ARPA-E’s Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA) program seeks to accelerate development of carbon negative buildings through the utilization of atmospheric carbon in building materials that store carbon to not only nullify embodied emissions, but to also transform buildings into carbon sinks and to contribute to negative emissions strategies. Achieving the vision for the HESTIA program, however, is also dependent on addressing the challenges in conducting life cycle assessments (LCA) for carbon storing materials and buildings.
This Exploratory Topic seeks to overcome these limitations by developing new LCA frameworks and tools that quickly and effectively analyze the life cycle impacts of building materials and whole-building designs, while also informing HESTIA-awarded teams on how to further improve environmental performance metrics of the program.
Related Program(s)
Projects selected within this Exploratory Topic will work concurrently with teams selected under the following ARPA-E program(s):
Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA)
Program Director(s)
Dr. Laurent Pilon
Projects Selected Within This Exploratory Topic
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
PARAMETRIC OPEN DATA FOR LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT (POD | LCA)
The University of Washington's Carbon Leadership Forum will develop a rigorous and flexible parametric Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework, aligned data, and process integrated tools to assess the environmental impact of novel carbon storing materials and buildings during their rapid prototyping and design. The team will then develop custom LCA models to evaluate individual ARPA-E-funded building materials and designs to optimize their environmental benefits and net-carbon negativity. Collection of site-specific LCA data and regional spatiotemporal modeling for bio-based material systems will also be conducted. Analysis of these outputs will inform further development for ARPA-E funded HESTIA teams and comparison with current state-of-the-art.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
CARBON NEGATIVE MATERIALS ASSESSMENT (CaNMA)
The University of California, Davis, will develop novel models that integrate material properties and characteristics into greenhouse gas sequestration scenarios to inform technological breakthroughs in carbon storing building materials. Models will also be generated for rapid assessment of uncertainty in the life cycle assessment of novel building materials that can inform ARPA-E-funded HESTIA teams of target areas for improvement during the material development process.