Global Renewable and Nonrenewable Energy Use Impact Assessment of U.S. Manufacturing: An Integrated Cradle-to-Gate LCA and DEA Approach

In this thesis, U.S. manufacturing industries` global supply chain-linked energy use and economic output are investigated considering a total of 16 renewable and nonrenewable energy carriers. A multiregion input output (MRIO) framework is employed to conduct the global supply chain-linked energy use impact assessment. The study period was between 1995 and 2014 based on data availability. Thus, 20 MRIO models were developed. Each MRIO model consists of the 40 largest economies of the world and the rest of the world (ROW) as the 41st country. Each country’s economy was structured into 35 manufacturing and service industries based on the Worth Input Output Database’s (WIOD) classification. The U.S. manufacturing industries’ economic output and detailed renewable and nonrenewable energy used are traced at the onsite (direct) impact and domestic and global supply chain (indirect) levels. Results indicated that food, beverages and tobacco industries were the main contributors to total economic output. Mining, quarrying, chemical and chemical products industries were identified in the second and third place, respectively, based on their total economic output percentage in 2014. Furthermore, U.S. manufacturing industries’ energy use was found to be heavily dependent on nonrenewable energy sources at 95.4%. Thus, only 4.6% of the total energy use was from renewable energy sources during 1995 to 2014. Subsequently, the renewable and nonrenewable energy use of the U.S. manufacturing activities were quantified with MRIO models. The renewable and nonrenewable energy use of industries and countries were benchmarked with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The objective of benchmarking was to identify the countries and industries with the ratio of renewable energy use to the nonrenewable energy use in the global supply chains. Two benchmarking measures were proposed in the DEA phase, renewability ratio (RR) and economic-output-induced renewability ratio (E-RR). These two measures are used to conduct the benchmarking analysis on countries and industries and rank them based on the corresponding efficiency scores for every 5-year period between 1995 and 2014. High efficiency scores found for industries which use less nonrenewable energy and high renewable energy such as gas and water supply (EGW), private households with employed persons (PHEP), other community and social and personal services (OCSPS) for the RR analysis. Furthermore, the least five efficient countries were found to be Indonesia, Russian Federation, Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania, respectively. The RR measure was more conservative in identifying and scoring the industries and countries in terms of ratio of renewable to nonrenewable energy use. On the other hand, the E-RR approach was found to be more optimistic in terms of efficiency scores since the industries’ economic output was considered in addition to the ratio of renewable to nonrenewable energy use impact