DoE Expands Transportation ATB Data

Following its first-ever update, the Federal government’s Transportation Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) now offers its users expanded cost and performance data to inform transportation sector analysis nationwide.

The Transportation ATB – first released in 2020 – was developed by the Department of Energy’s (DoE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory. The resource provides detailed cost and performance data, estimates, and assumptions for current and future vehicle and fuel technologies in the United States through 2050.

The Transportation ATB provides vehicle data in a series of interactive charts for either a single year or a trajectory out to 2050 for fuel economy, modeled vehicle price, levelized cost of driving, and emissions.

These metrics are available for a variety of individual powertrains, as well as in comparison with other powertrains.

The new update expands upon the available vehicle technologies to include additional classes of light-duty vehicles.

The update also introduces data for select medium- and heavy-duty vehicles – including step van, box truck, and long-haul sleepers – and their associated powertrains, DoE explained.

Another important data addition is current and future projections of fuel consumption, cost, and emissions in domestic, commercial aviation for passenger and freight transport in the United States. This includes data for both conventional and sustainable aviation fuel, the department said.

In addition to the vehicle data, the Transportation ATB provides fuels data, with the new update featuring price or cost, production, and emissions estimates for selected fuels in four new categories: on-road fuels, blendstocks, marine fuels, and the newly added aviation fuels.

“The introduction of the Transportation ATB in 2020 was an important step in providing trusted, consistent data for cross-sectoral analyses,” said ATB Lead Laura Vimmerstedt. “Now with this update, the Transportation ATB broadens the scope of the analyses it can support – covering more diverse vehicle and fuel technologies and providing more detailed data for robust analyses.”

The goal of the Transportation ATB is to integrate data from various sources into an accessible format that provides a consistent set of key assumptions for transportation analysis.

The Transportation ATB provides consolidated and comprehensive data from cutting-edge sources.

The tool offers a suite of free, publicly available resources to help users easily interact with the data and meet their analysis needs. This includes user guidance and methodologies available on the ATB website, a Tableau workbook with interactive charts and visualizations, and formatted data with database-friendly summaries.