 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we are very very glad to welcome you here this afternoon for this briefing on a very, very newly released analysis by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The the study that is being released and was just posted today is called the Transportation Energy Future Study. This is a very important topic because it has long been a major concern of national policy in terms of national energy security, national security issues for going back into the 70s that we really needed to look at transportation. We needed to look at our use of oil and how we could reduce that amount of oil. Over the ensuing years, we have learned more and more about the threat of climate change and the need to also address greenhouse gas emissions in terms of carbon and of course petroleum is a very carbon intensive fuel. So it has been a major concern of the Congress of the public for decades now to find better ways to look at these issues. How can they be addressed? What makes sense in terms of technologies, fuels, vehicles, etc. What are the ways to do that? So it is very exciting to have this new analysis that has just been released that is you're going to hear now about that in terms of the conclusions coming out of this study called Transportation Energy Futures. The study will identify a set of strategies that can achieve deep cuts in petroleum use and carbon emissions coming from the US transportation sector. This gives us a chance to look at underexplored opportunities as well as the challenges along the path to a more sustainable transportation energy future. The study was done by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the US Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL, as well as Argonne National Laboratory. We have a range of speakers today so that we will hear about perspectives of policy officials from the Department of Energy as well as the Department of Transportation. And then we will also have the findings presented by by the senior analysts from the National Renewable Energy Lab. So I first want to turn to Michael Carr, who will be our first speaker, who, Michael, is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Mike. Let's see if, thanks. Thanks, thanks to everyone for coming today and thanks to EESI for kindly hosting us and quickly in a hurry. I'm just gonna take a couple minutes really just to frame a little bit of the context and just just to talk a little bit about where the administration and how much sort of weight we put on this as a goal going forward. I think most of folks in here, I think know the vital statistics about oil. It's an incredibly volatile resource. It, as far as its price, that has dramatic impacts across the American economy. We spend about a billion dollars a day importing importing oil and beyond that sort of drain on the Treasury and drain on taxpayers' wallets, we have, you know, every day we're we're subject to potential price increases due to world markets that can whipsaw our industries, our airline industry, of being a great example of one that has suffered greatly at the hands of oil price spikes in the past. So, and so, you know, a couple vital statistics in 2011, we imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil for a price tag of about four hundred and sixty seven million dollars. Thirty-six percent of all U.S. energy uses is from petroleum now, and seventy percent of that of that petroleum goes into the transportation, and fifty percent of our petroleum give or take is imported. So, you know, given that framework, given that sort of set of circumstances, it's been a policy both for Congress, but in particular for the administration in recent years to diversify our sources of fuel for the transportation sector and diversify the opportunities for individuals to move around the country. And so, you know, the historic cafe standards are one example of one of our recent efforts, and this study, in addition to our ongoing efforts in both biofuels and in electric vehicles, electric drive vehicles of all kinds, including fuel cells, and in other areas, in other agencies, including, you know, including in transit. This study helps to give us a little bit more of a frame for what the opportunity space is going to be in the future. And so, you know, there's a couple of really interesting top lines that I think come out of this. You know, my biggest takeaway from it is there, you know, a combination of policies, a combination of technologies, I think present us with an unprecedented opportunity to virtually eliminate the impact of oil on our transportation sector over the long term. And that's something you really couldn't have said 20 years ago. And so, you know, it'll take a range of things, and I think we'll talk about a few of those today. But it's an exciting time to be working in this field because we really do have the opportunity to make a difference in the relatively near term. So with that, why don't we get on to the substance of it, and then we can talk a little bit more later with some questions. Thanks. Okay. Thanks very much, Mike. And we'll now turn for perspective with regard to thinking about the transport sector. We have with us today Arthur Rapinski, who is the energy economist in the office of the Secretary of the Department of Energy. Thank you for the kind words, and I'll see if I can defer actually talking about substance for the length of my presentation. I'd like to congratulate my colleagues at the Department of Energy for all of their extraordinary work in bringing this study to a successful conclusion. I can assure you that doing projects like this is never easy and behind every tiny little number on the one page snapshot, there are many, many hours of expert judgment and analysis and quantitative modeling and just plain elbow grease. They should be very proud and I congratulate you. From the perspective of our agency, I'd just like to leave you with the Department of Transportation. Shut up. The Department of Transportation, we've of course participated with our colleagues at EPA in the CO2 tailpipe emission standards and CAFE standards. But the primary method by which the Department influences the transportation system is through transportation infrastructure. So of course we take a much more a very sort of infrastructure oriented view and in that context I'd like to suggest just a couple of things. And the first is that the transportation system, that if you're thinking in a 50 year time frame, the transportation system exists basically to serve the public and the economy and that over that time period both the economy which it serves will transform itself in unexpected ways and consequently the transportation system itself will go through a series of changes, sometimes in unexpected ways. If you think back one of the extraordinary inventions of the century just closed is the container, a no-tech steel box that really transformed freight in the world. 50 years ago there were ocean liners which then disappeared and suddenly reappeared as cruise ships, possibly the greatest one of the most important technological innovations in automobiles was actually the microprocessor which has made possible all sorts of improvements in vehicles that probably wouldn't have been possible in 1970. So I'm looking forward to as much of the next 50 years as I'll be able to experience personally. And I think that we will see yet more extraordinary changes in the years to come. And I think this report suggests some of the ways in which the energy consumption of the transportation sector can be transformed. Thank you. And I quite agree that this is a very exciting time that we're really on the cusp of seeing enormous change because there are so many opportunities coming to the fore. And it is really incumbent upon us to think about things in a holistic way and in terms of a suite of actions in terms of technologies, new research, whether we're dealing with vehicles, other kinds of infrastructure, fuels. It's a very important, I think, approach to make sure that we always look at how things can fit together. It can be a very exciting kind of puzzle and that this study provides an opportunity to really provide opportunities to think about these pathways forward and how we could put them together. And somebody who thinks about research and innovation a lot is Peter Chipman, who is the senior transportation specialist with the Research and Innovative Technology Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation. Peter. I don't have to say the name of my agency. Again, it's a long one. And for those of no art, he's more than likely going to outlive the next 50 years so we'll see the conclusion of this. I just wanted to say that, well, when we read at DOT the Transportation Entry Future Study, we said, wow, we really need to get involved with that. And we recently signed an interagency agreement called the Clean Transportation Sector Initiative that is sort of a next steps to have to continue that good work. And kind of look for in the areas that were recommended by the study for future research, where we can get into that. And from the DOT's perspective, see where infrastructure can help leverage those fuel pathways and create efficiencies for those fuel pathways. And essentially help, as you were saying, Carol, help cover a well-rounded view of the sector over the long term. And I also want to say personally to Mike, I know you already know this, but you have such a fantastic team and we're just really honored to be working with us on the CTSI. And thank you for their time. It's going to be a good product. And now, where to the real show in terms of having a chance to really hear firsthand the conclusions, the findings coming out of this very, very important study, the Energy Future Study. And to present those findings is Austin Brown, who is senior analyst with NREL, the National Renewable Energy Lab. Thanks so much, Carol. I usually detest podiums or podiums or whatever. I don't like standing behind this, but I have a cheat sheet since this is so new. I can't get away with any sort of an excuse for memorization. So you have to bear with me. I'm going to stand behind here, Mike, even though it's sort of against my better nature. But I am really excited and a huge thanks to Carol and to ESI for hosting us here on really short notice and joining us to talk about transportation. So I'm going to try to wing through in some sort of a hybrid of as quickly as possible, because there's a lot to cover in a little time, but also with enough meat to hopefully give you a little bit of perspective on the study and what we looked at and really whet your appetites here. You just can't wait to go and download these long detailed reports and do some quality time with them. So I think to start with the key takeaways in transportation in the futures, which we heard a little bit about from Mike, is we have huge opportunities in transportation, key takeaway number one, but key takeaway number two is there's a lot of challenges to getting to where we believe that we can and need to get, and that there really is a diverse approach needed if you want to have any chance of approaching the sorts of scenarios that we explored here. Go through a brief outline of what we're going to talk about. We're going to look through the key findings that we came up with and then the overall project summary conclusions. The motivation here was to explore the options available in order to make very deep cuts in petroleum emissions and petroleum use and in greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. And when we say very deep cuts, we started out the study thinking of 80% as the sort of realm that we would be exploring. There's a lot of targets out there. There's a lot of things that we were using to evaluate options. To try to accomplish this, we took a collaborative approach. It's a project that was implemented by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy along with Argonne National Lab and the National Renewable Energy Lab. And we drew on broad expertise wherever we could through academia, through our colleagues in the field, we were able to really get back into line, keep us honest, really make sure we were looking at both key interesting questions, but also not going so far out on a limb that we were going to miss the mark and not provide useful analysis. The outputs of the study are nine published technical reports that are coming out. They'll be on the project's website as well as some materials like this presentation, like the one that will be made available on the project's website. So I thought I would talk quickly about how we scoped and reviewed the project. This is just a notional diagram. We started with the wide, wide world of transportation, really opening it up and saying we're not going to restrict ourselves to topics that we're already working on. We're going to try to look at any topic in transportation. That being said, we can't look at what we've accomplished. Then from that we synthesize those results into some summary materials like the presentation I'll be going over today. We want to make sure that this is always in parallel to the ongoing analysis done by our colleagues at DOE, at DOT, and at EPA, and at other organizations. The goal of this project was entirely to be non-duplicative wherever possible. We didn't want to rehash the same questions that were hashed and looked at. By modes I mean how we get around. So this can be broken down into light duty vehicles, which is passenger travel like cars and like trucks, and non-light duty vehicles, which ends up being a little bit of a mixing box for everything else, including things that we're very familiar with like buses, trucks, and aircraft, and also some uses that tend not to get thought about very much, uses like pipeline and marine and military vehicles. The non-light duty vehicle sector makes up almost half of transportation energy used today, and as I said, that's divided up into almost astonishingly diverse collection of different sorts of vehicles and modes, and that makes it really challenging to get your hands around. And that, coupled with the fact that light duty vehicles like cars and light trucks still are more than half of our communities that we explored in this study was looking at these potpourri modes in the non-light duty vehicle space to basically go out and say, we know there's a lot of efficiency potential in light duty vehicles that we're already working on, how much potential exists in these other modes. So we can summarize those findings in a table. The top row of this table is the vehicle energy efficiency improvements identified in each of these modes, and the first takeaway is that this efficiency potential is really very large. We're looking in many modes at the opportunity to save through technology more than half of the energy used per mile or per ton mile or per unit of service required. However, we have to place this into the context of the expected changes in service demand for those modes, and while we have the capability to make some predictions, we see that there is a real potential for an increased non-light duty vehicle modes far greater than the potential growth in some cases that we see in the light duty vehicle space. That's due to an increase in a projected increase largely in aviation and in international marine freight travel, but as well as an increase in domestic freight and these other modes as well. So while the good news here is that we see a huge potential for energy efficiency in a non- light duty vehicle space, we see that the third row is if we were to capture that whole efficiency potential, but did experience those vehicle use demand increases, what the net change would be, and while they vary a little bit from mode to mode and obviously are far from certain, the take home message is that without those efficiency potentials we would expect a really significant increase and with them we can basically break even in the energy demand. So this leads us into the question of how do we get you to the sorts of deep cuts that we're talking about. We could look at this and say oh energy efficiency can't get you there right. So rather than doing that we then take efficiency in as a piece of context to the larger sector. So next I'll go over light duty vehicles. Light duty vehicles were not a focus of the study but we did need to use and we did need to include a light duty vehicle mix as context to understand the opportunities available. I'll present briefly the mix that we used as a sort of central case. This is certainly not prescriptive. It's not like we're saying this is exactly what the mix would be. It could just be viewed as one possible low petroleum use mix. This vehicle mix was developed with Oak Ridge National Labs MA3T model. It's a vehicle choice model that we did run this case with the optimistic technical assumptions that come from the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Analysis looking at the research goals for those vehicles. And then we also took into context that there would be an infrastructure available for those vehicles that require advanced infrastructure. I'll talk more about infrastructure and research goals for the technologies themselves and by also in parallel deploying an infrastructure suitable to allow those vehicles to be operated by people. The vehicle types starting from the bottom are conventional vehicle, diesel vehicles, a flex fuel vehicle, hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles which are like the Chevy Volt available where you can get the energy from either electricity or from gasoline, fully battery electric vehicles. I can't state enough that this is just one example mix we're not trying to pick that this is exactly the mix that we'll go to. But the good news is with this many potential lower petroleum options there is some flexibility if some of these technologies end up working and others are more challenging going forward. So I said we didn't focus on light duty vehicles. We did however take a look at the barriers that might prove time to go through all of them today. Many of them are discussed pretty commonly in the literature what we tried to do in the associated papers is provide some quantification and some prioritization. Which of these are really absolute show stoppers and which these are barriers that the market might be able to help deal with on its own. By barriers I mean factors in the marketplace that aren't directly related to the technology that might provide an inhibitor to deploying that vehicle is the range of the vehicle. So you could imagine a consumer not being as eager to buy a fully battery electric vehicle if they were concerned that that vehicle might not be able to meet their full range requirements on a daily basis for all the sorts of trips that they take. So we know then that there are ways to deal with these barriers. For example you could make a longer range battery if you can make the technology good enough or you could provide a very short range of barriers to deployment that we would have to overcome. One other factor that we looked at in addition to these non-cost barriers is trying to take the perspective of the manufacturers that would have to be buying into these advanced vehicle technologies. It's fine and good to say that an individual and a consumer might have an economic case to buy an advanced vehicle due to the fuel savings available. But it's another question to say so we have some analysis in the papers also looking at what you would need to do to figure out what that investment case is. And this is a real I think a missing gap in a lot of the analysis that's done here where we say as soon as these vehicles are cost competitive we think they'll get snapped up. You also have to have auto manufacturers interested in making these at scale interested in building these in order to go out and make a profit selling them so if modes are how we get around fuels are where the energy comes from. It's no surprise to this audience I'm sure that today we use mostly petroleum as Mike mentioned. This is just a graphical breakdown of where those fuels come from. Most of that energy comes from domestic oil from imported oil from other sources of petroleum like natural gas plant liquids. There's some energy for natural gas that primarily goes into the pipeline infrastructure today and some fuels we looked at first we looked at the potential to use biomass in competitive markets. We developed a model that does a market equilibrium at various points in time basically looking for what markets would be willing to pay to use biomass for various services and the two that we explored in the most detail are biomass for fuels so biomass for either ethanol or for other liquid fuels that can compete directly with electric power which would be another lower carbon use of biomass. Using that model we found that in 2020 and in 2050 biofuels can be a competitive market for use of biomass and can displace significant quantities of petroleum based fuels even in a market that doesn't have a price of carbon. So this is looking I should emphasize this is looking at a scenario where our research goals from Department of Energy's program the goals set up by the biomass program and that includes both bringing the cost of conversion down improving the logistics of gathering the biomass sustainably and improving the conversion efficiency of those technologies. So this should be seen as the by 2050 at least of the upper bound of what we believe we can capture using sustainably produced biomass as calculated in the billion ton vision report which is used as the basis for the efficiency and cost that by 2050 biofuels could provide a significant portion of each fuel market jet fuel diesel fuel gasoline and so called bunker fuel which is mostly used in marine applications it's like a residual fuel. I should also say that this percentage is expressed against the baseline energy demand so the projected energy demand if we didn't bring in additional efficiency the percentage share of these fuels if you also used efficiency and demand side approaches to reduce that energy demand and at the end of the presentation I'll show what happens if you if you mash up all of these different parts of the scenario together the other component of fuels that we investigated in some detail was the fuel infrastructure requirement for these scenarios and when I say infrastructure here I'm referring to retail infrastructure things like gas stations and the most common thing is the retail infrastructure such as either hydrogen fueling stations charging stations both personal and public and potentially other things like ethanol fueling stations as well. So the first finding that we have is that the retail infrastructure is a very small portion of the overall fuel cost relatively speaking and that can be seen in the left graph you can barely pick it out there the green line along the bottom along here is the retail infrastructure associated with really any of these scenarios compared to the blue which is the total reference fuel costs which go up as they projected petroleum price goes up and the scenario fuel costs which come down as we as we use more efficient modes and use fewer fuels however and then we expand those infrastructure costs out there are significant replacement costs to go to these advanced infrastructures just important to keep in mind the context that we're reporting that basically this is the replacement costs for infrastructure to do things like just doing gas station turnover and renovation and upkeep then we compare that to a variety of different scenarios that use different combinations of fuels and estimate the retail infrastructure that would be required to meet those fuel those fuel demands at a national level the portfolio case here is very similar to the total infrastructure cost but by level much smaller than what we would expect to get in fuel savings out of the scenario however this is just looking at the requirements what this doesn't address yet and what we will look at in parallel analysis is the challenges to deploying that infrastructure we know that fuel infrastructure has a lot of immediate barriers the classic chicken and egg or their customers to use those stations and then conversely people are going to be more reluctant to buy electric vehicles until there's a reliable charging infrastructure that they can employ so those issues are only dealt with initially here and those require some significant further explanation. Lastly I'm going to look briefly at the approach we took to transportation demand this is transportation demand are the factors that influence how people use the transportation system and how people get around the United States that's largely through personal vehicles but other modes have key roles including even walking, bicycling and then obviously transit and other sorts of public transportation it's new and very much capacity building for us we've historically thought in terms of technology impacts we think it's very important for this portion of the study we tried to examine the potential available for petroleum reduction with demand side approaches I'm going to show a table of some of those potential impacts we divide that up into at least four categories it's not always divided this way and there's many perspectives on this the first one we looked at we call built environment characteristics this is how you choose to develop a city or how a city develops and how that impacts the demand that different city different approaches to how you build out a city can have very significant impacts on the demand for transportation we also looked at within a built environment what the potential is for trip production through other strategies example strategy would be teleworking or tele commuting and a few other options to reduce VMT the need to drive in order to provide the same amount of transportation service the third opportunity is driving so that's tools like driver feedback that have now been shown to have some good potential to improve the ability of a driver to get higher miles per gallon without changing the technology that's actually doing the driving itself and we found there's some significant potential there and the fourth opportunity we looked at is what we call non-LDV mode switching this is the idea that you could potentially move freight through trucks rather than through trucks and then save money that way there's a lot of challenges and a lot of issues that make it hard to do that they're explored in the papers but we do believe there may be some mode shifting potential there the other the other main conclusion besides the potential that's available which does seem to be very significant is that any of these if this is something that would want to be taken on as an option would require deep research and development projects on these technologies this is something that if it was going to be pursued would really require a concerted approach to thinking about this with many many partners both at the federal state and local levels because so much of the transportation system is defined by those local authorities and by individual decision making at different levels okay so I've made sort of a whirlwind tour through each of these areas in the most interest of this group but we did also in addition to these explorations of these topic areas see what would happen if you take the impacts associated with each of these papers and each of these opportunities identified and put them all into one framework to see what sort of combined input you could have want to emphasize that what we did not do is macroeconomic modeling to try to estimate the impact that this would have the combined impact of making this challenging so what this is not is a scenario is not a projection or a representation of goals but it is an assessment of the potential impact if you did pursue each of these individual opportunities and achieve them at the same time so starting from the left is the base case this is the amount of energy amount of petroleum energy specifically that we would expect to use by 2050 in the reference case that we would expect to do significantly that's about the same as it is today this is actually something that we should see is major progress if you look back just a few years the projections out if you took the projections out to 2050 they would be very significantly higher than this the specific projection that we use here is an extrapolated version of the energy information administration's annual energy I've divided that base case energy use into light duty vehicles and non-light duty vehicles and if you've got really good eyes you can see that the non-light duty vehicle is now a bigger share of that total use than it is today mostly because we're able to address the light duty vehicles with cafe standards that are already in the reference case the second column is the size of the potential opportunities identified in terms of efficiency potential identified light duty vehicle efficiency and drive train electrification which we show is a blended opportunity in between modes and also fuels because it involves both more efficient use of energy and a shift to alternative fuels a significant potential from biofuels to displace some of that remaining petroleum and then at the bottom some of the impacts of these demand side efforts is if we reduce a mile of travel but also make the vehicle more efficient we can't count those opportunities twice so we add back a little bit of a term for that overlap to make sure we're not doing any double counting but even after we do that we find that the combined potential identified in each of these opportunities is somewhat greater than the total petroleum use in 2050 so from this we could conclude that the potentials do exist to completely displace petroleum use of greenhouse gas emissions and here I've turned it into a time plot I want to caution you not to take this as a literal time scale for transitions just to illustrate the sorts of annual changes that would be needed to get to this scenario but again we see that the combination of use intensity or demand side measures energy intensity or energy efficiency measures and low carbon fuels has the potential to very significantly reduce the GHG emissions from the transportation sector I'll go over the key take ways and maybe see why I think that there are at least a plausible interpretation of this report the first one was that we have really key opportunities in transportation to reduce petroleum use and GHG emissions but then the second one is that in order to get to a scenario like this that's very very aggressive and optimistic would require addressing huge challenges in a very concerted and dedicated way so with that I will just put this up for more information who to contact if you have questions and where to go to find the detailed information and I want to also at this time thank Senator Murphy's office who made it possible for us to actually hold the briefing today because that's really critical to have that kind of cooperation so that we can find rooms so that we can help bring good solid information to all of us and so we want to thank them very very much for their participation let's open it up for your questions and comments now because as we've seen there is enormous potential in terms of efficiency improvements changes in technologies looking at fuels but again I think what I was also struck by was how these things all have to kind of work in tandem how we have to look at a whole range of things and be clear about that as for people who are policy makers or folks at state and local government levels private sector that it means really having a vision seeing how these things need to work together how infrastructure challenges can be overcome so that things can move together in tandem and if one does that there is incredible potential if we really look at this analysis very seriously so let's who has the first question if you could identify yourself please I'm Julia Piper with E&E News Climate Wire I wondered if anyone on the panel could say how this ties into the EPA report that was released today on light duty vehicles just sort of how these kind of complement each other but then also maybe more importantly get into some of the details of the heavy duty vehicles the improvements for submarine aviation they've all been pursuing biofuels in various degrees so what are really the opportunities here can you get into some details on that thanks I mean I don't think any of us can speak for EPA and how they see it I think that there's really a lot of parallels that are emerging in the analysis field in general that a lot of the studies of this are coming to me surprisingly many of the same conclusions about the opportunities that are out there the exact amount will vary on the modes issue from an analytic perspective one of the key challenges in the non-light duty vehicle sector is just how long those vehicles are used for you especially see this in aircraft and large ships where that's just an enormous capital investment you also see this in heavy trucks where trucks are on the road for a very long time but the good news in trucks and actually to a lesser extent in each of these modes is that the newest vehicles so for example for a truck a heavy truck, a Class 8 like what you think of as a tractor trailer the big trucks the first couple of years they drive something like 100,000 miles a year really really just pound these new trucks into the ground basically they get the newest, best, most efficient truck and then they can use it and for those years the fuel costs are the vast majority of their expenses or compared to the capital the drivers are expensive too but the fuel costs are really one of their biggest expenses is the Safeway trucks you see doing local delivery stuff on routes so the good news there is that you can actually get the efficient vehicles in and see a disproportionate impact you don't have to wait for the full fleet turnover I don't know if that helps but so trucks seem to have that the most but that's sort of some good news in each of those even though the challenges that those technologies are really long lived Any other comments with regard to the question? Anybody else? Okay Back here Hi I'm Max Parnas with Toyota I had a question about how the modeling was done I imagine that there's some kind of like endogenous technological improvement or you know cost reduction in there are those is that linked to any specific technologies that you're hoping to see is there something that you're saying you know we're relying on this kind of drivetrain or battery cost to come down I don't know I imagine a lot of that is fleshed out further so each of the every piece of modeling in this activity was done in the individual reports and then the synthesis is a symbol spreadsheet tool that we can also make available it sounds like you're asking about the sorry the light duty vehicles specifically and what technologies are involved so there we work very closely with the analysts in the vehicle technologies office and the fuel cells technologies office in the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy they work with their grantees to develop cost targets that they have as vehicles could cost that's things like the battery cost things like the drive the electric drivetrains costing characteristics how much a fuel cell would cost how much hydrogen storage would cost and what it would cost to produce hydrogen and we use those technology targets which are based on their engineering analysis as the basis for that cost for that cost modeling you know we don't you then assume that there's price premium paid on the vehicle so that there's profit margins as well or is it linked to what's going on with it you know the air B so we work with the the projects from RPE but usually those are more you know those are more of a reach project and so the goal would be once those bear fruit and are then sort of passed along to more development kind of research those would then enter in so far it's assumptions that are based on those programs targets quantitative targets so you could say from that there might be a way to provide more upside but we don't assume those in this in this study if you want this the specific model used to go from component cost to vehicle cost is called autonomy it's an Argonne National Lab model you basically say here's what the components of the vehicle are and then it tells you here's what the car looks like in terms of how much it might cost and if that's developed with a lot of collaboration with the automakers as well the program the individual programs with any RE do an extensive amount of modeling of the technology the various technology pathways some of which are not even within their portfolio I mean they have to understand the marketplace that they're trying to push these technologies into and so you know I think largely the answer to the question of the next modes or the next biggest opportunities in time is going to be answered on a very specific level within the programs and you can pretty much see it where our area of research emphasis shifts from year to year so this is a good opportunity to kind of take a step back from that and say okay so what is the larger opportunity space and part of that is making sure that we're looking at all of it but also to be able to say when you aggregate all these things up things break our way on the technologies what does this all add up to and it adds up to a really substantial effect. Okay question here first. Thank you. Hi Brian Scretny with the American Clean Skies Foundation with regard to your conclusions for displacing petroleum use I see you make a lot of gains in various areas from LDV and HDV efficiency to electrification to biofuels. What I don't see here though is an increased use of natural gas as a transportation fuel and with the recent shale gas boom we've seen a significant increase in CNG and LNG used especially in the heavy-duty trucking sector. I'm wondering how much that played into your calculations here and why we don't see more of it in your ultimate results. There we go. Sure. We did look at it a little bit on the infrastructure side when we were examining how these different infrastructures would be required to provide different sorts of fuel. It wasn't a major component of the outputs in part because there's a lot of parallel work going on for the role of natural gas and transportation and we were trying to address things that were not already being studied in that regard I would say mostly. We do. I mean there is a huge amount of interest in our vehicles technologies office in natural gas for trucks especially the business case there looks really great. I agree. And there are and I guess there are research tasks on natural gas in the transportation sector within ERE and in other places. I think what you see here too though is if you notice the total exceeds the demand and in that last chart and so that's one scenario and there are a lot of ways that this could play out on an individual basis. I think a lot of what you're seeing in natural gas is happening like you mentioned today and the commercial markets are already pulling in pretty strongly in a certain direction there and so I think it's part of the range of things of outcomes that we foresee but there are a lot of things that need to be done in a lot of different contexts so I don't think it's substantially or it really affects where how we see the world that we see that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity I think you're pointing to one that we certainly agree is there. And just in the spirit of the findings that one of the challenges with petroleum is that it's the only fuel source for transportation essentially and you run into problems when you have total dependency on one thing and diversity of supply like we have in the electric sector can provide some price stability can provide some other benefits and some hedging so one of the conclusions is diversity in options is available and so I think that's just in keeping with that. Yeah and as I recall on the slides you really did look at that there were sort of a host of options there and the whole point being that it's hard to say which ones will have what sort of percentage ultimately but that it could be any combination there of and certainly natural gas was an important one of those on that slide. Let's go there was a hand back here over here first and then back over here and I should also just mention too that I believe there are nine reports you said that we will on ESI's website in conjunction with the briefing we will go ahead and put a link to to those papers so that you can totally get into the weeds in terms of looking at this analysis because I think you know we'll all learn by looking at this ever more deeply. Okay. Hi I'm Allison with the Energy and Commerce Committee and I was hoping you could just talk a little bit more about what you're including in biomass and what your assumptions are about what types of biomass would be in the fuel supply and then also when you were looking at the greenhouse gas emissions reductions what were your assumptions was it just focused on the combustion or would you look at the life cycle of the biofuels that were being used? That's a great question so the I'll direct you to the biomass paper which is available on the website for a better answer than this but the short answer is all of the biomass that we know how to describe so it's all the different types in the billion ton vision study and then we also paired that up with all of the conversion technologies that we have that we have good engineering analysis on so that's so the supplies it's things like forest residue dedicated energy crops like like switchgrass crop residue that can be done without without this study looks at the billion ton vision study looks at crop residue you can do without interfering with the crop itself and a variety of other kinds of available biomass the conversion technologies are things like we do like biochemical ethanol like what's done today but also pyrolysis gasification and even algal biomass is a technology explored so the model basically looks at all of the available resources all of the available conversion technologies like gasoline, diesel jet and and bunker in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions we did look at the life cycle emissions associated with those those estimates come from the greed model which is an Argonne national lab model that is constantly being updated with the best understanding of what those life cycle emissions are most of these advanced technologies are expected to have lower GHG emissions than what's in the biofuels markets today and I should also say it's a slightly modified greed run we did to not take a credit for the electricity produced CO2 credits this is only for the fuels themselves but we only are looking at CO2 here so there is some emissions associated with non-CO2 emissions that aren't included here okay back here first and then great first I'm John Davies with the Federal Highway Administration I'd like to commend you for the remarkable breadth of this study I mean it really is a pretty amazing body of work and I'd like to ask you a little bit more talk a little bit more about the cost dimension of your analysis especially with respect to I guess presumed thresholds at which point various alternative energy sources vehicle technologies and sort of travel modes would become cost competitive did you have a presumed carbon cost or level of public support that was associated with the levels of reduction that you were projecting this analysis so due to the nature of exploring potential we didn't want to get at the study level too deeply into trying to look at the impacts of an economy-wide carbon cost some of the papers like the biomass paper do explore what impact carbon cost might have on that individual market but we don't have a macroeconomic model that applies that CO2 cost to all the sectors so each of the individual sectors seeks with the best tools or each of the individual reports tries with the best tools available to do an intelligent job of estimating the cost effectiveness of those strategies but the amount of tools we have available to do that in these different sectors varies so like when we're looking at light duty vehicles we do a cost competition model to try to estimate what a consumer might be interested in so I would say we don't have and what we didn't try to include in scope was what's the economy-wide cost and benefit of this sort of a scenario so I would say we don't have a lot of questions out there about how well those models work we're not sure so there it's just best described as a potential it's something that could happen if we get those scenarios we did not feel like we had the cross sector analytic tools to be able to do that but we did try to keep cost in mind with the best analytic abilities that we could in each of these individual issue papers okay here first and then in the back I'm Bob Hershey I'm a consultant to what extent did you look at some of the research being done in EERE for higher efficiency such as improved engines or thermal or electrics so each of those technologies should be directly represented in these especially in the light duty vehicle and non-light duty vehicle modes the EERE has a great project called SuperTruck which is looking at efficiency potential in trucks and it's very compatible with the analysis here you know we work very closely with them on this study so yeah those are absolutely included as potential technologies in here okay great back here to the biofuels side which pretty good to kill Hershey the the current infrastructure has been relatively hostile to biofuels did you do any work on what the infrastructure aspect and getting to those kind of levels when it comes to so in the outputs that we saw from this the most of the fuels that are produced once you get to these advanced technologies being fully mature are actually petroleum compatible so a lot of the you can produce electrolysis oil and gasification that are directly compatible with the with the wide scale distribution infrastructure rather than ethanol which can be a challenge so it wasn't something that we had to explore in a huge amount of detail with the retail infrastructure we did look at how much if you did go to E85 how much on the retail side you would have but that still doesn't address the some of these intermediate infrastructures are you going to go to rail tanking are you going to build dedicated ethanol pipelines are you going to go to compatible infrastructure the office of biomass and yet he does look a lot of that stuff okay what's your question back there you've talked a lot about efficiency within a mode and of different fuels and I'm wondering if it's another scope question I guess if you've looked at the opportunities for infrastructure investment to enable switching modes that are more efficient with energy at least yeah there's there's a paper looking at that in the freight sector specifically so it we call the non-ldv mode switching it looks at what the different influencing factors are for why freight is moved the way that it is today and might be in the future and then some potential options that might tilt that balance there's a lot of questions about you could do additional infrastructure in ports or in rail and different modes to do that there is we believe there's some potential there but right now the freight system is very much defined based on the characteristics and the geography of what you're trying to move so you find that it really depends on how far you're going if there's an existing rail line that goes there if it's basically if it can be done by rail today it is because rail is so much cheaper per ton mile than truck freight and so there's real challenges to developing that infrastructure but we did outline some of the opportunities there or comments Bill Umber with ACOR in order to reach the efficiencies you're looking at in light duty vehicles we're going to get the octane is that the octane? the octane in the fuels themselves? in the fuels themselves so I'm no combustion engine expert most of the vehicles at least in the out years are not relying on internal combustion engine vehicles do you mean for like turbo charging you can go to higher octane fuels? no IC engines internal combustion engines so we didn't look in detail of the technologies in ICE mainly because the analysis that EPA and DOT do for the part of their cafe goes sort of option by option through each of those available technologies so that wasn't something that we pursued in a lot of detail do you have more do you mind elaborating on your question? well we're going to have IC engines for some times and then you're going to need a higher octane fuel in order to function effectively at the higher compression ratio turbo charge it's that direct injection so where's the octane coming from? that's not something that I had thought of as a challenge well I guess I would just point out that again this relies this study relies on the individual technology pathways that are identified in the individual programs of EERE so the vehicle technologies program has been looking at high compression ratio engines for example and they have mapped out those demands and the biofuels program as another example has been pretty significantly transitioned in recent years into looking at the drop in fuels and they work again closely with the vehicle technologies program so that they have good visibility on what engines are coming down the line so you know those cost curves those sort of technology scenarios are inherent to the research efforts that are going on in EERE and then they just by their nature are built into this larger modeling exercise so I think that's a little bit of the answer to the earlier biofuels question as well you know we are always trying to track where the markets want to pull anyway and then we're trying to fit our various technology our technology pathways into those markets but in the octane issue area rather EPA basically controlled that well I mean I think if you're talking about sort of the narrower question at all and those those very specific questions I mean it's worth there's a couple things one thing that's worth keeping in mind this is a scenario that projects out fairly far into the future and so a lot of these you know sort of early market hurdles are you know sort of show up as blips on a larger on a larger trajectory and you know they're significant that doesn't minimize that they're real actual market barriers but if you look at technology potentials you're sort of assuming that that a you know policy factors are taken into account and then you do you overcome them eventually and so you know that's why you end up with this sort of broad sweep in the projection I again you know if you look at sort of if you want to really sort of dig down into the biomass program and what they're looking at a lot of different pathways a lot of different technology pathways to achieving higher octane ratings to achieving drop-in fuels to the to the exact fuels that are being demanded by the market I think we would tend to agree that the internal combustion engine marketplace is moving in that direction towards those higher octane numbers and you know and so we have to take that into account on our technology pathways and that's what we're doing okay good thank you it's to a number of these issues that it really is going to take looking at a lot of the underlying analysis trying to have a better understanding literally as I said earlier getting down into the weeds so that we can really look at how these things really do fit together where there are questions how do we solve some of the issues that come up but the exciting thing is that there are different pathways that can be put together creatively and this is I think a very, very important step in terms of helping all of us who are concerned about policy and looking at trends to know that there are a variety of options and we need to figure out now how to just go ahead and put them together because the opportunities and the innovation is clearly clearly there very, very much for coming and there will be a video and a link to the underlying papers on EESI's website and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us or the speakers directly. Thank you so much for coming.