Status Review of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard

Adopted and implemented in 2010, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) was the world’s first policy to address the carbon pollution caused by transportation fuels. A model for similar policies in British Columbia and other U.S. states, the LCFS is designed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, stimulate technology improvements, and help California achieve its climate change goals. The LCFS contributes to California’s overall GHG emission reduction goals under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32). It is a performancebased regulation that requires regulated parties (fuel producers and importers to California) to reduce the rated carbon intensity (CI) of the state’s transport fuel mix by at least 10 percent by 2020. It sets declining annual targets, starting with a 0.25 percent reduction in 2011 and reaching a 10 percent reduction by 2020. This report is part of a series providing status reviews on California’s LCFS. The periodic status review series by ITS-Davis provides updates on LCFS compliance and markets, and addresses selected special topics. This fourth report addresses the following: 1. Credits and deficits 2. Carbon intensity of fuels 3. Credit trading and credit prices 4. The Federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), LCFS, and U.S. biofuel imports 5. Special topics: Carbon prices and interactions with a cap-and-trade, key proposed amendments in re-adoption, Pacific Coast Climate and Energy Action Pla

Measuring Traffic in Cities Through a Large-Scale Online Platform

Online real-time traffic data services could effectively deliver traffic information to people all over the world and provide large benefits to the society and research about cities. Yet, city-wide road network traffic data are often hard to come by on a large scale\ua0over a longer period of time. We collect, describe, and analyze traffic data for 45 cities from HERE, a major online real-time traffic information provider. We sampled the online platform for city traffic data\ua0every 5\ua0min during 1\ua0year, in total more than 5 million samples covering more than 300 thousand road segments.\ua0Our aim is to describe some of the practical issues surrounding the data that we experienced in working with this type of data source, as well as to explore the data patterns and see how this data source provides information to study traffic in cities. We focus on data availability to characterize how traffic information is available for different cities; it measures the share of road segments with real-time traffic information at a given time for a given city. We describe the patterns of real-time data availability, and evaluate methods to handle filling in missing speed\ua0data for road segments when\ua0real-time information\ua0was not available. We conduct a validation case study based on Swedish traffic sensor data and point out challenges for future validation. Our findings include (i) a case study of validating the HERE data against ground truth available for roads and lanes in a Swedish city, showing that real-time traffic data tends to follow dips in travel speed\ua0but miss instantaneous higher speed measured in some\ua0sensors, typically at times\ua0when there are fewer vehicles on the road; (ii) using time series clustering, we identify four clusters of cities with different types of measurement patterns; and (iii) a k-nearest neighbor-based method consistently outperforms other methods to fill in missing real-time traffic speeds. We illustrate how to work with this kind of traffic data source that is increasingly available to researchers, travellers,\ua0and city planners. Future work is needed to broaden the scope of validation, and to apply these methods to use online data for\ua0improving\ua0our knowledge of traffic in cities

Analysis of Lifecycle Water Requirements of Transportation Fuels: Corn-based Ethanol - Model Description

Deriving ethanol from from corn grain and corn cob (crop residue) requires water. This report contains model estimates of the water requirements for ethanol based on default or user inputs of crop evapotranspiration, pre-irrigation water requirements for salt leaching and crop establishment, irrigation methods and the efficiencies of conversion technologies, and projected crop yields. Water requirements also depend upon procedures adopted for calculating co-product credits at various stages of the lifecycle. The model characterizes water requirements in terms of withdrawal and consumption, and source – ground water, surface water, precipitation, and soil moisture

Status Review of California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard

California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) aims to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) by creating financial incentives for innovation and deployment of low carbon fuels. From 2011 through Q4 2012, there was a net excess of 1.285 million credits (metric tons of CO2e); if all available for use, the excess credits represent about half of what is needed to cover the 2013 obligation. During the period, the average fuel carbon intensity (CI) of gasoline and diesel substitutes declined. There was a rise in credit trading and credit trade prices. Feedstock-specific issues are examined

Status Review of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (Revised Version)

This status review of California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) summarizes actions regarding the standard. Greenhouse gases are subject to regulation under the LCFS. Statistics are provided on credits and the price of credits; average fuel carbon intensity; ethanol production and consumption; the number and vehicle miles of travel of plug-in electric vehicles; and, gasoline prices. The California Air Resources Board will vote on re-adoption of the LCFS in July 2015 and major court decisions on LCFS, some leading to the need for the re-adoption vote, are summarized

Benefits of Electric Road System with charging from below technology to battery electric vehicles

This study uses GPS-logged movement patterns of 412 private conventional cars in Sweden to model the potential impacts and benefits of implementing an Electric Road System (ERS) that is designed to be usable also to passenger Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs). The study inspects the possibility of eliminating stationary charging stations and allowing smaller batteries in BEVs and its economic benefit. The study examines different ERS placement scenarios, charging options and BEV shares. The results show that an ERS makes possible a drastic reduction in the required battery capacities to complete all driving. With only charging at home, the mean reduction in battery capacity is 75%, or to about 14 kWh. An average battery capacity of 87 kWh could eliminate all stationary charging. In Sweden, with an ERS net economic benefits of 29-45 billion € are expected from reduced battery capacities alone, depending on the stationary charging pattern, percentage of cars switching to BEV, ERS placement and ERS charging rate

Feasibility of estimating travel demand using geolocations of social media data

Travel demand estimation, as represented by an origin–destination (OD) matrix, is essential for urban planning and management. Compared to data typically used in travel demand estimation, the key strengths of social media data are that they are low-cost, abundant, available in real-time, and free of geographical partition. However, the data also have significant limitations: population and behavioural biases, and lack of important information such as trip purpose and social demographics. This study systematically explores the feasibility of using geolocations of Twitter data for travel demand estimation by examining the effects of data sparsity, spatial scale, sampling methods, and sample size. We show that Twitter data are suitable for modelling the overall travel demand for an average weekday but not for commuting travel demand, due to the low reliability of identifying home and workplace. Collecting more detailed, long-term individual data from user timelines for a small number of individuals produces more accurate results than short-term data for a much larger population within a region. We developed a novel approach using geotagged tweets as attraction generators as opposed to the commonly adopted trip generators. This significantly increases usable data, resulting in better representation of travel demand. This study demonstrates that Twitter can be a viable option for estimating travel demand, though careful consideration must be given to sampling method, estimation model, and sample size

Battery electric vehicles’ contribution to the viability of charging from below electric road system based on individual driving patterns

This study uses detailed driving patterns to model the benefits of implementing an ERS in Sweden with charging from below technology that is usable by passenger BEVs. This technology would increase the utilization of ERS infrastructure and possibly lead to significant cost savings in BEVs by enabling smaller batteries. Results show that the required average battery capacity could drop up to 76 % and the expected savings of using smaller batteries range between 0.17 -6.5 M€/ERS km for a total of 2900-9300 M€. The economic net benefit is heavily dependent on the percentage of cars switching to BEV and ERS placement

Benefits of Including Battery Electric Cars in Electric Road Systems: Battery and infrastructure savings

The newly emerged electric road system (ERS) technology, mainly considered to electrify long-haul trucks, has the advantage of charging passenger battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Using detailed GPS-logged movement patterns for 412 private conventional cars in Sweden, this study models the potential benefits for passenger BEVs using ERS. The study shows that ERS aiming to electrify long-haul trucks can cover most private vehicle trips with home-only stationary charging and small battery ranges (68-101 km), or alternatively eliminate all stationary charging needs for private vehicles with large battery ranges (136-606 km). The study points out that ERS utilization is independent of the total travel distances of car users and depends more on visited locations and residency. The economic benefits from reduced battery capacities with ERS can be large compared to the ERS infrastructure costs, even when BEVs constitute a relatively low share of the vehicle fleet. When planning ERS infrastructure for trucks and buses, the economic benefits from passenger BEVs can be large and therefore can also be considered