How to Monitor Your Project’s Carbon Footprint with AI

00:01 Hi, wherever you are in the world, whether it is Europe, America, Middle East, Asia, or elsewhere, carbon is fast becoming a KPI on projects. In Europe, in France, in the UK, in particular, there are already legislation in the UK under NEC for X twenty-nine and with the British Standards PAS twenty-eighty, for example, that bring carbon as a KPI in projects. Long story short, carbon will be measured in the same way that cost and schedule will be. We will need to S curve it, we will need to baseline it, we will need to monitor it, we will

00:39 need to deep dive it, we will need to be able to evaluate change, we will need to be able to run risk analysis, there will be compensation events, and we will have liquidated damages against it. Understanding that carbon can be measured or at least shown in exactly the same way as schedule and cost is ninety percent of the battle. The other ten percent is how to do that. This module here gives you all of those answers. Enjoy.

00:01 Your Nodes & Links AI platform is incredibly unique in that it can calculate the embodied carbon of your project based on the materials and the equipment that you’ve resource loaded. You don’t have to resource load at the lowest level, you can resource load at any level and it can calculate that. Now the way it does it is quite special. It uses a piece of artificial intelligence called natural language processing which is at the heart of all the large language models like ChatGPT. What it does is it reads off the resources

00:34 and the materials and the equipment that you’ve put in your schedule and it categorizes them. So for example, if you’d put structural steel, it will categorize that as steel. It then looks up at a database that we have, a database of norms from across the industry of the average embodied carbon element of steel within construction. It then takes the amount that you’ve put, the tonnage, times it by the embodied amount to give the embodied amount of carbon. Because this is allocated at a level lower than a level zero or a level

01:10 one, we are able to S-curve after that, we’re able to breakdown after that, we’re able to run a risk analysis on carbon, and I’ll talk you through those points right now.

00:01 So, first we must calculate your project’s embodied carbon emissions and we can start that on the home screen. If we scroll down here, we have two widgets: one that tells us our project’s embodied carbon emissions based on the materials and equipment. So this project is twenty-five point five kilotons. In a second second that looks at how a week of delay affects different WBS components by clicking on this arrow here or by going into CO2 management and overview, we are able to dive down and we’ll do that

00:35 now. So here we’ve got our project’s carbon S-curve. We’ve got our total carbon footprint here and then interactive S-curve that tells us at any point in time what the baseline carbon and what the selected schedule’s carbon is and of course you can change the baseline just how we’ve done previously. The graph is interactive so we can turn these graphs on and off. What we can also see is how it compares against the baseline directly in words and this is an output of the natural language processing module. So

01:08 the selected schedule produces twenty-five point five, which is a one point three percent decrease compared to the baseline. We can see how about twenty-five point five is broken down between materials and equipment. So we can see the materials and if we hover over structural concrete, piling concrete, and steelwork make up eighty percent of all of the embodied carbon emission of this program. Of the small amount that is equipment, we have bulldozers, cranes, excavators, and excavators for both earthworks. Now a point of note how equipment

01:42 is calculated: we take the equipment, we understand the idle to active times, we understand the emission profiles from the running of that equipment IE, for example, the diesel emissions. We take duration of activities and then we calculate the use of the equipment. Hence this, what we generally find is that concrete and steel make up about ninety to ninety-five percent of all large construction works. What you also have is you have a number of insights here from which you can dive down and start to ask more details.

00:01 So, now we’ve reviewed the overall embodied carbon footprint of our project, we can start to dive down. And to do that, we can go on CO2 management breakdown, and let’s do that now. What this does is it gives us a WBS breakdown. So I can see here if I break it down that all of the carbon in this construction is currently in construction, within construction. I can see all of the different kinds of resources we’ve got associated with this project. I can see that station extension is driving the vast majority of the embodied carbon within this. I can see it’s phase three construction and fit out, and within this, I can see that it’s new station entrance. By clicking on this, allows me to isolate it. I can see that in new station entrance, the seventeen point six kilotons of carbon that is broken out into material and equipment, equipment being a very small percentage. Material is mainly structural concrete with elements of piling concrete and steelwork. If we wanted to analyze structural concrete more deeply, we could select that

00:36 up here in activity or resource. We can search for anything we want that will isolate all of the activities and milestones that have that equipment or that material associated with it. So here we can see all of the activities and the BBSS that have structural concrete. We can clear all by just doing this. We can also download these diagrams with this arrow in the top right. This way we can very quickly see what our carbon footprint is for each element of the project and be able to download and report on it. Next, we’ll talk about change.

00:02 So, finally, now we know our embodied carbon and where it lies, we can start to analyze change, and there are two ways to do this: there’s planned change and delay change. So, plan change is where we have a new schedule, we’ve changed the resources within it based on our plan that you can see on the overview screen, and you can see it at all points in the S curve here and in this statement here. To see how delay would change the program, what we do is go into breakdown and we are able to go to any level

00:37 of the WBS and it will calculate what a week of delay will do both in terms of kilotons and in terms of a percentage to the increase to the overall embodied carbon of the program. Now, using this, you will be able to very easily calculate what certain delays, so for example a four-week delay, would be four times that which would have a certain impact. The reason why this was built was in part from UK legislation specifically any C4 contracting, the X29 amendment plus the PAS2080 British standard

01:18 that details how you calculate carbon. Long story short, I’d invite everyone who’s under NEC4 to read the X29 amendment but it makes carbon a compensation event so by knowing how carbon will change because of certain actions you are open to getting compensation. So, with that, you’re able to monitor, analyze, and decide on the carbon footprint of your project.

00:01 Including carbon within your workflows is really up to you, but the best practice that I’ve seen is that in the monthly reports or in the change reports, elements of carbon footprint and carbon change are included. If it’s not in the contract, this just sets good practice to show that you care about the sustainability of your project. If it is in the contract, there will very likely be explicit workflows that detail how you can incorporate for things like claim events and disruption. All I would say is please sit down

00:34 with your line lead to discuss how you can incorporate carbon within the reporting of your project.