Webinar on the Alternative Fuel Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Transportation Tool (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on the Alternative Fuel Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Transportation Tool presented on Nov. 12, 2013.

COORDINATOR: Thank you all for standing by. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session of today's call. Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect.

I would now like to turn the call over to Linda Bluestein. Thank you, ma'am. You may begin.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thank you very much. Hi, my name is Linda Bluestein. I work with the Department of Energy's Clean Cities program in Washington, D.C., and our program funded the tool that you're about to hear about from Andy Burnham at Argonne National Laboratory.

The tool is called the Alternative Fuel Lifecycle Environmental and Economic Transportation tool. And really has many—some very functional uses and we're going to go into depth on that today.

Of course feedback and consultation with people in the field is very important when we're developing a tool like this because we want to make sure it's useful to a lot of our different Clean Cities coalitions and stakeholders and we'd like to in particular thank some liaisons that we had with folks that are Clean Cities coalitions.

And those include Stephanie Meyn from Western Washington, Clean Fuels Ohio led by Sam Spofforth and Andrew Couch and we had some Clean Energy coalition of Michigan work they run a couple Clean Cities coalitions in Michigan and Christina Ficicchia who is with the Empire Clean Cities coalition.

And then several of the staff with the solar center in North Carolina and if I'm missing any other coalition people from North Carolina I think some of our Clean Cities coalition folks as well in North Carolina contributed to the input on this tool.

So thank you to all of those folks and we really appreciate it and of course we are open to feedback and could like to hear from anybody with issues, concerns, questions or anything that you want to tell us about related to the information that we're going to give you on the tool.

The discussion that kicked off the AFLEET tool began with several coordinators and they expressed interest in having a tool to quantify the cost and benefits of AFV's for Green Fleet certification programs and to do consulting services.

So while Argonne has developed several tools such as GREET FLEET and Air CRED for cities focusing on the environmental aspects of alternative fuel vehicles the goal was to expand the scope to include cost as well.

And we did that by building off of other Clean Cities coalitions tools such as the VICE model and the vehicle cost calculator are some of the tools that I'm sure people on this call are familiar with.

The user methodology's developed by these efforts the AFLEET tool was developed to help clean cities stakeholders estimate the cost of ownership, petroleum use as well as greenhouse gas as well and air pollutant emissions of both light and heavy duty vehicles.

The tool uses Argonne's GREET model to calculate lifecycle petroleum use in greenhouse gas emissions and it also draws from the EPA's motor vehicle emission simulator and certification data to estimate tail pipe air pollutant emissions.

The tool uses a wide range of resources to provide default cost data and those include some familiar tools such as the Clean Cities Alternative Fuel Price reports and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act award for the 15 vehicles and technologies in the current version.

Andy Burnham will be presenting this to you, he'll be—he'll have slides and he will also discuss this by using his desktop to maybe at the end if there's time go through it a little bit more and show you the tool and how it's used.

And in addition to that at the very end we'll have questions and answers. Andy is an Assistant Environmental Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory where he has worked since 2004.

At Argonne, Andy has supported Clean Cities by developing tools and providing technical analysis regarding the energy used and emissions of alternative fuel and advanced vehicles.

In addition he has been performing lifecycle analysis to help update the GREET model with recent analysis focused on methane leakage and vehicle production.

Andy got his Bachelor's Degree in environmental engineering from Northwestern University and his Master's Degree in transportation technology and policy from University of California Davis. Andy please take over and show us your presentation.

ANDY BURNHAM: Thank you Linda. So as Linda mentioned today I'll be talking about AFLEET tool, trying to be clever the name of the title AFLEET Tool to Analyze the Cost and Benefits of Alternative Fuel Vehicles.

So hopefully we'll get the agenda—okay so for the agenda for today is first to get a little background on the tool and then do two demo's. One, looking at doing some analysis of purchasing a new alternative fuel vehicle and then the second one looking at kind of the footprint of existing vehicle fleet.

So getting into the background as Linda mentioned we've worked here at Argonne on some various tools for Clean Cities and basically the past 15 years, the first being the AirCRED tool, which DOE, clean cities and EPA co-sponsored.

And that tool was to estimate ozone precursor and carbon monoxide, emissions credits for AFV's for use in state implementation plans. Another tool that we developed was the Clean Cities area of interest 4 emissions benefit tool, this was to look at greenhouse gas, and air pollutant emission benefits for the recovery act grant proposals.

And then also in 2009 we developed the GREET fleet footprint calculator, which I think most of you are familiar with and this is basically the corollary of fueleconomy.gov with a focus on medium, heavy—medium and heavy duty vehicles as well as off road equipment looking at their petroleum use in greenhouse gas footprints.

So in getting into the motivation Linda touched on this as well is that we're looking at—we're talking with coordinators who are developing green fleet certification and consultant services and they were interested in looking for a tool to help estimate the cost and benefits of the AFV's.

And while there are a lot of tools out there some of the, you know, we've developed some on AFDC we wanted to kind of bring this together into an integrated tool to kind of do this more holistic approach and be a service not to just these coordinators who are interested in these programs but also to, you know, the rest of the coordinators is a simple tool to start, you know, do some fleet analysis and help them with their goals.

So the real focus was to build off of a lot of the, you know, great tools that Clean Cities have already developed or has worked with. So, AirCRED was kind of used the methodologies for criteria air pollutant, emissions and then GREET fleet has petroleum use and lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA's diesel emission quantifier is something I know a lot of the coordinators have used for grant proposals so we're trying to, you know, put a larger focus on the AFV portion for this tool and NREL's VICE model and the cost calculator were also inspirations and, you know, for doing some of the cost calculations as well.

And so we developed this in Microsoft Excel the primary reason is to interface with fleet data. Some of those other tools they're, you know, some are Excel, some are online. We thought for this again it would just be easier to do in the office that way within Excel.

So the tool is available for download, it examines light duty and heavy duty petroleum use, GHG's, air pollutant emissions and cost of ownership and it does so for 15 fuel/vehicle technologies.

So the conventional vehicles that it looks at are gasoline and diesel. Gasoline is the baseline fuel when we're doing some comparisons for light duty and then diesel for heavy duty.

And then for the hybrid technologies we have gasoline hybrid electric vehicles, diesel hybrid electric vehicles as well as diesel hydraulic hybrids and then for plug in electrics we have plug in hybrids, extended range EV's and all electric EV's.

The distinction between a PHEV and EREV and I know as transportation guys we get into all the acronyms so sometimes it's a little confusing but the PHEV is basically modeled after a Toyota Prius style blended mode electrical vehicle that has a basically smaller battery pack.

While an EREV like the Chevy Volt has a much larger battery pack and can operate as basically an electrical vehicle for extended periods. And then for alternative fuels we have biodiesel both 20 and 100% blend, E85, propane, compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas and then also LNG with a diesel pilot ignition.

And then we have also some kind of options within these fuels like for the compressed natural gas we can look at shale gas or landfill gas, some of your environmental implications of using different fuels will vary on kind of where it comes from.

And today the tool is on the GREET website we have a user manual as well. I believe there is going to be a link on the AFDC on the tools page if not today very soon.

So what are some of the major data sources that we use for the model? The GREET model, which was used significantly in a lot of the tools we develop provides well to wheel or lifecycle petroleum use in greenhouse gas coefficients.

And then it also provides us with some light duty fuel economy default data. We also use EPA's motor vehicle emission simulator or MOVES and this provides vehicle operation air pollutant emission factors by state so this is like NOx and VOC's and particular matter and so forth.

And we use this tool basically for the various vehicle types and the model as well so we have light duty vehicle types that are passenger car or truck and a light commercial truck and then for heavy duty vehicles we have school buses, transit buses, refuse trucks, single unit, short haul and long haul trucks and then combination short and long haul trucks as well.

And while some of these are fairly generic like the single unit truck we do have the ability to look at even more detailed locations so getting into, you know, class 6, 7 delivery street truck versus a step van versus a dump truck or a bucket truck.

All of those things can basically be in kind of a single unit vehicle type. So we were able to provide some data for that as well. And then another area of the Clean Cities recovery act project data we were able to get incremental cost and fuel economy.

One of the difficult things with cost data is that, you know, it can become out of date so this is one thing I'll try and stress throughout the presentation that using your own data will make the analysis yours make it more meaningful.

So while we do provide a lot of default data for providing key input, you know, using your own data will make the analysis better. And then one of the last major data sources is the Clean Cities Alternative Fuel Price report and the thing to mention here is that we are using public station fuel prices.

At this point in the tool we do not look at the infrastructure development costs for a private refueling station and, you know, in a lot of cases in that type of situation you're able to get a lower price than you might, you know, be able to get for a public station.

So that's an important thing to consider and something we will hopefully address in the very near future. So I want to talk a little bit about the structure and as Linda mentioned if I do have time near the end I can go into the spreadsheet a little bit and kind of walk through the various sheets but here's a little background.

So there are eight sheets so it has, you know, several different places but the kind of the format of the structure of the tool is to look at first the input of the various tool of the—excuse me various calculators and then the outputs so we have the payback calculator and then it outputs, the TCO outputs and the calculator and it's outputs.

So that's kind of the framework and I can show you hopefully at the end. And then the color scheme the way that we do that is try and say, okay yellow cells are things that the—key assumptions that the user should try and change with their own data if they have, you know, new information.

And then orange cells are drop down menus and then white cells are calculations and secondary assumptions that unless you're kind of getting very familiar with the tool I would recommend not changing anything in white cells.

So for the simple payback I want to go through kind of the various calculation methods. There's a simple payback calculator, the total cost of ownership calculator and the fleet energy and emissions footprint calculator.

And it really depends on what your goals are which I would recommend using in the spreadsheet. So the first one is the simple payback calculator, which calculates the simple payback for purchasing a new alternative fuel vehicle versus a conventional counterpart.

And to calculate a simple payback you simply use the incremental acquisition cost as well as the annual operating cost. And so the operating cost we're looking at is fuel diesel emission fluid and maintenance.

And then it also calculates the average annual petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutant emissions. So what I'd recommend someone who is working with a fleet because we talked to several I guess coordinators, stakeholders and just people doing fleet analysis.

And fleet managers sometimes they don't want to right away get into all the details of a cost analysis. They want to kind of scope it out and say okay here are some things that might make sense, what's the payback period in, you know, in years and mileage or whatever.

So this is a good way to do a quick calculation and it's easy to understand, you know, with a acquisition cost versus operating costs and so, you know, this is kind of the cost benefits we have for that. So that would be my recommendation for, you know, depending on the fleet manager.

And then there are fleet managers that want to get into, you know, more detail than the cost and so that's the total cost of ownership calculator. And this calculates the net present value of operating and fixed costs over the years of planned ownership of a new vehicle.

And this is very similar to the discounted cash flow analysis you see in the VICE model. And one thing to consider or to think about how this is different and how the results are made slightly different than a simple payback is that depreciation is not typically accounted for, you know, in kind of a simple payback.

So when you talk about light duty vehicles you'll hear Edmund's and Kelly Blue Book tell you that depreciation is the major cost of a vehicle. So if you're able to buy a car for $20,000 but then five years later sell it for $20,000 basically the only thing you lost was, you know, an opportunity cost invest $20,000 otherwise and, you know, maybe get some money that way.

But so that's some things to think about and so that's why I wanted to include those things to include. The data to compare, you know, depreciation of alternative fuels versus conventional is not very good.

And basically it's very similar I mean that's our assumption in the beginning but these are the things that at least as a starting point to do these analyses and maybe the fleet will have some sense on resale value of the different equipment so that can be inserted into the model but this is a starting point to do a little bit more detail of an analysis.

And then as well as kind of the cost we also include the lifetime petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions as well as air pollutant emissions. So air pollutant emissions will be slightly kind of different than petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Petroleum and greenhouse gas emissions really just depend on your fuel use so the average emissions from the simple payback will basically be the same average emissions of, you know, over the lifetime of the vehicle and the year you own it.

But hopefully the emissions are different so as the vehicle ages the equipment for after treatment starts to deteriorate and emissions get higher and higher. So that is an important thing to consider especially when we want to do a footprint, which is kind of the last tool we have is that as vehicles get older they have higher air pollutant emission rates.

So we are able to, you know, potentially target those as vehicles through a place. What the footprint calculator does somewhat similar to GREET Fleet is to look at the annual petroleum use in greenhouse gas emissions of existing and I guess as well as new vehicles.

And then, you know, be able to also look at air pollutant emissions as well. So when doing fleet analysis with AFLEET tool one of the things I recommend is trying to try to get fleet inventory data this is really important when trying to understand AFLEET.

But this is important for both the new purchase analysis and then doing some environmental foot printing. I've worked with several municipal and private fleets trying to demo the tool and its capabilities.

And so, you know, when I get a fleet's inventory data the typical things you'll get are the make, model and model year of the vehicle, some type of description of the vehicle, the mileage and fuel use, which you can use to calculate fuel economy.

And then fuel and then sometimes maintenance cost as well. So all these things can help do, you know, kind of be either a pre-process or help find inputs for the model and for the tool.

So if a fleet is really large and heterogeneous and I've worked with some city fleets that have, you know, thousands of vehicles due to some pre-processing trying to, you know, examine what the vehicles patterns are of use can help you target vehicles for replacement.

So, you know, some of the things that are, you know, fairly obvious as they're replacing high fuel use vehicles, you know, have faster payback with more, you know, lower cost fuel so the compressed natural gas gives you some benefits on an incremental cost basis.

If you're, you know, looking at a vehicle that's only driven, you know, 5000 miles and only uses 200 gallons of gasoline you're not going to have as fast of a payback as compared to say a large vehicle like a refuse truck or something like that using thousands of gallons of fuel.

And so you have opportunity for, you know, faster monetary payback as well as larger opportunities for petroleum displacement and greenhouse gas emissions with high fuel use vehicles.

And then also replacing old high mileage vehicles you can see large air pollutant emission benefits so again we want to try and get the oldest, dirtiest vehicles off the road for the air pollutant emission benefits.

Some of the other data that you might be—that might be useful to collect is typical replacement cycles. So you would want to know to target which vehicle that a fleet might be interested in replacing.

There might be some policy within the fleet that they like to replace vehicles after 10 years or a certain amount of miles or something like that. So it really can depend on the vehicle type and it can depend on the fleet.

So that can help you again with these large, larger fleets where you're trying to look and see what their options are that can be helpful. And then if you're going into kind of a detailed analysis you might want to figure out what their required rate of return or discount rate is.

And this will be different for private businesses versus municipalities versus an individual. So that required rate of return, you know, for an individual, you know, might be very low compared to a private business.

And then as I mentioned previously you want to look at the public fuel prices and availability as this tool focuses on those prices and doesn't include, you know, private fueling infrastructure costs at this point, which is an important consideration for, you know, CNG and LNG and propane.

So I want to go through a couple quick demos of the tool and then again if we have time get into the actual spreadsheet but just going through it in a Power Point presentation, a lot of you guys could potentially use this in the future as well to walk through in the future.

So for the first demo I'm going to use the simple payback and the total cost of ownership calculators to compare potential AFV acquisition. So the first thing you do with the tool is figure out—you enter in using a drop down menu your state.

So for this case I used Illinois where I'm located and then the next thing you do via drop down menu see the vehicle type so you type in or you actually select from the menu, which vehicle type you want to choose.

And then you enter the number of vehicles, the VMT—vehicle miles traveled per year, fuel economy and purchase price. So I kind of highlighted in red where I made changes to the defaults.

Typically all the default values for the number of vehicles are zero but then we provide, you know, information for the rest. And you can simulate both the light duty vehicle and heavy duty vehicle at the same time.

So here is the values I entered for a refuse use truck for the heavy duty vehicle type. You'll notice that we might not have a purchase price or miles traveled for certain vehicle types.

That means that we either don't have cost data or that vehicle really doesn't exist in the real world so there's not very many gasoline refuse trucks out there so we don't include that vehicle.

But we do try to put fuel economy data for everything just using kind of the simulation data or whatever we are able to find. So we have that information there but for the other things if there really isn't a real world vehicle we'll not have kind of some of the inputs for that.

So the next thing you'll enter is fuel prices and a thing to note is that what is the unit we are using and it can sometimes be confusing or at least when you're doing different analyses.

Everything here is kind of the fuel unit that you might see at the public station so when you go you'll see gasoline gallons or diesel gallons it's not DGE's or GGE's of diesel it's actual diesel gallons.

We used calculations of kind of in the background to get everything on the right energy basis but you'll be entering kilowatt-hours instead of, you know, GGE's of electricity, which is kind of a weird unit.

Okay the next thing if you are doing a total cost of ownership calculation you'd want to enter the year of the plan ownership, some of the financial assumptions.

Are you going to have a loan for the purchase, some of those loan terms like year of the loan, interest rate and then the percent of down payment and then also that discount factor.

And then this is very similar to the GREET Fleet if you are familiar with doing calculations here. This is to do basically the fuel production assumption so you may choose different fuel types say for ethanol you might look at corn versus cellulosic switch grass.

What's a compressed natural gas you might look at, you know, shale gas versus landfill gas and then especially important for when you're doing plug- ins or electric vehicles you want to change the electricity mix.

And so we based the electricity mix calculation on EIA, which is Energy Information Administration kind of NERC region and so you can see in the map these are fairly large regions it's not localized.

And this kind of takes into account that the transmission and the grid is not so local that you can be, you know, even though you're in California you may be getting a lot of electricity from Arizona.

So if you wanted to do a more specific analysis you're able to enter your own user mix and throughout the tool we'll have basically a hyperlink so you can see number 12 user defined go to background data sheet.

So if you would click on that and in the spreadsheet it would send you to the right place to enter your right values. You'd have to punch in 12 in the drop down box, click on 12 and then you can go and plug in say if you know you have renewable mix charging these vehicles you can do 100% wind or solar, you know, the renewable value.

And then if you are doing plug ins and EREV's there are some secondary assumptions on the payback sheet. So the fuel economy that I was mentioning previously that's kind of your charge sustaining or hybrid mode.

So basically when you're not really using the battery, depleting the battery. So here we have some of the calculations for when you're actually in what we call charge depleting or electric vehicle mode of the vehicle.

So we have the fuel consumption in gasoline and electricity you also have the range of the vehicle, how many charges per day you might be using or doing and then how many days of the week that you'll be driving the vehicle.

So this is—all these calculations are necessary to figure out how much electricity you're using versus how much gasoline you're using in these vehicles. So they're a little bit more complicated to simulate.

It's not so bad but you just have to realize that there's a little bit more to doing plug in type vehicles. And then some secondary assumptions on the payback sheet as well with maintenance and repair that you can enter here as well.

And then I'll go into show some of the outputs that we have so we basically have tables for both the cost and emissions data here I'm just showing the cost data. Now I'll walk you through it in a little bit to show what the summary outputs look like.

So the first thing you see is what the actual acquisition costs of the vehicle that you plan to purchase or that were planned so you have basically the—everything from light duty as compared to gasoline and then everything for heavy duty is compared to diesel.

So for light duty we see a gasoline fleet and I showed 10 vehicles were going to cost $200,000. And then for the hybrid if you purchase 10 it would 28,000 or $280,000 and the same thing for the heavy duty option you can see how much the actual cost is.

And then we also summarize annual operating cost so how much is fuel and how much is maintenance and repair. And then finally we do the incremental cost and we see how much incrementally different is compared to that, you know, conventional counterpart is the various vehicles.

And then that's simply it's kind of basically a simple divide to get your simple payback in years so this is for the light duty vehicles since they're only driven, you know, not as intensively as the payback is in the, you know, 10-year range for some of the options.

While for the heavy duty refuse trucks simulation were kind of in the two to three-years because those vehicles are used very intensively. So we have those tables, we also have some charts as well to show the results.

This is the petroleum use in greenhouse gas emissions chart for the various fuels that you chose to simulate. And then TCO outputs you'd have a similar structure we have table's kind of summarizing the costs for each of the vehicles you chose.

And then we also have the costs and we also have the energy's and emission table and then we have several different graphs to compare. So this is similar to what we see in the vice model for the cumulative cash flow analysis.

And what we're doing here is comparing this is the heavy duty, this is the refuse truck. We're comparing it to diesel and looking at kind of the—you can kind of see the paybacks where the lines cross over the project years kind of the payback.

And we see that the values are actually a little bit different than the simple payback and the reason why is that you have the simulation that I did was assume the loan for the first five years.

So you see kind of that lesser slope for those first five years because you're paying the acquisition cost over those five years and then after the loan is paid you get a much greater kind of operational benefit, fuel savings benefit, you know, throughout the rest of the years.

That's kind of a—it might be an interesting chart to show, you know, a fleet manager like that. We also include the air pollutant emissions in the same kind of graphical format as well, you know, greenhouse gas emission air pollutant in that same format.

And then I'll do one other demo and that's doing AFLEET energy and emissions footprint of an existing fleet. So this one you will go to the footprint sheet, this is a different sheet.

And you will basically enter information like the vehicle type, model year, mileage and then the fuel use for existing vehicles. And this might require a little bit of pre-processing if you have that fleet inventory sheet you'll be able to get something very similar to this.

And basically you can just copy and paste that data into here and get the calculations to run. You might have to since the vehicle type might not fit exactly with the vehicle type there that might be something you have to kind of copy and paste and make sure you have it correct.

But the other one if you format correctly you can just kind of copy and paste and get the results. So you see on this sheet that you also see the results to the right of kind of the input data but we also have a summary output sheet that has kind of the totals for passenger cars and the various emissions and energy it's kind of just a summary.

Again a similar thing, a similar chart looking at vehicle types for those emissions and energy use. So in summary, you know, AFLEET tool can help estimate the economic environmental costs and benefits of AFV use.

It can inform new vehicle purchases and examine energy and emissions footprints of existing vehicles. Something that I tried to stress is that while we provide default data for the key input using your own data makes the results and the analysis more meaningful.

And then from the future plan we have that this is going to be a framework to do cost and environmental analysis but we can always, you know, as data becomes available we can, you know, update the model and include things and some of the things that we're interested in is looking at infrastructure cost and as well as idle reduction technologies their costs, their emissions and things like that.

But it looks like I did save enough time to switch over to the spreadsheets so I'll just go quickly through the sheets and then open it up for question and answer.

Hopefully this works and it's not to blurry. So as I mentioned there's actually nine sheets and I think I know I said there was eight before but there's nine sheets.

One is an instruction sheet kind of giving some of that background of what the color scheme of the cells are and then a description of each of the sheets. We have a few things where we have some hyperlinks too.

So if you wanted to get to a certain area on the spreadsheet we have those spreadsheets—hyperlinks on there as well. And the key place you're going to be looking at is the input data as I mentioned.

As you can see this is a clean version of the model just as you would download it. So we have default data for mileage fuel economy and purchase price.

You'll see off to the side what the default data is so if you go and change something like that and say I want to look at a gasoline car that's going to be 15,000 miles you'll know that actually the default was that so you can go back and change it if you wanted to in the future.

If you're going to be doing a lot of different changes it's good to save one version and say this was my fleet analysis for X fleet and, you know, sometime you can highlight things and say okay this is where I made changes and that's a way to keep track of, you know, what you did.

But you always have to enter the number of vehicles that you plan to look at and I would recommend always doing the conventional vehicle as a way to compare and do the same mileage.

If I'm looking at a gas—I'm interested in propane vehicles, you know, I want to do 10 but I want to make sure the mileage is the same and the number of vehicles that I'm looking at is the same.

As I mentioned previously we have the fuel prices down below. Sometimes you'll get information in GGE's or DGE's so it can be a little bit confusing but everything here is based on the fuel unit but then you'll see kind of to the right what that cost is on a GGE or DGE basis if you need to slightly modify things.

The same, you know, as I walk through all the key inputs are on this input sheet. Now this might be frightening when I go to the payback its lots of numbers and it can be somewhat overwhelming.

So we tried to not put too much here at least on the input side but as I mentioned there are some inputs that you might want to do especially if you're looking at plug ins or either you have to enter kind of the secondary assumptions for kind of easy mode operation your plug in type mode operation.

We do have defaults but again it's always good to modify. There are also kind of secondary assumptions maintenance and repair as well. I won't go too much but basically what this sheet does is really the background calculations for everything.

So all the results of the calculations are on this sheet but if you're looking for the results you go to the payback output. So you kind of see how the spreadsheet is laid out.

We have the calculator and then the outputs for the calculator right next to each other. And as I mentioned there's the summary tables and then near the bottom we have the summary charts as well and the results will show up for the vehicles you choose.

Now this one is even more frightening the total cost of ownership sheet is—has basically a year-by-year analysis or year-by-year data for each individual car. So it is a fairly long sheet since it analyzes each one individually.

But if you really try to dig into the details and want to, you know, modify some of the assumptions you could get into that into this sheet and change things.

Since most of these are, you know, basically everything is white this is kind of something I wouldn't recommend for kind of a beginning user. You can do most of the major assumptions in the input sheet but that's what this framework is.

You have kind of the similar things that you'd be interested in, the mileage, fuel economy, fuel usage, purchase price per vehicle, purchase price for the fleet and then all the different costs and then we have some type of summary and the petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions.

But where you might prefer to go is look at output so again that's a similar structure of having the summary tables as well as charts that we developed for the various calculations that you might want to look at.

You know, these are things that we developed but I know that a lot of the coordinators are much more clever and much better at creating good results. So this is simply a spreadsheet it's very easy to create the charts that you might be interested in and, you know, using the numbers we have here.

So that's the two kind of new vehicle comparison models or calculators. And then as I mentioned here is the footprint so in the spreadsheet or in the presentation excuse me I kind of hit a lot of the fuel use things.

So we try to keep all those things separate but if you had, you know, gasoline, diesel all the different fuels you can punch them in here. So this would require a little bit of fleet inventory data to kind of put in the same format.

But basically I've seen that type of inventory data in the same approach and you can basically copy and paste and then you'll get the results on this side or you can look at the kind of summary results on the output sheet.

And then the last sheet is the background data so this is basically where all the assumptions are and a lot of the background calculations are. If you wanted to start learning, you know, more about some of the default assumptions there is the first section is basically a bunch of look up tables.

And you're able to click on a cell or hover over a cell and see where the data came from. So we have all these vehicle types and you're able to kind of choose some of the vocations.

I mentioned like for a single unit short haul truck you might want to look at a delivery step van or you might want to look at a dump truck it's kind of a very different vehicle type.

What you would do is in this drop down menu you can choose say dump truck and let's see if it works. You'll see that the default data in the model now will all be from the dump truck instead of the step van.

So that's a little bit more advanced if you want to get into that I know some of the fleets were interested in trying to get to that vocational level and that's how we do that.

And so since the background data sheet is very long have some links on the top so you can get to the different parts of the sheet. The user manual gets into a little bit more details of what, you know, where each of—while the data is I think we've got about 15 more minutes so I'm going to wrap up and if we have any questions or comments I'd appreciate, you know, I'd like to take them now.

COORDINATOR: Thank you, at this time if you would like to ask a question please press star 1 on your touchtone phone and record your name when prompted. Please make sure your phone is un-muted.

Again to ask a question please press star 1 on your touchtone phone and record your name when prompted, just a moment for the first question.

SANDRA LOI: All right thanks Peggy, this is Sandra Loi from NREL supporting Clean Cities. Andy we did have a question online, if you go back to slide 13 there was a question from Kelly Bragg asking are you entering AFV as you plan to purchase or the vehicles in the fleet as it exists?

ANDY BURNHAM: So when you're doing a new vehicle purchase analysis you're going to enter the vehicle that you want to replace. So that's in the simple payback in the TCO kind of input.

We're entering let's say we chose there is—the fleet might have 100 refuse trucks but they have 10 refuse trucks that are 15 years old. You know, you kind of did three analyses and you found okay well there's 10 diesel trucks that are ripe for replacement.

They typically travel, you know, and they're going to travel this amount of mileage when they're new so we're going to punch in that type of data. So this is to look at, you know, new vehicle, you know, new replacement of vehicles.

Then we're looking at new vehicles and if you're wanting to do a footprint you'll use the footprint sheet and that will have kind of a—kind of the list of all the vehicles and you can put in all the vehicles of existing fleet and just kind of look at what their environmental impacts are. Hopefully that answers it.

SANDRA LOI: Okay thanks Andy, Peggy any questions on the phone?

COORDINATOR: Yes our first one comes from Lisa Jannelle your line is now open.

LISA JANNELLE: Lisa Jannelle, I wanted to know if you could show the web address for the spreadsheets again?

ANDY BURNHAM: Yes if you Google AFLEET tool you will find it but the web address is greet.es.anl.gov/afleet and we will hopefully have that on AFDC's tool page if it's not already up there very soon.

LISA JANNELLE: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Our next question comes from Ms. Eric your line is now open.

MS. ERIC: Thank you I was wondering if you intended to address renewable natural gas? We have a renewable natural gas in Sacramento and, you know, we're sort of encouraging the use of that and the basis for that would be food waste.

ANDY BURNHAM: So at this point we have landfill gas as a—as our I don't know if I want to say placeholder but as our value for renewable natural gas we have done simulations on digestor, anaerobic digestion of animal waste and waste water treatment plants.

The greenhouse gas and petroleum use impacts are roughly similar so it's a good placeholder for that. That's something we can, you know, potentially address in future versions to include.

But like if you're going to be doing like that type of simulation you would want to know what the price of the CNG from that operation is. That would be like a user input but for the greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum use calculations I would use landfill gas.

And I can show you if I can get to the fuel production assumption sheet hopefully you see that now. You would choose a 15 MG instead of kind of the North American natural gas, which is basically the average fossil fuel of natural gas, you would instead have one, which is three for landfill gas.

MS. ERIC: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Thank you our next question comes from Rebecca.

REBECCA: Hi I have a question on TCO outputs sheet where it has the—you showed the chart that comes up.

ANDY BURNHAM: Sure let me get to it.

REBECCA: It's on 18 is where—yes that one, no.

ANDY BURNHAM: This one?

REBECCA: Yes, on the left you—it says it's cumulative cash flow can you explain that? I'm just not quite sure how that equates to showing that CNG is cheaper over time.

ANDY BURNHAM: So the TCO sheet is looking at the cash flow on an annual project year basis so in the first year you will purchase XYZ vehicle instead of say a diesel vehicle.

So there is going to be, you know, depending on some of these factors on whether you have a loan or not will be spending a let's use one refuse truck as an example.

So a typical refuse truck costs for diesel costs maybe I don't know $200,000 but the CNG version costs $250,000. So your cumulative cash flow looks saying there's no loan or anything you're going to be $50,000 less for the CNG case.

This one, you know, purchasing a more expensive vehicle but you also have some fuel savings potentially in that year as well. So that first year, you know, we'll add the negative $50,000 because the vehicle is more expensive but then you'll get a positive cash flow.

Say you're saving $20,000 or, you know, $25,000 on fuel so that first year you'll be say negative $25,000 but then, you know, as you go further and further, you know, you pay off the vehicle the fuel savings tend to dominate as we kind of see in this example after year five you're getting a higher and higher net cash flow as compared to diesel.

So hopefully that explains it because this is comparing, you know, the kind of your conventional counterpart to another one and if I can switch very quickly I think this is a good because we have lots of charts and one of the other charts in the TCO output is maybe a little more straightforward.

Basically that cumulative cash flow without comparing the vehicle, you know, this is a case I ran with gasoline and propane but this is the cost of the propane each year and this is the cost of the gasoline each year.

And then the charts above kind of compare the cash flow as, you know, this only the propane and we compare it to gasoline and we see how different it would be each year so again hopefully that helps.

REBECCA: Yes I have to say I still don't really understand because to me that looks like having a propane vehicle is more expensive than having a gasoline vehicle.

ANDY BURNHAM: Well I mean in this example..

ANDY BURNHAM: …I didn't really do the input but it's possible that a propane vehicle is more expensive it really depends on your fuel price right. So I mean if we go back and look at the assumptions, you know, we're looking at the assumptions, you know, we're looking at $6000 incremental cost for the propane vehicle.

And one thing, you know, this is something we talked to PERC a lot about is that the propane prices for on the AFDC for public stations are typically very high and that's something that they've been talking about a lot.

So you should be able to potentially get a much better propane price than say this. So if it's, you know, $2 even, you know, even if it's a public station and you're able to get, you know, something lower we can look at the results and you actually see a payback, you know, not necessarily right away but, you know, after…

REBECCA: Okay.

ANDY BURNHAM: …in 11 years. So it really depends on your inputs I mean any type of tool or any type of model it's a—something to inform you but if it's garbage in, garbage out you're not going to, you know, have a good result so you really need to, you know, think about the input think about what it means, you know, before just kind of, you know, say I want 10 of these, 10 of these and see what the results are because it might not really reflect your case.

REBECCA: Okay thank you.

SANDRA LOI: Andy this is Sandra again I just want to let everyone know that the tool will be linked on the AFDC's tools page probably in the next day or so we're currently working on that so look for that.

And I'll go ahead and send everyone that is on today's webinar a follow up email with a link to the tool once it is on the AFDC page as well as on the Argonne page.

And we will be making the recording of the webinar as well as slides confirming with Andy of course available and will be posting on the Clean Cities webinar archives pages.

And I'll include a link to that as well in my follow up email so just to let everyone know if you're interested in kind of going back or refreshing or passing it along to those who couldn't attend today I will go ahead and share that information with you and pass that along afterwards.

SANDRA LOI: Peggy do we still have some phone questions coming in?

COORDINATOR: I have one more and I believe she said her name was Ms. Miller and I'm not sure I'm sorry.

PATTY MILLER-CRULLY: Yes it's Patty Miller-Crulley, I was just curious for the projections over time is it assuming a flat fuel rate or is it inflated at all?

ANDY BURNHAM: Yes so yes when you look at the total cost of ownership we are looking at what the EIA projects fuel prices to be, you know, from kind of a starting point today through the next, you know, 20 some years.

And I think, you know, I work for Argonne and, you know, we work with the Department of Energy and no slamming EIA or anybody but if you could really project fuel prices, you know, in the next 20 years that we'd all be rich.

But, you know, it is the best available data we have to try and do projections and some of the things you'll notice in those, which are good is that CNG the price inflation for CNG is much more stable than it might be for gasoline and diesel.

You'll see those values kind of go up more significantly so that is something we take into consideration is that, you know, things, you know, there will be inflation for fuel prices and other things in the model.

And so we take that into consideration in the total cost of ownership calculations.

PATTY MILLER-CRULLY: And is that broken down by region or state or is it just a flat what they predict?

ANDY BURNHAM: They only have for cost simulation I believe it's only for national and we use national assumptions. So, you know, kind of that's a good point to bring up is that these prices here on the fuel and DEF are kind of national values.

We toyed with the idea of trying to look at kind of the regions that the Alternative Fuels Price report provides and we potentially could do that in the future, you know, the electricity is important on that change depending on the state you're in.

And I guess all these will and so again, you know, this is at this point it's a default value but we highly recommend at least on the starting point to use, you know, your own data and then the model will take under consideration that inflation, you know, that we reject.

And, you know, that's kind of in the background data so that would be my recommendation on how to deal with it but if you have further like really good nitty gritty details, you know, please follow up with me and we can talk about them.

PATTY MILLER-CRULLY: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Tara Marifield your line is now open.

TARA MARIFIELD: Thank you, my name is Tara Marifield and I was wondering if this tool can be used to quantify any cost savings associated with the reduction in the emissions and things like that?

ANDY BURNHAM: So yes I mean that's, you know, kind of the logical step is that you can do, you know, say this vehicle is going to cost this amount of extra for gasoline and we're all talking about externalities here, externalities that aren't, you know, properly accounted for in the market.

So, you know, greenhouse gas emissions and energy security and air pollutant emissions. So you could say well the cost to, you know, it's going to cost us maybe $10,000 extra so we are, you know, reducing GHG's by, you know, 1000 pounds or whatever it may be.

So you could do, you know, the cost per pound of certain things and it gets tougher when you try and, you know, put all those things and put a dollar value on all of those things and I know, you know, it's hard to weigh things.

You can't just add, you know, petroleum savings plus tons of GHG's plus, you know, pounds of NOx reductions and then divide by dollar and get some realistic value.

But you can, you know, think about, you know, how to see what might be most cost effective, you know, for single pollutants and, you know, kind of there's going to be always, you know, tradeoffs and, you know, the ability to do that is here with the model and the results at least.

TARA MARIFIELD: So if I could follow up if that's all right. The problem we've always had is we don't keep our vehicles for 11 years so I—and I by saying yes I'm going to save this much in emissions hey that's great for the environment but we're never going to reach those cost savings that we're estimating unless I can get a dollar figure to attach to those emissions reductions I don't know that I can sell it to the people who say yes or no to the dollars that I have to spend.

ANDY BURNHAM: Yes I mean that's, you know, I think one of the things at least in the tool is to—I mean we are the Department of Energy, we're trying to think a little bit on again is obviously the business of alternative fuel vehicles and then kind of the environmental factors of it as well.

And so, you know, we are some of the default assumptions are really like kind of a long ownership and maybe a low discount factor but in reality and for businesses they might not be that case.

And so, you know, that is true it can be a tough sell that, you know, people are looking for paybacks within two to three years and if it's not a payback then they might not be interested.

But municipalities and other people might have longer time horizons and more interested in kind of these environmental impacts as well. So, you know, it really depends on the fleet, fleet manager and, you know, this tool, you know, may help do some of, you know, show that okay this vehicle might cost more but we are going to be, you know, much more environmentally friendly and that might have some value to the fleet manager otherwise.

So yes that's the thinking of this is to look at both the monetary economic cost and then kind of externalities that aren't, you know, included in trying to at least do the calculations to figure out, you know, which ones—what are those impacts for the different vehicle types.

TARA MARIFIELD: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: I have no other questions at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Great thank you Peggy. Andy another question that we actually received online if we take just a couple more minutes is if there are any plans for including off road equipment?

ANDY BURNHAM: So that's one of the things we would like to do yes. We are planning to combine the GREET Fleet tool into basically this tool. And so we need to figure out if we're going to add more sheets or kind of, you know, we can add basically some rows for the vehicle types or however we might do that.

So that is something we need to consider, it will take a little bit of work but yes that is the goal is to kind of bring kind of all the things we can do with GREET Fleet, which is one of the primary things is being able to analyze the environmental impacts of off road equipment.

So yes we are planning to do that and, you know, make this kind of where those calculations are done. So if anybody has feedback on how they think that might—how they might want to see that that would be useful feedback for me.

SANDRA LOI: All right thanks Andy. Another question it's actually from a two-parter the first part of it is how are after-market treatment devices handled for the emissions calculated?

And then the second part or second question is how are various percentage blends from biomethane landfill and biodigester gas accommodated?

ANDY BURNHAM: Well the first question was on looking at after markets conversion so this is primarily looking at the purchase of new vehicles. So you may have a case where you might I guess convert a relatively new model year vehicle, you know, 2012 vehicle like that and it will be converted and created.

So that's kind of the emissions are based on EPA certification data for those type of new vehicles. We don't have as good of information on what the environmental impacts are for kind of out of life or even intermediate life vehicles.

I know that's something that EPA has, you know, they streamline their certification process to do that so that is something definitely of interest. So that's something, another thing that, you know, for potential feedback for future additions because did start to collect data on how much things were for converting and things like that.

But on environmental side at least for the tail pipe, you know, that data is a little bit harder to get but if people have some suggestions that's another good thing to think about.

And the second one I'm sorry I think you're looking at maybe looking at some blend of renewable natural gas and conventional natural gas. At this point we don't have that type of blend set up it's kind of an either or.

So that's a good question, you know, potentially in the future we could do maybe some percentage, you know, this is going to be landfill gas, this is going to be fossil gas I mean typically when people get gas it's going to be, you know, either you're going to get it from some project I mean it's going to be some connection it's always going to be landfill gas or you're going to get it from the transmission and distribution pipeline and it's going to be probably mostly fossil.

But I know there are cases where people are thinking of trying to market, you know, 20%, 30% blends so that's another something to think about and keep sending comments and, you know, questions and we'll—things that will help us for the tool in the future.

SANDRA LOI: Okay thanks Andy, Peggy have we had any other phone questions come in the line?

COORDINATOR: I do have one more, Matt Simon your line is now open.

MATT SIMON: Hi this is Matt Simon I had a quick question about how far back and how far forward the lifecycle analysis works for the battery for electric vehicles?

ANDY BURNHAM: So that's a really good point I think, you know, some of the things I don't get into are like what are the specific assumptions for different things. And battery replacement is one of those areas where we don't have great data on the lifetime of a battery replacement.

So that's something we want to include in the future. At this point we do not assume that as part of the cost, we are looking to update in the future and, you know, I'll quickly go into some of the nitty gritty details of cost data.

So we have some things like grade out on the cost of certain things so I've been working on that specifically. So you'll see some of my notes and kind of the references of what, you know, something might cost for a battery replacement.

But at this point we just don't have, you know, great data on that so I guess I think that, you know, basically what you're asking is, you know, replacement cost of a battery or?

MATT SIMON: Well also it would be the carbon footprint that's calculated is that how—what are the assumptions for where the battery materials come from and what happens at the end of the life of the battery?

ANDY BURNHAM: So yes that's something, you know, we take into consideration in the GREET model we look at the fuel cycle and the vehicle cycle. But this model only considers fuel cycle it doesn't consider the energy use and emissions to build the vehicle.

I think as Linda mentioned that's one of the areas I do research on so that is something if you want to like a real detailed lifecycle calculations I would recommend actually using GREET instead of this tool.

And if you have specific questions about that please contact me but this doesn't include the battery production, which is typically it's a small percentage of the lifecycle but it can be important depending, you know, big battery vehicles it can be, you know, fairly important.

So that's another one maybe to get back to me and I can help you with the actual GREET model.

MATT SIMON: Okay thank you very much.

COORDINATOR: I have no other questions right now.

SANDRA LOI: All right thanks Peggy, so thank you so much Andy and Linda I didn't know if either you had any closing remarks we can go ahead and wrap up the webinar for today if you have any closing comments please jump in if not we can close up today's webinar thank you so much.

ANDY BURNHAM: Thank you, no I appreciate it and I have my contact information on this last slide so please feel free to email questions and visit the website and look at the user manual and yes thank you very much for allowing me to present today.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Yes thank you Andy, hi this is Linda Bluestein again I just wanted to thank Andy for all the hard work on this tool and invite people's feedback on it as well.

And I also wanted to thank Kelly Gilbert who is with our Kansas City coalition who I failed to mention at the beginning of the webinar as someone who provided valuable input on the tool.

Thank you very much, Andy, and I think this probably concludes our webinar, Sandra.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, sounds good. Thank you, everyone, for participating.

COORDINATOR: Thank you. That concludes today's call. You may disconnect at this time.