Extending the geopolitical supply risk indicator: Application of life cycle sustainability assessment to the petrochemical supply chain of polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fibers

Abstract

Due to the material diversity of high-tech products and globalized supply chains, it is important to be able to assess geopolitical supply risks for the supply chain of any commodity. This article extends the Geopolitical Supply Risk assessment method under the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework to account for multi-stage supply chains as well as domestic production and applies this extended method to the supply chain of carbon fibers based on polyacrylonitrile. Particularly, the article estimates the Geopolitical Supply Risk factors emerging from international trade of petroleum, propene and acrylonitrile. Risk factors are calculated for 145 countries, and a total set of six scopedependent indicators is identified for 54 countries. The case studies of acrylonitrile supply chains for Russia, Peru, Japan and Greece exemplify this approach and risk mitigation strategies are discussed for each of them. The results show the applicability of the modified Geopolitical Supply Risk characterization factor to a multi-stage supply chain with different internationally traded commodities in the petrochemical industry. Thereby the method serves to further integrate Life Cycle Assessment and the socio-economic dimension of natural resource impacts.

Raw material criticality assessment as a complement to environmental life cycle assessment: Examining methods for product‐level supply risk assessment

“…Helbig et al. () modified the GeoPolRisk method to account for domestic production, which is assumed to be “risk‐free” from a geopolitical perspective.…”

“…Except for a case study of polyacrylonitrile‐based carbon fibers by Helbig et al. (), the limited applications of the GeoPolRisk method thus far implicitly assume a single‐stage supply chain from upstream raw materials (such as minerals and metals) to final product manufacturing and assembly. Although Helbig et al.…”

“…Although Helbig et al. () developed an extension of the GeoPolRisk method to improve modeling of supply disruption probability in multistage global supply chains, the extended method is not explicitly connected to the functional unit of a product, and does not incorporate vulnerability factors like substitutability. In principle, however, different supply disruption probability and vulnerability factors would be needed for each inventory flow input to each unit process—an enormous exercise in data collection and computation.…”

“…While these assessments have been conducted on a national, regional, or global level, raw material criticality is also relevant on a product‐level—to inform product design, material selection, and supply‐chain management. There is a growing interest in adapting criticality assessment to a product‐level analysis as a complement to (environmental) LCA (Bach et al., ; Cimprich, Karim, & Young, ; Cimprich et al, ; Gemechu, Helbig, Sonnemann, Thorenz, & Tuma, ; Helbig et al., ; Henßler, Bach, Berger, Finkbeiner, & Ruhland, ; Mancini, Benini, & Sala, ; Schneider et al., ; Sonnemann, Gemechu, Adibi, De Bruille, & Bulle, ).…”

“…() and subsequently extended by Helbig et al. () and Cimprich et al. (,b); the Economic Scarcity Potential (ESP) method developed by Schneider et al.…”