Fuels

The Transportation Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) provides price or cost, production, and emissions estimates for selected fuels.

The Transportation ATB presents fuels in three categories:

• On-Road Fuels
• Jet Fuels
• Marine Fuels

Diverse types of data are presented. Some fuel production pathways represent today's commercially available fuels, where data are available on high production volume market prices. Other data are estimated costs for current or future fuel production technologies, and may represent low or high volumes of production. In some cases, blendstock data are more readily accessible than fuel data.

A fuel is directly used in a vehicle, while a blendstock is one component of a fuel. Fuel price data include taxes for all fuels currently taxed, while blendstock data do not include taxes. Data for biofuels and hydrogen come from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory analyses; data for petroleum-based fuels and conventional electricity sources come from other sources, primarily the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In the 2020 Transportation ATB, multiple single-point estimates of fuel metrics are provided in each case rather than full time-series trajectories. This does not imply that fuel prices will be stagnant over this period.