstractions of a product system or process to potential impacts on the environment through characterization factors (CF). For regionalized impact categories like water-use, the regional CFs can vary over several orders of magnitude within the same country. The aggregated country-level CF, often used in LCIA, represents an average of local CF weighted by the local water consumption of all (or most) human water use including water use by all (or most) economic sectors. There is, however, great variability in spatio-temporal distribution of human water consumption across different industries. This study provides industry-specific water-use CFs for the electricity sector across the US. Our analysis shows that for electricity generation, the use of all-sector aggregated water-use CF would lead to an underestimation of impact scores compared to industry-specific CFs, by two folds. Even within the electricity sector, for two of the major subsectors, electricity based on natural gas and hydroelectricity, the country-level CFs can be significantly different due to the geographic distribution of powerplants. Our findings signify that the use of industry-specific CF can have a high influence in LCIA, especially for impact categories, such as water-use, with great spatio-temporal heterogeneity. [Display omitted] •Water consumption varies greatly among various sources of electricity.•The regional Characterization Factors (CFs) for water-use in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) varies greatly in the US.•The tempo-spatial distribution of electricity and its sub-sectors has a notable impact on the total impact score.•Across the US, the use of generic water-use CF for electricity leads to under-estimation of impact score in LCIA.•Hydroelectricity and coal-based electricity have the highest CFs among other electricity sub-sectors.