The following was submitted by Ms. Daryl Davis on May 1, 2007
Embodied energy is all of the energy used to create the building in the first place, the mining of raw materials, transporting the raw materials to a manufacturing site, manufacturing the products, transporting the products to the building site, and finally all the energy used to construct the building.
This is not a new concept. When I tried to quantify the amount that might be contained in [The Breuer Tower] I wrote to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to see if they had updated their 1979 study, "Energy Conservation and Historic Preservation". This study gives several methods of measuring the energy contained in various types and sizes of buildings.
Rhonda Sincavage of the National Trust referred me to Mike Jackson of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency who has been writing and speaking on the subject and is the author of "Embodied Energy and Historic Preservation: A Needed Reassessment" published in the Bulletin of The Association for Preservation Technology, Vol. 36, No. 4, 2005. I have a copy of that publication and it is probably still available from the APT.
I wrote to Mike Jackson who responded with the following:
"The data from the earlier ACHP study is still pretty valid for older buildings, particularly of the era of the Breuer building.”
"I have found that talking in BTUs (British Thermal Units) is something people can't relate to, so I have converted the eco equation of equivalent gallons of gasoline per square foot. A typical office building of the era you are examining has an embodied energy of 10-15 gallons of gas per square foot. (At 250,000 square feet, that means something like 3.75 million gallons of gas, which in dollars comes to about $11 million just in energy cost is embodied in the Breuer tower). Only a small fraction of that embodied energy is recoverable when the building is demolished, mostly in the metals. So, demolition will result in a huge amount of waste, and any new building to replace this building will require another input of non-renewable energy resources to construct.”
"If this building is being demolished to construct a more energy efficient new building of equivalent size, it is virtually impossible to make the new building so energy efficient that you can compensate for the wasted embodied energy. (I'm developing some more comparisons on this topic using real examples, but haven't completed this research yet.)"
"We are also hearing people use the presence of asbestos as a reason to demolish a building. Depending upon the nature of the asbestos containing materials, it is often necessary to remove these materials before any larger regular demolition can be done. This is the same kind of removal that would be needed for renovation."
