Location: Europe, without Russia and Turkey - Europe, without Russia and Turkey
This dataset describes the transport needed for an average export of hard coal from Latin America to Europe.The average transport distance for export coal from Latin America (mostly from Colombia) is estimated to be 800km. This corresponds to the rail transport of coal between the city of La Dorada in the mining area of central Colombia and the port of Santa Maria at the Colombian Coast (VDKI, 2017). The average transport distance for import coal to Latin America is assumed to be 200km, also by rail. Only the balance of 600km is used here, as 200km are already covered in the market for hard coal, RLA. The transport via transoceanic freight ship is a rough estimate. Average coal losses and related emissions during transport and storage are included. The latter are based on generic estimates as no geography-specific data was available. Trade volumes are based on 2015 import data according to the United Nations (comtrade.org).

Note: Discrepancies of hard coal trade volumes between different statistical sources as well as between import and export statistics of the same source are primarily due to differences in coal classification methodologies, which are not uniform on a global basis. They also occur because of coal in-transit, coal that is unaccounted for, and reporting discrepancies by importing and exporting countries.

Undefined unit processes (UPRs) are the unlinked, multi-product activity datasets that form the basis for all of the system models available in the ecoinvent database. This is the way the datasets are obtained and entered into the database by the data providers. These activity datasets are useful for investigating the environmental impacts of a specific activity (gate-to-gate), without regard to its upstream or downstream impacts.