networked-geothermal-dynamic-lca: Time-explicit, prospective and dynamic-climate LCA of a networked geothermal energy system versus a gas/oil reference

Code, public configuration, derived result tables, and publication figures for the manuscript "A prospective and dynamic life-cycle assessment framework for the early-design stage of networked geothermal heating in cold climates"

The workflow compares a networked geothermal energy system (GEN) with the conventional distributed gas/oil reference with electric air-conditioning (REF) that it displaces, on an identical delivered-service basis: 89.375 GWh_th of heating, cooling, and domestic hot water to 37 buildings over 50 years, validated on the Framingham, Massachusetts utility pilot. Every life-cycle stage (EN 15978 modules A1–A5, B2–B6, C1–C4) is dated on a calendar (2025–2075), linked to prospective premise/REMIND SSP2 electricity backgrounds (SSP2-PkBudg1000 and SSP2-NPi), and evaluated under three temporal LCIA formulations — conventional static, time-explicit static, and dynamic climate — implemented in the Brightway 2.5 ecosystem (bw_temporalis, bw_timex). The robustness layer includes seven deterministic sensitivity cases (S1–S7) and a 10,000-draw three-method paired Monte Carlo. Headline result: GEN reduces life-cycle GHG emissions by 44%, 28%, and 42% under the three methods and repays its construction carbon by approximately 2036.

Reproduction is supported at two tiers. Tier 1: every manuscript figure and table regenerates from the included derived CSV tables (data/derived/) using only Python with pandas, numpy, and matplotlib — no licenses required. Tier 2: the full Brightway pipeline (scripts/b6/) additionally requires a licensed ecoinvent 3.9.1 (cutoff) database and premise-generated backgrounds. Raw Eversource/Framingham case data are confidential and not included; see docs/DATA.md for the complete data-availability statement.

Code is released under the BSD 3-Clause License. Development repository: https://github.com/Mahsaghandi1993/networked-geothermal-dynamic-lca

This work is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2502121 and is shared in accordance with the project's Data Management Plan and the NSF Public Access Policy.