This is one of a series of reports produced as a result of the Transportation Energy Futures (TEF) project, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-sponsored multi-agency project initiated to identify underexplored strategies for abating greenhouse gases and reducing petroleum dependence related to transportation. The project was designed to consolidate existing transportation energy knowledge, advance analytic capacity-building, and uncover opportunities for sound strategic action.Transportation currently accounts for 71% of total U.S. petroleum use and 33% of the nation's total carbon emissions. The TEF project explores how combining multiple strategies could reduce GHG emissions and petroleum use by 80%. Researchers examined four key areas -lightduty vehicles, non-light-duty vehicles, fuels, and transportation demand -in the context of the marketplace, consumer behavior, industry capabilities, technology and the energy and transportation infrastructure. The TEF reports support DOE long-term planning. The reports provide analysis to inform decisions about transportation energy research investments, as well as the role of advanced transportation energy technologies and systems in the development of new physical, strategic, and policy alternatives.In addition to the DOE and its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, TEF benefitted from the collaboration of experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, along with steering committee members from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, academic institutions and industry associations. More detail on the project, as well as the full series of reports, can be found at http://www.eere.energy.gov/analysis/transportationenergyfutures. While there has been considerable research focusing on energy efficiency and fuel substitution options for LDVs, much less attention has been given to non-LDV modes, even though they constitute close to half of the energy used in the transportation sector ( Figure ES.1). We conducted an extensive literature review of the non-LDV modes, and in this report we bring together the salient findings concerning future energy efficiency options in the time period up to 2050. The studies reviewed provided potential energy savings for individual technologies within each mode, as well as an overall energy savings representing the case where all possible improvements are implemented. The overall mode improvement estimate accounts for mutually exclusive technologies and the possibility that some technologies may counteract the effects of others. In addition, we discuss the projected activity increases in each of the modes and combine this with forecasts of overall energy efficiency improvement potential to estimate the total GHG emissions relative to current levels and to a "business as usual" case based on Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) 2011 projections.
ContractWe find that there is room for technological and operational improvements in energy efficiency for each non-LDV mode,...