Project Summary
The State of California has made a commitment to transitioning to cleaner and more advanced alternative-fuel-based technologies in order to mitigate the negative impact of transportation-related emissions. Each of these technologies addresses one or more pollutant externalities ranging from volatile organic- compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and others. The State’s policy-making with respect to transportation fuels will benefit from a more detailed understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each technology for addressing negative externalities as well as the different challenges and barriers each faces in California’s unique market. In order to compare the potential benefits and tradeoffs of each solution this research is developing new metrics to quantify these costs. This includes finding and analyzing the available data sources and developing new survey designs to facilitate the development of more powerful metrics. Additionally, this study is assessing whether and by how much the strategies compromise economic growth via cost and benefit analysis. A literature review of the different potential solutions is underway, and has thus far identified types of costs to consider, the supply chains of fuels and technologies (biomass and biogas, power-to-gas and vehicle-to-grid) and penetration/adoption rates of alternative fuel vehicles. Remaining work on this project includes comparing the different solutions, categorizing them by type of technologies, intended externalities, and by stakeholders involved.
