Fuels

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

On-Road Fuels, including ethanol and petro- and bio-based diesel fuel
Blendstocks, including ethanol and diesel bio-based blendstock
Aviation Fuels, including conventional jet fuel and sustainable aviation fuel
Marine Fuels, including conventional heavy fuel oil and bio-based marine fuel.

Biofuels are presented in each of these fuel categories. Biofuel pathways presented in the ATB rely on various biomass resources that include agricultural residues such as corn stover; forest residues; sludges; fats, oils, and greases; and corn. Changes in the market for biomass feedstocks can cause market prices at any given time to differ from the biofuels market prices noted in the ATB. The supply curve costs and quantities of these resources are not presented in the ATB; users of the ATB are encouraged to refer to other literature for this information, such as (U.S. Department of Energy, 2023). These results do not include effects of credits such as those from the Inflation Reduction Act, Renewable Identification Numbers (RIN) credits from the Renewable Fuel Standard, or credits from the California Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS).

Diverse types of data are presented. Some fuel production pathways represent today's commercially available fuels, where data are available on market prices for fuels that have high production volume. These are called "current market" data. Other data are estimated fuel costs for current or future fuel production technologies and may represent low or high volumes of production. These are called "future modeled" data. A label of "current modeled" is used where empirical data are used to validate a model of current conditions. In some cases, blendstock data are more readily accessible than fuel data.

Fuel is directly used in a vehicle whereas blendstock is one component of a fuel. Fuel price data include taxes for all fuels currently taxed whereas 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 2024 Transportation ATB, multiple single-point estimates of fuel metrics are provided in each case, and they are not associated with a particular year. However, the absence of time-series trajectories does not imply fuel prices will not change over this period.

References

The following references are specific to this page; for all references in this ATB, see References.

U.S. Department of Energy, M.H. Langholtz (Lead). “2023 Billion-Ton Report: An Assessment of U.S. Renewable Carbon Resources.” Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2023. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/beto-2023-billion-ton-report_2.pdf.