1666693 - Developing a Framework for Railroad Track Maintenance Emissions Life-Cycle Assessment

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) currently provides railroad project sponsors with guidelines for a consistent approach to benefit-cost analysis (BCA) for passenger and freight rail track constriction, capacity expansion and mainline corridor upgrade project proposals. The systematic process of identifying, quantifying, and comparing expected benefits and costs helps decision-makers evaluate trade-offs among alternative transportation investments.  The current BCA guidance recognizes that both passenger and freight rail projects may reduce transportation impacts on the environment by lowering emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants, but its focus is on mobile-source emissions of transportation operations. One limitation of the current guidance is that it lacks consideration of emissions due to construction and maintenance of the proposed transportation infrastructure, including the manufacture, transportation, installation, modification, refurbishment and disposal of various track infrastructure materials.  This FRA-funded project, being conducted by Michigan Technological University in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, will address emissions due to a wide range of track maintenance, rail corridor upgrade, capacity expansion and new track construction projects by integrating the proposed life cycle assessment (LCA) framework into the FRA BCA guidance.  

LCA is a method used to assess potential cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of products or processes. For a rail corridor, life cycle emissions of track construction and maintenance include impacts incurred during the mining, extraction, production, transportation and installation phases of all the raw materials and manufactured track infrastructure components associated with construction and maintenance activities; and the impacts due to their eventual end-of-life reuse/disposal.  The overall goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive framework for conducting LCA on emissions from various types of track maintenance activities and processes in different track use categories (operational and infrastructure settings), an organized database with a first generation of emissions inventory data, and preliminary rail track maintenance LCA tools.

Based on a review of best practices from other industries such as highways and pavements, the project team has refined the goal and scope of the track maintenance LCA framework to determine what types of activities and emissions should be included or excluded from the analysis.  To help structure the framework for subsequent data collection and emissions analysis during later phases of the project, the project team has proposed a systematic methodology to develop process charts that document the activities, processes, equipment and materials associated with a given maintenance activity.  This presentation will provide an overview of the proposed track maintenance emissions LCA approach and insight into the development of the LCA framework.  The presentation will also provide an opportunity for practitioners to offer the project team valuable industry feedback as we move into the next phase of identifying gaps in data of emissions associated with track maintenance and construction materials, equipment and processes.