Establishing regional greenhouse gas emissions mitigation priorities in Canada's building and transportation sectors

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The climate crisis necessitates rapid and transformative changes to all sectors of the economy to phase out fossil fuel combustion and minimize global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Worldwide, companies and all levels of government (including Canadian firms and governments) have committed to reduce GHG emissions to net-zero by 2050 and many have committed to substantial near-term (e.g., by 2030) reductions but most lack concrete plans or realistic pathways to meet these targets. Deep decarbonization of buildings and transportation sectors, which in Canada emitted 277 Mt CO2eq in 2019 (27% of the country's emissions), is especially challenging due to the GHG emissions intensive processes currently employed and reliance on infrastructure systems with large up-front committed GHG emissions and costs and long project lifetimes. Particularly challenging aspects in these sectors include transport fuel cycle emissions from Canada's light duty vehicle fleet, and concrete and steel production. A suite of decarbonization options exist or are under development in these sectors, but require significant investment in new infrastructure to be widely deployed. Many of these options substantially increase use of other resources and require low-carbon electricity to reduce GHG emissions relative to incumbent technologies. The absolute GHG mitigation potential of these options is not well understood due to technology uncertainty and regional factors affecting GHG emissions of these options when deployed. This research will integrate life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic assessment (TEA) with other techniques to demonstrate where new technologies can be cost-effectively deployed to maximize GHG mitigation across Canada's buildings and transportation sectors considering spatiotemporal variability and uncertainty and infrastructure investments required to deploy new technologies. The specific near-term objectives of this research are to: 1) Assess regional and temporal variability in GHG emissions and supply costs of existing building materials and vehicle technologies, 2) Evaluate how changing background systems (e.g., electricity grids) will affect future emissions of these technologies as other sectors decarbonize, 3) Demonstrate how spatiotemporal variability and uncertainty evaluated in Objectives 1 and 2 impacts the cost-effectiveness and GHG mitigation potential of new technologies in select applications within Canada's buildings and transportation sectors on an absolute basis. This research program will advance the understanding of the role of individual GHG mitigation strategies in meeting net zero targets and the associated tradeoffs and risks of different GHG mitigation pathways. Methodologically, this research will advance methods for estimating environmental and economic impacts by developing a novel dynamic framework that can be applied to provide more holistic and robust assessments of new technologies relative to incumbents.