Considering future regional air quality impacts of the transportation sector

Michael Mac Kinnon, Shupeng Zhu, Marc Carreras-Sospedra, James V. Soukup, Donald Dabdub, G.S. Samuelsen and Jacob Brouwer

Energy Policy, 2019, vol. 124, issue C, 63-80

Abstract: Regional air pollution is strongly impacted by transportation emissions. Policy mechanisms to reduce emissions are required to reach environmental quality goals. Projecting the drivers (e.g., technical, economic, societal, regulatory) that will impact future emissions is challenging, and assessing regional air quality (AQ) is complicated by the need for detailed modeling tools and data inputs to simulate chemistry and transport of pollutants. This work assesses the contribution of emissions from transportation sources to ground-level concentrations of ozone and fine particulate matter via two methods. First, impacts are quantified for three U.S. regions including California using output from an economic optimization model to grow a base year emissions inventory to 2055. Second, impacts are considered for California using state-level projections with an updated emissions inventory and modeling suite in 2035. For both, advanced AQ models are used, showing that the impacts of light duty vehicles are moderate, reflecting shifts to more efficient and lower emitting technologies. In contrast, heavy duty vehicles, ships, and off-road equipment are associated with important ozone and PM2.5 burdens. Emissions from petroleum fuel production and distribution activities also have notable impacts on ozone and PM2.5. These transportation sub-sectors should be the focus of future emissions reduction policies.

Keywords: Air quality; Transportation policy; Energy projection; Ozone; Particulate matter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518306165
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:124:y:2019:i:c:p:63-80

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2018.09.011

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().